The Sorrowful Mysteries and the Sorrowful Church

“We are very members incorporate in the mystical body of thy Son, which is the blessed company of all faithful people.”

This is the belief of the Church, that we are indeed the Body of Christ. For many members of the Church, this present time is a season of hardship and difficulty as we strive to live out our Faith in a world that prevents us from doing so. The world does not understand us because it does not understand our Master and Head of the Body. As His precious body suffers, so must the Church suffer with Him. The Sorrowful Mysteries of the Holy Rosary do help us to focus on what the Church must face and bear as it seeks to follow Christ.

The Agony in the Garden

Our Lord wrestles with temptation. As He faces the truth of His crucifixion, He also finds that there is an opportunity to escape it, to take the easier path and to minimise His pain and suffering. He is utterly free to take this path like each one of us. However, He is faithful to His Father and seeks to do His will knowing the pain of what will follow. Yet the temptation is there and it is the most basic temptation – that of self-preservation. It causes this internal wrangling within Our Lord, an internal strife and suffering which cannot abate until all is fulfilled.

The Church herself suffers from this same temptation. It can either remain faithful to God, and thus find discomfort resulting from the hostility of the world, or it can seek to make life easy by becoming a socially acceptable establishment but losing its identity as the Body of Christ in the process. The internal wranglings of the Church make headlines these days, yet some parts of the Church have been able to commit themselves to the path ahead, stick to Godly principles and move on through Gethsemane. With Our Lord’s pattern, the Church must look ahead and see the pains and sorrows that it will face for its fidelity. In doing so, it will find its own agony but will share it with Our Lord.

The Scourging at the Pillar

Our Lord is beaten for His “blasphemy” just to appease the Jewish authorities despite the fact that the Civil Authority knows that He has done nothing wrong. He is not punished for any civil scandal, but rather for confronting the hypocrisy of society. However, as St Peter tells us that the Lord’s “own self bare our sins in His own body on the tree, that we, being dead to sins, should live unto righteousness: by whose stripes ye were healed.”

The Church herself has not the same record of blamelessness that Our Lord has: she has suffered as a result of the behaviour of her members. There have been abuses of moral power, there have been abuses of social power and social standing, and these have been recognised by the Civil Authorities and the perpetrators are beginning to be punished. Yet, the whole Church suffers at the hands of those in her ranks who have committed great sins and hypocrisies. One paedophile priest leads all priests to be labelled “paedophile” by those who don’t think; one corrupt evangelical preacher causes all evangelical preachers to be labelled corrupt. Christopher Hitchens rightly points out the sins of churchmen and women and that their sins have not just damaged the lives of the innocent victims, but also the innocent churchfolk who are tarred with the same brush. Just as Christ bears our sins in His body, so must the Church bear our sins too and be scourged for them.

The Crowning with Thorns

As our Lord is publically mocked for His outlandish claims, so is the Church. The Lord is the King of an unseen Kingdom: the Church is the dispenser of God’s unseen Grace. The Lord’s kingship is laughed at for its sheer irrelevance in the face of more powerful and more obvious potentates: the Church is laughed at for its irrelevance in society in the wake of more powerful and material claims.

The Church is ridiculed for seeing God in wafer, for seeing God dead upon a Cross, for believing in God Whose very existence is questioned constantly. The Church is laughed at for being anachronistic, for being behind the times, for being a social clique in which men wear and parade around in dresses mumbling arcane words and preaching about an afterlife that isn’t going to happen. “If there be no resurrection of the dead, then Is Christ not risen: And if Christ be not risen , then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain.” The fidelity of the Church will see it crowned with Her Master’s thorns. The Church bears her Lord’s message and she will suffer ridicule because of it.

The Carrying of the Cross

Our Lord told us that we must each take up our cross and follow Him. We must each bear the very thing that will be the instrument of our demise. For the Lord, this was His cross, His instrument of torture. For the Church, this will probably be the weight of the world’s indifference and hostility to the non-material (and hence immaterial) Gospel. Yes, there will be good things done by all kinds of people, non-Christian and Christian alike. Doing good things is not the sole preserve of the Church – anyone can feed the hungry, clothe the naked and heal the sick.

However, it is the preaching of the Gospel to an increasingly incredulous society that will prevent people entering the Church, but even actively push them away. This may indeed be down to poor preaching, but it is also down to the fact that fewer people have ears to hear. Isaiah was told at his call that he would “Make the heart of this people fat, and make their ears heavy, and shut their eyes; lest they see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and understand with their heart, and convert, and be healed.” Our Lord was met constantly with those who had such little faith. It is the Good News about the Salvation of man through Christ that the Church must bear, even if preaching it may finally destroy her.

The Crucifixion and Death

It is entirely possible that the Church will fade and disappear from view, crucified on her own Gospel by those who hate her. Lawsuits may strip her of her assets, her buildings, her organisation. Indifference and the pressure to be relevant will strip her of faithful bishops and priests who will peddle their own ideas just to be heard for the love of their own voices. Parishes will wink out of existence and church buildings be turned into flats, nightclubs and museums.

It is possible that the church may disappear from view, buried in the dark and forgotten.

The trouble is, if the Church is the body of her Master and her Master rose again in glory…

Conclusion

The Church is suffering and sorrowing. Each priest has a clear idea of the state of how things are in his parish. Some are low in spirit pressured by how things seem to be getting at them; others feel that they are fighting against an ever-increasing tide. The point is that this is precisely what Christ said would happen to the Church. If we are in the Church then we must see His sorrows in our sorrow. If our sorrow is not like His, then we are not doing it right. There is a spirit in the air that is profoundly anti-Christian. It cannot be pinpointed to organisations or to people, but the fact that the Church is in pain is indicative that something is happening and that the Prince of this world is mounting an attack to destroy the Church.

This has happened in every age, but it feels different this time.

However, we have Christ’s promise that the gates of Hell shall not prevail against the Church and we have Christ’s resurrection. We can be confident in His victory and keep ourselves faithful to Him. We can still rejoice in the Lord alway!

Etymological Episcopalian Eschatology?

The word "set" is rather unique in the English language as any glance at its dictionary definition will prove. Then, of course, there is the word "cleave" which is rather fun because it is its own antonym. Words, like everything else, have their creation and mutation. Their job is to communicate ideas, to transfer that picture in one mind to the blank canvass in another mind. Without agreeing the rules of communication, there can be no certainty that the picture painted in one mind is a faithful copy of the picture that is communicated.

Mathematics is indeed a fine example of communicating ideas reliably. The definitions are made, the rules of inference and mathematical grammar are stated and then the picture painting can begin. Thus everyone can agree that if we all agree on what + means and what 1,2,3 and 4 are, we can be sure that 2+2=4. A change of the way that + works or in what 1,2,3 or 4 are will certainly change the result, but if we know what something is, we can reproduce it quite clearly. Mathematics is a study in certainty.

However, Mathematics is not a study in physical reality, but rather a study of abstraction. Neither is it a source of theological certainty or capable of proving that actual entities exist. Philosophically speaking, numbers do have a perfectly real existence but certainly not a physical existence. You can't have two apples then take away the apples leaving the "two" behind.

Words are fascinating things in their own right. Etymology allows for beautiful discussion into meaning. Great literature possesses dimensions that describe human life on planes that have yet to be explored fully. Poetry can say more about our emotions than the actual words used can describe. Ours is a life spent not only trying to make sense of things but also communicating that sense to others. We try to share our very selves completely with others. The tragedy is that we necessariy fail.

I am very proud to say that I am an Anglican Catholic. I have tried to give some meaning to the term, but at every stage the words "Anglican" and "Catholic" are contested mainly from historical viewpoints. "Ah! You're not Anglican because you don't hold to the XXXIX articles!" "Ah! You're not Catholic because you don't believe that the Holy Father is infallible." "Ah! You're not even Christian, because you claim to be Catholic." Ink is spilled daily by someone telling someone else what they are not.

The ACC is often criticised because it tries to make things as clear as they can be. We say what we understand to be the case and invite others to converse with us and explore the situation. Of course, other groups do exactly the same thing. They have their own dictionary, their own history and search for God. This is natural. We can accept the dictionary and accept the understanding of Christian doctrine, and thus find ourselves as part of the group, or we can reject the dictionary and understanding and find ourselves outside the group. The failure to agree is essentially the failure to be identical.

Over the years, I seem to have been haemorrhaging identity. What I thought I was, I have either grown out of, moved on, never actually been, or couldn't possibly have been. Yet I understand myself to be a human being standing at the cliff-edge of the present and falling headlong into the future still not knowing who I am or what I am to be. "Change and decay in all around I see." All is in a state of flux, but then all has ever been in a state of flux until it calcifies into the past. Yet this calcified past crumbles the further back it goes. History becomes myth and even legend the further back we go and the further from objective scruitiny. Holes appear in the fossil record and the nature of Evolution can be doubted.

However, myth produces etiology - "Just-so" stories. Every culture has its myth a story of Creation to explain why things are as they are, why the elephant has its trunk, why the giraffe its neck. Of course, these are less stories of fact but fables produced to explain something fundamental about life. There are many folk who regard the opening chapters of Genesis as factual history, and who is to say that they are certainly and definitely wrong? There are also many Christians who regard these opening chapters as etiology, statements as to why things are the way they are. Things exist because God gave them being. Man does not have the perfect existence with God because his freedom of choice leads Him away from the transcendent and towards the emptiness of his belly. There are more to myths than just stories, more than just lack of absolute facts.

The same is true for all Christians, especially Catholics. Is the Apostolic Succession an undeniable fact? What about the existence of the Undivided Church of the Councils? Was the Reformation in England an historical accident or a reclamation of the truth from a corrupt medieval Church? People continue to argue over these in order to prove their own identity or to deny the identity of others. The Church produced Seven Oecumenical Councils whether it was actually undivided or not. At the Reformation, there were definitely those who regarded themselves as Catholic or Protestant, or even both. Perhaps the factual history does not actually matter in the small details. After all, if the Lord Jesus Christ is truly worshipped, neighbours loved, the Creeds affirmed, the Holy Gospel preached, the Apostolic Succession intact and the Sacraments distributed in the tradition as laid out by the centuries, then the actual origin of Anglicanism ceases to a central bone of contention. Our etiology says more about our identity than our lack of certainty about history can.

As far as I can say about myself, and that is far too little that I can be certain of, is that I am a Christian, that I am a Catholic and that I express that Catholicism through the English usage (Missals and prayerbook of 1549). I say, from the tenuous grasp I have of my own thoughts and with the hubris that I actually know something concrete, that this makes me an Anglican Catholic. Further, this puts me in line with a whole part of God's Church. I find myself welcomed with open arms by people who tell me that I am what I believe myself to be, because they believe themselves to be the same. The name may be irrelevant historically, but it is perfectly relevant and perfectly meaningful when we describe our understanding of our identity and how that relates to our preaching of Christ Crucified, Christ Risen and Christ the Saviour.

Our identity lies not in who we were, nor in who we are but in who God wills us to be and, if we continue in His Will in service and obedience to Him and the gernerous service and love of all men, that is where we will be. Our true identity as Christians is eschatological, our present identity merely an approximation. Until then, I will walk as humbly as I can (and my hubris often prevents me) as an Anglican Catholic thanking God for the spiritual direction that this body gives me as I walk into Infinity and in the hope that this little part of God's Church will thrive in His Life.

Sign of the times?

Sermon preached at Our Lady of Walsingham and St Francis on Advent Sunday 2013.

Off the top of your head,

what signs of the Church

are there outside now?

There are the two signs on the door

 and there are the two signs

on the walls of the porch.

There’s even that A-frame outside,

but is that it?

Is the church flag a sign?

What about the statue of Our Lady,

 is that a sign of the Church?

It’s amazing how many signs there are

that we pass by on our way to Church.

There are road signs telling us to

Stop!

Give way!

There are signs all around us

telling all kinds of information

 – “Please Pay Here”,

“No Dogs Allowed”, “No Smoking”,

that weird sign that looks like

a man trying to open an umbrella

that is supposed to mean

 “men at work”

or rather “men on a tea-break”.

How much attention do you pay

to the signs that you see on an everyday basis?

[PAUSE]

There are other signs too.

“Red sky at night…”

If the sky is clear at night

in December, you’ll know

it’s going to be frosty the next morning.

 If the green man at the pelican crossing has gone out,

 then you know that crossing the road

is not going to be good for your health.

So what would you make of a sign

which showed a man on a donkey

saying “Danger, Messiah at work”?

 It’s a strange sign indeed, especially

when it’s more suited to Palm Sunday than Advent,

but it’s more correct than you think.

Remember, “Advent” means “arrival”,

or perhaps more literally “carried to us.”

When we see Our Lord Jesus on Palm Sunday,

 we see Him carried to us on an ass.

He comes into Jerusalem as the King of Peace,

not on a great war-horse to conquer,

but to broker a new relationship

between God and Man.

It’s such a familiar sign to us Christians,

our Lord entering Jerusalem on an ass.

This takes us back to that Christmas scene

when Joseph brought a pregnant Mary

 into Bethlehem on a donkey.

Or does it?

[PAUSE]

Nowhere in the Bible do we see

that traditional image of Our Lady,

big with child,

coming into Bethlehem on a donkey.

The only mention of anyone riding on an ass in the Gospels

is what we see here on Palm Sunday.

Like angel wings and three kings,

the donkey ride into Bethlehem is just a romantic idea

– it’s not biblical.

Human beings are very good

at remembering things that aren’t really there

in addition to not seeing things that really are.

There are some signs which are not really signs at all. 

The idea of a Christmas donkey ride into Bethlehem

is quite plausible,

but the fact it is not included in the Bible

does mean that it is not important to our Faith.

The donkey ride into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday

is a sign that tells us that

Our Lord Jesus is precisely who He says He is

and is thus terribly important to our Faith.

It is important to get the signs right.

In the book of Revelation,

we are told that the number of the beast is

six hundred and sixty-six

and it seems most likely that

the beast that was meant

by St John in his book

was in fact the Emperor Nero.

 However,

this has caused some Christians

to try and fit that number to all kinds of people

from the Pope to Martin Luther

to Adolph Hitler to Aleister Crowley

 to Nelson Mandela!

They believe that it is a sign of the future Antichrist.

Yet this is not what St John is actually saying!

We Christians cannot afford to live like this,

seeing signs that aren’t there and ignoring the signs that are.

Our Lord Himself warns us,

“Then if any man shall say unto you,

Lo, here is Christ, or there;

believe it not.

For there shall arise false Christs,

and false prophets, and shall shew great signs and wonders;

 insomuch that,

if it were possible,

they shall deceive the very elect.”

As in the case of 666,

some Christians spend too much time

analysing the signs too closely

and ignoring the message

 that the sign is giving us.

It is the obsession with avoiding sexism and homophobia

that is leading some Christians

to fall away from their faith.

It is also an obsession with homosexuality

that prevents some Christians

 from seeing the person

beneath who needs

Christian love and charity in order to live.

It is the indiscriminate and misdirected hatred of abortion

that is preventing some Christians

from seeing the pain of women

who have been raped.

The sign of Christ can only ever be Love.

Wrangling about signs takes us away from love.

If we stand in the middle of the road

trying to work out whether

the colour of the green man is significant,
whether it should be a lighter green,
          or a darker green,
          or blue,
          or turquoise to mean what he is suppose to mean

 then when he goes out,

we will get run over.

 If we get stuck too far in the signs that God gives us,

then we will miss the sign

that draws us ever closer to Him.

It is the duty of the Christian

to love God and Neighbour,

to pray and to be active in helping others.

As we see the signs

 of the Christmas lights going up,

so are we reminded that Our Lord is coming again.

To ask “when” is to miss the point.

All we can do is our duty

to the best of our abilities

and to wait for His coming.

He is coming soon

and will ask us what we have done for Him

while we’ve been waiting for Him.

What better sign of God’s goodness

can we be to the world

if we seek to live our lives

truly awaiting His arrival joyfully?

Unashamed Idealism

As the days grow shorter and the night draws in, as the cold grabs you from the moment you set one toe out of bed or the damp inveigles its way underneath every layer of clothing, it's very easy for the spirits to sink and become lethargic. Such are the seasons of the year and we should be prepared for such a downturn after the joys of spring and the lazy days of summer.

Life itself has these seasons too. Ecclesiastes iii promises seasons in life in which things have a wonderful aspect and others in which the spirit is suppressed.

Lately, as I look round at people in the street, I see very little of the joy of life. Some of my friends and colleagues are suffering so much. Their lives have taken a rougher pace and a more dismal hue. I am losing one friend to cancer, another friend has had a heart attack (and is still with us, thank God) another has been unwell for some time and seems to be having everything he stands for attacked by legal issues while he battles with his health. Other friends have suffered so much due to flooding, typhoons, wars and skirmishes and the like and are crying out for aid. Sometimes it's hard to be even remotely cheerful. Can one even dare to be cheerful in the midst of so much suffering?

St Paul says, "Rejoice in the Lord alway: and again I say , Rejoice!" Easier said than done?

Well, it has been said that one of my main faults is that I am far too idealistic, but then I've found that idealism at least opens me up to the possibilities of the future and gives me something to work towards. What follows is my vision for the future of the Church in the hope that such idealism might raise the spirits of my readers. It is my vision and no-one else's, and certainly not necessarily representative of the views of any institution to which I happen to belong. Nonetheless, this is what I want to see in the future and, if I am allowed, this is what I want to work for.

The Church is the custodian of Good News. Too often the Church misses this and adds sometimes very significantly to the suffering of others by legalism and judgmentalism. Sometimes the Church uses the Good News to make "good" people ever so good and "bad" people practically irredeemable. I have seen this so much in the past online and in many a pulpit, and probably I have done the same thing myself. Well, it's got to stop. People are people and creatures of God with the potential for being children of God regardless of who they are.

My vision of a Church is that hospital for sinners that seeks only to meet the sinner where they are and lift them out of their pain and misery, bind their wounds and help them find health again. It is a Church that puts the little human being on the path to sainthood while yet living in imperfection.The parable of the Good Samaritan is the perfect model for the Church from the words of Christ Himself. If we use the 10 Commandments, or indeed any Biblical verse, to make someone appear to be irredeemable, then we have lost the Good News completely, and we pass on by the sick soul lying bleeding on the ground. The fact of the matter is that Christ came into the world to die for sinners, to save the world from death caused by the infection of sin and evil, from the rapidly growing nothingness eating away at God's Creation and destroying the perception of any worth that every single human being possesses. The Good News is that God does not want to lose anyone, at all. So why then do parts of the Church demonise sinners? Why are here all these shrill insistent voices that make some sins worse than irredeemable?

If someone uses God's law to punish sinners, then necessarily that someone must be God, for only He can wield the law with any true justice. Look how homosexuals have been demonised after being labelled as homosexuals. Sometimes people label themselves as homosexuals despite homosexuality being just one aspect of their being, an aspect which is subject to man's fallenness but also God's goodness. Labels can only ever stand for the part and never for the whole and yet that false induction is just what Humanity does. My vision is of a Church that assumes only the best in a person by seeing God in that person: it is also a Church that recognises its own frailties in the sins of others. It is a Church that helps people work out their own salvation in fear and trembling before the Divine Judge.

There are those judgements in cases where things are so complicated that only the eyes of God can see the truth. What about the woman who has had an abortion after finding out that her baby is so severely disabled that it could not possibly live after being born? Is she to be demonised for this? Or is she to be seen just as much as the victim of circumstances and loved and cherished and helped to rebuild her life by an institution that cares that she's hurting? Yes, abortion is something that should be stopped utterly, but campaigning outside abortion clinics with shrill voices of hate and judgement, with vile pictures, banners and slogans will destroy lives just as effectively. My vision is of a Church that will seek to eradicate abortion by stopping the need for it and allowing God to be the judge in the occasions when this miserable act occurs. It is a Church that sees and embraces all true victims without hesitation. It is a Church that remembers that it possesses only the Keys to Heaven and has no ability of itself to pass judgement on God's behalf until it has been perfected by God and with God and in God.

So my vision of a Church is one that eschews a legalistic approach to sin, but rather renders unto Caesar that which is Caesar's (letting the Civil Law deal with Civil things) and unto God what is God's. Ultimately, only God's law will remain and the Civil Law will vanish away when we see Christ sitting at the right hand of the Father coming in Glory to judge the quick and the dead. Until then we have imperfect human law with all its travesties and technicalities and loopholes and complexities, but also bringing order and no little justice to our lives. Where it fails, then must the lawmakers revise it and perhaps the Church will be allowed to be part of the process. If not, then it must live out its faith in a strange land where perhaps its song is curtailed, but whose visible presence gives hope for those who seek to make the Law better. The Church is in the world, not of it.

My vision is of a Church that lives out the Grace it possesses in the Sacraments that it is called to distribute. It is a Church that fully believes what she preaches and is unapologetic for believing in things that the World cannot understand or wants to be blind to or even finds scandalous. My vision is of a Church that realises that she possesses a Tradition which connects her to Christ more surely than any private interpretation of the Holy Scriptures which God has inspired and that she is bound to be faithful to that Tradition to bring the true Faith, the true Hope, the true Good News and the true Love to all mankind. It is a Church that studies both God and Humanity carefully and is not afraid of criticism. It is a Church that will defend God, as far as its feeble humanity allows but not force Him on people who choose not to believe in Him.
 
This, then, is a start and perhaps reveals more the state of my conscience than anything else. I love God and I love the Church, but the latter is not yet perfected and it is the duty of every Christian to help it work towards that perfection in God and in the Love of Christ Jesus who offered Himself for all Mankind and has taken the first step in offering us Salvation.

That's just the Church. I must make it clear that my vision of the future also very much includes my lovely wife-to-be and the possibilities of a long and very happy family life: thinking about that gives me great joy, but that's just for me and her and no other eyes.

What's your vision of the future? Dare you be positive?

Wholly holey, or holy?

Sermon preached at Our Lady of Walsingham and St Francis, Rochester on the twenty fifth Sunday after Trinity

If God is so great, why did He create washing up?

There’s something about washing-up that is so dreary, so dull, so mundane. For those folk lucky to have dishwashers, there is no need to have to deal with the piles of dirty plates and pots and pans. For the rest of us we have to pull on our rubber gloves, pick up the sponge and scrub.

But then, perhaps you like doing the washing-up. For some folk it’s an evil especially when you’re left at the end with that germy old sponge that you now have to throw away.

Mind you, think how the sponge feels!

[PAUSE]

The way that a sponge works is the fact that it’s riddled with holes which hold the water until it is squeezed out. This makes it ideal for scrubbing the pots and pans. However, as the water gets dirty, so the sponge gets filled with germy water. It may get squeezed out at the end of the washing up, but soon it will be so germy that it has to be thrown away.

That seems like a poor lot for the sponge.

[PAUSE]

Of course, sponges today are man-made but they are based on the sea-creature called a sponge which was used by our forefathers for the similar purposes of holding water temporarily. The animal sponge is a remarkable creature in its own right, and often we forget that. God’s creation is full of wonderful animals.

We know that God’s creation is good. He tells us that Himself. God looks at everything that He has made and it is very good. It is all very good, without exception. So where does Evil come from then?

[PAUSE]

St Augustine tells us that Evil is a lack of Good. Wherever Evil is there is no Good and wherever Good is there is no Evil. Since God created everything, and everything is Good, Evil must be a form of nothing, an emptiness, a darkness.

Of course, there is a bit of a problem here. People do good and evil often in equal measure, but people are not nothing – there are no obvious holes.

[PAUSE]

The fact of the matter is that we are worldly beings, and fallen from the presence of God. We have inherited the holes in our being from The Fall – the sin of Adam and Eve. We’re well aware of the presence of evil in our lives: we sin and keep sinning and seem unable to stop. St Augustine is telling us effectively that Evil is the presence of nothing that prevents us from being the something that God wants us to be.  We’re a sponge – full of holes – when we should be solid. We’re the wrong type of holy!

This is problematic if we’re hoping to find ourselves with God for Eternity, if we hope to be like Him. St John tells us that, “Whosoever abideth in [The Lord] sinneth not: whosoever sinneth hath not seen him, neither known him.” He also tells us that “He that committeth sin is of the devil: for the devil sinneth from the beginning.” So it would appear that if we sin now after we’ve heard this, we’re in trouble and likely to find the Devil breathing down our necks.

[PAUSE]

We must be careful. In the Greek language, St John is not saying that if we ever commit sin then we’ll never see God. He’s talking about habitual sin. If we keep sinning, and don’t care that we keep sinning, then we are turning our back on God.  Sinners just will not see God because they don’t want to look at Him. They want to remain full of holes so that they can soak up worldly pleasures.

The time will come when those worldly pleasures will end, and these folk will be so light and insubstantial because they are full of holes that they will blow away like chaff in the wind.

But we have holes in our being too that are caused by our sin. What do we do?

[PAUSE]

Well, we can do absolutely nothing to fill up the holes in our lives ourselves because all that we have is full of holes. The whole point is that we trust solely in God, for He will fill up those holes with His Grace. God wants everyone to be saved. He gives of Himself to fill the holes in our lives in the sacrifice of Christ upon the Cross. Certainly when we receive Our Lord in the Holy Sacrament, we are made more solid, and more like Him. Every grace given to us by God makes us more solid, makes us more real, just like He is real. We just have to choose to receive it!

[PAUSE]

God has given us a promise, we shall see Him. When we do see Him, then we shall understand who we are in relation to Him, because not only we will recognise Him but we shall see Him in ourselves. We shall indeed recognise ourselves as the sons and daughters of God.

Can you see the family resemblance yet, or is your life too full of holes?

 

Broad Birettas and Canterbury Caps

I was enormously privileged to go to the Provincial Synod in Newport Beach and to meet so many people. When you are in a tiny Diocese out of the mainland of the Anglican Catholic Church, it's easy to think it's just you against the world. Of course, I found myself amid many fascinating and wonderful folk from all around the world, from Colombia to the Philippines.

Of course, the "regional variations" that I mentioned below were very much in evidence for me at the synod. I was wrong-footed a couple of times due to pronunciation and by the slight alteration of texts. I'm of course used to the Venite as being the entirety of Psalm 95 following Benedictine and 1549 practice. The main liturgy book in use in the U.S. is of course the much beloved 1928 Book of Common Prayer. It's easy to see the passion and love that my American counterparts have for the 1928 BCP. For them, it stands as a rock to which to cling during the liturgical vicissitudes of the prevailing culture.

Culture, of course, is responsible for the "regional variations". During the Synod Mass, I saw mozettas and cottas and surplices and piping and birettas (both 3 and 4 ridged) and mitres and Canterbury caps and lace and academic hoods and tippets and rochets and chimeres and copes. It was a beautifully colourful Mass! It is of course possible that one might have taken issue with the wearing of a surplice and hood at Mass, or of preferring the biretta to the bare head. Ritual Notes could well have been in conflict with the Directorium Anglicanum or with Fortescue. Purists may well have balked, but the Mass was celebrated by the correct minister (to wit: Archbishop Haverland) using the correct matter with the correct form and the correct intention - in short, despite the variations in dress, the Mass was valid and we were all in communion.

In discussion with Bishop Damien Mead, we felt that what this demonstrated quite clearly is the idea of the ACC as a potentially Broad Church. This might cause eyebrows to raise with those who have always regarded the ACC as the High Church of the Continuing Anglican movement, and especially with those who find our stance a barrier to seeing how we are both Anglican and Catholic.

In the U.K., we are somewhat different from many of the Dioceses of the U.S. This is to be expected. The histories of individual dioceses is bound up in their locales. Yet, even in the Diocese of the U.K. there are variations in how things are done. My parish is a "High as a Kite" English Missal Parish. The Bishop's own parish in Canterbury uses the 1549 Canon. One of our clergy cannot say the filioque in the Nicene Creed out of a perfectly justifiable conviction. In the U.S., there are those who hold to the defining principles of the XXXIX articles. Most of us in the U.K. don't. The folk at St Matthew's Newport Beach have an Evangelical flavour added to their Masses which would cause the little old Anglo-Catholic matriarchs to drop a few stitches!

It doesn't matter. We are all Anglican Catholics and we are together.

However, following my experiences at the Anglican Catholic blog (currently in hiatus) in which I was accused (unfairly, I thought) of ignoring other Anglican jurisdictions, I do want to say categorically that Continuing Anglicanism is very much alive and well beyond the confines of the ACC. I had a very pleasant chat with Bishop Chandler Jones of the APA. Also present at the Synod were Archbishops Brian Marsh of the ACA and Peter Robinson of UECNA. There are faithful Anglicans all over the place of all sorts of stripes, be they Anglo-Catholics, Anglican Papalists,  Anglo-Protestants, Classic Anglicans, Anglo-Calvinists, Anglo-Orthodox, whatever. They all stand for some expression within the broad umbrella, unlike that large body which claims to define Anglicanism which in many places simply isn't even Christian, let alone Holy, Catholic and Apostolic.

Anglicanism is indeed a broad church, but admittedly there is probably very little in common between Anglo-Catholics and those who interpret the BCP to be Calvinist. Disagreements over doctrine do happen, and one must without fail follow one's conscience as long as it is kept properly informed. As I have said below, I can never be a Calvinist and this seems to have stirred up more ill-feeling. I do not think Calvinism is correct doctrine, nor do I think its central tenets to be provable from Holy Scripture as interpreted by the Church. However, it is entirely possible that I am wrong. There must necessitate a "walking apart" between me and those who subscribe to TULIP. It is a fact of life, a fact of humanity and a fact of fallenness.

That doesn't mean that "walking apart" needs to be an unkind affair in any sense. If they are both truly valid versions of Christianity, then they must necessarily be walking in the same direction and to the same source. As long as can be found within them the Doctrine of Jesus Christ the Son of God preached faithfully and passionately, then there can only be a common end, and that end can only ever be decided by God alone. The hand of friendship can certainly cross all borders if one is willing either to offer it, or to receive it. If we cannot share the chalice, then sharing a cup of tea is a start.

Shall I put the kettle on?

An hundred and forty and four thousand reasons to be a saint?

Sermon preached at St Augustine’s Church Canterbury on the Sunday in the Octave of All Saints.

Knock, knock!
After putting down your cup of tea,
and with a slight sense of irritation at being dragged away,
 you open the door to one of those
 door-to-door religious people.

“Greetings!”
she says with a cheesy smile on her face,
 “are you one of the 144,000 people
who are going to Heaven?”

Well, just how do you answer that one?

[PAUSE]

There are folk who do genuinely believe
that there will be only 144,000 people in heaven.

That does seem rather bizarre,
why such a precise number?

According to St John the Divine, the Lord says
 “Hurt not the earth, neither the sea,
 nor the trees, till we have sealed the servants
of our God in their foreheads.

And I heard the number of them
which were sealed:
and there were sealed
an hundred and forty and four thousand
of all the tribes of the children of Israel.”

Who are these hundred and forty and four thousand?

Well,
St John goes on to tell us that
there are 12,000 of each of the tribes of Israel:
Judah, Reuben, Gad,
Aser, Nephtalim, Manasses,
Simeon, Levi, Issacher,
Zabulon, Joseph and Benjamin.

To be a member of one of these tribes,
don’t we have to be Jewish?

Are we Gentiles not really eligible to go to heaven?

[PAUSE]

We do seem to have a bit of an inferiority complex
when it comes to people who get to go to Heaven,
those people whom the Church calls saints.

We can see this in our attitude towards the saints.

We can go overboard in venerating them,
bowing and scraping and preferring praying to them
instead of to God who loves us more
than they can ever do.

 Or we can loathe the whole idea of saints
because it creates an attitude of “holier than thou”,
separating us into being the sinners
and thus unworthy of the love of God.

[PAUSE]

We’d all be a bit shocked  if St Paul or St John Baptist
walked into our Mass now,
 principally because they are dead in this world,
 but we can at least identify them
as being truly saints.

We can’t identify the saints
who are in our midst right at this moment
because they have not yet died.

We only seem to be able to recognise
the saints when they pass from this world
 and into the next.

We read their lives and their stories and,
because they have been examples to us
 in following Our Lord Jesus,
we can be confident that they are indeed
with God in Heaven.
We have to be careful though
because we can easily start believing
that we can work our way into Heaven
by our own deeds.

[PAUSE]

Salvation comes only at the hands of God Himself.

We do not have to be Jewish
 in order to become saints
because Our Lord Jesus grafted us into the true vine.

We are Jewish by the Lord’s Jewishness
because we are one with Him,
and thus eligible to become one of the saints.

We look at the lives of the saints,
 not at what they did,
but rather about what Our Lord Jesus did in them,
what He inspired in them,
what miracles He wrought in them,
how He assisted people as they died
 for love of Him.

 Being an agent of Our Lord
 is not reserved to the clergy,
 it is open for all Christians
 to find Our Lord working in us.

This does not allow us the opportunity to boast.

There is no such thing as being “holier” than someone else.

The word “holy” is the same word
as the word “saint” which means “set apart for God”. 

Either one is set apart for God
or one is separate from God:
there is no meaning to the word “holier”.

Bishops, priests and deacons are not
more holy than lay folk
because “more holy” is meaningless.

 Indeed, history has shown that
many bishops, priests and deacons are far from holy
and there’s a good reason to believe that
there are more laity in Heaven than clergy!

As Our Lord says,
“To whom much has been given, much will be required!”
It’s also true to say that some saints
may not even be visibly part of the Church.

We may not recognise them,
but God does say,
“I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion.”
The word “Church” comes from the Greek
“kyriakos” meaning “belonging to the Lord”.

It is God who calls us all to be saints
and it is God who will decide who those saints are.

 The number 144,000 is a figurative number, not a literal one.

 St John says that the crowd of saints is
“a great multitude, which no man could number,
of all nations, and kindreds, and people, and tongues.”

[PAUSE]

We aren’t saints yet, because we’re not finished.

Our sainthood comes with our perfection.

We have to remember that
Our Lord Jesus Christ was not born perfect;
 He was born sinless, but not perfect.

His perfection came when He cried out
 “It is finished” upon the cross just before He died.

 In that very moment,
His perfection gave us the opportunity
 to become perfect too in Him.

Our whole lives strive for that perfection,
but we can easily lose sight of it
if we allow the distractions of this world
to divert us from the finish line.

 It is the saints who have been perfected in God
who cheer us on to the end.

It is the fact that they are still alive,
still cheering us on,
still supporting us with their prayers
beyond the confines of our perceptions
that helps us to focus on running
 the same race that they ran.

If we believe Christ’s promise for us
 that we will reign with Him in Heaven,
then we have to believe that
those who have gone before us
with the same hope
 have indeed been thus honoured
and we have the same opportunity
 to stand with them,
 rejoicing in the same presence of God for all Eternity.

[PAUSE]
As we say in the Apostles’ Creed,
We believe in the communion of the saints.

Are you one of them?

Doubt, valuable doubt

Doubt is a valuable thing and not always the enemy of Faith. The conquest of Doubt allows the believer to be assured that he believes in God of his own free will, and not through the mode of his upbringing because he has called that upbringing into question.

If the believer does call into question his infantile faith, that is, the faith in which he was brought up, even baptised, then it ceases to be an infantile faith, but rather a growth and blossoming within the soul.

To question the existence of God, an existence which is indeed not self-evident but rather pointed to by the means of His Creation, causes an upheaval and pain in the soul. Pain is, of course, a good thing because it tells us that something is wrong. One can indeed choose to numb that pain by doing away with God completely, or rejecting His position as King and by doing so, one may numb that pain permanently, but it does not address the real problem.

However, in confronting the pain and confusion, even if one is completely confused, and continue in the worship of God with one's head down and powering through will result in a greater appreciation of God and bring to Him a greater offering, that of one's own free choice.

We must worship God in truth, and our experience of the truth may harbour a doubt in God, or in His actions, or in His goodness. It may even be a doubt that affects a priest at the very moment of the Consecration of the Host! But to continue and give God the benefit of the doubt is to give Him something valuable of our very selves - it is our honesty and the pain that it is causing. God does promise that he who shall endure to the end shall be saved. We have that choice and that choice is precious to God Himself.