What We Believe

Trinity VIII
S1. Matthew's July 29, 2007 All Saints July 29, 2007

The Gospel of Our Lord Jesus Christ is timeless and universal and it knows no boundaries of time or place. It is as relevant today as it was when Our Lord first proclaimed it in Palestine, and its appropriateness to the present day is often striking.
Today's Gospel comes from St. Matthew, and in it Our Lord warns us to beware of false prophets. We hear Him again teaching and preaching in what we know as the Sermon on the Mount. He has just said that the way to Him is straight and narrow, and that many will not find it but will go astray through the broad and easy gate of life. Our Lord then warns us to beware of false prophets, whom we shall know by their fruits. There is no doubt that we are beset today by a plethora of false prophets,preaching diversity, inclusion, tolerance, understanding, whose fruits we can see at every turn. Our Lord tells us that corrupt trees bring forth evil fruit. When a political leader states that although he may be personally opposed to a morally wrong action on the part of government, he will still vote for it, that is evil fruit. When the revealed truths of God
as clearly expressed through Holy Scripture, reason, and tradition are flouted and ignored by those who claim they are acting in His name, they are wolves wearing sheep's clothing, and that is evil fruit.

Our Lord was not an advocate of understanding when the law of God was broken. He chased the money changers from the temple with a whip of cords, rather than shrugging His shoulders and saying, "That's all right - they're really not harming any
one". God was not an advocate of tolerance, oflive and let live, when he destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah with fire and brimstone. If you have any doubts about that, read the nineteenth chapter of Genesis. Our Lord was not practicing inclusiveness when He said that many are called, but few are chosen. Diversity was not among the words used by Almighty God when He gave Moses the first commandment, saying "I am the Lord thy God, thou shalt have no other gods before Me". The Gospels tell us that the sheep shall be separated from the goats, and that, as we heard today, not every one that says to Him "Lord, Lord" shall enter into the Kingdom of Heaven.

The love of God for His creation is boundless, but He is also a perfectly just God, who will mete out to each soul exactly that which he deserves. The poet Dante got that pretty much right, placing in the lowermost circles of hell those who were responsible for the damnation ofthe souls of others, who led them away from God's law and love. The shepherds who are wolves in sheep's clothing will be judged just as corrupt trees are hewn down and cast into the fire. By their fruits ye shall know them. Do not confuse forgiveness of the repentant sinner with tolerance of the sin. God will forgive those who acknowledge their wrongdoing and come to Him with a sorrowful and contrite heart. He will not overlook transgressions committed in the name of inclusiveness, where there is not a shred of sorrow or repentance. Not knowing what is right is no excuse, either, especially for one who professes to be a Christian. God's law is not debatable or negotiable. There are Ten Commandments, each and every one of which must be obeyed. Jesus Christ did not say that if you believed at least a part of what He said it would be all right, and everything will be warm and fuzzy. It seems we have to say over and over again that what is right or wrong does not depend upon person, place, or time, or any whim of man's.

The most skilled of all of the false prophets, of course, is Satan himself, the great deceiver and enemy of God. How pleased he must be with his efforts, especially in recent years, as he strives to bring down the Church that Our Lord established as the means in this life to man's salvation. We know that he will fail in the end; that as Our Lord has told us, the gates of hell will not prevail against His Church, but it is still disturbing and distressing to see Satan's successes, transient and temporary though they may be.
We can be grateful that we worship God in a church which refuses to yield to false prophets; that adheres firmly to the faith that has been proclaimed unashamedly and openly for millennia; that doesn't shift and change in response to the desires of the
world; that doesn't genuflect to the false prophets of humanism. We cling firmly to the word of God, not the changing vagaries and whims of men, but striving to the best of our ability to hold firm1y to the faith of the Apostles and the Fathers of the Church, as
revealed to us in Holy Scripture and understood by reason and tradition. St. Vincent of Lerins stated the issue clearly as early as the fifth century, that we are to believe that which was always and everywhere believed by all people. We are blessed us with godly Bishops who are the direct successors of Jesus' twelve apostles, who are not concerned with being relevant, contemporary, or tolerant but rather with being true to the Christian faith.

It takes courage to be a Christian; sometimes a great deal of courage, to look those around us squarely in the eye, and say "That's wrong". It takes courage, when we are labeled as narrow-minded and mean-spirited. We are called intolerant of the variety of
human behavior, and the wrongs that are done are really not their fault, and besides, the Resurrection and all that stuff is just a metaphor, a way of teaching, that probably didn't really happen anyway. That courage, however, is what God expects of us as we aclmowledge Him in our lives - for if we do not acknowledge Him, He has told us that He surely will not acknowledge us. It is that courage that sustains martyrs tortured and killed for their belief in God. It is that courage that strengthens those who must face a world gone awry, filled with wolves in sheep's clothing, who claim they are doing the work of God while leading men away from Him. False prophets indeed; we know them by their fruits, and we know that the way to the Kingdom of Heaven is to do the will of Our Father in Heaven, not that of our fellow man.

I should probably have said all of this six years ago, when I had just returned from being in the United States on sabbatical, but it all seemed very subjective.

What I noticed then were several trends in The Episcopal Church in the USA which have probably become more pronounced over the intervening years. Some, if not all, of these firsthand but subjective observations bring into focus key issues which are at the heart of the new ways of understanding the faith in The Episcopal Church (TEC) today. These highlight the fact that the divisions we are experiencing in the Anglican Communion are not simply to do with sexuality. I write about these because it is important to note that there really is the beginning of a new kind of religion in parts of [TEC] - a religion which not only re-interprets the traditional central tenets of the Christian faith, but which in fact has the potential to jettison many of them altogether.

MY FIRST observation six years ago was the gradual replacement of the word "Lord" in reference to Jesus Christ. There was a perceptible change as I traveled across from the east coast to the west, from the traditional: "The Lord be with you" in the liturgy, to the revised version, "God be with you," and eventually, on the west coast, "God is in you .... and also in you"! The reason for the change is relatively obvious: "Lord" is not only male, it is also perceived as authoritarian. But there is a great seriousness about a simplistic removal of the word, which would eventually preclude rather than [necessitate] the basic early Christian declaration of faith "Jesus Christ is Lord" - the very declaration which all will make when every knee bows and every tongue confesses him.

Secondly, and aligned to the last point, is the removal or weakening of the title "Father" in relation to the first person of the Trinity. This has led to an uncomfortableness for some with the basic baptismal formula, "In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit" and to replacement "blessings," such as "The blessing of God - Creator, Redeemer and Sustainer" where God is described by function rather than

in personal names. [In 2006] at the General Convention, a series of prayers were introduced for every situation, from a child coming out of nappies to a person passing a driving test, and including, of course, a "coming out" prayer. When I asked myself why it was necessary to provide liturgical prayers for such occasions, the answer immediately stared me in the face:

All the prayers were devoid of the words, "Father," "Son" and "Lord," and clearly were enabling people to pray in this new way! But the removal of "Father" (a revealed name of God) would be a disastrous move, since it is the name by which Jesus taught us to address God in the Lord's Prayer, and it is also central to the first tenet of the Apostles' Creed: "I believe in God, the Father Almighty ... "
My third observation was an emerging new theology of baptism. This was clarified for me when I was taken with members of the International Anglican Liturgical Consultation to a radical Episcopal church in San Francisco. When we entered into the liturgical space, I could see the table, which was unbounded by rails and clearly open to all. But I could not see the place of baptism. When I asked where it was, I was taken out the back, and told that it had been placed there so that baptism would not be a stumbling-block to newcomers. In other words, the idea goes, all people are welcome to the table no matter what their belief or lifestyle, as Jesus had table fellowship with prostitutes and sinners. Baptism can be looked into later, when there is time to think things through. This is, of course, a reversal of the biblical model, where baptism was the sacrament freely and always available for all who come to repentance and faith, and communion, the table fellowship of the baptized for which self-examination was necessary.

Aligned to that, I have also observed, and have seen particularly in the west coast, [is] an uncomfortablnecss with repentance and confession of sin. The theory, as I understand it goes something like this:

The archetypal Eucharistic rite is focused around the gathering, the word, the intercessions, the table and the going out. Confession is an optional extra ... It is one thing to omit penitence in a church which has the expectation of personal auricular confession, but quite another to omit it in a church of the Reformation which enjoins General Confession. There is, in my view, behind this, a serious underplaying of personal sin and personal salvation.

The next element of the liturgy to be "downplayed" was historic Creeds. Again, we are told that the Eucharistic prayer is creedal (a part-truth), or that Creeds are not a necessary part of worship (another part-truth), but the eventual reality which 1 observed was the omitting of the historic Creeds altogether in the main Sunday liturgy ... There is a ... distancing from propositional statements of faith, even the historic ecumenical creeds - and in some cases from their central tenets and beliefs.

Sixth, and following on from the last point, there is an inclination to try to find ways of holding all faiths together as believing in a common god. This is seen, for example in Grace Cathedral, San Francisco, where there is an interfaith labyrinth and an interfaith chapel, in which the symbols of all the major world faiths are displayed. This makes its way into the liturgy, where, when the Eucharistic bread is broken, I heard words similar to the following used: "we break this bread for our ancestors in the Jewish faith, our brothers and sisters in Islam, our friends who are Buddhists" etc.) and this at a key Christocentic part of the liturgy.

AND LAST, though in fact there are many other observations 1 could also make, there is, in my personal subjective view, a dawning realization that the heart of the central act of worship (the bread and wine of communion) is the doctrine of the atonement - a doctrine increasingly disliked in the newer religion. I noticed an increasing emphasis on the Eucharist as "community meal," a reduced emphasis on the sacrificial death of Christ in some newer Eucharistic prayers, and the preference in some places to distribute the elements with words such as "the bread" and "the cup" rather than "the body" and "the blood.') Alongside this, the issue has been raised as to whether the words of Institution ("this is my body" ... "this is my blood") are required for a Eucharistic prayer. Whatever disagreements on Eucharistic doctrine there may have been between "Catholics" and '"'"Evangelicals" in the past, there was always an agreement that the heart of the matter was the sacrificial, atoning death of Christ.

I write all this because we need to be aware that change is incremental. It is only noticed after a period of time. I do not say this to "damn" The Episcopal Church. Indeed, my own diocese is in a very happy link relationship with a [TEC] diocese ... But changes are happening, and changes which are not peripheral, but central to our identity as Anglicans and indeed as Christians. The issue which we face) as has so often been pointed out, is not essentially one of sexuality but one of authority and doctrine. In so many ways, parts of [TEC] have been losing deep aspects of their identity. If God is not Father) Jesus is not Lord, the Son is not unique, baptism is not necessary, the creeds are optional, repentance and sin are dated concepts and the atonement is marginalized or even rejected, where do we go from here? The faith remaining will be a very different faith from the Christian faith once delivered to the saints - and 1, for one) am not going there!

The Rt. Rev. Harold Miller Bishop of Down and Dromore Church of Ireland