The Diocese of the Western States
The Anglican Province of Christ the King
Father Peter F. Hansen, Rector, St. Augustine of Canterbury, Chico, California
Sermon for the Synod Mass - May 5, 2007
And for the 4 th Sunday after Easter – May 6, 2007
“And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth.” John 1:14
I was baptized and confirmed as a child in the Protestant Episcopal Church USA (PECUSA). The intervening years have seen my old denomination change its name twice, to ECUSA , and now it's TEC: “just call me TEC.” The theology of TEC has changed too many times to count I those 50 years.
We observe today with some horror a behemoth dying on the seashore, wondering how it came to be there. It is more than instructive, and is no reason to gloat: it's imperative that we learn from this demise and resolve for ourselves never to make the same mistakes, never to commit the same treason.
We trace a failed biblical authority to the Graf-Wellhausen school of higher criticism of the late 19 th century. We see seminaries erode the faith of countless young men. We hear our own Archbishop's prophetic account of a coming assault on his dear church, how he became a priest reviled under James Pike, and how he quietly founded the St. Joseph of Arimathea Foundation. He has always told us this was an attack on the Incarnation. He was right.
Reading The Problem of Pain by C. S. Lewis the other day I came on a passage that spoke to me. In his first chapter, Lewis lays out how: “In all developed religion we find three strands or elements, and in Christianity one more. The first of these is… the experience of the Numinous .” By Numinous he means a consciousness of spiritual beings, at least of angels, perhaps God, that we fear, respect, worship, sacrifice and pray to. Then he gives: “…the second strand or element in religion. All the human beings that history has heard of acknowledge some kind of morality ; that is, they feel towards certain proposed actions the experiences expressed by the words ‘I ought' or ‘I ought not.'” This, we recognize, is his familiar argument from Mere Christianity for the very existence of God.
Then he relates these two strands, first noting that “in many forms of Paganism the worship of the gods and ethical discussion of the philosophers have very little to do with each other. The third stage in religious development arises when men identify them —when the Numinous Power of which they feel awe is made the guardian of the morality to which they feel obligated.” Here dear Clive observes that this connection isn't always made, and that it isn't really in our nature to desire such a connection. On the contrary “we desire nothing less than to see that Law whose naked authority is already unsupportable armed with the incalculable claims of the Numinous… It is not unnatural that many sections of the human race refused it; non-moral religion, and non-religious morality, existed and still exist. Perhaps only a single people, as a people, took the new step with perfect decision—I mean the Jews: but great individuals in all times and places have taken it also…” And I read an observation that stopped me cold: “ only those who take [this step of relating Spirit and Goodness] are safe from the obscenities and barbarities of unmoralized worship or the cold, sad self-righteousness of sheer moralism .” There is something eerily familiar about this separation, this gap, and its cruel result. Lewis notes: “At every stage of religious development man may rebel… He can refuse to identify the Numinous with the righteous, and remain a barbarian, worshipping sexuality, or the dead, or the life-force, or the future. But the cost is heavy.”
What I recognized in this description was TEC , having separated God from morality, and arriving at both “the obscenities and barbarities of unmoralized worship” and “the cold, sad self-righteousness of sheer moralism.”
Morality distinct from the God of the Biblical record had its signal call in the “new morality” suggested by Joseph Fletcher in his 1966 landmark book, Situation Ethics . All it took to turn this Episcopal priest and seminary professor into a life-hating atheist was for him to put the first great commandment— to Love God —after and subservient to the second— the love of one's neighbor : you had pure humanism driving a religion. Fletcher won the hearts of millions, promoted abortion and euthanasia, then died with no belief in God, or even in life itself. The moral decline of TEC follows the trail of Fletcher's great fall.
What Fletcher was seeking was a new definition of kindness , though he called it “ love .” Lewis speaks of such loveless humanistic kindness later in the book: “There is kindness in Love, but Love and kindness are not coterminous, and when kindness…is separated from the other elements of Love, it involves a certain fundamental indifference to its object, and even something like contempt of it… Kindness, merely as such, cares not whether its object becomes good or bad, provided only that it escapes suffering.” TEC's current kindness toward sexual deviance lacks any real concern for the people, the objects of their self-satisfied altruism. It merely wishes to not to be thought the source of their pain.
Obscenities and barbarities arise in unmoralized worship as priestesses hold new ‘sacred' ceremonies offering honey and milk and raisin cakes to goddesses we Episcopalians never heard of, and re-imagining god as their mother, christ as their sister. This witches brew of satanic worship is only ‘ Rite Four,' while much newer Prayer Books are yet being written. The old new one, dating way back to 1979, already did away with sin, repentance, any need for confession, or even the power of a priest to absolve, and the necessity for confirmation or bishops at all for that matter. Sin of course cannot exist in such a sinful religion.
What I realize reading Lewis is a mechanism operating in TEC that results in the offensive quality of its worship and its moral waywardness, things we've all seen and reacted to. But from what does this mechanism arise? Why would a church disavow God's primal right to command our first love and to establish a moral standard upon mankind? How does an ancient ark suddenly throw off all its moorings and drift out to sea?
The philosophical link between the Spirit and morality was made concrete, tangible, real for us in the coming of Jesus Christ. Not just as the godly man, the goodly teacher, the wonderworker, the tragic peacemaker. God's eternal Son became human flesh, a complete and perfect man for us. And the Eternal Spirit stepped into mortality, mortal and moral , and He lived . The Incarnation is proof of that connection, the Numinous and goodness both come from an Almighty God who must first be obeyed and loved before we can even be human. Deny that truth at any point, and the bridge falls, like the overpass to the Macarthur freeway the other day, steel girders melting above 2000 degree heat. Fail to understand God as lawgiver, and Christ as His Son, and it falls. It must fall.
More than 25% of clergy in the Church of England today openly declare they do not believe in the Virgin Birth of Jesus Christ. It's a myth to them, an unnecessary archaism . In TEC's Diocese of Northern California, a friend of mine is now the only priest who won't laugh at the Virgin Birth when scoffed at by a speaker at their convention. I hate to think of the percentage of disbelief in this basic creedal doctrine were TEC to be polled today. Their reduced population reflects the disbelief of their clergy, claiming ‘2.2 million', but in reality having less than 800,000 in church after three decades of open rebellion. Even Jefferts Schori admits: “ It used to be larger… but Episcopalians tend to be better-educated and tend to reproduce at lower rates than some other denominations. Roman Catholics and Mormons both have theological reasons for producing lots of children.” Oh, so Episcopalians aren't interested in having children. Why? Because “we encourage people to pay attention to the stewardship of the earth and not use more than their portion.” Catholics and even Mormons still believe the Gospel. Episcopalians believe in Global warming. When the next ice age arrives, which group will remain, I wonder? Again, annihilation is the only true good.
But the Incarnation ties man to God through the appearance among us of His only Son. It explains the reason for Sacraments, unfolds the mystery of Sacrifice, and elevates us to Perfection through the humility of our seeking and receiving Forgiveness. “God became man so that man might become…”
Nicaea settled the Son's eternal existence with the Father. Constantinople established Christ's complete humanity. Ephesus made sure that Christ is a united person, and Chalcedon affirmed Christ's dual natures, human and divine. Minneapolis dismantled them all, and set a church adrift between an abandoned faith and a zealous tolerance of all except the faithful.
But how does this relate to us? It does no good for us to gloat over TEC. What does this lesson teach us ?
The Incarnate Word insists we be perfect, even as the Father is perfect, in the course of instructing us on the dynamics of forgiveness. It is an act of divine grace to forgive, and is in the very nature of God. God will do and has done all in His power to reach us and to forgive us, and to that end He gave up His Son. Our sins are roadblocks between us and God, but Jesus is the means by which they may now be done away. It's all about Him . But is He God , or just a righteous teacher? Do our kids know that He not only died, but that He is living still? The wrong answer to such questions can spell disaster. Our adults and children must be shown where in the Scriptures this is proven, bolstering their faith as the years grow darker. If a church does not have both adult's and children's Bible studies, we skate perilously close to the brink of TEC's disaster.
A friend of mine, a retired Assemblies of God pastor, asked himself: What happened to the Command of Christ ? Several times in St. John's Gospel, Jesus gives His apostles a New Commandment, to love one another as He loves them. As this is Christ's own command, and not simply citing of the Old Testament commands to love, my friend reasoned, wouldn't the early church have cherished this and spoken of it often? He researched, and among all the Apostolic and the Ante-Nicene Fathers' writings, there are less than half a dozen references to His command or to these passages at all. In the heat of persecution, and the stresses of heresies, we became a church of doctrine and creed, a purified teaching— all good, all essential —but we forgot the love that is willing to die for my brother Christian. Thus came the Great Schism, the Reformation, and the ensuing fracturing and fragmenting of the Church, now even our own Anglicanism, showing the world we are not His disciples by our lack of love for each other. All of Christ's nature must remain in us. The Spirit leads us to love, forgive, sacrifice, worship and uphold doctrine—the Acts 2:42 church: continuing steadfast in the Apostles doctrine and fellowship, the breaking of bread and prayers . Lose one crumb of this, and we sink into mere virtuosity , clamoring over a dead creature on a lonely coastline, and gloating over its demise.
We are a church alive . Enter our sanctuaries and the Presence of Jesus Christ is felt. You must sink down on your knees. You know that He is here, and that He is good, the source of all goodness. Incarnate forever, our God and King shows us what is right and what is needful for us. The truth is secure in the Prayer Book and Holy Bible, if we learn them and teach them. The love is that ineffable substance that goes beyond our great message and makes it live. If we're not about love, we're not about anything, and we will end up that mere footnote in the Handbook of Denominations .
Our Archbishop Robert Sherwood Morse gave a call to come out onto the desert; to leave the fleshpots of Egypt and experience the heady deprivation of existing only on the grace of God. His call was answered, by some, by us. Forget Egypt. Don't look back on Gomorrah. Look forward to Salem. The proof of our cause is not a ruined heap that smokes behind us, but the Peace God gives through His Son alone, a Priest forever, and the Love that only flows out from true forgiveness and willing sacrifice.
“ For God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world; but that the world through him might be saved.” John 3:17
PFH+