Being a Priest at a Difficult Time in the Church –
Meditations on Hope in a Time of Judgment
by Christopher Seitz
Archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20030922233701/http://www.anglicancommunioninstitute.org:80/beingapriest.htm
Would anyone dispute that it is a difficult time in the church?
· A new archbishop of Canterbury has been appointed, without anything like the support from the developing world that George Carey could rely on; and we are heading into a difficult time;
· A diocese in W. Canada has acted independently of the C HOB in moving forward to bless same-sex unions, in the face of concern and explicit warning from the ABC, Bishops and clergy in Canada, and Primates thoughout the communion;
· A similarly independent action was taken recently by the Bishop of Kansas;
· An Anglo-catholic priest in Philadelphia has been deposed, received elsewhere in the Communion, and then somehow transferred to Pittsburgh; his status is unclear, and the polity governing such a series of events is likewise unclear;
· General Convention 2003 is poised to move forward in several contentious areas, including prayer book revision and same-sex blessings, if previous trends can be trusted; Pittsburgh and SC have made clear ahead of time their unwillingness to be a part of these trends;
· For many of us, questions are being raised more broadly about disassociation from General Convention should changes be made in faith and practice ungrounded in scripture; what form these acts of disassociation might take is yet to be known; as I so many areas, we are in uncharted waters;
· For some time concern has been raised about the quality and catholic character of theological education in the main ECUSA seminaries, and these are the places which ostensibly provide “leadership” for future generations; are they not addressing, but creating, difficult times?
· In the larger communion, authority has been said to reside in “instruments of unity” and four have been set forth: Lambeth Conference, The Primates Meeting, The ABC, and the ACC; increasingly, as stresses and strains emerge, and as the communication networks accelerate our access to information, it becomes a matter of urgency just how these various instruments relate one to another;
· At Oxford 2002 last summer, Carey indicated that two general conceptions of the Communion are abroad, one which understands Communion as fellowship, interdependence, and accountability, and another which sees Communion as a loose federation of semi-autonomous Anglican provinces; he views the first as appropriate to Anglican faith and mission, and the second is under threat most obviously from internal dissension and disagreement within a so-called independent body; Canada and the ECUSA are obvious instances of this.
Now this list could be supplemented, but the general picture is clear. And in the US, the difficult times of ECUSA find their counterparts in Methodism, Lutheranism, Roman Catholicism, and the various mainline reformed bodies.
It is now necessary to mention, and in some detail, the international character of our struggle, because the ECUSA has come of age as a segment of the wider, worldwide anglican communion. We have been more aware of this since the 1998 Lambeth Conference, where the southern hemisphere face of Anglicanism made itself known. We have been more aware of it because the 38 Primates now meet annually, thus providing a context and a check on the PB and the ECUSA. We have been more aware of it due to rapid communication, rapid travel, and the multiple, internationally-attended gatherings of the past five years. We have been more aware of it because of the formation of an anglican mission within the US region, spearheaded by two Primates in loose association with their provinces. We have been more aware of it because, frankly, it belongs to the character of anglicanizm to be more than a localized geographical extension of some Old World form of denominated Christianity. And in today’s climate, this means that American Episcopalians, even revisionist ones, have been hesitant to detach themselves from the historical and missionary links to the Christian phenomenon called Anglicanism. So, our difficult time is no local matter, even as lawsuits and continuing churches and property disputes and all manner of theological debate have become our daily bread.
You will have your personal story about the difficult time. I know I have mine. The last five years have been for me a whirlwind: unsettling, risky, experimental, deeply prayerful and deeply unsure, disoriented from the travel, from being stretched into a wide variety of contexts. I can assign dates and recall episodes which seem pivotal, but the season we are in has been with us long enough to reckon that it is no mere chapter or blip.
I will give five meditations under the general heading, “Being a Priest at a Difficult Time in the Church.” Three will address the personal and spiritual dimensions of leadership in a difficult time, and these are intended to feed into small group work. I will suggest themes or questions for discussion, based upon my biblical examples, which I draw from the Old Testament. These will be suggestive and not exhaustive. Here I am persuaded by the work of Ephraim Radner and others, who have tried to reflect biblically on our difficult time, in the light of the divisions of the Christian churches especially after the reformation. The one ‘mother church,’ the invisible church, the self-righteous remnant church, the everyone’s got a bit of truth church – he has contested these conceptions and argued for the church as divided and suffering, as did Israel, in imitation of Christ, for the sake of the world.
Two mediations do not lead into small group discussion. I will use these to speak more directly to the challenge of false teaching, and, in conclusion, to the challenge of being an Episcopalian in our day. I believe we are living in a period of false teaching, but how we address that in a penitent but forthright way is by no means clear. If quietism and withdrawing are out as options, so too are politics and strategizing which do not recognize our sin and complicity, which do not compassionately seek to heal and forgive and find our unity in a source beyond our selves and our own sense of what is right or wrong. How a path is to be steered between withdrawal or crass strategizing, and what the spiritual challenge within all that might be – that is what I see as the agenda my talks should address.
I have chosen figures from the Old Testament because they embody struggle in times of judgment and challenge, and offer resources for our day. I am not convinced we can know what to do, or how to act, without taking advice from the saints who have gone before. If there is one good thing about our time, I think it is that we are being taught not to rely on our own wordly wisdom. We are being driven, like Daniel, back to the scriptural testimony of prophets and apostles. We are being asked to find our story in their story. We are being asked to hear God’s word from outside ourselves, and this means we are being asked to locate our struggle—being a priest at a difficult time in the church—within the struggles of God’s faithful leaders in every age. If this gives us a place in God’s time, even in struggle and in judgment, then that will be our peace and our good, in his abiding wisdom.
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Meditation 1: “ Jeremiah: Honesty and Restriction in a Time of Judgment”
Wilt thou be to me like a deceitful brook, like waters that fail (15:18)
Lord, thou hast deceived me and I was deceived (20:7)
Though Moses and Samuel stood before me, yet my heart would not turn toward this people (15:1)
The gales had been howling all night and were about to bring their full force onto southern parts of Scotland. I was trying to move my heart and mind into this present gathering. The weather seemed appropriate for our topic, “Being a Priest at a Difficult Time in the Church.”
Helped by the internet and the rapid communication of our age, we can all describe the many storms which threaten to break up our church and which crash into our own souls from time to time, seeking to damage or destroy our spirit. Isaiah saw a troubling—if clarifying—vision at a time of transition, “in the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the LORD high and lifted up” – transitions seem to be multiplying faster than ever: a new Archbishop; another general convention; lawsuits abroad, awaiting resolution; new prayer books, new teachings on sex, new theses, new views on this or that. And a major transition is before us here, now: the movement from one tenure--of Bishop Salmon--to another.
This is not an easy topic to address. One could be too dramatic. Or one could seek resolutions to problems that are not there. Or resolutions which run too quickly over the real, but deeper spiritual, problems. Or, one could focus on strategies to root out the problem, as though it did not involve us in deep ways too. Then again, how much of the present difficult time actually affects me and my parish, or is this just so much background noise, which ought to be marginalized or ignored, so that the real work of ministry can go forward. And why is Seitz the one addressing this?
I confess I sense the problems keenly in my own way, as an exile and as one who lives in a fully post-Christian culture and context. But I also have some inkling of what life is like in the parish form of leadership in our troubled time. (I count seven clergy in three generations as, “walking the walk”). And the point of the small groups is to take what I offer and pour the hot water of your experiences on the Nescafe of my reflections. Crunching down cold hard grains will not work. And I think Bishop Salmon has been right in insisting that the real business of this conference will happen in the groups. Which is another way of saying, here, the Holy Spirit is our teacher. And that work cannot be micro-managed or over-anticipated. So pray for me and we will all be students of the Holy Spirit as He does his work and ministers to us with his gracious judgments.
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“Righteous art thou, O Lord, when I complain to thee; yet I would plead my case before thee.”
Jeremiah was a spectacular man. His is one of the larger prophetic testimonies, to be ranged alongside Ezekiel and Isaiah. He lived in a difficult time. A time of judgment. And a time of decision, personal decision. What marks off his testimony is the personal nature of his life as a leader in a difficult time. We go inside this man in a way that has no rival in Israel’s testimony.
Based upon Moses, Jeremiah saw a chief ingredient of his ministry as intercession. Moses laid down his life for his people, and gave his life for them, in intercession and in sacrifice.
In the difficult time of God’s judgement, this role is forbidden Jeremiah, and he must bear the anger and hurt of his people. “Do not intercede with me, for I do not hear you.” He tells them a hard word of truth, that the desisting and forebearing God will forbear no longer. That his own vocation will be crushed on the sheer fact of the matter. And that like Moses there will be no special treatment for him. He will lose everything and go into exile, a bad fig with bad figs. There will be no special treatment for anyone. There is no remnant. All that will have to wait a later day, when the desisting and forebearing God shows the light of his face again.
Now I want to focus on two facts of what it means for Jeremiah to be a leader at a difficult time. We do not need to determine whether our age matches up to his. Of course ours is different, but the challenge the Holy Spirit sets before us is seeing where things fit, and where he has a word to say inside this fitness.
Two things. Extraordinary candor. On God’s part and on Jeremiah’s. It is hard to calculate the risk in some of Jeremiah’s language. If this was bitterness tossed off without personal regard or cost, it would be easier to take. But it isn’t. “Lord, you have deceived me and I was deceived.”
To focus on one hard statement like this might be to over-dramatize the reality of the matter, and miss the theological point. This human honesty is of one piece with a general picture of truth-telling. Jeremiah knows God’s mind and his plans, and that is why he suffers as he does. He has full knowledge of the facts. Of Israel’s manipulating worship, of failure to heed clear warnings, of internal bickering under the shadow of impending judgment, of the personal cost of this, from his own family and friends, and of the sheer exhaustion of patience on God’s part. The first fact of leadership, in Jeremiah’s case, is getting the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. It is letting the full light shine on all the ugly reality. And naturally when that happens, Jeremiah gives aim at the source of the light, “the word of the Lord has become a reproach to me…cursed be the day I was born.”
But another fact rushes in alongside this fact. And there can be only one explanation for it. The NT language is, “but the darkness comprehended it not” – and in Jeremiah the language is, “but the Lord is with me like a dread warrior, he has delivered the needy from the hand of evil-doers.”
To get the full range of God’s light, is to see the truth exposed. At a difficult time in the church, if we are leaders, we cannot but let the truth come at us. To be sure, we will handle this truth in different ways and in different doses. It is God’s own choosing to display this truth to us, and we will doubtless see it in different ways. That is in part the mercy God grants us, in not letting us, having us, walk in the shoes of Jeremiah, completely. Where the light comes at us with a ferocity that takes our breathe away, and takes Jeremiah, literally, into exile forever.
How does the truth of our time of judgment make itself known? Give some prayer and thought to that. You will notice that I have now stopped saying, a difficult time, and have chosen the biblical language instead, a time of judgment. I do this not to manipulate or impose on God’s sovereign design in our day, in our church. I do it because as a Christian leader, I cannot simply say that the difficulties we are experiencing in our Anglican Communion are to do with this or that cultural reality. This is the case, of course, but I will not have said all that must be said, until I see God’s hand hard upon his church, which he loves and cares for even as he loves and cares for His only begotten Son.
But I prefer the language of judgment because in the bible it the language of purification and hope. That is why the Psalmist can say, “I love your judgments or Lord.”
And this is why there are two facts to be considered in the life of our leader Jeremiah. For inside the encounter with hard truth comes the experience of genuine life and joy and hope and confidence. “Sing to the Lord, praise the Lord, for he has delivered.”
Inside your work as a leader, where has God given you a miracle of his own specific making, with your name on it? One that has to do, not with blessings in this or that earthly way, for which we can also sing out his praises? But one, not unlike the lifting up of Job, where he speaks with a clarity which lifts you away from his judgment to a land of hope and promise? If he has not done this, that too is a topic for discussion. This may be the hardest part of your time together. I suspect it would be for me.
And finally, in a way modest in its distance from Jeremiah and his charge, can we—you and I—speak of some retraction of our gifts, some foreswearing of our talents, as the consequence of God’s judgment in our day? Jeremiah’s vocation—at the very centre of his life with God—was to intercede. And that vocation took a drastic hit, given God’s sovereign purpose. This might be an occasion to speak of the ways God has asked you to make adjustments in what you have judged your best service for him. To make personal sacrifices, given your place in this time of judgment -- and of discovered hope for a new day in His mercy.
Speaking personally, decisions I have made to be put at God’s disposal have cost quite a lot. Things I worked hard at, and trained for long years to complete, have been set to the side. This would not have been true if we weren’t in a period of judgment and purification.
In my last talk, I want to look at what I call, an unexpected season. Not a chapter or an episode, but a season. Perhaps a good way to get the small groups rolling is to speak honestly about the challenge of our time, as you see it. Jeremiah flirted with gripe sessions on this topic, but God always hedged that in, and rebuked him when necessary. I have always been struck by the fact that commands not to intercede, and the accompanying complaints, are restricted to chapters 7-20. The strongest compliant comes last. But in that complaint, praise arises. And in Chapter 21, Jeremiah is back on the job and he will not stop now until God’s work in him is finished, a work that takes him before kings, and into pits, and finally into exile in Egypt. And in the midst of all that, his sleep brings a vision.
“Thereupon I awoke and looked, and behold, my sleep was pleasant to me, behold the days are coming, says the Lord, ….that as I have watched over them to pluck up and tear down, to overthrow, destroy and bring evil, so I shall watch over them to build and to plant” (Jeremiah 31)
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Meditation 2: “Elijah – Fear in What We Do Well”
I, even I only, am left a prophet of the LORD; while Baal’s prophets are four hundred and fifty men (1 Kgs 18:22)
Jezebel sent a messenger to Elijah “So may the gods do to me, and more also, if I do not make your life as the life of one of them by tomorrow.” Then he was afraid…and he left his servant…and he himself went a day’s journey into the wilderness… and he asked that he might die (19:2-4)
And after the fire, a still small voice (19:12)
When I was working at Holy Comforter last year, I just missed a skit that George Burley had put on. It didn’t matter that much as I got the pleasure of watching others act out bits of it just the same – that’s how much of a hit it was. It had to do with being in good spiritual shape, and the costumes and main joke lines came from an old Saturday night live skit, with Arnold Schwarzneggar. “We pump you up” – Holy Comforter’s hucksters of spiritual growth were proud to claim. You will appreciate how John Barr’s liturgical caution was tested by this Sunday morning display of poor taste, cheapening the serious side of spiritual growth and discipline we have come to associate with him.
If we wanted to watch a spiritual muscle man we would need look no further than Elijah. And we if wanted an example of being a leader at a difficult time, Elijah is again our man. If we thought bad bishops and bad teaching and itchy ears were threats in our day, we will now have to take a humility pill. Get a reality check.
The land is overrun with false prophets and bogus religion. No one has yet mastered the god-is-everywhere and all-religions-are-one game quite like the worshippers of Baal. Here was a one-size-fits-all-religion and it dominated the spirituality marketplace. Elijah is a purist and a take-no-prisoners-guy and he is isolated. Yet he does not go into hiding, but indeed takes the fight to them. It is an away game without analogy.
And in this time of hardship, our man is a success. He is a man of prayer. A man of healing. A man who can work with sparse resources at big tasks. A man unafraid of those with power, who are ruthless with its use and misuse.
A man who can smell slippery slopes and spiritual compromise at great distance, and one whose moral compass is matched by his daily resolve. It is not a matter of concern that he alone is left. He actually pays tribute to this fact in his contest with the religious leaders of his day, “I, even I only, am left as a prophet of the LORD, while four hundred and fifty are the prophets of Baal.”
It comes as no surprise to those who fight such battles that it all turns on them. And rightly so. In this case, it did indeed. And alone, armed only with the power of One God of Israel, Elijah was victorious. There would even be appropriate time for spiking it in the end zone that day. Something that for most of us, we shall have to wait until the feast with the Lamb to enjoy.
First observation: I think it is important to keep in mind that certain spiritual battles are really this sharp-edged. A time to say that the two views before us are mutually corrosive and excluding, cannot be squared, cannot be resolved by recourse to a deeper place. This may be infrequent, and human sin may seek to make charity a stranger to godly compromise in Christ. But there are also times when the difficulties we face as a church will only go away when God himself acts, in time, and one view of the matter emerges as a view He can endorse and claim as His own, and none other.
Such was a time for our man Elijah.
But we need to stay with the matter longer and look inside it, as does our narrator. Elijah’s victory is such, that the sheer zeal conveyed by God’s verdict caused him run like the wind before Ahab’s chariot a full seventeen miles. “Ain’t no stoppin us now” is the theme music to chapter 18 of 1 Kgs.
But then the muscle man finds a blank space in his spirit. He is the only one left, all right, and the target on his forehead feels big enough to fill the universe. What has gone wrong, that he is now threatened by a Jezebel who claims power from the very gods he just defeated? His life has always been under threat, and up to now, he has experienced nothing but the sheer pleasure of God’s power in God’s service. God has gone away for our muscle man, and now being the only one there is, being the only one there. I can feel the cold chill come upon him as the narrator reports in simple prose: he was afraid, and he arose, and went for his life. God has gone away, so wisely, Elijah goes to find him.
Being a leader at a difficult time, at this unexpected ECUSA season, means having to get our priorities straight with God. It means confessing our own moral failures and compromises, so that we might see clearly in the fog bank welling up around us. It means asking God to be clear with us about who he is. It means accepting that we are not all Christ wants us to be, and asking for that to change, for His sake and for our own. Inside the power realized from such a time of testing, we may begin to make genuine progress. We may feel the power of God’s yes, when we stick our neck out in a difficult situation. But we will never reach a point where God will not or cannot stand back, if He wants to teach us to trust Him in some other way we had not foreseen. To be a leader at a difficult time is to throw our lot in with God, for His sake, and this means coming up against the rock face of fear, when we discover he is truly all we’ve got.
So Elijah is right to go in search of God, because God wants to be found in a new place in Elijah’s life, and that means getting out of the fray outside, and into the inside fray.
So what happens? He who had done the miracle of feeding, must be taught to be fed that way himself. “An angel touched him and said, ‘arise and eat’” (19:5). How humbling that was can only be sensed when we realize it felt like a scene of death for our man Elijah. And when the food had done its proper good for this day, Elijah is told he will go now on a great journey, and funny thing it is, it is a journey to the Great Mountain itself, where the prophets all came from to begin with.
God lets Elijah tell the sort of pained story we tell God when we are lost and need him, and he lets him tell it again. Sometimes he lets us tell it many times. “I alone am left.” But one time, we like Elijah, are meant to get it. That God speaks in the power of His presence, and in the ways He means for us to feel that power and know Him in it. But that He also has a way to speak to us we have never known before, and He means to be heard on those terms. Only then, when we repeat our pained account, does His answer come, because He has brought us to a place where we can hear Him at last.
He does not dispute that Elijah is alone, but he provides a means for that to cease being a matter of fear. The same battles will be there when he returns. He will still be called upon to fight them. Indeed, he will fight and then hand the battle over to yet another man, whose name sounds a lot like his own. And when the dust settles, it will turn out that those who keep faith in the Lord are indeed 7000. And it will be that way because God says so, and because he has found a special way to speak to Elijah and encourage him, a way that came in the midst of struggle and fear, and precisely because it was a difficult time of judgment.
It might be possible in times of hardship, such as we are now facing as a church body, to believe that if we do what we believe is right and true in His eyes, we can count on his showing us that it is so and we are right to battle on as we do – often through times of real hardship and sacrifice, and not just when we run that thrilling 17 miler in front of our foes.
But the victory will never consist in that. God does not simply use us to second His vote down here in His battles, and then reward us for that. He demands that we learn through fear that He is our personal support and voice, before He is anything out there on a battle field where we fight for him. That is because we never fight for God as we might fight for a coach or a team or an outcome we judge to be right. If we think that way He will show up with the surest signs of victory and power—earthquakes, fire, wind—and He will show these to us in all their maximal clarity, and then pass by.
What we are seeking in this difficult time in the church is another voice, a voice where God is fully present, but which we can only learn to hear when stop thinking we are in a fight where God needs us more than we need Him. If He has to turn the volume down so low that we simply cannot recognize how this could be a way for him to speak, then that is what He will do. We have His still small voice’s word on it.
I suspect this is a good time to talk about being humbled by the things we are good at for God. To consider the places we are most sure we are getting a result which pleases God. But which, perhaps by its very success, at a difficult time in our church, has begun to feel like it is more up to us than to Him. And which requires Him to speak a fresh word of encouragement, with a voice we just don’t hear all the time. Perhaps you have heard that voice, like Elijah, the hard way, the only way. Perhaps that voice is the one you are on a journey to hear, and are being taught to get ready to hear by some miraculous feeding. Or perhaps it is a voice you are not sure you are entitled to hear, because the isolation or daily grind has become more familiar than hoping for something else.
There is one final thing I take away from this story. It is never possible to define our Christian walk merely over against something. Over against the world, over against Baal worship, over against our opponents, over against Christians we judge to be wrong or to be weaker strategists than ourselves. And that is a danger in our difficult time: that defining who we are in the battle is a matter of spotting weakness and error in others. Elijah never gets away with that. God is who He is, on behalf of us, but within our Israel of faith. So, after Elijah hears that small voice, he also hears that there are 7000 out there he did not know about. 7000. That must have been a touch sobering for the man who said so often, in victory and in fear, “I am the only one left who is getting it right.”
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Meditation 3: “Ezekiel – False Teaching in the Israel of God”
For thus says the LORD God, Behold I, I myself will search for my sheep and will seek them out. I will seek... I will rescue.... I will bring.... I will gather.... I will feed.... and I will myself be the shepherd of my sheep (Ezek 34)
The New Testament gives full testimony to the challenge of faithful leadership in difficult times. There is the challenge of the culture, and this had an acute face for two reasons. Jesus was a Jew, and the first Christians saw themselves as coming into a relationship with Jesus and with the scriptures of Israel which promised his appearing and which set forth a pragmatic and concrete way of life. Just as this way of life had distinguished Israel from her neighbours, so too it sharply distinguished Christians from their pagan culture. Gentile Christians knew themselves to have been delivered from darkness, or as Paul puts it, from being without hope and without god in the world.
The second acute challenge was an internal one. Those who had been brought near, had been baptized, had been placed in leadership, were constantly challenged to stand firm in Christ. This meant not falling back into a rigorous but self-contained Judaism (this was attractive for Gentiles as much as for Jews) nor treating the claims of Christ as negotiable in the face of pagan culture. We know that Gnostics came and went in their so-called Christian deportment, and the neither-god-nor-man Jesus of their believing matched the shuttling restlessness of their desires in the body, allowing them full release into the pagan ways, but with a spiritual superiority and indifference at the same time. That should sound familiar.
I am constantly shocked to see, influenced by a bad kind of Lutheranism, how little modern Christians realize that to be a Christian in the early church meant precisely being set off by a pragmatic code of life. Whatever the dangers of the law or legalism, it remains the case that the first Christians saw the law of God revealed to Moses as a gift to the church—fulfilled in civil and ritual matters, but still--a kind of foundation stone that no pagan philosophy could outstrip, given its antiquity, scope, and relevance, not least because this was Christ's own scripture.
False teaching and corrupt leadership were no stranger to the early church. Knox was right to say that the synagogue of satan was always to be found wherever the righteous were set apart in Christ’s love.
But properly to deal with the challenge of false teaching in our day requires severe intellectual discipline and humility.
Intellectual discipline because we must recognize that the church is already divided, and this precisely in the area of its confessional teaching. Even when with charity we speak of ecumenical friends, be they Lutherans or Roman Catholics or the Orthodox or the Reformed, we immediately see how difficult it will be to invoke a "true church" solution to handle perceptions of false teaching in our own ranks. Appeal to some distillate of common belief or ecclesial structure is sadly what has proven unworkable, in historical terms; and where found, it has often become divisive rather than uniting. I say this with great sorrow as one committed in word and deed to Nicene Christianity and a New Ecumenism. As one who sees common struggles across sections of Christ's body, and as one committed to a rule of faith as a hopeful ecumenical bottom-line.
I mentioned intellectual humility as well, because when we look to the New Testament it simply does not comprehend our dilemma: the state of the church as we now find it, so severely divided as it is across denominated lines. What the challenge of false teaching cannot present as an option is the establishment of the true church. The New Testament cannot see that as a solution because it has not anticipated the fact of Christian ecclesial division we know as our daily bread. And “establishing the true church” has been tried, and having been tried and found wanting, has only meant trying and trying and trying again.
But I wonder if the New Testament in its own way does formulate something like a spiritual response to false teaching. Its ad hoc formulations, to be vigilant, to draw back from, to separate oneself from false teaching — these do not amount to concrete ecclesiastical strategies for dealing with the challenge. Instead, they are vigorous reminders of how fragile Christian faith is, in the best of circumstances, and therefore they put us on notice to be watchful, for ourselves and for our fellow Christians. They drive the Christian believer into his or her prayer closet, into the bruised and forgiven depths of his or her own soul, where fresh requests for strength and hopefulness must be made and made and made again. And, on the other side, they rule out pragmatic compromises made simply to keep everyone together as an end unto itself. Which would only be a cheapening of the cross and an emptying of its transforming power. John 17 is clear. Unity is never a sociological end in itself for well-meaning Christians. Unity is so that “the world might know,” might see in Christ and His body something that sets the church off and draws the world in because of this. Schemes for unity along other lines obscure this missionary imperative.
So this is why the Old Testament proves itself the durable witness the Early Church knew it to be. Because it is clear about division within the household of faith and because it resists ecclesial remedies for spiritual waywardness. There is always only one Israel, just as God is one, and his will is one.
We know the story, but it must be hammered home to our gentile hearts. God loved Israel for no inherent reason on her part. She was unfaithful, a bride of youth become a whore, to use Ezekiel’s strong language. From the tenderest moment of her betrothal, rescued and embraced, she preferred to become like the nations and cast God’s love in his teeth. God used Israel, it might be said, precisely to establish his character as the desisting and forbearing God. The one who does not deal with us quid pro quo, but on the basis of a vast reservoir of mercy–so vast as to establish his divinity, for no one but God could love like this.
But Israel is divided in judgment, north and south, exiled and homebound, just as the church is today divided. And God promises in those scriptures to bring the division to an end, and his plan for this costs him his only son, the good shepherd. And more than that, the miracle is that, in so doing, he brings within his embrace the nations for which Israel was to be a blessing. And now he loves the church as he once loved his beloved Israel.
When we read Israel’s mature record of her walk with God, we see false teaching and the challenge it presents. And we see that God's forbearance puts a mighty strain on those he calls to be his faithful ones.
Ezekiel is a prophet during the time of most severe judgment. He sees into the temple and the priests who are there he names by name. Their worship is the rankest abomination and idolatry. They are proud of it. They see the division as just judgment — on those in exile! The division, as they see it, has rid them of the judgment of God and of their opponents, in one fell swoop.
Ezekiel is uncompromising in insisting that God’s judgment is not over but will continue, until it reaches into the inner chambers of power and the most holy places which have been defiled by bogus self-worship. And in announcing this he does not crow from afar, but from a place of judgment, where he, caught up in Israel, as Israel, cannot claim exception or exemption. He bears in his own body the marks of Christ, to use Paul’s language. He physically experiences the judgment of God, existentially living it out. He loses his wife. He loses his beloved temple and worship. He loses his right to intercede. But somehow, through God’s grace, the words he is given–lamentation, woe, complaint–become sweet in his mouth, and he can bear this time of division and false teaching and loss.
When he turns, in the midst of the judgment of God, toward the future, he rehearses the tragic tale of false teachers. The shepherds, woe to them. It reads a strangely contemporaneous text, mindful of our own troubled shepherds in such disarray.
"Therefore you shepherds, hear the word of the LORD. As I live, declares the LORD God, surely because my sheep have become a prey, and my sheep have become food for all..and because my shepherds have not searched for my sheep, but...have fed themselves...I am against my shepherds and I will require my sheep at their hand...I will rescue my sheep from their mouths that they may not be food for them."
False teaching is a threat because it does not feed. Because it deprives the world of life-giving truth. It may also irritate us, and frustrate us, those of us who are priests, as we see power in the hand of those whose teaching we judge to be wrong or perjurious. But God's concern is with what gets lost in all this. For us, it is a matter of believing we have categories, standards of measurement, rule and canon, and that something is being offended against -- but for others, it is the insistence that no such categories actually exist, and that Christian leadership is about attitudes and processes. That is the struggle for us in leadership: category errors. But what God sees is the deprivation, the starvation, the manipulation.
So what remedy does He provide?
Here I think it important to see what remedy is not provided, at least not in the first instance. “Here are good shepherds, let them be declared as such, and let the shepherds of forfeit be gone.” “If there are bad shepherds, bad bishops, let good ones be brought in to replace them, and let a New Israel emerge.” No, in the first instance there is no such strategy. There is sustained talk of God's personal work in the midst of judgment.
"For thus says the LORD God, Behold I, I myself will search for my sheep and will seek them out. (Listen to the verbs heaped up with the first-person) I will seek... I will rescue.... I will bring.... I will gather.... I will feed.... I will myself be the shepherd of my sheep. I will give them a home, I will seek, I will bring back, I will bind up, I will strengthen, I will feed in justice."
And then the present flock is judged. For in this time of forfeit shepherds, the sheep have fought against one another and have stirred up mud and ruined the drinking water. They have pushed and injured one another, and have caused scattering and prey-mongering.
Friends, we must lean into the promise that God is doing serious shepherding in this time of trial we are in as a church. It may not be clear to us. That is why God gives us prophets, like Ezekiel, to show us what God does when all looks dark, when all is dark. When we cannot fix it. When we cannot fix it. And so, setting up good shepherds and some ‘good Israel’ distinguished and known as such over against ‘bad Israel.’
‘Cannot’ -- because God wants to work on us too, who have bruised, and been bruised, have chocked down dirty water and kicked up mud and mire ourselves. We are all in there with Ezekiel, but in there with him is the promise of God. Shepherding in the darkness: seeking, finding, rescuing, gathering, feeding, cleaning, binding up, strengthening, giving a flesh heart instead of a heart of stone, breathing new spirit, and giving us a shepherd, a good shepherd, always doing his job from before the foundation of the world: the slain one with power to give. Power we need this day, when it is hard to be a priest, at a difficult time in the church.
We are in a period when our judgments must be tentative and penitent. But the question out there, the question about God’s care and providence, must be answered strongly and positively: Can we view this as a time when God is anything but tentative? When in the confusion of ECUSA, He is more at work in the silence than He may seem to be when all is well?
There was a special power in Holy Saturday. All looked dark and lost: our man done in after he walked the long green mile, for us, into the foreign country, for us. There was this long day when nothing seemed to be happening, and yet it was a day when God was more alive and active that He had ever seemed to be.
May God give us grace to lean into this special power of His, at this time, this difficult time when we are priests in His church. Withdrawal and setting up our own good shepherds – these are out as options. We have a Good Shepherd and in him God is at work. Hard at work, at this hard time in the church, when it is difficult, but when God is doing His special Holy Saturday work, just as he was in Israel’s, in Ezekiel’s, exile of judgment.
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Meditation 4: “Daniel – The Freedom of Exile”
Our God who we serve is able to deliver us from the burning firy furnace, and he will deliver us from thy hand, O King. But if not, be it known unto thee O King, we will not serve thy gods, nor worship the golden image thou hast made (Dan 3:17-18)
When I was asked to do this series, on being a leader at a difficult time in the church, my first thought was, do it all on Daniel. There could hardly be a better fit for our time, if we agree that this is where we now are.
The institutions of Israel have collapsed. King, priest, prophet, the three great bulwarks, have been dashed to the ground. There is no temple. No regular round of offerings. No regular round of worship. No state. No home. No support for familiar religious habits which feed the soul and keep the heart of faith alive. The daily round for the faithful Israelite is gone.
Rehearsing this, it actually sounds like we’ve got it pretty good. Maybe clarity comes when all the familiar supports are cast aside. Because Daniel is a man with clear vision. Let’s consider how this is so, why it can be.
I guess the first thing to note is that Daniel has friends. Three companions. And he didn’t insist on this, as a survival strategy, it just happened that as the secular authorities culled out some of the Israelites to study their language, Daniel and S,M,A were cast together. There is no in-fighting. The bottom line has been discovered. They are men of God, the One Lord, and that is where their identity is. They can sit easy to the names and labels of this world; in fact, they have double names in this time of exile. The name we go by, related to our Lord Jesus, and the name the world knows us by, in this time of God’s good judgment, when the ECUSA is being sifted toward some new purpose God alone can see.
When Daniel, through prayer and conviction, learns the dream of N and when he gives God glory in reporting it to him, and when he is promoted, his first act is to see to it that his friends share in his fortune. “Daniel made request of the king, and he appointed S,M,A over the affairs of the province of Babylon.” For it is not his fortune, but a fortune which is theirs together. And when as a consequence of this promotion, there comes greater exposure and so greater trials, fiery trials, S,M, and A stand firm, in the manner of Daniel. Daniel faces his own trial in the lion’s den, later, under the reign of Darius. But in all their trials, they are as one man. There is no destiny, trial or accomplishment which is about Daniel alone. In the time of judgment we cast away the familiar round and throw ourselves on the mercy of our God. Throwing ourselves on him means finding new fellowship, of the kind that was hard when we felt secure, winning victories that had to do with us and our talents, in God’s service to be sure. But Daniel is never a man alone. He had friends. True friends. They were friends and they were true because this was the fruit of the time of judgment, when just this kind of fruit gets grown, if we are faithful in the manner of Daniel.
What else do we learn from Daniel? The familiar rounds are gone. The worship books have been changed. The places of prayer, where the knees fit the kneeler, are gone. The leaders we trusted for this or that divine service –these are gone. New languages must be learned. But Daniel and his friends never miss a beat. Well, there are simply new rounds to be discovered, or old rounds adapted for a new day and a new purpose.
It is ominous to hear the opening lines of Daniel, of the temple vessels being brought to Babylon, and lodged in a foreign god’s house of worship. What a potent symbol. And then in that same context to hear of vessels of wine and rich food, there at the University of Babylon. Will the old wine of the One Lord now get poured into vessels of a different sort, associated with a kindler, gentler, compromising small-g god?
No, Daniel and his friends, without any fuss or bother, simply prefer a leaner fare in this time of exile. They don’t screw up their faces or make noises appropriate to pride and self-sacrifice. And in the end, their diet actually improves their complexion, and the Chaldeans want a piece of the action as well.
And later, in chapter nine, we hear of Daniel pouring over scripture, straining to hear a word in the midst of judgment. How long? Jeremiah said seventy years. Is that word the container of a deeper word, the Holy Spirit alone can teach us to hear? The only way to know is to read and read and pray and pray. And then a fresh word comes. It is a time to discover scripture speaking and sustaining in a way that is hard-won, but also deep truth conveying. A new way of hearing, a new way of being taught.
And how can one worship in a strange land? Psalm 137, verse 4, “How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land?” By the waters of Babylon we sat down and wept,when we remembered Zion. There is a lot going on in those four words: when we remembered Zion. Four words which have their own special meaning in our difficult time.
Daniel had his own version of this estrangement. Laws had been passed to prevent any worship of God, dreamed up by petty officials jealous of Daniel. The text is clear. Precisely when he learned of these laws, he opened his windows, faced in the direction of Zion, and got down on his knees. He didn’t complain, petition, or beseech, he gave thanks, three times a day, “as he had done previously.” Everything had changed, but some things never changed, but instead, conveyed a freedom and a revealed a freshness and a joy that can get buried during other times.
The British, under Churchill, used as a code during WW2. Three simple words, which expressed their freedom in a time of trial. “But if not.” And the words came from Daniel’s friends in chap 3. Our God whom we serve will deliver us from your hand, O king, *but if not* be it known we’ll not serve your gods or worship the golden image which you have set up.” I’ve been to the mountaintop, it really doesn’t matter anymore. The freedom of the man who knows God is great, and his destiny is bound up with full surrender to him, made possible because God has shown himself again and again the surprise of strength to the weary. And the way that happens is by sticking to the familiar rounds, adapted for a new day.
Two final things require to be noted, I think. In a day of great disruption and loss of the familiar round, God does things that are special, that we may not have been prepared to anticipate. Daniel sees great visions, long-range visions. Moses saw the promised land, Jeremiah a field which would be purchased when exile was over, Ezekiel, a new heart, a united Israel, flesh coming and spirit coming where there had been dry, dry bones. Daniel sees a world vision. A vision which he cannnot comprehend, because it does not pertain to his day. A vision with miry toes, and figures and historical movements which lie outside his ken. These are visions which are for us, and for those who would outlive Daniel and take up this book and hear of a son of man, of one in the furnace with the friends, and see the backward glancing shadows of the Cross. A vision which was literally for the ages, under God’s guiding hand, wracking the faithful Daniel and making him ill, but confirming that what he was enduring was for some larger plan, with the same sure God of his day overseeing it and assuring us of his hand over time, ours, and our children's, and our children's children after them.
And finally, Daniel the Missionary. The man for the unwashed Public. Daniel’s disruption and exile and loss of the familiar, sent him out into a world desperate to hear some word, different than the one they had grown familiar with. It took several encounters, but Daniel’s steadfastness, and freedom, and fellowship, and loyalty to his friends and his God, brought the mightiest man in the land to his knees, confessing that Daniel’s God was the Most High, and finding freedom in repentance before his face.
And it is not just a one-off display of piety. There is the great Darius, N’s successor, actually rooting for Daniel in the lion’s den, rushing down to see if, if the great “but if not” was true. The great “but if not” indeed meant some hope he had never known before, clutching his idols of wood and stone. The king said to Daniel, “May your god who you serve continually, deliver you.” And the king spent the night fasting; no diversions were brought to him, and sleep fled from him (6:18).
And when dawn broke he rushed down there. Why? So that he might also one day say, *but if not* and find himself one of Daniel’s companions, he who was the king of the known world but longed to know what Daniel knew.
Being in exile meant that God could use Daniel to reach out in ways God alone knew were part of his great plan of salvation and hope, for the world.
Loyalty, friendship, steadfastness in prayer, bible study, and worship, freedom, great visions – these are all possible in our time, our difficult time in the church. No one could take these from Daniel, and because they couldn’t and because Daniel knew that, knew the freedom of “but if not”, King Darius the Great could find what N the repentant and B the unrepentant too late discovered.
I make a decree, that in my royal dominion men tremble and fear before the God of Daniel, for he is the living God, enduring forever; his kingdom shall never be destroyed, and his dominion shall be to the end. He delivers and rescues, he works signs and wonders in heaven and earth, he who saved Daniel from the power of the lions (Dan 6:26-27).
What are the disciplines which sustain you during this time? What new way has God used the scriptures, which you had not known before? Where are your friends, your true friends? What competitions inside the Household of Christ have you let fall away, as new fellowship during a hard time has broken down pride, or simply showed a common cause in Christ somehow hidden before? Have you had great visions, whose range is beyond you, your own participation or full understanding, but which may sustain a next generation? Where does the freedom of “but if not” make its strong voice heard? And where are great works being done because God is using your faithfulness to work change in others, even during a difficult time being a priest in the church.
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Final Meditation: “Joseph – Reconciliation in an Unexpected Season”
Thus Joseph knew his brothers, but they did not know him. And Joseph remembered the dreams which he had dreamed of them. (Gen 42:9)
When Joseph’s brothers saw that their father was dead, they said, “It may be that Joseph will hate us and pay us back for all the evil which we did to him.” So they sent a message to Joseph, saying, “Your father gave this command before he died, ‘Say to Joseph, Forgive, I pray you, the transgression of your brothers and their sin, because they did evil to you.’
And now we pray you, forgive the transgression of the servants of the God of your father.” Joseph wept when they spoke to him. His brothers also came and fell down before him, and said, “Behold we are your servants.” But Joseph said to them, “Fear not, for am I in the place of God? As for you, you meant evil against me; but God meant it for good, to bring it about that many people should be kept alive, as they are at this day. (Gen 50:15-20)
Genesis is punctuated with unexpected chapters. Indeed, one could call the walk of Israel with God a walk with nothing but unexpected chapters. Abraham called out and sent, literally, to God knows where. Sarah made laughable promises. Isaac winning an unexpected birthright. Jacob working an unexpected seven years. But still through it all, a consistent thread could be spotted, even by eyes worn out by patience and obedience.
Israel was being birthed. Guided. Provided for. Occasionally a blessing. Being fruitful and multiplying. Dying but being buried in a land of future promise, as a surety, an earnest on those repeated, unexpected, promises. The twelve tribes come forth from Jacob-Israel, with all their unruly character. But then there is, not an unexpected chapter, but an unexpected season: a famine unlike the smaller famines hits. Joseph is in Egypt, not for a stay to pass his wife off as his sister, but as a citizen, as a man who eventually marries one of the Egyptian women and rises to power and influence. This is a strange detour from the promises to bless, to multiply, and to give a home at last.
We are experiencing a strange and unexpected season in our shared life. Our church is in turmoil, and we may sense it is not a chapter but a season.
What did we expect when we decided to become priests and leaders in this church?
Some of us expected a long season: the continuation of strong catholic, prayerbook worship. We puzzled at the chapters of zebra books, and green books and finally a ‘79 revision and adjusted, with varying degrees of acceptance. But we hear of new, alternative books and further revisions and we wonder why this must be such a long season.
Some us of saw the traditionalism of our past belief dry up and leave us stranded, and then the winds of renewal breathed new life. We were dead bones and we tasted, and saw, that the Lord was good. We saw miracles of transformation around us and knew the strong words of the man born blind, look, this I know, I was blind and now I see. But the years wear on and the hoped for harvest, in all its proper length and breadth, has not transpired as we had hope. We are entering a time—with a score of Cursillo and Faith Alive and Toronto Blessing and HTB years properly credited, for what God has indeed wrought in spades—but still unsure of our season.
There are women among us. Who looked forward to sharing fully in the good work of Christ’s ministry, mindful of a saviour who took on human flesh and redeemed both male and female by a miracle of grace. And yet we see tension and division among ourselves, about just what ministry we are exercising and why. The season has come on us slowly and unexpectedly but it shows no signs of resolution.
Some of us, men and women, rejoiced to see scripture again opened and changing lives, yes, even among us Episcopalians. An unexpected chapter, as the dry business of finding sources or debating synoptic problems or authentic Pauline letters, gave way to a new urgency and expectancy before scripture’s plain sense word of address. And yet the same scriptures in our season are opened to a different, at times opposite and self-evidently corrosive alternative purpose, in defense of axioms and virtues which seem at one with the culture’s best sense of itself anyway. And this season is a season, and no mere chapter.
In this season of unexpected disappointments and turns and confusions, it is very easy to seek short-term solutions. I am struck at how, in a very long season indeed, Daniel never sought to fix things, and yet he is as active and busy and committed as anyone can possibly be.
In our season, the one thing I think we can be sure will happen, is that people will make mistakes and hurt each other. Much of this happens because our season of unexpected turns, is but part of a larger season in the church’s missionary life. Things are in enormous flux.
The Episcopal church in the US, we discover in our unexpected season, is but a tiny part of a worldwide Anglican communion. And we adjust to this, at times with enthusiasm, and at times with humility, and at times with a sense of loss of control and confusion. How does this communion, which is itself facing an unexpected season, think it will find its way?
The Episcopal church, we discover in our unexpected season, has an identity marked by the old world, and the effect of missionary transplantation into the new world, alongside German, French, Italian, Spanish, Skandanavian versions of post-reformation Christianity. And yet in the new world, where do those old world, denominated identities still mean something critical, and where are they falling away in the light of a new missionary imperative? A fire needs a fireplace, but what will the fireplace look like if it does not have preaching tabs, or a 1928 prayer book, or a geneva gown or a credal core, or an anabaptist zeal or an historic confession or a magesterial polity? As single, critical, identifying features.
We have come to see the centrality of our scriptures, some of us out of sheer desperation and last-inning discovery, as crucially as did the reformers in their own day. But the season we are in does not mean that the clarity or sufficiency of scripture meets with uniform acceptance or clear teaching and living. We need something else, working with scripture, on our side of the ledger, and we need language to help describe it, old language like Holy Spirit, Rule of Faith, the Father’s Interpretation and like things.
At the end of his long season, Joseph could look back and survey the damage. Wrong decisions were made. Evil was meant. Within the bosom of Israel itself, and not from outside it, because the season was hard and the future held together only by God’s word of promise, wrong was done. In his dreams, Joseph saw something that looked like submission. Like bowing down before an irritating favorite younger brother. Even Joseph may have thought this was what he saw.
But everyone was wrong, however much they were right! They saw through a glass dimly, in this unexpected season upon which they were soon to embark. And some of the brothers, unsure what season they were entering, sought to keep the frightening season out. “Let’s get rid of the dreamer” they cried. But the dream was not Joseph. It was a dream God gave. And so God would oversee it and God would, in His time, make the dream clear. In this unexpected season. God’s favorite speaking season.
It only dawns on Joseph that the dream is not about his personal success when, in Ch 42, the brothers come down to buy grain. Suddenly what looked like a dream about him and his power over his brothers was a dream about what God was doing through him, maybe even in spite of his own best sense of what he was up to, in an unexpected season. Because he was faithful in an unexpected season, God could use his good and others’ evil to an end He alone could see.
Friends, we live now in an unexpected season. In this season mistakes will be made. Some will try to shut the season out. Some will thing the season is not about them. Some will think they know what the season and its attending dreams are about, and they’ll be wrong. We will all of us—after the pattern of Judah in his way, Rueben in his, old father Jacob in his, and Joseph in his—have to be caught short-sighted.
But each of us will discover in our errors and our faults, our fears, our mis-steps, and even our tough stay-on-course-ness, that there is a dream which will not die, and that God alone is bringing about, even for us in this fragile ECUSA ship, in the difficult time to be a priest in His church.
We can count ourselves blessed, not always to have got things right, but to hear in the end that God is working through our faults, in spite of ourselves. That God’s long-sightedness corrects and forgives our short-sightedness. Inside that scene of forgiveness and correction, which we see in Joseph and his brothers, may it also be our gift to forgive those who meant us harm, and be forgiven by those we sought to be rid of, in this unexpected season, at a difficult time in our church.
For in the end it is not our time, but God’s time, God’s plan, God’s church, and we are only earthly vessels gazing on a vast treasure, a treasure which has caught us up in its vast heaven and which promises to deliver us on another shore.
In the end it was enough that Joseph relinguished himself into God’s care and protection. “Don’t forget my bones” was all that was left to him to care about!
And God didn’t forget, because He was faithful in his difficult time. And He won’t forget us either, who are priests in this difficult time in the church.
