Desert

“Lord, I am not worthy that thou shouldest come under my roof: but speak the word only, and my servant shall be healed. For I am a man under authority… ”

A few years ago a friend who came from the Lutheran church, had spent some time with us Anglicans. But he told me he wanted to go to his home church for the celebration of Reformation Sunday. It sounded like the high point in the Lutheran church year. Reformation Sunday—I thought about it, and it made me sad that a church could celebrate the breaking of the Church into a myriad of splinters, wrecking the once unified Western Catholic Church. I asked him if we shouldn't also calendar a Feast of the Great Schism, the mutual anathematizing of the Catholic Church from the Eastern Orthodox in 1054.

We have our own day of the year now in which we acknowledge a more recent event, a break that continued , rather than ended, the unbroken line of apostolic order in American Anglicanism—today, the Preservation of the American Episcopate, 1978. It isn't a Reformation, a changing of the nature of the Catholic Church into just another Protestant separatist Christian body, angry forever over the treatment of our mother church. I hope not. But it is a remembrance of a few brave men and women who saw the fatal flaw in their church leaders and determined to found this movement, this church we are in. We celebrate today because they had courage enough to found a place outside that was not outside, but further inside of God's One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church.

At the Minneapolis General Convention of the Protestant Episcopal Church USA (PECUSA) in 1976, a new prayer book was ratified and the ordination of women into the priesthood approved by a narrow vote. These moves certified that the Bible no longer had authority to steer Anglicanism in America. A long standing cornerstone of the Anglican way, that nothing be established in our Church unless it pass a three-part test of Bible, tradition and reason, was swept aside. Now any 51% majority could establish or ruin doctrine and practice, morality, truth, salvation, and the apostolic order itself. Anything was possible. Nothing was holy, beyond the competence of the membership to change. Everything in fact did begin to change.

A strange mixture of groups then joined to make a separate path for many troubled at PECUSA's strident break with 2000 years of Christianity, high and low church Episcopalians. They met at St. Louis in September 1977 and there founded the Anglican Church in North America, ACNA, a national body that was short lived. The reasons for that fragile, fractious beginning are long to tell, but a power grab by two of the original four bishops left the other two no option but to go it alone. One of those had been Fr. Robert Sherwood Morse of St. Peter's, Oakland, who had preached the closing sermon at St. Louis: The Long March into the Desert . I quote from Fr. Morse's sermon:

     “We begin today the first step of a long march! Our Church has yielded to the temptations that Our Lord denied in the wilderness. As the Church is the mystical Body of Christ in what is left of human history, we face those temptations until time is no more…

     “The major thrust of the Spirit of the Age is against the essential mystery of Christ—the family and sacramental marriage! The demonic in history are those blind forces which would impersonalize life—eroding those interpersonal commitments that make civilization possible. Without the priority of the family—no nation, church, or society can survive. The crisis of our Western culture is theological. For the primary problem of our time is the attack on the family…

     “Dostoevsky says that Hell is to be unable to love! The zeal of the Church has always been up until now to save man from this Hell—by giving man, via grace, a conscience. For without a conscience we cannot love! …The most vivid agony reserved in Dante's Inferno is for the neutrals—who have no need to die for they were never alive! …The late Fr. Raymond Raynes, was asked who is most in danger of going to Hell and answered immediately, “The indifferent,” and then he thought and added, “and priests”—and I would also like to add, “and bishops.” There is no neutrality or indifference in God or in these issues facing us in the Church. God grant us the grace to love and suffer His will—to know Him as He is and not as we want Him to be…

     “We begin today a long march through the deserts of our time—but our movement is of the Spirit of God, for He is calling us successful—seldom rich—usually lukewarm Episcopalians to return Christ to the center of our lives and through us to our countrymen—to restore them and us to the things of God. We will be guided like the Hebrew children by a pillar of smoke by day and fire by night—a description of our smog-bound cities. What vision do we hold out to the world?..

     “What vision sustains us on this long journey—this pilgrimage of hardship? Only the love of God and our desire to share it—that our children's children until time is no more might receive the gift of faith—that experience of that incredible love of God that has touched our lives. But that love calls for personal sacrifice. I call upon you to exercise your apostolic commission—save yourselves, your children, your families, your friends and fellows—leave this modern Egypt—the fleshpots of the Minneapolis Church—whose bishops act like Pharaohs building pyramids of personal power and privilege. Leave this kingdom of death, this House of Pharaoh, and march with us into the desert. We must all wait in the desert for through this experience we as penitents will be cleansed. God give us the strength that some day our movement might be as that of the early Christian desert Fathers who were more concerned with what God thought of them than what the world thought of them. Come with us, join us, march with us into the desert—for God call us to himself!”

This was no breaking of fellowship, but a manning of lifeboats to save the few who would leave the Titanic. There is little doubt of that great ship's demise today, 29 years later. And yet those who today clamour about its hull, now cracking amidships, contend that it's only about homosexuality. No. That's only just symptom, but look how Fr. Morse, now our Archbishop, put his finger on their problem, an attack upon the family, upon children, upon conscience and morality, when he spoke at St. Louis. The current woes of that church, now twice renamed—PECUSA to ECUSA, and now ‘TEC'—began when the Bible, tradition and reason could no longer settle an issue, giving way to a Congregationalist majority rule. A congregation without these superior authorities is a fatherless society. It becomes a homeless society, and will at last be no society at all. In future years, the vision of our founders will become evident to all, for the day of that consecration saved the Anglican Church in America.

On January 28, 1978, in Denver Robert Sherwood Morse joined the ranks of the Apostles. His consecration insured the continuation of a fatherhood in God of a family of Anglicans that could survive the coming winter of our faith. Father now of our family, he does not rest from the leadership, godly judgment, and loving purpose by which we began this long march. It was not a triumph, in the way of corporate takeovers, successful revolutions, or wars of conquest. No one fought the Episcopalians, and in time we learned no longer to be hurt or offended. We got out with our faith intact, and then had to learn who we were. We dreamt of returning to some greater body of faithful souls who would see, a little later, where the problem was. But with each successive movement to leave, we found them clinging only to their immediate issue: Barbara Harris—a woman bishop, charismatic worship, and now Gene Robinson . With such clarity did our archbishop see the entire shape of the problem, and we are the recipients of his vision.

It's been almost 30 years we've been on the desert. Will we have 10 more before we cross the Jordan? I'm not sure we can press the analogy, but if so that day will not end our struggle. Jericho lies that way, and in the end, Jerusalem. Successes breed new problems, and we must be happy to be in the desert. We have each other, and we have the Lord in His tent, a tower of flame in this dark world.

This is also the 4 th Sunday after Epiphany, and one of my favorite passages in the Gospel is recorded in that Mass—the healing of the Centurion's servant. When Jesus would be willing to go to the man's home, he objects, “Lord, I am not worthy that thou shouldest come under my roof: but speak the word only, and my servant shall be healed. For I am a man under authority.” Jesus remarked that there was no one in Israel with such great faith. The Roman had seen what so many had missed about Jesus, that He could heal by saying so, yes, but also that He was powerful only because He remained under the power and authority of His Father.

No Church, no spiritual movement, no lasting family exists without headship, a father to direct it, heal it, protect it, empower it, authenticate it, and give it a name. We are Episcopalians inasmuch as we are founded upon the Apostles and their successors, episcopoi : Greek for bishops . No more bishops have been validly consecrated since the 1979 prayer book was instituted, because its order of consecration is altered. A Concordat with the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America insured that TEC no longer considered its bishops any different than Protestant pastors. The failure to drive out heretical teachings, as those of John Shelby Spong, denying every element of our ancient creed, has shown a failure of leadership and protection of the flock in TEC's House of Bishops. And now that house is no longer even headed by a man at all. There are no fathers left to them. They are fatherless. They will soon be homeless. The society is breaking up.

We do not meet today to celebrate such a fall. We remember with gratitude the courage of a handful to take that first step into the desert for us, we happy few, their heirs. One day we may emerge from these sands, but we will remember we have fed upon the manna, have drunk from waters poured out from a stone, and have survived attacks because on this desert our Lord comes with us, and we are a family, keepers of the faith, men women and children, once slaves in Egypt, but now free.

PFH+