Organic Anglican Catholics

Why every part of the Church needs to be seen as organic.

The most important sixteenth of a square inch

Sermon preached at the Cathedral Church of St Augustine of Canterbury on the Sunday in the Octave of the Assumption

Is that it?

A little flake

a sixteenth of 

a square inch in size?

And you're calling

that a significant relic?

You must be joking!

People might look

at our relic on the Lady Chapel altar

and think just these things.

It's true.

It might be housed

in a very special reliquary

but our relic 

is just a tiny, tiny scrap

of material.

It's marginally less underwhelming

than a Mr Whippy ice cream

for dessert at The Ritz.

Until you think about it.

[PAUSE]

Let's be clear.

On Our Lady Chapel altar

is a relic

of Our Lady's veil.

It may be tiny.

But one thing is clear.

However tiny it is.

Our Lady,

the Queen of Heaven,

the Theotokos

the Mother of God

has touched it.

The same hands

as those which nursed

Our Redeemer as a baby

and held His body

taken down from the cross

have touched

that little spot of material.

We have a direct connection

to the truth of the Gospels,

and it is among us.

[PAUSE]

People might think

how silly it is

to get worked up

about a 2000 year-old 

fragment of cloth.

But we have every reason to celebrate

especially as there are

no physical relics of Our Lady's body.

No-one has a relic 

of Our Lady's body.

The heads of St Peter and St Paul

are in the Vatican.

There are incorrupt bodies of 

St Francis Xavier

and St Padre Pio

and others 

All the apostles of the New Testament

have bodily relics.

But there are none 

of Our Lady.

Not one.

Not even her hair.

What does this tell you?

[PAUSE]

There are no bodily relics

because Our Lady's body

is no longer on Earth.

She has a tomb 

in the Garden of Gethsemane,

but it is empty.

This makes 

her relic so much more important.

It proves that she exists.

It proves she has a connection with us

despite being in Heaven.

Her veil for us

becomes yet another thread

that ties the reality of Earth

with the reality of Heaven.

Mary is testament 

to our salvation.

Whatever Our Lord assumes

that He saves.

He assumes our humanity

to save our humanity.

He assumes our will

to save our will.

He assumes His mother 

to save our human family.

And the evidence is there

in our Lady Chapel.

[PAUSE]

But Our Lady still shares 

something with us.

She touches her son

at His birth and His death.

And with her,

we touch her son

in the Eucharist.

This is the gift Our Lord

shares with all of us.

In assuming His Mother,

she becomes our Mother

to venerate and honour,

for we must always honour

our father and our mother

as the Lord commands.

And she shares her son with us

and her concern for us

is His concern for us.

[PAUSE]

It may be tiny

but that sixteenth of a square inch,

is evidence of our salvation

and our welcome into

the court of Heaven.

Anglican Rite Old Catholics and meaning

 

Why the meanings of some words mustn't change.

Jesus wept!

Sermon for the tenth Sunday after Trinity

Children are horrible!

Any parent knows why

children are horrible.

They break your heart,

that's why.

"Don't go too near the edge!"

Splash!

"Mummy!"

"Leave that priceless antique alone!"

Crash!

"Mummy!"

"If you eat all that, you'll be sick!"

"Mummy!"

Scrub, scrub scrub.

There are times when children

just won't listen,

go their own way

and end up needing to be bailed out.

That's all very well, when it comes

to ponds, 

Ming vases 

and wet patches on the carpet,

but you know very well,

that there are some scrapes

that you can't get them out of,

and some that are positively terrible.

Being a parent 

sometimes means 

sitting down and weeping

for the child

that is on a dreadful path

because you can't reach them.

[PAUSE]

It's not for a want of trying.

You've taught them yourself,

they've had all the right lessons

in PHSE at school,

they've seen all the cautionary tales

on television

and yet, they still go down the path

that you know full well

leads to great pain,

and there's nothing you can do

because you've done everything.

Your child must take

the consequences of their actions,

and that is hard.

And when you know

those consequences

are now unavoidable,

all you can do is weep.

[PAUSE]

God weeps.

He weeps over Jerusalem,

over Ephraim His beloved child,

over the efforts of

thousands of artisans

and craftsmen whose faith,

blood, sweat and tears,

built the temple to worship Him.

He weeps because 

He has come to them,

urged them to return to the Way,

showed them what the Scriptures mean,

commanded them to love,

love God,

love neighbour

love enemy,

and they will not listen.

They continue

along the same path

which is not the way

to salvation,

but the way to complete

and utter destruction.

God sees

and God weeps.

[PAUSE]

"Ah!" says the atheist,

"If God were all powerful,

then He would stop the consequences.

He would rescue them.

He would stop them from falling.

What God is this,

Who stands and weeps

like a big sissy?"

It seems like

these folk

have never really been parents.

If you love your children,

you love them as they are.

While you do your best

to teach them about life,

they have their own minds

their own lives,

their own experiences,

their own authentic selves.

They are not extensions of you.

While we are commanded

to honour our father and our mother,

we are not commanded to become

their clones,

and, if we're honest,

we don't want our children

to be carbon copies of us.

We want better for them

than that.

God has given us

our very selves,

our own separate beings.

We are not meant to be His clones,

but we are meant

to have a hand

in our own creation

in our own perfection

in our own reality.

God wants us to be

people who are truly authentic

and thar means

taking the consequences

that our choices have 

upon our very selves.

He will not violate this,

any more than we can control

or would want to control 

our children.

To violate this

would mean that God

would violate His own nature,

for His nature is Love.

He prefers the pain

of frustration,

of grief,

of suffering,

of the Cross,

than the destruction

of our being ourselves.

And,

while God the Father cannot suffer,

while God the Holy Ghost cannot suffer,

God the Son can,

because He has taken on 

our full humanity

so that we can take on

His full divinity.

We can take on His divinity

but we can choose not to,

by failing to know Him,

by failing to receive Him,

by failing to love Him.

[PAUSE]

Our Lord stands and weeps

for those who choose destruction

rather than life.

He stands and rejoices

for those who return to Him

ready to share Eternity with Him.

Weeping may endure for a night,

but joy cometh in the morning,

the morning of Eternity's sunrise.

Anglican Catholic Development of Doctrine Part II

 

Having spoken positively about Newman's development of doctrine last time, is it true that his theory is without criticism?

I O U one sermon

Sermon for the ninth Sunday after Trinity

There are those who claim that Our Lord is a revolutionary.  There are those who claim that Our Lord seeks only to reform society, not tear it to shreds. There are those who claim that Our Lord has no interest in politics and what governs how societies operate but rather direct souls to the Kingdom of God.

What do you think? Where does Our Lord fit in, politically? Is He authoritarian, liberal, conservative, revolutionary or completely apolitical?

[PAUSE]

Imagine then, a manager of a national bank who has been told he is on two weeks’ notice. Looking at his customers’ mortgages, he halves them all, reducing the debt of several thousand people. Will the district manager commend him for his actions, like the master of Our Lord’s steward?

Why not?

In fact, is the master in Our Lord’s parable even like real masters of stewards.

Our Lord is presenting a scenario that makes no fiscal sense, nor does it make sense to anyone who is owed lots of money by several people. It’s a parable that makes very little sense to us because this is not how banks, building societies and mortgage lenders work. Indeed, how would we react if we were in the master’s shoes and saw those in debt to us relieved by someone who works for us?

What the Lord is describing would be described as fraud these days and this shows us that money has become completely entwined with law. By reducing the debt of others, the steward is causing financial chaos. Indeed, think of the mess that our errant bank manager would cause by slashing people’s mortgages willy-nilly. The law would come down on him like a tonne of bricks!

And what does the steward get? What does the bank manager get?

[PAUSE]

Grateful people. People who are willing to return the favour. People who now see something of greater importance than the value of money because someone saw their friendship as more important than their debts.

And that’s important for today. Our banks rely on selling debts to one another. It was this behaviour that caused the great economic crash of 2008. As far as banks are concerned, our debts are their bread and butter.

But our society doesn’t just operate on our monetary debts, it also operates on our moral debts too. We say that a man going to prison is paying his debt to society. When someone does something kind to us, we are morally obliged to them – we owe a debt of gratitude.

The weird thing is, we speak of debt as if it were something, some commodity to buy and sell, something to pay back. But what is a debt really? We know what fifty pence looks like but what does a debt of fifty pence look like? Our minds can’t turn it into a thing. The best we can do is to think about it as a place where fifty pence should be and isn’t.  A debt can only become real as a relationship between people. If Dan lends fifty pence to Tom, then there is an expectation that, at some point that fifty pence is given back. If Dan says, “forget about the fifty pence” then suddenly the debt vanishes.

Debt exists only as an expectation between two people. As soon as the expectation is altered the debt is altered.

That’s all that the steward is doing – he’s changing the situation by changing the relationships and creating new relationships based on something more valuable than debt – the kindness of others.

[PAUSE]

We often think of Sin as a debt but, again, Sin is defined by a relationship. We hear it said that Jesus pays the price for our sins, but who is He paying the price to? Do our sins steal anything from God? No, because the Earth is the Lord’s and all that therein is. Do our sins steal anything from the Devil? No, because the Devil is not another God, but a creature like the rest of us.

Sins are like debts because they change the relationship with God, but they can’t be passed around like monetary debts. Our sin remains our sin, because it is our relationship with God that is damaged and requires repair. Our Lord offers Himself on the Cross as that atoning sacrifice for sin – a demonstration that God still loves us and that His relationship with us is unchanged. On the cross, that relationship is restored and Sin is shown up as being a complete nonentity that only exists when we allow ourselves to become enslaved to it. The moment we let it go, the moment we claim Christ’s death as our own, that is the moment when sin has no effect on us. Sin disappears with God’s forgiveness, just as a hole in the wall disappears when the stone is put in its place.

Does this not put us in God’s debt?

[PAUSE]

A debt of gratitude certainly, and a debt that cannot be repaid.

But then, God doesn’t want it to be repaid.

He just wants that relationship with us, just like the steward pays the debt of others to build a relationship with them.

We owe it to Him to love Him, and this debt will make us Eternally joyful.

 

Anglican Catholic Development of Doctrine: Part I

 

Is Newman right or is that an exaltation of human reason?