The Rev. Timothy Fleck

April, 2017

A couple weeks ago, Bob and I attended a series of workshops in Boston called “eFormation Boot Camp,” based on a curriculum developed at Virginia Seminary, and offered on this occasion by Province I of the Episcopal Church.  The goal of the event was to teach and encourage parish leaders to use Social Media more effectively to communicate within and beyond the congregation.

I guess the lower-case “e” before Formation was code to let us know that this gathering would be hip and cool and up-to-the-minute – or at least as up-to-the-minute as the mainline church is able to manage, which seems to be consistently about twenty years behind the cutting edge.  And I think that’s okay:  in a culture that idolizes novelty for its own sake, being a little out of step may be where a countercultural church should be.

Sorting through all the buzzwords and jargon, though, the message that I brought home was that social media and technology can be effective ways to share the church’s message, but that the slickest podcast in the world is worthless if the message is not clear and compelling. 

Most of the workshops were led by those elusive beasts: millennials who are committed to the church.  And these were the folks telling us codgers to concentrate first on getting our message clear, and not to worry so much about the infrastructure.  Perhaps we have outgrown Marshall McLuhan’s dictum that “The medium is the message.”  Perhaps we have entered a world where the message is the message, and the medium is just the medium.

So what is our message?  On one hand, we are stewards of the most cosmic, world-changing message humanity has ever been given:  the God who created us and the rest of the universe has chosen to live and die as a human being to save human beings from ourselves.  He died and was resurrected to overcome the forces of death and sin, and we are invited to follow him and know resurrection life.

This message is difficult, but we have lots of resources on lots of cross-compatible platforms and formats.  We have the message in nano-form (For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life. – 132 characters, eminently tweetable).  We have it as an FAQ document in our creeds and in our Baptismal Covenant.  We have memes that we call icons and stained glass windows.  And all of these are hyperlinked to the searchable full-text version:  #HolyScripture. (If some of these terms are Greek to you, don’t worry, that’s kind of the point).

On the other hand, we too often bury this buzzy message and fill up our bandwidth with a steady stream of business as usual.  Don’t worry, nothing too challenging, nothing you haven’t heard already.  If you’re really interested, mail a self-addressed stamped envelope, and in six to eight weeks we’ll mail you a brochure. 

In a couple weeks, we will celebrate Holy Week.  Over the course of seven days we will re-tell and re-live the entire message of Salvation History:  God’s creation and care for the human family, God’s continued communication with us through the Prophets, God’s message delivered to us in the Word, our corrupt and violent response, and God’s ultimate re-boot of creation in the Resurrection. 

Perhaps it would be more hip and cool and up-to-the-minute if God were just to live-stream the whole thing.  It would probably get a bigger audience, and the demographics would certainly skew better.  But sometimes the medium does matter.  This is a message that we receive by hearing it, singing it, walking it, praying it, again and again, year by year, Sunday by Sunday. This is a message that burns itself onto our hard drives, re-writes our operating system. And this is a message that we are called to forward to all, by striving to live it every day.

March, 2017 

Christianity has inherited from Judaism an ambiguous relationship with the world.  I don’t mean the natural world; in Genesis, God repeatedly declares the created world to be good, and throughout the Old Testament are hymns and thanksgivings for the beauty of the earth. I mean the world of other people, the culture outside our doors.  In the Torah are hundreds of commandments about keeping apart from the outside world, at least as that world is understood to be Gentile.  In Jesus’ time, the burning question for faithful Jews was how to live in a world where pagan Romans occupied Israel:  collaborate like the Sadducees, resist like the Zealots, concentrate on right behavior like the Pharisees, or withdraw like the Essenes.  When Christianity became a state religion in the fourth century, the Desert Fathers and Mothers withdrew from the world, protesting the Church’s compromise with the Empire.  For two thousand years, Christians have been simultaneously drawn into the world to preach and serve, and drawn back from the world to focus more deeply on God.

The battle still rages: this very morning, I ran across both approaches.  In The Atlantic, I read a review of Rod Dreher’s new book, The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation.  Although this book is not even scheduled to be released publicly for several weeks, it has generated a lot of discussion by way of advance reviews and the author’s public speaking on the topic.  Mr. Dreher’s title refers to Benedictine monks and nuns who, as the Western Roman Empire crumbled, withdrew from the pagan culture of the Dark Ages and preserved Christianity as well as culture and learning, so that when the social situation improved in the later Middle Ages, the seeds they had kept alive could grow and flower.  His thesis is that, as Christianity ceases to be a guiding force in American culture, Christians need to withdraw from that culture and create intentional communities where they can live the Gospel authentically and await a more hospitable time.

The idea is tempting. Many would argue that Christianity has been at its best when it has been the most counter-cultural and that if the choice is between rejecting or compromising with the culture of American politics and entertainment, rejection and withdrawal make a lot of sense.  Dreher offers the example of Orthodox Jewish enclaves that have been able to preserve their religion and culture for centuries even in the midst of American and European cities that are wholly antithetical to their values and beliefs.

An hour after reading this review, I watched Presiding Bishop Michael Curry’s sermon from last week’s Episcopal Revival in the Diocese of Pittsburgh (if the idea of an Episcopal Revival seems impossible, that is part of the problem. See http://tinyurl.com/Revival2017). At Holy Cross Church in the Homewood neighborhood of Pittsburgh, Bishop Curry preached the need for a revival that goes beyond the church and spills over into the world.  He begins from the same premise as Mr. Dreher, that the West has lost its Judeo-Christian grounding in favor of worshipping the Golden Calf of the Self.  But rather than seeing that as reason to withdraw from the world, Bishop Curry points us back to the example of Christ himself, whose insistence on love grows more and more urgent the closer he gets to his own crucifixion, the act that ++Curry describes as “the sacrifice of un-enlightened self-interest for the good of the other.”

In other words, Jesus didn’t have the luxury of withdrawing into a bubble, of keeping his hands clean and his eyes closed to the sinful brokenness of the world around him.  And neither do we.  Jesus did not compromise with the corruption and violence of this world, but rather opposed it with righteousness and peace, even at the cost of his own life.  And so must we.  Jesus overcame death and the grave, defeating the satanic powers of this world by facing them head on in love.  And so may we.

Lent begins March 1.  Lent is often understood as a period of spiritual purgation and purification in preparation for the mighty events of Holy Week.  Seeking that purification, some of us choose various kinds of fasting:  withdrawing ourselves from certain habits or indulgences of the world.  Such fasting is not a bad thing if it gives us time and space to focus on our relationship with God.  But if we think that we are living the Gospel by walling ourselves off from our disreputable neighbors and the messy world we live in, we have missed the point.  To quote Bishop Curry again, “There is much that seeks to articulate itself as Christianity that doesn’t look anything like Jesus.  If it doesn’t walk like Jesus, and talk like Jesus, and look like Jesus and smell like Jesus, it’s not Christian! ... And if it’s going to look like Jesus, it’s got to look like love.”

February, 2017

 In conversations about the relationship between the Church and the World, there are three closely related but distinct concepts that often get confused:  Outreach, Evangelism, and Mission.  Many parishes have committees with one or more these names, and the work and ministry they do often overlaps.  Sometimes the name we give the committee has more to do with what was fashionable at the time it was set up than with the actual ministry of the committee.

Outreach comes from the sense of reaching out a hand to help others.  Sometimes it is specifically tied to the “works of mercy” described in Matthew 25:35-36:  feeding the hungry, giving drink to the thirsty, welcoming the stranger, clothing the naked, and visiting the prisoner. Sometimes it is defined by something like the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.  And sometimes it seems to mean everything that the church does other than worship:  I have seen “outreach” applied to activities that would be more accurately called publicity, community relations, prophetic witness, and pastoral care.

Outreach also can carry with it a sense of reaching out from the center to the margins, which in turn implies that we are at the center, we are the establishment with the resources, the power, and the knowledge of God, which we are graciously willing to share with the less-fortunate folks “out there.”

Evangelism literally means good news, and specifically means preaching the Gospel, proclaiming the resurrection of Christ and the Kingdom of God, and what those mean for the liberation and reconciliation of the world. Inside the church, though, Evangelism seems to mean getting people to come to church, specifically our church, and if possible to come back and sign a pledge card.  Ministries such as welcoming visitors and incorporating new members are important, but there is so much more to Evangelism than these.  And “the E word” sometimes carries uncomfortable connotations of professional Evangelists in the media, with their forceful insistence that they have all the answers and that we must be one of them to avoid damnation.

Mission also has some awkward associations with the great missionary project of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and its baggage of colonialism, cultural imperialism, and “converting the heathen.”  A more recent version of this condescending attitude is the “mission trip,” on which a group of first-world teenagers or adults drops into an economically disadvantaged community for a week, then comes home to post sanctimonious humble-brags on social media.

Until recently, if many churches dealt with Mission, it was to spend a lot of time crafting a mission statement:  a one-sentence capsule intended to explain why we’re here and what we think we’re supposed to be doing.  But Mission means sending, and theologically means the sending of God.  One who is sent does not set his own mission.  How does it change the way we think about it if we stop trying to craft our mission, and instead recognize that we are talking about God’s Mission, and that the Church is one of the instruments that God is using to fulfill God’s Mission.  Mission is not something that the Church does; it is something that God is doing through the Church:  the consummation of creation that we like to call the Kingdom of Heaven.

A brick doesn’t need a mission statement, but if a brick is willing to participate in the Builder’s mission along with mortar and wood and glass, together they can accomplish something greater than any of them individually could have imagined.  If the brick insists that everything must be brick, and in fact that the bricks must be in charge of drawing the blueprints, it’s unlikely to end up with anything other than a pile of broken bricks. 

Being an instrument of God’s Mission is as much about listening and watching and learning as it is about talking and doing and teaching.  We are not the only tool in God’s toolbox, and we need to be humble enough not only to listen for God’s plan, but to recognize that God may be using other people and other institutions to fulfill God’s mission, and that sometimes we just need to get out of the way.

Looking at Mission from the viewpoint of God’s Mission, the question is not “What can we offer the less fortunate?’  The question is not “How do we get more people to come to church?”  The question is not even, “What should we be doing?”  The questions that I believe will lead us to be the Church is “What is God doing in the World?  What is God doing in our neighborhood?  And I wonder if we can get in on that?”

December, 2016

This weekend, I was at a meeting of a body of Episcopal lay and ordained leaders of the Diocese.  As there were several new members, we had just spent some time talking about group norms and the need to speak up and say “ouch” when someone in the group says something that we find hurtful.  The group leader had then begun discussing the pastoral needs of those who are upset over the results of the recent election.

A member of the group raised his hand and said, “I need to say ouch.”  The leader yielded, and the council member went on.  He said that the rector of his parish had sent out a pastoral letter to the entire congregation the morning after the election, offering comfort to those who were distraught and hope that we would get through the difficult days ahead.  The council member said, “I have been in the church a long time, through a lot of elections, and I don’t ever recall my pastor feeling the need to publicly comfort those who were traumatized because their candidate had lost.”  He acknowledged that his rector had certainly been acting out of good intentions, but that it was hurtful to this man, who had voted for Mr. Trump, to have the election results treated as a national tragedy requiring public grief-counseling.  And hurtful for the rector to assume that every member of the congregation felt the same way.

It is treated as a truism that our nation is deeply polarized, although I believe it is an open question whether we are more polarized than at other times in our history, or even whether sharp differences in worldview are necessarily a bad thing for society.  Polarization does mean, however, that we tend to sort ourselves into groups that seem to believe as we do, and even restrict our sources of news and knowledge to those  that seem to reinforce our own worldview.  We move more and more into bubbles and echo chambers, and convince ourselves that our bubbles and echo chambers represent the whole world.  Or the whole church.

The fact is, our congregations are far more diverse politically than we like to pretend, and this is a very good thing.  The Episcopal Church may be a “progressive” denomination, and our parishes may be “liberal” congregations, but that does not mean that we all think the same way or vote the same way.  Of course, we wouldn’t really want to march in lockstep, but it does mean that we are called to live as brothers and sisters with people whose votes cancel ours out, or who support a man or a woman or a policy that we find appalling and unredeemable.

We know this when we are thinking about it, but it is very easy when we are in a group of people who are “like us” to assume that we all think and vote the same way.  To assume that everyone who is “like us” rejoices and grieves over the same results that we do.  To assume that our own conscience is the norm and the benchmark of right-thinking people, and that those who disagree with us must not be intelligent enough to understand the question, or must be motivated by greed or racism or elitism or jealousy.  We are thrown off-balance by the idea that someone whom we think is just like us might look out at the same world and see something entirely different than what we see, because it means that our way is not the only way of seeing.

God did not create political parties, and does not bless one side of an election more than the other.  God created human beings in vast variety, and then exposed us to a huge variety of experience, so that we each come to important decisions with different eyes and ears and stories.  I believe that God hopes for us to listen and see that variety, to marvel at the ways that others are unlike us and yet still children of God.  God does not create us to live in bubbles.

November, 2016

Our Presiding Bishop, the Most Reverend Michael Curry, recently published a video message to the church, where he elaborated on his theme of the Church being called to the Jesus Movement in the world (see the video here).  When someone had asked him to paint a picture of what that Jesus Movement might look like, Bishop Curry described the moment in the Eucharist when the Gospel is read:  the people are standing, singing, expecting something important to happen, and as the Deacon carries the Gospel book into the middle of the room, the people re-orient themselves, turning from wherever they are, to face the Deacon, putting the Gospel and the act of proclaiming the Gospel in the center of the congregation, turning to face the Word and Spirit through which Christ is present in the room, through which Christ is present everywhere: loving, liberating and life-giving.

I have experienced many Eucharists and many Gospel processions, and I am aware of the symbolism of proclaiming the Gospel from the midst of the people, but after Bishop Curry’s enthusiastic interpretation of this moment, I will never experience it in quite the same way again.

In many religions, believers place their bodies in relation to certain cardinal directions or certain holy sites while they pray:  Muslims face Mecca to pray, whichever direction that may be.  Through much of history, Christians have prayed facing east, facing the rising sun of the new world, the Kingdom of God, turning their backs on the setting sun of this waning world, looking for Christ’s promised return from the east.

Orientation is one of those funny words that the church took for a specific purpose, that secular language borrowed back, and that now the church is borrowing back again.  To orient just means to face east, just as the noun orient refers to the Asian lands to the east of Europe.  To orient oneself for prayer is to face east, and by extension to face Christ.

It has been traditional in many places to build churches with the altar at the east end; such churches are said to be oriented (if you are paying attention, St. John’s in Southwest Harbor is oriented, but St. Saviour and St. Andrew are not).  This is not to say that an oriented church building is more “correct” than another, and in fact in some traditions the direction toward the altar is called “liturgical east” no matter which cardinal direction it faces, just as we may refer to the “Gospel side” and “Epistle side” of the church even if we read them both from the same place.

In academic context, we may talk about orientation as the week at the beginning of the fall semester when new first-year students are taught about rules and expectations, taught how to find the dining hall and the gym, taught what it means to be a student.  They may need reminders, corrections, and discipline as they go along, but the intention is that orientation has pointed them in the right direction, toward that which is healthy and worthwhile.

Traditionally in the Examination at Baptism, we will ask the firsts three questions about renouncing the world, the flesh, and the devil, with the candidate facing the back of the church, and at the fourth question, which begins “Do you turn to Jesus Christ…,” invite the candidate literally to turn to face the altar.  This is a sacramental acting-out of orientation, or perhaps re-orientation, getting the candidate pointed in the right direction for the life of discipline that follows.

More broadly, we speak of orientation as a fundamental characteristic of who we are as people in relation to other people:  sexual orientation, political orientation, other-orientation versus self-orientation. These describe us in terms of the things we value, the things we seek, the things we put at the center of our lives, the things toward which we turn.

We are glib enough to know that we don’t need a compass to pray, that God hears us no matter which direction we face, that we can hear the gospel with our back to the Deacon.  But I hope that we are sacramental enough to recognize that what we face, what we place before our eyes, both bodily and spiritually, affects the value we place on those things and the way we live our lives.  I hope that we are incarnated enough to realize the significance of putting the Gospel at the center of our congregation, both physically and faithfully.  I pray that, as we continue to follow Christ and learn what it means to live as the Jesus movement day by day, we can keep singing as we turn and face that loving, liberating, life-giving One in our midst.

October, 2016

Ain't no miracle being born,
People doin' it everyday.
It ain't no miracle growing up,
People just grow that way.

So it goes like it goes
Like the river flows,
And time it rolls right on;
And maybe what's good gets a little bit better,
And maybe what's bad gets gone.                               

It Goes Like it Goes, Words by Norman Gimbel, Music by David Shire
© 1979 Fox Fanfare Music, Inc.  All Rights Adminsitered by Warner-Tamerlane Publishing Corp.
All Rights Reserved.  Used by permission of Alfred Music, License # PR161006-2007.

For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven.            Ecclesiastes 3:1

If April is the cruelest month, as T.S. Eliot wrote, October seems to me perhaps the most wistful.  As the nights get a little frosty and the leaves start to turn, we naturally start to think about changes from the exuberant vibrancy of high summer to the subtler pleasures of autumn.  Around here, there is a measure of exhausted relief as the tourists begin to taper off, mixed with a sense that the excitement is ending and we’re entering a period of quiet.  We turn from an outward focus on the world visiting us, to a cozy reconnection with our nearer neighbors.

October contains more kinds of homecomings than just football games:  younger students return to school and get back to schedules and homework, but with new teachers and new things to learn.  College students return to campus homes that may begin to feel ambiguously more like home than the home they have left. In some senses, it feels we are returning to our normal lives.

We know we are in a cycle because of the things that repeat; we know that we are moving on because of the things that are different.  Even in the seemingly endless cycle of the seasons, there are variations:  will this winter be strangely mild as last year, or shockingly harsh as two years ago?  Is the world getting warmer, are sea levels getting higher, are lobsters moving north and shedding earlier?  Or is this just part of the grander ebb and flow of our planet?

From close up, it’s sometimes hard to tell the difference between a turn in a large-scale cycle and a real change in the world.  For a mayfly that lives one day, the world moves in one direction, beginning at dawn, moving through noon and ending at sunset. It would be hard to explain to a mayfly that the entire cycle repeats every twenty four hours, or that there is a greater repeating cycle of three hundred sixty-five days of varying lengths.  We know that our solar system orbits around the center of our Milky Way galaxy every 250 million years or so, but that knowledge has little impact on our experience of a crisp October sunrise.

Like mayflies, our own lives have a beginning, a middle and an end; dawn, midday, and dusk.  But we have the gift and the burden of seeing our family and neighbors being born, maturing, aging and dying, and can understand our own life-day as a turn in the cycle, our life-seasons as part of the rhythm of the cosmic dance.  And yet, we experience our lives as moving forward:  this year will not be exactly like last year, and the person we are today is not simply a repetition of the child we were.  We grow and change, our world changes, and we try urgently to make sense of the change, to give shape and meaning to the narratives of our lives.  The cycle repeats, the seasons change, and nothing is ever quite the same.

Cycles are safe, repetition is cozy, but it doesn’t get us anywhere.  Nothing gets any worse, but neither does it get any better.  The world around us is caught up in its own vicious cycle of better, faster, bigger, newer, but that is just an eddy in the larger, almost imperceptible arc of human history, which Dr. King reminds is long, but bends toward justice.

And that long arc of human relationship with God is what we call salvation history, which our tradition suggests has a beginning, a middle, and an end:  a dawn at creation, a brilliant midday in the incarnation, and a darkening sunset at the end of this world, when God’s Kingdom will finally be revealed in its fullness.  For us mayflies in the late afternoon sun, this promise of completion sounds very much like death, but perhaps that is only because we have not seen and cannot imagine watching through the night to see the sun rising on a new day that is not just a repetition of today.  A short piece of an arc may look very much like a straight line, but in fact it is part of a much larger circle.

September, 2016

At one of our vestry conversations with the Bishop last month, he surprised some folks by talking in some detail about what has been going on in other parishes in the Diocese:  specifically in several parishes in and around Augusta, and the parishes in The County known as the Aroostook Cluster.  What could these churches’ struggles have to do with ours?  What has Kennebec County to do with MDI?

A few years ago, five parishes in Kennebec County were struggling.  All agreed that Augusta could not sustain five parishes indefinitely, but each parish had its own history, its own gifts and strengths, and none of them wanted seriously to consider giving those up.  St. Mark’s was the old, traditional stone church in downtown Augusta, and its city-block campus of buildings supported many local ministries and organizations.  Because it was the biggest and most centrally located, some in the surrounding churches worried that any move toward cooperation would end with them being “swallowed up” by St. Mark’s.  For several years, the situation was what Bishop Lane described as a “staring contest.”

Then the vestry of St. Mark’s did something surprising.  Looking at their resources and their options, they voted to close up their church and worship for the winter at Prince of Peace Lutheran Church.  By the next spring, the congregation of St. Mark’s discovered that they had a lot in common with Prince of Peace, and they decided to stay.  They called the Pastor of Prince of Peace to be their Rector, and walked away from their beautiful but impractical old downtown campus.  The new shared ministry continues to grow and bear fruit.  The remaining parishes are still discerning how they are called to be the church in Kennebec County, but St. Mark’s has shown them a fresh possibility.

A number of years ago, five parishes in Aroostook County realized that they were not sustainable as they had been, and entered into a cooperative ministry known as the Aroostook Cluster:  One priest and five deacons served the five parishes, who agreed to a rhythm of Eucharist and Morning Prayer, with some service times on Saturday or Sunday evening.  More recently, two of these parishes, in Caribou and Mars Hill, decided prayerfully that the most faithful way they could be the church was to close their parishes and bring the gifts that God had given them to the three remaining parishes.

When asked what the Diocese had learned from these stories, the Bishop’s answer was quick:  “We should have started sooner.”  By the time parishes are in financial or membership crisis, many options have already foreclosed.  Conversations started earlier, when congregations are healthy, are more likely to give birth to new, creative ways of doing ministry.

I have a fancy printed fold-out map of the Diocese of Maine, dated 2004, which shows dots for seven congregations that no longer exist:  some in small towns like Dexter, some in urban areas like Portland.  Some have closed, some have merged, and at least one, in Biddeford, has re-booted itself as a neighborhood social-services center.

I have a blurry multiply-Xeroxed map of the Diocese from the late 1940’s, showing a dozen congregations  in north woods towns where it’s now hard to imagine that they ever could have survived.  As many parishes and altars as we have now on MDI, it’s shocking to remember that at one point there were also Episcopal chapels on Knox Road, on Eagle Lake Road, on Sound Drive, on West Street in Bar Harbor, and on Gott’s Island (thanks to Ed Garrett’s article “The Episcopal Church Comes to Mount Desert Island,” The History Journal of the Mount Desert Island Historical Society, Volume III, 2000).

I don’t share these stories, and I don’t believe the Bishop shared his stories, to depress you with evidence that the Church is dwindling and that our parishes are surely on the path to extinction.  To me, these are not stories of extinction but of evolution: individual organisms dying out when they can no longer survive in a particular ecological niche, but at the same time other organisms growing and blossoming in new niches as they become available.  Either way, life continues, even though it may not look much like the life that came before.  And that, of course, is the blessing and the mystery:  new life is not possible without the death of old life. 

If that sounds kind of theological, it’s not a coincidence. Christ’s death on the cross looked to all the world like extinction, but out of it comes abundant new life that looks nothing like the life that came before.  If our church is going to live resurrection life with Christ, we must trust him enough to die with him, too.

August, 2016

In a couple weeks, The Right Reverend Stephen T. Lane, Bishop of Maine, will be making his regular official visitation to the parishes of Mount Desert Island.  At the risk of bogging down in church-talk, I think it’s worth reminding ourselves a little bit about bishops and why we have them.

A couple months ago, in an article about ordination, I referred to the office of Bishop as being apostolic and catholic – terms we are used to hearing applied to the Church in the Creed we affirm every week, but not to particular orders in the Church.

Bishops in our tradition sometimes claim Apostolic Succession, that is, continuity with the Apostles, in a very literal sense.  Since each Anglican Bishop (and Roman Catholic, and Orthodox, and others) is consecrated by laying-on-of-hands from at least three prior Bishops, and since we see an apostolic grace in that sacrament, one can trace a sort of genealogy right back to the Apostles.  In more Protestant traditions, apostolicity is understood to mean continuity of teaching and function from one generation of ministers to the next, whether or not that continuity has been sealed with the outward sign of hands.

However one understands it, though, there is something in the office and the person of the Bishop that speaks of a continuous bright line back to that first band of disciples.  The line may bend, but it hasn’t broken.  I like to picture a sort of bucket-brigade, passing the tradition of the apostles hand to hand across the centuries.

If apostolicity is continuity over time, catholicity, meaning universality, is connection across the world.  While the ministry of the Bishop may be to be apostle, chief priest and pastor to the geographic division we call a Diocese, Bishops are also called to guard the faith, unity, and discipline of the whole Church (see the Catechism, page 855 of the Book of Common Prayer).  When the Church has convened Councils to clarify the universal faith of the church, it has been the Bishops who have met, and it has been concord with the statements of these Councils that has defined orthodoxy.

In the brokenness of this world, Bishops and even whole churches may try to cast each other out and pretend they have no need for one another, but our tradition teaches that the Bishop is a representative of and link to the universal church.  It is no accident that three of the four “Instruments” that draw the Anglican Communion together involve Bishops:  the Archbishop of Canterbury as spiritual head, the Lambeth Conference as a periodic Council of Bishops, and the Primates’ Meeting as a think tank for the Bishops who lead the Provinces of the Church.  

Apostolicity and catholicity may seem like ridiculously abstract ideas, absurdly heavy to be carried on the shoulders of our frail bishops.  But that’s the thing about sacraments.   Water is a good thing, but there is nothing in it that conveys union with Christ and rebirth as children of God.  Bread and wine are good things, but they have nothing in them that strengthens our union with Christ and one another, or feeds us for eternal life.  As a sacramental church, we teach that God uses material things:  water, bread, wine, and even us in all our brokenness and limitation, to share God’s grace with the world.

Stephen Lane is a nice man, a good man, eminently qualified by education and holiness of life to lead a religious institution.  But as a Bishop, he and all Bishops become the sacramental means by which, among other things, the spiritual gifts of unity across time and space are mediated to the church.  That has nothing to do with how nice or good or holy he is, but with the way we believe God uses Bishops in God’s church. 

As Christians, we are the Body of Christ, the sacramental means by which, among other things, Christ’s work of reconciliation is carried on in the world.  That has nothing to do with how nice or good or holy we are, but with the way we believe God uses Christians in the world.

And if all this seems like a bit much for August in MDI, just remember that +Steve is also our chief priest and pastor, and a good friend with whom we enjoy worshipping and breaking bread.  Please plan to join with all the MDI parishes as we celebrate Eucharist with our Bishop on Sunday evening, August 14, 6:00 at St. Saviour.