Diocesan Convention: Reports and Resolutions

So I am the lay representative this year for diocesan convention (Maryland), and having looked over the convention journal with the rector and talked strategy, I thought I'd give a few thoughts about it and diocesan business. Now, to me the most interesting stuff is in the supporting material, where there is a lot of informative stuff that the average parishioner is completely blank about. For instance, there is a complete list of parishes, and by "complete" I mean that it includes all the closed an merged parishes too, with dates of demise. There are quite illuminating reports of what the bishop and the standing committee did in the year, and a list of all clergy including ordinations, transfers in and out, licenses, and the like. There are reports from various ministries, some of which are illuminating in perhaps the wrong way: did you know that there is a national white privilege conference?

It's a terrible temptation to snark mercilessly at what is an earnest attempt to do right on the part of (one hopes) well-meaning people. And yet, the resolutions. It's always the resolutions. So, we have six resolutions, one of which is the inevitable and necessary compensation resolution which sets forth expected rates for clergy and employees as well as the standards for supply priest pay. Two more have to do with rearranging the system of regions we have (something like deaneries in some other dioceses) and adjusting their function a little. These are the real business and can be discussed on their merits.

After that, however, comes the other part. The fourth resolution asks us to "[support] all such measures prohibiting the Department of the Environment from issuing a permit to authorize the hydraulic fracturing of a well for the exploration or production of natural gas in the State until April 30, 2023 or until a specified panel is appointed, convenes, and reports to the Governor and General Assembly on the safety and environmental risks of such activities." Well. I personally am extremely wary of fracking; the fears of groundwater contamination seem to me to be well-grounded even if they haven't (yet) been demonstrated, and if contamination happens, it's likely to be widespread and extremely difficult if not impossible to undo. That said, environmental effects of industrial techniques are not even vaguely in our core competency. As my very liberal daughter observed (more pungently than I shall express it here), this is about making ourselves feel good about doing something absolutely ineffectual. really, nobody in the diocese who wasn't at convention will ever know that we passed this, and nobody can seriously believe that such a resolution will have any impact when general assembly meets— and the governor is a Republican, and appears to be a Catholic.

Next up is a resolution which asks us to "support the adoption of state legislation for “death with dignity” in the 2016 session" and "encourages on-going discussion of the issues surrounding this issue". OK, well, this is a little closer to stuff we actually know about, but "death with dignity" is after all a euphemism for physician-assisted suicide in the face of terminal illness. It's not something that we, as laypeople, are up on as to the moral and legal nuances. Half of us will want to oppose on the grounds of our inarticulate moral queasiness, and the other half will want to support on the basis of some relative's painful and undignified final days. Both sides will sigh in relief when the first clause is struck and we pass an ineffectual but self-affirming resolution to talk about the matter some more.

Finally, we get to a resolution which "encourages Episcopalians to build bridges that will foster positive relationships between residents and local law enforcement officers who are assigned to police neighborhoods where congregations are located" and which states that "community engagement such as this is in line with the concept of what it means to be a parish." This takes a bit of unpacking unless you have been following the news recently of the death of a man in Baltimore City police custody apparently due to their brutality. It's a serious social problem, made all the more dire given developments since the convention journal was produced; but again, we're outside our competence, and the impotent wording of the resolution shows this. OK, so this is turning out to be a big issue, but I fail to see how we in convention can contribute much, especially since few of us live in Baltimore City. And note the phrases used: what does "building bridges" mean? How about "foster positive relationships"? What's "the concept of what it means to be a parish"? These vacuities are progressive church buzzwords, rhetorical filler; they are about saying the "right things" without saying anything. So what it actually says is "the situation with the police in Baltimore City is atrocious but we don't have any idea of what do about it but mouth platitudes."

So we have three resolutions which amount to nothing but self-congratulation, and meanwhile there are three very big elephants standing in the room.

An Unlikely Anglo-Imperial Union

My wife has been studying early 20th century Japanese history, and the advent within the household of a novel in which Hirohito makes an appearance brought me to the thought that he and the presiding bishop shared an interest in marine biology. The thought of them meeting and discovering their shared interests led me to flash upon the following:

I must however say that for all the regrettable vesture of her career she never wore a miter to compare with THAT. Further reading also informs me that while her interests turned to squid, his lay in hydrozoans. I should have known the relationship was doomed from the start.

Stability and the Liturgy

General Convention is coming up in July, and we now have a resolution to amend Article X of the church constitution to specifically authorize forms outside the BCP (the bolded material represents the addition):

But notwithstanding anything herein above contained, the General Convention may at any one meeting, by a majority of the whole number of the Bishops entitled to vote in the House of Bishops, and by a majority of the Clerical and Lay Deputies of all the Dioceses entitled to representation in the House of Deputies, voting by orders as previously set forth in this Article:

a) Amend the Table of Lessons and all Tables and Rubrics relating to the Psalms.

b) Authorize for trial use throughout this Church, as an alternative at any time or times to the established Book of Common Prayer or to any section or Office thereof, a proposed revision of the whole Book or of any portion thereof, duly undertaken by the General Convention.

c) Provide for use of other forms for the renewal and enrichment of the common worship of this church for such periods of time and upon such terms and conditions as the General Convention may provide.

This addition has become the focus of some small controversy. I think Tobias Haller is correct in pointing out that this regularizes the anomalous position of the Book of Occasional Services (and to a lesser extent, Lesser Feasts and Fasts: most of the latter is covered under clause (a) above) in the collection of our liturgical texts. But these are not the only books we have, and Enriching Our Worship is really the focus of most people's concern, together with the writing of same-sex blessing rites.

Historically, western liturgy was divided into several volumes, e.g., missals, ordinals, psalters, each of which fit into a different context of worship. In the reformation these were all wrapped up together in the Book of Common Prayer, which due to a certain paralysis has never been updated itself. The US BCP has always followed the pattern of its ancestor in terms of what it covers, but the need for a supplement was felt over a century ago, leading first to the Book of Offices and thence to the current BOS.

There's a substantial shift in content along the way, however. The vast majority of the 1914 book is devoted to dealing with consecrated things; the order for compline (which made its way into the BCP in 1979) is an exception. The 1940 offices show the same pattern, but the BOS adds a whole new category of services, listed there under the heading "The Church Year". This section contains, in large part, services people were already doing, mostly keyed to the church year. One can argue the need for some of this, as anyone who wanted to do Lessons and Carols at Christmas already had copies of Carols from Kings 1 (in order to do the Willcocks descants if nothing else) and therefore had the order laid out for them, but the section as a whole reflects the high-and-wide interest in recovering all these seasonal liturgies as part of the official cycle of things (which, by the way, the Anglo-Catholics were already doing without benefit of GC authorization).

Some of the material promulgated of late by the SCLM fits into these two patterns, whatever the merits of the texts in question. By and large I don't think much of it, but that's not the main issue here. A lot of the most egregious stuff from the last round is material that nobody is every going to be subjected to unless the rector gets bored with the prayers in the BCP and goes on a hunt for novelty. Thus we got a devotional cycle of prayer which I found it hard to tell whether the theology or the writing was worse, but I would venture to guess that it would never appear on a Sunday morning, so no doubt the average parishioner will never be exposed to it.

But that leads to Enriching Our Worship, which is not a prayer book supplement. Indeed, when it was first promulgated, it was set forth as material for the future revision of the BCP. These days, it's an alternative service book, except that it has never gone through the trial process because it is permanently stuck in it. And it has a lot of problems, bad enough to where I won't take communion if it is used. It enjoys no permanent approval, and yet it appears to be the basis and standard for all of SCLM's other output— not the BCP, the supposed standard for our worship.

That's the problem in this resolution: in authorizing whoever writes liturgies for the church to produce whatever anyone feels they need, it follows the spirit of exactly what's being done wrong now. I suppose we ought to amend things to allow for extra-BCP work, but that material also needs to go through the same kind of review as the BCP itself, including sunsetting of trial liturgies.

God's Dreadful Plan

Preached on Good Friday, 2015

So this is where God's plan takes us.

But then, God's plan so often makes no sense, at least while it is playing out. God sets Adam and Eve in the garden as part of his creation, and right off they get themselves expelled because they will not keep the forbidden fruit out of their gullets. He picks, for his new nation, an ancient couple who can no longer bear children; their grandson cheats his brother and proceeds to bear a pack of sons who sell one of their own into slavery. That act in turn leads the whole “nation” into Egypt and slavery, and when the LORD God brings them out of bondage in a display of mighty wonders, their response is to gripe constantly about the rest of the trip, when they aren't raising up an idol of a false god. Skip forward to the kingdom, and they get as far Solomon—three kings in all—before the whole thing falls apart: the northerners are dispersed by the Assyrians, while Judah and Benjamin hold on for another two hundred years before going into exile. The prophets go with them, and mourn the lost kingdom while proclaiming a messiah who will come and set all things right.

Does this make any sense? Our sacred history tells us that the LORD, the Almighty, the king of creation time after time picks such weakness in men in which to manifest Himself. And then, in Roman Judaea, he puts Himself in humanity, the promised messiah; and heaven announces this to shepherds in a field and to foreigners who, having brought their gifts, disappear back into their own country. This God incarnate, this Jesus, then picks twelve followers who are apparently among the thickest of men. The chief, whom he could just as well have named Peter for his rockheadedness, is throughout a weak reed, prone to fits of enthusiastic faith followed by abject cowardice. Thus, on this Friday, we find the disciples dispersed, Peter's bluster betrayed in his three denials; of the lot, only John makes it to Calvary, to stand among the women.

And Jesus? There he hangs, nailed to the rood, tortured, bound in his humanity to mankind's death, expiring as we all shall. Is this any way to run a creation? Many rebel, and say, “no God could run things this badly.” But who are they to say? Where were they when the world began?

When the world ended, the old world before the temple's curtain was torn in half, it is easy to see where we all were. There is the God-and-man, hanging on the cross, and there is mankind: one with a hammer, another with a nail. One taking silver pieces, another handing them to the betrayer. One swearing lies about the messiah, another having at him with a whip. One dressing him and robes and mocking him, another washing his hands. A few helpless faithful stand watching; a multitude jeer. We stood moments ago in the midst of his passion, our hearts with the faithful, our lips with the spitting. And is that not our way in all things?

Perhaps it is unfair to lay upon us all the various outrages and neglects committed in Jesus' name. And certainly the godless have tortured and stolen and murdered with the best of us. And yet, the hymn puts in our mouths the truth: “Twas I, Lord Jesus, I it was denied thee; I crucified thee.” Who among us can deny it? In a myriad of offenses, we hammer away at the cross, while we gaze upon it in sorrow.

And God presided over it all, enthroned in pain. Where is God when we suffer? He is in our humanity, for he joined the divine to the human in Bethlehem, and carried it to its end on the cross. And yet, we know, that is not the end. On the cross is laid all our sin, from the beginning until that latter day when all passes away. The world sees this all as foolishness: how fitting that the God whom they do not heed finds His end here! Yes, they say, how proper it is that this religion for idiots be put to rest in a rocky tomb! In a just world, they say, things would have happened differently; and there is the proof that justice is what men make it to be. And on another continent, the followers of another god fall upon Christians, and slay them, ostentatiously. Twenty-one are martyred in Libya; a hundred and fifty more are killed in Kenya. Islam cannot accept Jesus on the cross. He was replaced there by another, they say, or in any case he did not die. We, his true followers, know differently; the holy women, and after them, the disciples, testify that Jesus was crucified, died, and was buried, and on the third day....

But for now, in our weakness, we kneel before the cross, watching as the plan is worked out. And to what purpose is this plan accomplished? Because God so loved the world. He gave his only Son, and that son is how we see love, suffering and dying for us. God's love of itself we do not understand; or rather, we cannot see how it is carried out as the days roll onward. But his love in Jesus: that we can understand. It is a love in weakness, not in power; it is a love in sacrifice, not in trade. The paradox of divine purpose is in its revelation through the small, the scorned, the futile, even the perverse and evil: a man and his aged wife, a trickster father and his scheming sons, a nation of whiners and a pair of contending kingdoms, and finally, the god-made-man dying in public scorn, abandoned by his followers. Those same frightened disciples became the apostles who endured abuse and finally death or exile to spread the faith, joined by one of their chief persecutors.

And we live under the same commission: to spread the kingdom, not through worldly power, but in testimony. We speak the word of God as it has been delivered to us from of old; we baptize as we have been told; but most of all we make known our discipleship through love, to those we know and those who, unknown to us, are our neighbors. We cannot make sense of the love of God, but we can see it here, on the tree which is both the instrument of shame and the sign of triumph. Therefore contemplate the cross, for there is found our salvation: not in the reasonable plan of the world, but in the sacrifice of God's only son.

Even the Bishops Aren't Safe

I'm always interested in Bishop Martins's blogs, and especially his blogging of church meetings. So the last few days he has been writing about the bishops' convocation at Kanuga, and for Sunday he had the following to say about the eucharist:

Now, I don't want to sound whiny, but I can't not mention the level to which I was upset by the liturgy itself--ostensibly Rite II from the Prayer Book, but with the text generously emended to exclude masculine pronouns for God, which is the ideological hobgoblin of today's liturgical elite. I can usually take this somewhat in stride on such occasions--ideologues gonna be ideologues--but I had my own little meltdown when we sang Thomas Ken's Psalm paraphrase, the concluding verse of which is the ubiquitous 'Doxology,' and the text of that verse was altered to exclude "him" in the first three lines, and render the Holy Trinity as "Creator, Christ, and Holy Spirit" in the last one. I can tolerate a little ideology, but heresy is a tougher pill to swallow, and any evocation of the Trinity that eschews "Father" and "Son" is most likely just that--heresy.

I personally am the parish delegate to our diocesan convention, and I can tell you now that if convention features a liturgy which pulls this kind of thing, or if they use Enriching Our Worship, I won't partake. I am tolerant of the clunky avoidance of pronouns in reference to the Godhead, but erasing the Father is not something I'm going to put up with.

And again I say, in this sort of large gathering, this kind of act is exclusionary. What's more galling is that it is probably meant to be so: if those of us with a commitment to orthodoxy are put off, I suspect that's held to be all for the better.

The Other, Bigger Lent Problem

David Lose, via Sed Angli:

[T]he brunt of the problem of Lent is in the first four words, “And when you fast….” And when you fast?! C’mon. Except for the occasional crash diet before summer vacation, who fasts anymore?

And there it is in a nutshell, you see, the trouble with Lent: it feels like this strange,weirdly anachronistic holiday that celebrates things we don’t value and encourages attitudes we don’t share.

Read it all.

Dust, Made Living

Preached on Ash Wednesday, 2015

This year I have volunteered to relieve the rector of the annual task of explaining how one should “beware of practicing your piety before others” and then proceed to daub our foreheads with char. That task, however, I will cheat upon by suggesting that one may apply a damp tissue or, failing that, the back of one's hand upon leaving the church.

No, it is the words which accompany the smearing to which I will speak first: “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” This was the word of the LORD God to Adam, after the first sin, and it speaks the fundamental fact of formation from the inanimate matter of the earth. We are not spirits which occupying fleshly vessels, as Gnostics ancient and modern teach; we cannot live separate from our animal bodies. We must eat and drink, and rise and sleep, and in all but the warmest climes we must cloth ourselves and seek shelter from the weather. This is the way of our living, and yet, from the day of our conception, the day of our demise awaits, unless the Day of the Lord intervene. It is as a sign to ourselves, therefore, that we mark our foreheads: a sign of our mortality.

Nevertheless, we who are baptized carry the divine light and are joined into the holy body, the church of which Christ is the head. Still, our fallen nature struggles against the divine. Thus the Church, in her wisdom, has set apart seasons in the year for penitence, which is to say, times in which our minds and bodies are especially harnessed to spiritual discipline for the sake recollecting our sins and purifying our wills, as best we feebly can. Therefore we fast: by tradition we fast of meat, and in the East they also forgo eggs and dairy, and even cooking oils. But if other abstinences prove more fruitful to you, if some other act of self-denial more constantly keeps you mindful, then choose it. The point is recollection of the spiritual through discipline of the flesh, not mere obedience to a rule.

Beyond that, we are called to greater prayerfulness; and if you are not already doing so, I commend to you the daily devotions which may be found in the Prayer Book, even if you can fit only one into your day. And if you can start in Lent, perhaps you can continue through the year, so that prayer becomes ever more part of your daily living.

In these forty days we are reminded of the days spent in the ark during the flood, the days of Jesus' temptation, the days of resurrection before Jesus ascended to the throne of heaven, taking our earthly form to the heart of the Godhead. From thence he shall come to judge the living and the dead, on the day of the Lord, which as the prophet Joel says shall be terrible beyond human endurance, were it not for the mercy of the Lord in our salvation. Thus we prepare ourselves for that dread day, that we may watch with the wise virgins, our lamps well lighted. Our appetites, though, call us away, both in body and mind. Let us sleep! Let us find pleasant diversions! Let us give free rein to our impulses! they disobediently cry, as on that sorry day in Eden.

And thus it is given to us in some seasons to rejoice in our salvation, and in others to look upon our sins and acknowledge them. We reheat the twisted metal of our souls in the forge of self-denial to make them malleable, and hammer them on the anvil of spiritual disciplines to restore their proper shapes. And thus we begin this season, the mark of ashes recalling to us our origins in the substance of creation. We are but dust, made living through the first grace of God in creation, and now, made living again through the grace which comes through our savior Jesus Christ, who shares in our flesh, its morality made immortal. In that terrible last day, when the old earth and heavens pass away, all that is worldly will finally pass with them, all that has not withered or rusted or been eaten away long before. And before the last, we may, like Paul, be called to set aside wealth and comfort and the approbation of our fellows in our witness to the gospel; indeed, like those slain in Libya, we may lose our lives. But in these losses is salvation found, when what is worldly passes away. And thus it is well that we prepare through self-denial and prayer.

Easter will yet come, the day of glorious resurrection, and after the Day of the Lord, the glorious eternity of the new life. But we are not there yet; and the way to Easter leads first to the cross, that great sacrifice. Can we not watch with our Lord in our own Gethsemane, praying and fasting?

THIS.

So, being in Boston again, it was time to look for a place to go to church on Sunday. Last year's trip to Trinity Copley Square having ruled them out, I then found that Old North only had a said service within my service time constraints. (Tourists seemed to be surprised that church services were held there.) The nautilus in the pediment at the cathedral is, um, off-putting; Greek revival isn't my thing anyway. So next, I looked into Emmanuel's website, but the statement that "Believing is not a condition of beloving or belonging here" told me that wouldn't be welcome.

It was thus that I turned to Church of the Advent on the edge of Beacon Hill. Advent had been recommended to be after my recounting of my experience last year at Trinity, but as AC is not my churchmanship (I'm sky-high) it hadn't been at the top of my list. Their schedule, however, listed "Sung Mass (Rite II)" at 9, which sounded promising enough.

Trinity out-decorates Advent, but only because it's bigger and because John Hubbard Sturgis did not paint every square inch of the brick and stonework. Instead, he built one of the few American essays in "muscular Gothic", with its massive structural elements and elaborate patterning. It is emblematic of the style's overmuchmess that Sturgis put a hammerbeam ceiling in an not-all-that-large room more or less because he could, and perhaps because nobody else up to that point had done such a thing in America. Various lily-gilding through the years includes Ralph Adams Cram's rood, and the elegant but very French and not at all muscular aumbry whose golden tower can be seen to the left of the altar in the picture.

It is an intense space, and at 9 o'clock it was populated, not terribly densely, by a mixture of grey heads and parents with very small kids. One gathers that the main action is the "high mass (Rite I)" at eleven. But what we got at nine was, with a few quirks, the perfect image of a high church Eucharist of about 1986 (which date being dictated by the delivery of the 1982 hymnal, which actually came out in '85). The words of the BCP were said exactly as written, with no messing about with God's gender or lack thereof. The lessons were according to the original lectionary and were read from the RSV; indeed, each hymnal rack also held a volume of lectionary readings, copyright 1978. The service music was by Dom Gregory Murray and was unfamiliar to me, but it was quite singable and very much of the period. There were a very few deviations: the sursum corda was lined differently from that of the hymnal, and the tone used to chant the Lord's prayer was also unfamiliar, and quite difficult to sing without music. I also found their adherence to the dictate of the BCP that there should be a definite pause at the asterisk in the psalms, to be exaggerated to the point of posing an impediment to common recital. The two insertions in communion (the prayer of humble access and the non sum dignus) were not typical of the period.

And yet. THIS was the direction that prayer book revision took, before the loss of nerve in the face of the happy-clappy set and the political purists made decently-and-in-order services out of the BCP increasingly rare. And it is something that could be recovered, if people are willing to take church seriously and solemnly again. It is something that could be regained, if people could admit that, for most of the population, the contrived speech patterns of leftist academia are off-putting where they are not outright rejected. It could be revived, if the stupid progessivist doctrine that we "can't turn back the clock" (meaning that we cannot ever say that some supposed accommodation to the culture was a bad idea and should be discarded) were once and for all rejected.

Sure, 1979 is (as everyone admits while looking at a certain sentence in Prayer C) hardly perfect. But the way it was originally done, by serious-minded Episcopal parishes, is much better than the way I find it done in so many supposedly progressive places today. The "celebrating the community" ethic does not work. It produces worship of the community and of our identity as righteous members of the same. It's time to repent of it and go back to celebrating the Godhead instead.

The Suffragan Mess

As a parishioner in the Diocese of Maryland, and especially as the parish delegate to the next diocesan convention, the accident in which the newly elected suffragan bishop killed a bicyclist has a double impact upon me. I have elided the bishop's name out of charity, though I will not paper over the facts of the matter by calling them allegations. The various witnesses are clear: on a Saturday afternoon, the bishop swerved and struck a man, then fled the scene. When she returned she was found to be deeply intoxicated, and was apparently texting at the time of the accident (I am unclear as to the source of this assertion); she was eventually arrested and is being held on bail. This is bad enough, but it has also come out that in 2010, while she was serving in another diocese, she was stopped by police due to her erratic driving and because one of her tires was shredded; the officer on the scene cut the coordination tests short for fear that she would hurt herself, and her blood alcohol was determined to be far in excess of the legal limit. Charges were eventually dropped on other charges of possessing marijuana, and the incident was eventually pleaded down to probation before judgement.

I am somehow managing to view the episode with an emotional detachment suitable to a Vulcan, and thus am not moved to expressions of moral outrage or judgement. It is clear, as Bishop Ihloff (MD ret.) says, that she cannot be allowed to continue as a bishop of this church; the disciplinary machinery of the church has begun to move in this direction, so we are told. Care for both the victim's family and for the soon-to-be-ex-bishop must proceed, and as I understand it, is being provided for. Justice will be done.

But what also will be done is a second election to replace her, for this diocese is simply too large to be served by a single bishop. And while I am not interested in assigning blame in the previous election, it is abundantly clear that The Process (or at least its execution) failed us. That process, at least as described in Rev. Anjel Scarborough's letter, seems to have invited someone deeply in the thrall of alcoholism to engage in a campaign of denial in order to advance her clerical career. Regardless of the conclusions of any psychological examination, any elector with full knowledge of the details of the 2010 incident would surely have to question how well-controlled the drinking was of a person who but three years before had to be pulled over before she hurt someone else (or herself, for that matter). And all the more so considering that she was not forthcoming to those electors about her situation: that should have been a red flag.

The "experts" have opined that really, nothing much more than a failure of judgement within the process was at fault. I am not convinced. And furthermore, this doesn't provide a route for correcting a patently faulty process. I'm not seeing testimony from people who are familiar with alcoholism and who look back at the older incident and say, "well, she could have been OK, from what we knew then." The testimony I have read is that everything about it, all the way to the election itself, should have told the search committee members responsible that her nomination should not have gone forward as it did.

The second search is going to have to be different. If nothing else, electors are going to have to be proactive in researching the candidates, because it is apparent that current processes do a poor job of presenting the candidates. What we had here was a situation in which someone was implicitly encouraged to hide the truth about herself in favor of presenting a facade in a few short written statements (none of them, to my mind, particularly demanding) and to show up at various public events and put on a good show. The potential for this to produce disastrously bad bishops ought to be obvious.

Sine Symbolo Fidei

AAK over in Sed Angli writes of a Christmas Eve service in which the creed was not said, in contradiction to the rubrics. Let us turn to page 358 of the BCP: On Sundays and other Major Feasts there follows, all standing The Nicene Creed. Turning back to page 28, we find Christmas listed among the "principal feasts".

Just so we're clear on that.

Of course this is the twenty-first century Episcopal Church, where rubrics exist to be set aside as the priest pleases, so the mere fact that the BCP tells us to do something doesn't amount to any actual requirement. And gosh darn, it wouldn't be "inclusive" to have all those C&E visitors be asked to state their faith in public, not to mention their lapsed and irreligious relatives. Not only that, it speeds up the service by a precious two minutes to leave this out.

Come on, clerics. It is obvious that on the two greatest feasts of the year, those in attendance should be called to recommit to the mysteries of the faith, as they are called to do on every Sunday of the year. Those who cannot do so can stand silently, and they can absent themselves from the altar rail in turn. To do otherwise shows our own lack of commitment to the faith.

The TREC Report Is Out

I'm going to let the Young Curmudgeon Priest speak for the core issue this time:

I think I am stuck. I am stuck because I have decided that while structural change is certainly necessary and should always be ongoing; the real crisis in the Episcopal Church is not one of structure, it is one of theology and missiology. Is the purpose of these changes so that we can create and nurture disciples of Jesus Christ or are these changes so that we can make it easier to be social workers that mention God once in a while? I am not convinced that our shrinking numbers have much to do with changes in society, but has much more to do with the fact that we no longer stand for much other than being nice. We have replaced cries for Jesus with cries for Justice forgetting that justice comes with a life in Christ. Are these proposed changes for Jesus or are they for us? We can reimagine and restructure all we want, but until Jesus becomes the center of our lives again - all of this is a waste of time.

All the structural changes proposed by TREC are designed to make it easier to make change in the church, but given the history of things since 1974 it's hardly arguable that simply being able to change things is going to improve matters. More change, in the current theological climate, simply means more of the same. TREC failed to articulate a theology behind their work or which their new structures would embody, and that's pretty much what ECUSA is about these days.

Awaiting the Reckoning

preached on Advent 1, Year A, 2014

The day of the Lord; the day of glory. The day of wrath and mourning, when heaven and earth pass away, and the new, redeemed earth awaits the descent of the new Jerusalem. The day when the wrath of God is poured over the earth and is spent.

Years ago, before we we were married, my wife used to listen to a Christian radio station at work. And one day there was a preacher who said, in excited radio-preacher tones, “You know, the day of the Lord could be today! And wouldn't that make today extra special!” Somehow “extra special” feels inadequate as a description. A dreadful day, and yet each week we pray for its coming, the day when the kingdom is not only at hand, but is established finally and totally.

All through the fall we have heard the parables of the kingdom as they appear in the Gospel of Matthew:

• “The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who wished to settle accounts with his slave.”
• “The kingdom of heaven is like a landowner who went out early in the morning to hire laborers for his vineyard.”
• “The kingdom of heaven will be like ten maidens, five wise and five foolish.”
• “It is as if a man, going on a journey, summoned his slaves and entrusted his property to them.”
• “All the nations will be gathered before the Son of Man, and he will separate people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats.”

Week after week, we have heard of a time of reckoning, when each of us will be called to account:

• How have we handled our talents?
• How have we treated our debtors?
• How have we shown mercy and compassion?
• How have we kept ourselves ready?

Week by week we have heard: it not just in our piety that we show our faith, but also in our acts. You must love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul and mind, but also must you love your neighbor as yourself. Show God your works, and you will show him your faith, says the apostle James; faith without works, he says, is dead.

OK, so here we are. We settle into our pews, in this sacred and handsome place, and we give so freely of our wealth that our parish is able to budget a tithe of its income towards outreach into the community, supporting Guardian Angels' ministries and the Seafarer's mission; many go well beyond that in their participation in the projects of Habitat for Humanity and other such charities. Perhaps our flasks of oil are thus well-filled, and perhaps we risk some confidence in being placed on the right, among the sheep, when that latter judgement is at last carried out.

And yet, the years hang heavy. Decades ago it was easy to believe in an apocalypse of thermonuclear fire: a war whose pointless outcome would have been suffering of every kind for the survivors, and an invitation for the second divine revelation. More recently one might contemplate the militarism of a fanaticized Islam, or the ruination of the environment through any number of poisonings.

As yet, however, the armies do not gather at any Megiddo, and as it draws night to a third millennium of Christendom, we wonder at that generation which will not have passed away before the end. The earliest church believed it was their own generation which would be these witnesses, but it did not come to pass in that way, though they were put through a great tribulation, with the temple razed and Judah dispersed. And thus the urgency fades. Generation after generation has come and gone, and still the skies are unriven, and the earth tumbles on around its annual circuit, pain and joy dispensed in greater or lesser degree from year to year. We look in dread and hope for the signs, and do not see them. Some, heeding not Jesus' words, calculate the hour and day and month and year, leading to ridicule and doubt when their predictions do not come to pass. Some give up and say that the prophecies of the gospels were written after the fact, “predicting” the Roman destruction of Jerusalem in the seventieth year of the era, because (they say) it had already happened. In our fascination with the end, we make and watch post-apocalyptic films whose desolations show no glory, but only a desperate struggle in which “Maranatha”— “come, Lord”— is futile and unspoken, and in which men and women seek, without hope, the nonexistent oasis of a dispirited gracelessness.

And so here we are, sitting in not too uncomfortable pews in our handsome church, hearing the words of the prophets which prefigure Jesus, and the words of Jesus which warn of the wrath which is to come, soon. Soon; soon to be two thousand years of “soon”. The great city Babylon reigns on, indeed seems to be growing, with its kings and merchants having naught to bewail. We wait and wait in our little quarter of this city, some comfortably, some distracted by their travails, while around us the ungodly world sins on, unheeding. How can the human spirit stand such a wait? Generation after generation lives and dies, and the expectation is wearied. The lamps are trimmed, and trimmed again, and maiden after maiden must venture out for more oil, in dread lest the bridegroom make his appearance. But he never comes, and our urgency is deadened. We pray, “even so, Lord, quickly come,” but our hearts are not in it. We rest content, our souls well-filled by the spiritual wealth we sense we have stored up around us. The harvest goes unreaped, for what is the hurry? The Father has waited for so many lifetimes, for centuries, for two millennia: surely He is in no hurry to close up the register of the book of life.

But the day will come, tomorrow, a year from now, a century off. It does not matter. The wrath of God will be spent, and Jesus will return, when we do not expect. And in our own lives, if we be spared the day of his coming, our last rest will overtake us, and the record of our lives will be writ in indelible ink. When the angels come to gather us in, it is that book which will be opened, and we will set to one side or the other, for life or destruction. And therefore we must live in expectation of that dread day, both in trembling and joy. The time is coming soon, for our time is coming soon. The day of the Lord could be today, and were we not ready, what account could we give? The day of the Lord could find us resting in a death that may take us tomorrow or decades hence, and what account could we give? It is that urgency which we must find.

Our time is limited, even among us who are fortunate to live out the fullness of years; the work is great, and the field vast. Does your life testify to those about you? Does it uplift your fellow Christians in their struggles? Then good; by grace, you may stand among the sheep. But year by year, the call goes out, and because the faith is not articulated, it is not heard; or because of lives which belie the Christian path, the call is spurned. Who knows how many could not be called back from the lake of fire, which is the second death? It is perhaps very, very many. And every day the time draws nearer, when the accounts are settled. May we be counted good and faithful servants, and not be left outside when the doors are shut on the wedding feast of the Lamb of God. To do so, we must do what is set before us: to live generously, and graciously; to witness to our faith; to stand strong in the face of persecution; and at the last, to commend ourselves to our savior. In these things, if we are steadfast, the salvation offered to us will be ours on the last day, and thus we may say “Maranatha!”— “come, Lord!”— with pure hearts, in the knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. To Him, and to the Father and the Holy Spirit, be honor and worship, unto ages of ages. AMEN.

The Next Round of Gnonsense

The scholarly world has been rocked by the need to rebut yet another round of breathless coverage of a questionable textual claim, this time by that master of biblical sensationalism, Simcha Jacobovici, and his partner in hype, Barrie Wilson. It's the old gnostic "Jesus and Mary Magdalene were married" canard, this time based on a supposedly obscure text in the British Museum which the pair of them (Jacobovici and Wilson, that is) have discovered and newly deciphered.

Well, if you have been paying attention to the textual follies of the past several years, you already know the answer, one way or the other. They give the name "Ecclesiastical History of Zacharias Rhetor" to the text, but in fact they are only interested in one pericope within it: the Syriac version of The History of Joseph and Aseneth, which is also known in Greek. This is not by any stretch of the imagination an obscure text; on the contrary, papers on it are being discussed this year. If you want to read it yourself in translation, you can do so at Mark Goodacre's pages on the text. The point of the text is to get rid of the difficulty that Joseph's sons, Ephraim and Manasseh, were the founders of two of the tribes in spite of their non-Jewish mother. The topic was of interest to post-exilic Jews who were tempted to take gentile wives, an issue which did not go away in New Testament times. The matter is not entirely settled, indeed, as to when the story was written, with a minority seeing in it a Christian cast.

What is certainly NOT in it, however, are the names "Jesus" or "Mary"! So the startling decoding is to simply substitute those names for "Joseph" and "Aseneth", and QED! There's your proof.

Of course, anyone who stops hyperventilating long enough to consider the logic of this can see that it falls under the fallacy of "just making stuff up". Using similar methods I can prove that Liberace was actually not gay and that James the I and VI was the lovechild of a union between him and Queen Elizabeth I. But that didn't stop reporters at virtually every major media outlet from falling for the press releases of a man whose track record (the Talpiot Tomb, the James Ossuary, etc.) is one long string of sensationalist but at best doubtful claims. It's hard for me to decide between surpassing incompetence, wish-fulfillment, or outright malice as an explanation for the willingness to repeat claims that are just not true and which would be shown to be so by consultation with anyone in the field (textual scholarship, that is, not cable channel "documentaries"). But in any case I would support making them appear in public with an appropriately worded T-shirt until Epiphany.

Meanwhile everyone who actually knows something about the field is doing a facepalm at the thought of having to straighten the public out again. None of these radical claims has withstood examination, and this one is far poorer than most. Indeed, it is so preposterous in its misrepresentations that it is hard for me not to entertain the thought of fraud. Yet year in and year out the mainstream press surpasses itself in its gullibility. The prudent man, Christian or no, doubts these revelations on sight, but among the masses, a culture of invincible ignorance grows.

TRECing the Seminary

Surely everyone who follows matters in the Episcopal Church is aware of the struggle at General Theological Seminary. The dean has said things which in retrospect should not have been said, but more disturbingly has unilaterally made changes to the life of the seminary which have elicited objection from faculty and alumni alike. A protest in the form of a work stoppage on the part of most of the faculty has been met with a weasel-worded firing of the lot. The trustees have offered "reconciliation" in a form condescending and imperial while standing firmly behind the dean.

It is ironic that the one official seminary of a liberal church should be at the forefront of the move to reduce university faculty to peonage. Consider the direction that the TREC committee reports have taken, however, and contemplate their proposals to consolidate powers and reduce checks on those powers. This is how they want our seminaries to be run, and this is how they want the church to be run.

TREC's concern for getting things done is in plain conflict with the way church governance is set up to impede that. Voting by orders, consents to episcopal elections, the requirement to approve changes to the liturgy in successive general conventions: these are all mechanisms which slow change in the cause of greater review and consensus. Everything TREC has proposed about changing governance is in the cause of allowing action the face of objections. There's something almost Randian in their faith in forceful management, as though the Very Rev. Howard Roark and the Rt. Rev. John Galt are going to save the church once they have all those impediments to their free reign removed.

Those of us who still remember know this to be the antithesis of Anglican praxis, which of old tended indeed toward the anarchic, yet still grounded in a stubborn, charitable, practical center. We still have yet to see an ecclesiology or missiology expressed from TREC, whose language is rooted in business management. They seem to have no idea of what the business of the church might be, and indeed this amnesia seems to be a disease so widespread at the upper levels of the church as to nearly doom us. To me (and to my young adult children) it seems stupidly obvious that if the business of the church has no religious object, then there is no reason to be involved in its business, and no reason to attend to a pale non-worship of the oft-renamed god of the upper middle class intelligentsia.

It all keeps coming back to recollection and repentance. I do not know the circumstances or the precise substance of the dean's remarks, and to some very large degree I do not care. What I do care about is the mentality where he comes in to unilaterally upend the spiritual life of the place to no clear purpose. I do not care whether he is empowered to do so (and there is plenty of complaint that this is not how this is done in academia, anywhere); appeal to the raw exercise of power is not something I find in the New Testament. It of the same destructive ilk as the currently fashionable theory about how the interim is supposed to come into the parish and shake things up so as to make it easier for the new rector to impose his regime on things. My experience after four of these transitions is that more humble respect of the traditions and character of the parish would result in a stronger congregation instead of one weakened by the dispersal that is the result of such deliberate disruption and disregard. I have to think the same holds true for our seminaries, but more so; reducing them each to theological and liturgical Laodiceas is the road to having their graduates spewed from the mouth of anyone seeking the savor of Godly spiritual food.

No, what needs to be done is to remember what being Anglican entailed, and turn back to it, rather than to look to schemes whose hidden premise appears to be that we need to become less what we are as fast as possible.

The Numbers: 2013

Well, the 2013 statistics are out, mostly. I say "mostly" because the overall by-diocese numbers have not yet been published. But the overall totals are here, and they show the familiar story of decline: reported domestic membership is down 1.4%, while domestic ASA is down 2.6%. (Overseas numbers are croggled by a change in Honduras's reporting which has cut their numbers in half.)

Only it isn't this good. Last year I remarked that this would be the year when the South Carolina departure would be manifested in the losses. The overall reported numbers for the diocese, however, are strange, showing a decline in ASA of only 366 attendees, which would represent no more than one good-sized parish departing. It's not a plausible number.

So what is going on? Well, the parish charts have been updated, and here we see a major discrepancy. The ECUSA remnant has a list of parishes largely consonant with the parishes listed on the national chart, with a number of omissions, most of which appear to be because the parish/mission is brand-new. There are also four parishes which plainly represent the remnant of a large departure. Add it all up, however, and there are at most thirty-four parishes and missions with a total ASA of about 3,200, as estimated from the parish charts; and eight of these either don't have charts or aren't even listed on the national site. It is a huge drop from the seventy-two parishes counted in 2012.

So where are the rest? Well, the schismatic diocese, it turns out, keeps detailed statistics too. And their 2013 report shows forty-nine parishes with a total ASA of 9,223. Add this to the ECUSA parishes and you get eighty-three parishes, which when you take out the non-reporters and doubly-counted splits, is pretty close to seventy-two.

Nine thousand plus three thousand, however, gets you surprisingly close to the 12,005 reported in the overall totals, suggesting that reported ASA is inflated. Add the schismatics' ASA to the reported domestic drop of 16,451 attendees, and suddenly things look noticeably worse: the 2.6% loss turns into a 4% loss. Membership losses almost double, to 2.7%.

It is not terribly obvious why these numbers are being reported, which is a polite way of saying that, by all appearances, the numbers have been substantially fudged. Revisions have be made in previous years, however, and it is possible that these numbers may likewise be updated. Even without that, however, we are still in the same rut: 3% losses per year, every year, for over a decade.

One Heck of a TREC

I have been alerted by Tony Clavier to the release of a letter from TREC which presents a mixture of observations, conclusions, and proposals. So OK, not every thing they say is wrong-headed, maybe. But once again we are presented with a fundamental failure to remember what a church is all about.

TREC spends a great deal of time talking about how to get more change, but the rhetoric of its bemoaning the supposed inertia of the present structures is quite telling. Consider the following: "The Episcopal Church’s structures and governance processes reflect assumptions from previous eras that do not always fit with today’s contexts. They have not adapted to the rapidly changing cultural, political, and social environments in which we live." Now, I would wholeheartedly agree with the very first clause of this: the church's priorities do reflect a mindset that is some forty years old, at least from July 29th, 1974.

So let's back up and talk about the actual problems of this church. The main presenting problem, of course, is numbers: we don't baptize enough babies to make up for all the people we bury, so we need to recruit enough adult members to make up for the difference, plus replacing the people who leave. This we are failing to do, to the tune of a 3% net loss per year. That's an objective, inarguable problem despite the occasional attempt to deny it. But consider this: is better organization going to fix this problem? Almost certainly not. The thing, first of all, is to have parishes staffed with effective clergy to raise up laypeople who attract other laypeople; and second of all, a national church which fosters this, and doesn't do things to make the parish priest's life hard. But this is first of all a matter of the church's will, and this remains sharply divided in spite of efforts make it otherwise.

Let's start with the way they talk about General Convention. Their first statement is that GC "has historically been most effective in deliberatively discerning and evolving the church’s position on large-scale issues (e.g., prayer book revision, reform of clergy formation and discipline canons, women’s ordination, same sex blessings)". Well, that's what they are constitutionally tasked with, all right. But let us talk about how GC has evolved in dealing with these issues. A great deal of time and introspection went into the 1979 BCP; the issue of women's ordination was discussed with some deliberation. But the latter issue was decided by two votes, either of which could have brought the proposal to naught. From there the quality of deliberation has declined, so that same sex blessings were "discussed" by parading speakers from either side before microphones where each speaker got to say his (short) bit and then sit back down. This is a parody of deliberation, a whitewashing of the tomb of discourse; there is no way in which it represents a conversation within the body.

The record of narrowly divided votes on major issues and presenting theological crises doesn't point to something that can be resolved by organizational efficiency; nor was the church heretofore arranged to facilitate such easy resolution. We have voting in orders to make change difficult, as with the requirement to approve changes to the prayer book at successive GCs. The push towards efficiency in this wise is a vote for unrestrained change, as is the centralization of power in the person of the presiding bishop, whose office of old was barely more than to hold the gavel in council, and whose person was selected by fickle age. At the same time, they propose nothing that is going to do anything about problem clerics, which is at least as big a problem as our numeric decline. My reading of all their materials is that they do not consider this a problem in the first place, which as far as I am concerned puts them squarely against the side of the angels.

All in all I see no need to continue into the details of what they propose. Their imagination is too small to encompass anything that will do any good, and I'm brought back to the observation I made in my first outing on the subject:

If re-imagining doesn't mean repenting of the theological deviance and litigiousness which have characterized the national church of late, then I don't want any part of it. I imagine a church in which its clergy and people stand together each Sunday and unite in stating the Creed without reservation. I imagine a church where I don't have to go over the service leaflet in order to decide whether I will be able to take communion in good conscience. I imagine a church which has the confidence in its liturgy and music to not change everything for fear of offending some unnameable person. I imagine a church that can speak truth to liberal as well as conservative power. I imagine a church whose preachers can speak knowledgeably and confidently from Anglican tradition. But I don't imagine that I'm going to get that any time soon, except through benign neglect.

Imagine a church where I get a priest in my parish who is orthodox and an effective preacher, and a bishop who is not a theological embarrassment, and then get back to me.

Rock On, Choristers

Just because:

In Moments Like These

Back in Cursillo days, there was a particular song that began like this:

In moments like these I sing out a song,
I sing out a love song to Jesus.

Love songs to Jesus, it turns out, are their own little genre, and apparently they've evolved into, well, romantic ballads. At least that's what I'd heard, but being a stalwart 1940/1982 kind of guy, I hadn't really been exposed to these that much.

So this morning we, er, people at church sang a song for which I have provided the word cloud at right. I didn't sing it, at least not after a line or so, because I noticed that (a) it was a love song, and (b) it wasn't to anyone in particular. As you can see, there's no reference to Jesus, God, Christ, salvation, the cross, or indeed anything even slightly religious. You could sing it to your wife or your boyfriend or your pet monkey or even you favorite well-padded armchair without changing a word. Oddly enough, the one missing word in all of this is, well "love".

But it hardly seems to matter. Lyrics don't get more generic than this; whether it is a hymn of adoration to the godhead or an ode to one's romantic interest, it's vapid and trite. Why should we sing this kind of this rubbish?

Maleficent Redemption

Over at Stand Firm, Timothy Fountain has an excellent analysis of how the recent Disney film deals with themes of love and redemption in ways that step way outside the classic romantic paradigm. His conclusion:

These three big themes - fallen people in a fallen world, repenting of the evil that looks for excuses to take us over, and expressing highest love in sacrificial care for others - are messages of the Word of God. I found Maleficent thought provoking, surprisingly fresh, and, God willing, an opportunity to articulate the Christian message where it might not otherwise be heard.

I can only add that some of the same ideas show up, albeit less well-executed, in Frozen. True love, in these stories, is agape, not eros, not even philia. It will be interesting to see if this striking turn continues as the new Disney message, and whether it also appears in the output of the Pixar side of the house.

On Sermon Illustrations

Kendall Harmon has today linked to a CT post on bad sermon illustrations. Now, if you are a glutton for punishment and have read through my sermons, you may have noticed a total lack of anecdotes, and a relative paucity of factoids. There are a couple of reasons for that. Part of the reason is simply that I do not have a ready source for them. Yes, there are books and websites full of them, but I do not care to own the former nor search through the latter.

Which brings me to the other main reason: Calling these stories "chestnuts" is being rather kind to them. One of the commenters refers to them as "just so stories", or "urban myths". They circulate as a kind of liturgical glurge to pad out inadequate exegesis.

I don't oppose them entirely. A good illustration is a powerful thing to engage the hearer. But scripture comes first; the teaching of tradition comes next; the preacher's insight after that. The stories are a condiment, a seasoning, to spice the story, not to overly sweeten it or substitute for spiritual meat.

So What Now, Since We Are Freed?

preached at St. Mark's Highland on 29 June 2014

This week continues the long series of readings from Paul's Letter to the Church in Rome which began last week, and this week's text is the complement to the previous, in which Paul began working through the implications of Jesus' atoning sacrifice versus our present sin.

I have remarked, on occasion, that the all-pervasiveness of sin is the one empirically verifiable doctrine of Judaeo-Christian religion. Everyone does things they know are wrong; anyone who observes the world honestly can see that. The LORD God gave the law to the children of Israel, and even as they had seen the fire on the mountain, they sinned a great sin before Moses had even descended. And I don't know about you, but if Awe-Inspiring Special Effects isn't enough to convince people to put their trust in the LORD and behave, I don't know what would be. We are perverse beings; or rather we are slaves to our broken nature—slaves to sin.

Or at least we once were, before we came to the water of baptism and were reborn in the new life. So what now, since we are freed from that bondage?

Last week Paul began with a question, which appears again this week: why not keep sinning? After all, he said last week, more sinning means more grace; this week, he suggests that being free of the law, we might think we may live as we please. It is a rhetorical question, of course, which Paul answers with his favorite comeback: By no means! We were held in thrall by the rebelliousness which goes all the way back to Adam, but that bondage was broken on the cross. But the freedom we gain is not license; indeed, at the very beginning of this long argument, way back in Chapter One, Paul identifies licentiousness as one of the marks and signs of our sin.

No, the freedom we gain is that we may again take up obedience, that we may become (as he says) “slaves of righteousness”. Now, this may seem to us paradoxical and unbelievable. We are free, but only through being bound to God. We are free, but we yet continue to sin. Fifty-four years after my baptism, and I am still slothful and intemperate, and those are my good faults. The most damning accusation the world levels against us, as representatives of Christ, is that we are hypocrites.

That accusation Paul does not answer this week, but another—that we are no fun—is at the heart of this week's argument. We are stuck in church on Sunday morning, listening to (they say) dull music and being lectured at; we frown on sex and drugs and every other pleasure. But as Paul says, all this freedom to frolic through life is illusion, and that the adultery and fornication, the double-dealing and exploitation, the violence both in word and deed are all signs of the bondage to sin which leads, in the end, to destruction. For those who lack another hope, the payoff, the wages of this sinning may not be held a raw deal, though I see that what the old serpent promises is never really what sinners get.

But this is Paul's message: we do have another hope, through Christ Jesus. We do not have to settle for the wages of sin, but have the gift of new life made available to us through grace. And since sin came as disobedience, so life and freedom come as faithfulness to what God commands of us.

Jesus gave us a new commandment: love one another has he loved us. We know the measure of his love, stretched out on the arms and post of the cross. Paul says that we are not to yield our members to sin, but Jesus yielded up his hands, his feet, his side to those who crucified their Lord. Therefore we yield our members to righteousness, even as they remember their old habits of sin. Take up the bread and cup in remembrance of his sacrifice, and then take up the acts of service to the LORD, living in Godly harmony, in charity, and in worship. Thus we show in our lives the free gift of the Father, in the Spirit, which is life and hope for the age to come.

This Puny Cosmos

So, a week or so after the end of he the new Cosmos series, Trinity Sunday rolled around, and we did Prayer C, with "the vast expanses of interstellar space, galaxies, suns, the planets in their courses, and this fragile Earth, our island home." Not one of the BCP's more felicitous texts, but its heart is in the right place. And it is surely most suitable, in its comprehensive story of salvation, for this culminating day of the Easter and Pentecost season.

Those vast expanses, those galaxies and suns, and that fragile Earth all featured prominently in Neil deGrasse Tyson's scientific story. I do not recall Tyson specifically referring to the mediocrity principle, but it buttresses his cosmology. Earth is unimportant, unremarkable; there are held to be uncountable earths populated with innumerable races. There must be: probability dictates it.

But the story of earth is anecdote, not data. We don't know how uncommon earth-like planets are, or how commonly they evolve some form of life, or how often that life evolves toward creatures like unto ourselves. Indeed, more recently the oddness of earth within the solar system has been heightened by suspicion that the formation and existence of our rather-larger-than-typical moon is important to the development of life here. The hope of those who want to believe that there is nothing remarkable about our human existence is that the unimaginably numbers of galaxies and stars within galaxies and planets around stars are sufficient to overcome any conceivable rarity of our situation, but pitting the unimaginable against the inconceivable is on the order of multiplying zero times infinity and expecting to get an answer.

The motivation behind this is Genesis, Chapter One, or rather, a distaste for it. When Stephen Hawking asserts that "the human race is just a chemical scum on a moderate-sized planet, orbiting around a very average star in the outer suburb of one among a hundred billion galaxies," the several value judgements (including Hawking's exaggeration of how common the sun is) are, after all, his judgements. God was not in the wind, nor in the earthquake, nor in the fire, so there is no reason to look for him in the gas giant, the supernova, the galactic core, or the black hole, or in any number of cosmic vastnesses or exotica.

If it offends that the creator of all should have created all but the most infinitesimal portion as mere backdrop to the divine earthly drama, well, that reflects on our aesthetics, not on God. The "pale blue dot" is a question of perspective, but in the end, it is the divine eye that matters.

The Numbers: 2012

So another year's statistics are out, and the five year fast facts summary brings the cheery news that domestic membership is down 1.5%, same as last year, and that domestic ASA, after last year's interruption, has resumed its steady decline, not quite the traditional 3% this year. overal summary informs us that in a decade we've lost 24% of our ASA, and that not only did half our parishes lost ASA, but that over half had lost at least 10% of their ASA over a decade.

On a diocese-by-diocese basis, I note first of all that 2012 will be the last year that all of South Carolina is counted; as the 19th largest diocese by ASA, its loss means a decline of up to 1.9% of the total, alone. That year will also see the disappearance of Quincy into Chicago, but given that it was the smallest domestic diocese (Navaholand, which is a mission, is smaller), around 4% of parishes each have more ASA, and its membership is less than the typical error in that number. It's also a sign of How Things Have Changed that Quincy was not merged into Springfield, which in the old days would have been a far better fit; but most of the diocese having passed on to ACNA, I suppose Springfield would represent, to the remnant, that which they wished to avoid.

At any rate, the diocesan numbers are somewhere between "not as bad as they could be" and "well, pretty bad actually". Nineteen dioceses recorded gains in ASA, San Joaquin squeaking in with one, that's right, one extra attendee. Only three relatively large dioceses recorded gains: Chicago, Southeast Florida, and (oh well) South Carolina. Four of the gainers were overseas, including three of the top four by percentage gained. Lots of dioceses scored big losses, topped out by Los Angeles, whose loss was 10% of the total domestic ASA loss. Ohio also did quite poorly, with a 14%+ loss.

Then we get some other cheery numbers. In the domestic dioceses, burials outnumber child baptisms by 2300 ex-people, or in the 8% range of the total of either. Receptions alone are enough, for now, to make up the difference, and presumably some adult confirmations also register an increase, but again, the losses show that the attendance problem is caused in large part by people just not coming anymore. Overseas dioceses did better, as usual.

Next year's numbers are sure to be bad, what with the departure of most of SC. A continuation of the 3% ASA decline is a near certainty. And it will be a sad day when the best we can come up with is the observation that, well, at least our financial investments increased.

What Can I Do to Avoid "Thinking Liturgy"?

Via one of Facebook contacts I came across the news that the Thinking Anglicans website is starting a new blog titled Thinking Liturgy. They say that "[I]n this new blog we shall look at the link and explore how our worship can reflect the social justice that we have proclaimed, and at the continuing relevance of this in the second decade of the twenty-first century." But before that they talk about what does get done in church:

These things are intimately linked with what we do in Church. We gather around lectern and table to hear and receive the Word of God; we share forgiveness and peace with our neighbours, and eat with them, recognizing the presence of Christ as we do so. We are the body of Christ, not just in Church, but in the world. Our table fellowship is not just a symbolic table fellowship existing only within the confines of the church building; rather, all these things are one.

Anyone see what they left out? To be a little fair, they do mention "worship" twice; but let's go back to 1 Corinthians 11:26: "For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord's death until He comes."

It's that whole anamnesis thing again. Worship of and communion with God is the center of the liturgy; this is why we repeat the creed, and why one of the crucial elements of communion is a recitation of Jesus' words and acts on that final night. I do not see how social justice figures in this, except as an excuse for messing it up or forgoing it entirely.

One of the Facebook respondents waspishly remarked, "Personally I'm very happy with my unthinking Liturgy." Personally I am too exhausted to be waspish, and can only manage raw denunciation, unfair though it may be to snipe at them before they have even really gotten started. In the name of Social Justice, which is to say, progressivist politics as practiced by the college-educated class, I can only expect Father-free liturgies and the kind of self-congratulation I encountered at Trinity, Copley Square. I expect a lack of real theological (much less political) engagement. I expect giant paper-mâché Calvinist puppets of doom. I do not expect to be taught even the most basic Christian dogma.

Meanwhile, in an Anglo-Catholic parish in slums on the banks of the Thames, the rector carries on the work of the church by reviewing the church school lunches to make them less institutional. Their ritual is arch-traditionalist, and their theology, age-old; I cannot imagine that they do not teach their children the basics of the faith, nor would I expect that the preacher stands in the pulpit at the major feasts and hedges on the gospel narrative. By contrast, my experience of social action liturgy is that it consists of making empty gestures whose effect is to reward the participants and even onlookers with the self-congratulation of having done something Significant.

Therefore I do not want liturgy that "reflects social justice". I want liturgy that recalls and recollects and repeats the age old acts, with dignity and solemnity, liturgy that acknowledges our own sins and not just those of others, liturgy directed to God in worship. I'll even settle for worship conforming to the rites of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America as they are recorded in the Book of Common Prayer.

Like Papyrus Fragments in the Desert Wind

I've once again stolen the title, this time from where I do not recall, in honor of what appears to be the denouement of the whole Jesus Wife Fragment. Once again, the scholarly focus is more on the Gospel of John fragment that accompanied it, which appears to be in the same hand and has suspicious parallels to a modern edition of another text whose language is inappropriate for the period. But another detail has emerged in further examination: there's a hole near the top of the page, and on one side the scribe as written around the hole, while on the other, he has not. Now, it's not unread of for a text to be written on a damaged page, and for the text to be fitted around the damage; it's extremely hard to justify, however, that on one side, there was damage, and on the other side, there was not.

More details about the supposed origin of the document have also turned up in Owen Jarus's article on the LiveScience site. Supposedly these texts came out of the collection of one Hans-Ulrich Laukamp, who supposedly obtained them in Potsdam in 1963. This story, it turns out, has many difficulties. It does seem that Laukamp was living in West Berlin at the time, but Potsdam was then in East Germany, and Laukamp could not have travelled there. But in any case, Jarus was able to contact the executor of Laukamp's estate, and Jarus was told that Laukamp, a toolmaker, had no interest in old texts and did not collect antiquities. Another acquaintance gave the same story. Further investigation revealed that the German antiquities authorities had no knowledge of the parchments.

Thus the legitimacy of the text continues to dissolve. And finally, the major media, those who pushed this story, are yielding in their defense of the fragment. The Wall Street Journal ran a story on the story; other negative stories ran in Slate and the Daily Mail. Even Laurie Goldstein of the New York Times, who was one of the chief media advocates for the text, came out with an article recounting the extent of the doubts. Far from delivering revelations about the early church, or even about Gnostic heresy, all we are left with is revelation of the gullibility of those who long for such exposes.

The Gospel of Jesus' Brother-in-Law

So, in the last few days the whole "Jesus Wife Fragment"/"Gospel of Jesus' Wife" episode has taken another twist. Christian Askeland's article title this time is a bit too not nice to use but I had to come up with something. Anyway, here's the story: the mainstream press articles haven't said much about the context of the JWF, but those who have followed the story more closely know that it arrived with several other fragmentary texts supposedly from the same collector. Well, one of those has been now shown to the world, and it is a bit of the Coptic Gospel of John, in what looks like the same hand as the JWF, and on papyrus of comparable age.

And according to some scholars, it looks to be forged, in the same manner that the JWF is thought to be forged.

The problem is this: the text matches that of the Qau Codex. But not only does it match, it even follows the set of line breaks of a specific modern edition in an eccentric manner, to the point of having a glitch at a page break, and this edition is (like the Gospel of Thomas edition thought to have been used to compose the JWF) available on-line. This, however, presents another problem: the Qau Codex is in a dialect of Coptic which, by the date this appears to have been written, had died out.

So why should a churchman care? Well, on one level, all of this fuss ought to be immaterial. Whether the JWF represents a modern forgery or an ancient gnostic text, it stands well outside the orthodox canon; in a sense, the question is whether it is a modern or ancient forgery. It's all about the world-changing hype. King, whose baby this is, has connections to the Elaine Pagels/Jesus Seminar/"we can learn about early Christianity through the gnostic material" people. But this fragment has now been cut loose from this because of its late date, to the point where its importance in that wise would be indicating a significant survival into a time around Charlemagne's reign. The mainstream media is looking, for whatever reason, for another Coluphidist "well, that just about wraps it up for Christendom" wildly overstated story, and Harvard and Company played off this desire and got an endorsement of King's claims that was emphatically undeserved.

If you want a non-hyperventilating mainstream story reviewing the whole thing you can try this one from the Weekly Standard. And if you want a larger perspective on the novelty of these claims, you can see this column by David Jenkins that came out after the first round of JWF stories. But you can just as well ignore the whole thing, and dismiss anyone who tells you that this or that find challenges orthodox doctrine. Sure, you'll get called a traditionalist (as if that were a bad thing) and accused of burying your head in the sand, but you'll save yourself a lot of grief sorting through the nonsense.

TRECing to Calvary: Part 2

OK, so here's the real imagining problem: we're stuck with a social model of the denomination which is forty-some years out-of-date.

Or maybe the problem has been with us longer, for courtesy of Joe Rawls I read these words of Dietrich Bonhoeffer back around 1930: "The theological atmosphere of the Union Theological Seminary is accelerating the process of the secularization of Christianity in America." He complained about the lack of understanding of dogmatics, the trivialization of sermons, the obsession with the fundamentalists, and so forth: his complaints are all so familiar. But the current driving mindset of the denomination has added to it a schizophrenic quality stemming from a far more recent social conflict.

The core of this can be found in how conspicuously inaccurate the old "Republican Party at prayer" line has become. Republicans these days are Methodists (at least that's what the Valpo maps imply) or Mormons or Southern Baptists or megachurch evangelicals, but given that, for the first time, the Supreme Court has no Episcopalians on it and that the last really prominent Episcopal politicians were George Herbert Walker Bush and the Rev. Sen. John Danforth, both well outside of the Republican mainstream today, it's extremely safe to say that the policy connections between the political party and the political church are basically nonexistent. At the same time, however, that sense of establishment prestige and entitlement lingers.

And we are still wealthy, and (by some standard at least) well-educated. But it is not the moneyed upper class which is our core, but the upper middle professional class. And most strongly expressed are the sentiments of one corner of academia. Let me be quite blunt about this: there is nothing about the current cant which passes for ECUSA theology that I don't recognize from my days as a college student in the late 1970s. The obsession with sexuality, the politically correct radfem monkeying with the God-language, the dabbling in leftist progressive politics: I heard it all, first, at the University of Maryland College Park, coming out of the various leftist activist groups and their professorial sponsors. But it predated even that, as anyone reading about the fads of 1960s "mainstream" theology is aware; before that, one must remember that fundamentalism is the reaction to modernism, and not the other way around.

In any case, the driving forces of Episcopal Church theologizing, for some decades now, have been stuck in this boomer time warp, and caught between the pretense of outsider "prophetic speech" and the reality of church establishment power. This church is a political power center for advancing leftist progressive causes, while at the same time dabbling in fashionable skepticism about our own teachings and equally fashionable credulity toward secular spirituality. And it's no great secret that deviations are winked at or just ignored, if not even exalted by our guardians of the faith, while commitment to age-old tenets is dismissed and deemed irrelevant.

In the context of such juvenile attitudes it is hardly surprising that one sees a movement towards a more juvenile liturgy, in which solemnity is fled from and in which anything that might be found burdensome or offensive to some hypothetical person is omitted or bowdlerized. Meanwhile the pattern of textual revision brushes aside ancient theological concerns in favor of a kind of linguistic totalitarianism in which it is believed that if patriarchal language is taken from the congregation's mouths, they will be forced to take a more feminist view towards their fellow humans, so that we come to church to find that the words of scripture cannot be spoke for fear of offense. The effect is of meddlesome older siblings who nag like the parent they most assuredly can only pretend to be.

I am not the only churchman to see this. Robert Hendrickson said much the same in his Assize Sermon reflection. And the observations cut across the conservative/troglodyte-progressive/heretic battle lines which defend the field of discourse. And there is some hope of a turn-around to be seen in the outcome of the last GC, in which Communion Without Baptism was rebuffed and the proposed Holy Men, Holy Women was sent back for more work. But of course, it is a sign of the times that everyone know that CWOB will continue with the tacit approval of many bishops, and that unbelievers and apostates will continue to be lifted up here and there as Christian exemplars, because their politics were Just. That's what rebellious college students do, after all.

But that time is past. It is time to take up the mantle of adulthood in full, not just its powers, but its responsibilities, and particularly those to what has been passed down through the ages. It's time to admit that the ancients did actually know something. It is time to admit that there is no establishment to rebel against any longer, but only ourselves.

And most of all, it is time to admit that the church's job, first of all, is religion. Social action is important; social justice is demanded by faith and scripture. But even the heathen do as much. Only the church can administer the sacraments; only the church can evangelize; only the church can worship. And only the church carries the anamnesis, that which it remembers of old and (if the rubrics be followed) repeats and reaffirms each Sunday.

Today, the cross stands before us, not shining in brass and silver, but crudely, brutally, the rood of the glorious sacrifice cloaked in earthly shame and agony, unto death. Once again it is given to us to turn away from the world and sacrifice the approbation of our supposedly more enlightened peers, and to speak back to the world the truth of Christ crucified. Will we? Can we? Or shall we turn away, like the rich young man, because we hold the social wealth of the world?

TRECing to Calvary: Part 1

I must confess that I have paid exactly no attention to the whole re-imagining the church restructuring project. "Re-imagining" alone is enough to put anyone of even vaguely traditionalist leanings off their feed, with its promise of jargon-laden platitudes. Besides, Anglo-Catholics, and probably most of us central churchers of sufficient age, do not have to re-imagine the church: what we do is recollect the church that was held as an ideal of old.

The emphasis on "re-imagining" instead of recollection (or, heaven forbid, repentance) points at the real difficulty, but Derek Olsen's first thoughts about TREC's first outputs point at the issue from a different direction. He writes:

As a liturgical, sacramental Christian, my main need from the Episcopal Church is a functional worshiping community. Thus, I primarily need:

• A healthy clergy person educated in the teachings of the faith and in the proper conduct of its liturgies
• A sound liturgy with roots in the apostolic and catholic and Anglican tradition shared in common with other worshiping communities

Well, I have the same needs. But as anyone can read here, these expectations aren't being met even now. When I travel, I have to sift parish websites as to whether the priest is going to deliver an orthodox sermon in the context of a prayer book liturgy, and even then it's fairly likely that I will be subjected to some greater or lesser aberration unless the parish makes a point of proclaiming their traditionalism.

What is "re-imagining" likely to do to make this better? I have to think, "less than nothing." If re-imagining doesn't mean repenting of the theological deviance and litigiousness which have characterized the national church of late, then I don't want any part of it. I imagine a church in which its clergy and people stand together each Sunday and unite in stating the Creed without reservation. I imagine a church where I don't have to go over the service leaflet in order to decide whether I will be able to take communion in good conscience. I imagine a church which has the confidence in its liturgy and music to not change everything for fear of offending some unnameable person. I imagine a church that can speak truth to liberal as well as conservative power. I imagine a church whose preachers can speak knowledgeably and confidently from Anglican tradition. But I don't imagine that I'm going to get that any time soon, except through benign neglect.

And that doesn't even begin to address the structural questions. Susan Snooks has, in a series of blog posts, stepped up to the financial consequences of the suggestion to reduce the national church asking to 10%; in her concluding post she describes the proposal as "utterly unrealistic" and brushes up against many of the other ideas being floated along the way. For example, she mentions the notions that the number of delegates per diocese be reduced and that retired bishops be taken out of the voting in their house. Well, OK, and she points out that neither of these proposals would save much, nor would they reduce the unwieldiness of GC. So what would they do? Well, she raises as a question the likely consequence: it would be easier to push innovations through GC because smaller margins would be needed in the Deputies. One must also assume that part of the reason to unseat the retiree bishops is to reduce their ability to slow change, not they they are effective in that wise now.

Excessive inertia is part of the church's problem, but it isn't church structures that cause that. The real inertia is how we are stuck in a certain 1970s mindset, which I will discuss in the second post.

Jesus's Wife Resurrected from Dead

In honor of the subject I'm stealing Christian Askeland's title and one of the net's favorite memes. As everyone who hasn't stuck their fingers in their ears on the matter is aware, Harvard Theological Review, just in time for Holy Week, has published an issue dedicated to the authenticity of the so-called "Gospel of Jesus' Wife", a parchment fragment purporting to be from a gnostic text from antiquity. The first time around on this, after the first few breathless days in the major media, the scholarly community issued forth with a great deal of skepticism and indeed confidence that this scrap was a modern forgery. After that, a great silence ensued.

But now the issue is back, courtesy of radiocarbon testing and who knows what else. Laurie Goldstein at the New York Times at least was circumspect enough this time to couch her article so as to reveal the continuing doubt in the scholarly community and to give the facts baldly enough to where someone who remembers the original claims can judge what has changed. Others were not not careful, leading to many articles giving the impression that these tests vindicated believers in authenticity against skeptics.

The reader of these articles, however, needs to be aware of those old claims. Most important is that the original claim was for a fourth century parchment. This has been undermined by the tests, which gave dates ranging over nearly a millennium and a half. This is important because, of course, the historical context is utterly different in the two periods: the late date puts it as a testament to gnosticism under the caliphate or late in byzantine history, not a glimpse into early Nicene Christendom or perhaps earlier, and the earliest dates would imply that an ancient author must have used a papyrus several centuries old.

But the big issue continues to be that the initial doubts did not rely upon the authenticity of the medium upon which the text is written. Leo Depuydt's response, which has been reprinted with some additions in HTR, states that "I find nothing in these documents that could change in any way the fact that I am personally 100% certain that the Wife of Jesus Fragment is a forgery. I have otherwise never deemed ink or papyrus tests necessary or relevant in light of the evidence set forth below." Francis Watson's initial response to the test reports states that "It has never been doubted that the Jesus’ Wife fragment may well have been written on a piece of genuinely ancient papyrus, using ink whose composition followed ancient practice."

The basic problem beyond a general suspicion of so convenient a document is that the text itself shows signs of being a composite of phrases from the Gospel of Thomas, excepting the few words which have attracted all the media attention, assembled by someone with an imperfect knowledge of Coptic grammar and syntax. Indeed, one error in particular has suggested to some scholars that the forgery is dependent upon a particular scholarly edition of Thomas. Doubts have also been raised about the possibility of fitting the fragment into a larger text written on a page. Indeed, a number of scholars object to referring to any "Gospel of Jesus' Wife" given a complete lack of any evidence of any such larger work.

But even ignoring all these problems with the authenticity of the text, the big offense in all of this is the hype. Even with the seemingly carefully hedged statements from Dr. King it's really hard to avoid the conclusion that this affair has been managed by both her and her university to attract maximum publicity from media outlets who are credulous and sensationalist. Goldstein's headline, given enough page space, could more accurately have read "Unimportant Gnostic Text Apparently Written On Old Parchment; Textual Problems Unresolved". Even if the text is genuine (and I'm going with those who think it's forged, for now) it has no implication for orthodox Christianity. It's just another oddball Gnostic text. The takeaway, no matter how the authenticity debates wind up, is in what this tells you about the biases of the major media outlets who are culpable of promoting this.

The Limitations of Being ‘Spiritual but Not Religious’

Rabbi David Wolpe nails the fundamental weakness of the "spiritual but not religious" notion:

Spirituality is an emotion. Religion is an obligation. Spirituality soothes. Religion mobilizes. Spirituality is satisfied with itself. Religion is dissatisfied with the world.

To be spiritual but not religious confines your devotional life to feeling good. If we have learned one thing about human nature, however, it is that people’s internal sense of goodness does not always match their behavior. To know whether your actions are good, a window is a more effective tool than a mirror.

No one expects those without faith to obligate themselves to a religious community. But for one who has an intuition of something greater than ourselves to hold that this is a purely personal truth, that it demands no communal searching and struggle, no organization to realize its potential in this world, straddles the line between narcissistic and solipsistic. If the spirit moves you to goodness, that is wonderful. For too many, though, spirituality is a VIP card allowing them to breeze past all those wretched souls waiting in line or doing the work.