A
Distinctly Anglican Feast
Fr.
Tony’s Letter to the Trinitarians
December
2018
A
parishioner with background in the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Churches
shared with me an observation of one of her Orthodox spiritual directors: Each of the three great branches of
traditional Christianity (Roman, Orthodox, and Anglican) all honor and observe
the great days of the Liturgical Calendar:
the Good Friday fast, the Easter (or Pascha) feast, and the feast of the
Nativity of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ (Christmas). All three traditions honor them. Though each tradition agrees that Easter is
the foundational core feast of our faith, each enjoys a different relationship
with them and places differing emphases on them. When you compare the overarching themes,
theological structures, and year-round liturgical practices of these three
traditions, it becomes clear that each takes its own day as the center of its
ethos and emotional life.
Pascha
is the great unparalleled Feast Day for the Orthodox: Christus Victor (Christ
Victorious over Sin and Death) is their most used way of understanding the
atonement. The Great Fifty Days makes it
the longest of all the feasts. Good
Friday is seen as an unfortunate but necessary prelude to Christ’s victory,
just as his birth is seen as the incarnational step necessary for the Second
Person of the Godhead to become mortal, to allow such a victory to occur.
The
Roman Catholic Church, while honoring and meditating on all three days, tends
to place special focus on Good Friday:
the sufferings of Christ on the way to and upon the Cross, as well as
his Mother’s sorrow as a weeping onlooker: stabat
Mater dolorosa, and “Mary, a sword shall pierce your heart.” The sacrifice of Christ on the Cross is the
central theological theme that generates and colors most other Roman Catholic
devotion.
Anglicans
(including us Episcopalians) have always focused on the incarnation as central
theological idea that colors and forms all our other doctrines and
practices. It is the heart of our
sacramental theology and theology of the Church. Because God was made fully human in Jesus,
there is a bit of the divine in all of us.
Because of the incarnation, all nature participates in and hides the
divine. Our belief in the incarnation
lies behind much of our social justice and hospitality ministry. The great Caroline Divines of the 1600s such
as Lancelot Andrewes, Thomas Ken, and William Laud all lay an unusual (for
their day) emphasis on the incarnation. Charles Gore, Bishop of Oxford England (d.
1938), made the Incarnation of Christ the center of his systematic theology,
developed beautifully in Lux Mundi
(Light of the World) (1889). William
Temple, Archbishop of Canterbury (d. 1944), made incarnation the center piece
of his explanation of the Gospel in his Gifford Lectures (1932-34), Nature, God and Man. It is clear in this passage from his book Christus Veritas (Christ the Truth)
(1924):
“In
truth the Church is itself the permanent sacrament; it is an organized society
possessed (though not always availing itself) of a supernatural life—the life
of God—which united humanity with itself in Jesus Christ. But all of this again
was only possible because the universe itself is an organ of God’s
self-expression. Thus we have the following background of the sacramental
worship of the Church: the universe is the fundamental sacrament, and taken in
its entirety (When of course it includes the Incarnation and Atonement) is the
perfect sacrament extensively; but it only becomes this, so far as our world
and human history are concerned, because within it and determining its course
is the Incarnation, which is the perfect sacrament intensively—the perfect
expression in a moment of what is also perfectly expressed in everlasting Time,
the Will of God; resulting from the Incarnation we find the ‘Spirit-bearing
Body,’ which is not actually a perfect sacrament, because its members are not
utterly surrendered to the spirit within it, but none the less lives by the
Life which came fully into the world in Christ; as part of the life of this
Body we find certain specific sacraments or sacramental acts.”
As we begin in Advent to prepare for
the Nativity of our Lord, as well as his Coming Again in Glory, let us ponder
the deep meaning of Incarnation. God
took on flesh and became truly human in Jesus’ birth. This marks a radical continuity between our
lives and God’s. This implies a
sacredness in all it means to be human. Human love, friendship, the
simple pleasures of our world, and even our sorrows and pain—all these are
taken up into God the moment God takes on our flesh.
Do we honor the sacred in each other, and in the world about
us? What does the Incarnation say about
our own treatment of children, families, and people in general? What does it mean about our national policies
in welcoming or rejecting the foreigner and alien?
A Holy Advent to you and yours, and
a Merry Christmas!
--Fr. Tony+
No comments:
Post a Comment