The fact that we pray for God to “keep us” in His true religion clearly implies that it is possible for us to drift out of it, into false religion or no religion at all. Most of us have observed this tragic reality in the lives of the people around us, and if we look frankly at our own hearts, we will likely recognize tendencies that could lead to apostasy if left unchecked. If we are to maintain our faithfulness, some sort of safeguard is evidently necessary.
Read MoreThe true meaning of time is rooted in agriculture and the agricultural metaphor. The acts of God commemorated in the Old Covenant were all linked to the cycles of planting and harvesting. Redemption itself is described in terms of agriculture. St. Paul says that “Christ is risen from the dead, and has become the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep” (1 Cor. 15:20). This refers to the offering of the first sheaf of grain that was the promise of more to come.
Read MoreLet us summarize three important points from the previous posts. First, the church year is the way the church experiences the true meaning of time that was revealed in the covenant God made with Israel, in the light of the fulfillment of both time and the covenant by Jesus Christ, the Son of God and Messiah of Israel. Second, this experience of time is rooted in the dynamic relationship between fulfillment and expectation, between the current experience of the kingdom "in the Spirit" and the longing for its fulfillment in the coming of Christ. Third, this experience of time requires commitment to disciplines of prayer that are rooted in the church year.
Read MoreThe life of Jesus Christ changed the way the people of God experience time. Jewish weekly time was rooted in six days of work leading to a Sabbath. Holy Week narrates Jesus’ fulfillment of this time. He entered Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, the first day of the week. He finished his work on Friday, the sixth day. This is the primary meaning of the words “It is finished” (John 19:30). The word “finished” is a form of the word “teleo” which is related to “telos.” On the cross, both time and the covenant were brought to their completion.
Read MoreThe experience of time in the church stands in contrast with the experience of time outside of the church, in “the world" (cf. 1 Jn. 2:15-17). Each experience of time brings us into its own narrative or story and forms us accordingly. Many Christians struggle to live out their faith because they live in the wrong time. They "believe" in the sense that they hold in their minds certain things to be true, but they are stuck in the world's experience and narrative about time. Living in the world's time and story cancels the impact of a merely cognitive faith.
Read MoreIn Part I, we started by acknowledging the many ways we attempt to make peace without being born again to the life of God the Trinity, without seeking earnestly to enter peace in the rest of God the Father by being conformed to the likeness of Jesus the peacemaker and the Spirit the peace-giver. In Part II, we approached and considered again the Person of Jesus, He who is the peacemaker, seeking understanding of how He enables and empowers us to know the peace of God again. In this third and final essay, I think it is now possible for us to talk about what it means to be makers of peace like Him in the world.
Read MoreAs we come to terms with how we’ve attempted to create false peace, we begin to yearn for the true thing. Shalom, true peace, is the creation of God, the quality of life known by all things that walk in step with His will. We cannot make peace for ourselves. It is given, and we must receive it by the terms that it is given. We must enter into it and participate in it with a sense of humility and wonder.
Read MorePeace is a concept that emerges clearly in the Biblical account of Creation. The poetry of Genesis characterizes the creation of the cosmos as God making a dwelling place for Himself. Each part of the creation story involves a kind of call-and-response as God makes a place and then fills it with life, calling each of these dwellings and dwellers “good.” On the seventh day, when God takes His rest, it is meant to invoke an image that would have been common to those familiar with the architecture of an ancient temple: the god seated in the center of the temple to consecrate it and inaugurate its operation.
Read MoreLike all real and good things that take practice, prayer doesn’t always come easily. In fact, as we grow in prayer, we can expect to have seasons where it is downright difficult to pray. There are a lot of reasons for this. When the newness of a habit begins to wear off and we settle into a pattern, we begin to experience new challenges to our disciplines of prayer. It is important for us to remember that difficulties in prayer are not necessarily a sign we are doing something wrong. In fact, experiencing difficulty in prayer can be a sign that we are doing exactly what we need to do. Here are some of the common difficulties that face a person who is learning to pray.
Read MoreForgiveness is the first shape salvation takes in our lives. Through confession we experience forgiveness from God and are initiated into the ministry of reconciliation. We are then sent out to practice this ministry, first in the Church and then in the world. I say ‘practice’ here to cut against the notion that forgiveness is something at which we are immediately skilled. Forgiveness is a journey, the steps of which sometimes take months or years each. But forgiveness is real and it can bring us freedom from the power of our wounds. For this to happen, though, we have to get real about those hurts we would most like to avoid. Forgiveness begins where we really need to forgive, or it does not begin at all.
Read MoreIn the past, I’ve written that healthy shame will turn toxic unless acted upon and held in health by a power beyond itself. Individuals and communities—including churches—will repeat cycles of toxic shame until someone intervenes. I have seen in pastoral conversations many attempts to ‘manage’ the voice of shame by negating it. We do this either through ignoring it or by trying to persuade ourselves that shame can tell us nothing and is merely a figment of a general atmospheric moralism. But no matter how boldly we shout I am not ashamed! we still are.
Read MoreHappy Epiphanytide to all! In the season of Epiphany, we commemorate and celebrate the manifestation of Jesus Christ to the Gentiles, when salvation was opened to all mankind. As the collect states, we now know Christ through faith because of his Epiphany: put in the immortal words of our beloved late Fr. David Brounstein, “It’s [our] big day!”
Read MoreThe terms of this satisfaction emerge in dire tones as Anselm’s treatise turns, in its second part, to his revelation of God’s salvation offered through Christ the God-man.
Read MoreMartin Thornton said of St. Anselm of Canterbury that he “occupies a place in English spirituality not unlike that of Chaucer in English letters. He is the father-founder who first brought all the essential elements together, who gave the school its clear character and stamp. In Anselm, English spiritual theology is embodied and potentially formed; formed as a young man who still needs to mature but who is no longer a child” (English Spirituality, 156). Anselm was a Benedictine monk who occupied the Archbishopric of Canterbury during the tumultuous period following the Norman Conquest at the end of the 11th Century. Like many in the English school of Catholic theology, his writings were imaginative if not always precise.
Read MoreIt was the first funeral that I remember attending. It was for a boy my age, and I was a young boy. I can recall the commemorative photo of him on display and thinking, ‘I look like him.’ Unlike many funerals I’ve since attended, the body of the departed was present with us, and the casket was open so that everyone present could process forward and say goodbye. It all seemed like it could barely be real.
Read MoreAnglican Catholics are defined by a prayerful encounter with the Scriptures in conscious dialogue with the Church and her saints. To read the Scriptures as an Anglican Catholic means to be fully and robustly Anglican—to grow into the maturity of the Church’s threefold Rule of Mass, Office, and Personal Devotion—and to be fully and robustly Catholic—anchored to the Faith once delivered to the saints and confessed everywhere, always, by all, in the undivided Church through the ages.
Read MoreTrinity is about to end and I find my prayer practices are limping feebly toward its conclusion, just as they have limped feebly through most of Trinity. When I reflect on the expanse of the last twenty-something weeks I see, in my mind’s eye, a desert landscape. It is a dry, rocky expanse. It reminds me of the Coachella Valley: bordered by low-lying hills, roughly textured by boulders, sand, scrubby sagebrush, sheer sandstone cliffs, and little green-trunked trees that bloom with bright yellow flowers.
Read More“Now is not the time for this.” I can think of few phrases that so capture the spirit of our age and its perspective as this. We are obsessed with schedule and itinerary and the control we believe they give us. Life must be arranged and it must be optimized. But as we all know, reality does not yield in this way, and few things reveal the objectivity and intractability of reality as death. We do everything we can to defer and distract from our reckoning with death; it’s never quite the right time to consider it, after all. And so we must see it as a severe mercy that we are halted this day and called to remember again.
Read MoreGetting back into a rhythm is a difficult thing. When I wrote frequently for our blog last year, the process of sitting down to put thoughts to paper was routine, familiar, and often easy. I developed a liturgy that suited me well and allowed writing to be a prayerful exercise. Yet, after a five-month hiatus for the birth of my daughter, I find myself struggling to make my fingers type. It’s not that I don’t have things to say, but rather that the time away has dulled the familiarity of the liturgy. What was once a discipline of stillness to center my thoughts and prayers well enough to write has become once more a laborious struggle to remember how to be still. It’s much easier to let other things take away my time, and I find myself making excuses that other things are more important than this more cumbersome task at hand. It feels like I’m starting over.
Read MoreThe Church fathers taught that the Spirit’s primary ministry is to re-produce Christ within the Christian. This is not to say that there is more than one Christ, but rather Christ means to become fully and truly present in the life of every Christian as He is, while making them that which they are called to be. As this work unfolds, the fellowship of the Church matures in the godlike character of agape, or the love that is uniquely God’s to bestow and enjoy. But before we are united in love as members of one another, before we are made perfect as the living members of the Body of Christ, we will experience the work of personal perfection and the manifestation of Church unity through what the Scriptures call the ministry of reconciliation.
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