A Member of Christ

The Prayer Book tells us when we were baptized we became “a member of Christ.” As we noted last week, unus Christianus, nullus Christianus. “One Christian is no Christian.” We cannot be Christians by ourselves.

In the beginning, God said “It is not good for man to be alone.” He followed His observation by creating Eve to be with Adam, and so laid the foundation—not only for the family, but for society as well.

The Church is God’s bringing together—from the scattered and contentious race of man—a Family “of all nations and kindred and peoples and tongues” of His own. From its beginning, the Church understood God drew its members together “for our salvation and that of the whole world.” “We are His family and the sheep of His pasture.”

Families are both wonderful and exasperating, made up of people sometimes loving and sometimes loathing each other. Many of the closest bonds we form on earth are with family members, and oft-times, the greatest tensions and trials of our lives come from members of our family. When the Church is likened to a family, it’s not meant to be a perennially pleasant comparison. The comparison tells us something about God and each other (and maybe ourselves, too).

We are part of each other. “No man is an island,” John Donne reminds us. Your cousin may be delightfully witty and your nephew deadly dull. They remain related regardless. The man who occupies the pew in front of you may have a bad singing voice or a ill-fitting toupee; the pretty woman in the choir may draw admiring glances from the men and disapproving glares from the ladies, but each—the unknowing toupee-man, the attractive soprano, the admiring men and disapproving women—all are “members of Christ,” the “family for which our Lord Jesus Christ was contented to be betrayed, and given up into the hands of wicked men, and to suffer death upon the cross,” as one of the Collects for Good Friday reads.

God puts up with us, and He expects us to put up with each other. He loves us, and He expects us to love each other.

This is why we have parishes. Places where Christ’s members, His family, come together to worship Him, receive the Sacraments, intercede for the fallen world, and learn how to love each other, even if we don’t always like each other (and sometimes, of course, our best friends may be in the neighboring pew).

It’s no accident that you belong to the parish you belong to—God brought you there, to do—and to be—something. In your parish, as in your family, God is “working out your salvation.” It’s not always easy, it’s sometimes challenging, and it’s often fun and happy and exhilarating. God has made you His own in baptism and plopped you down in a parish to figure out what that means. So jump in with both feet and figure it out. The answer has eternal implications! -Fr Gregory Wilcox

Unus Christianus, nullus Christianus

The Prayer Book Catechism is straightforward in its teaching: “…in baptism, I was made a member of Christ, the child of God, and an inheritor of the kingdom of heaven.”

We did not, the Prayer Book says, become Christians when we “accepted Christ as our personal Savior.” We didn’t become Christians “the hour we first believed,” or when we became convinced we were sinners. Those notions, so prevalent in modern Christianity, are foreign ones to the religion of the Prayer Book.

“In baptism I was made a member of Christ.”

That means you weren’t made a Christian when you decided to be one, but when God decided to make you one. Even if you were baptized as an adult and went through baptismal preparation, even if you chose the time and place of your baptism, nothing you could do would make you a Christian until the priest poured the waters of baptism over your head. Being a Christian is less a matter of believing than it’s a matter of being. God made you a Christian through the sacramental waters of baptism.

We can’t baptize ourselves. Somebody has to baptize us. That doesn’t sound profound, but it tells us something important—even essential—about the Christian religion. The Christians of the first few centuries had a saying quite at one with the Prayer Book: unus Christianus, nullus Christianus. “One Christian is no Christian.” You can’t be a Christian by yourself.

“In baptism I was made a member of Christ.”

If we are members of Christ, part of His body, the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church, we are also members of each other. Fellow Christians don’t simply “go to the same church” we do—in the waters of baptism we are “born again” into the One Family of Faith.

If you have been baptized, you are a Christian. You may not live the life of a Christian, you may deny every article of Faith in the Creed. But you and I are Christians because it pleased God to make us Christians. Only He knows why. You may have been baptized because your parents wanted you to, or even because everybody else in your family is baptized and it’s just “what we do. We don’t really go to church all that much, but…” The reasons for your baptism don’t affect the reality of God’s sacramental act.

Baptism is the beginning of a Christian’s life. After the priest baptized you, he said to your Godparents and the others present: “Seeing now, dearly beloved brethren, that this Child is regenerate,” [that is to say, “born again”] and grafted into the body of Christ’s Church, let us give thanks unto Almighty God for these benefits; and with one accord make our prayers unto Him, that this Child may lead the rest of his life according to this beginning.”

Baptism isn’t magic, it doesn’t mean we are “going to Heaven,” but it does mean our footsteps are set on the path of the Lord Jesus, following Him where it pleases Him to lead us. We can always leave the path.

Baptism means God has made you His own in a special way, for a special reason. We are meant to “work out our salvation” with other Christians, as members one of another. And the parish church is essential to the “working out of our salvation.” There we receive the sacraments, offer to God the weekly sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving, and have to “work out our salvation” with people we may not know very well and sometimes may not particularly care for! But “in baptism I was made a member of Christ.” Unus Christianus, nullus Christianus.-Fr Gregory Wilcox

The Feast of Feet

Ascension Day is this coming Thursday. It’s a Holy Day of Obligation, and we’ll have Mass for the feast, but it’s not one of the popular feast days; most Christians will spend Ascension Day not knowing it is Ascension Day.

But I love the feast, though it may seem to be for an odd reason. I first came to love Ascension Day because of the Holy Feet.

Since the Renaissance, most classic paintings of the Ascension of Christ show him seated on the clouds, surrounded with angels; all the Apostles are standing below, looking up at Him as He sits in splendor. El Greco, Rembrandt, Titian, Michelangelo—everybody who was anybody during the Renaissance painted the Ascension. Each one followed the same pattern.

But in the Middle Ages, that wasn’t so. They had a more earthy, palpable view of the Faith than those who came later. Medieval paintings and manuscript illuminations of the Ascension show the Apostles standing and looking up. But they don’t see a Levitating Jesus—or at least, not all of Him. The Apostles are shown looking at the bottom of the Lord Jesus’ feet. It’s all you can see, because the rest of Him is already taken up into the clouds.

I first loved it because I was a boy and I thought it was a lot more fun than all the stuffy, uninteresting depictions of the Ascension as an excuse for the Great Artists to showcase their talents. But I loved it because it seemed more real. If this really and truly happened, the Apostles would, at some time, have been standing their looking up at the soles of their Lord’s Holy Feet. I loved it then, not quite understanding why. I love it just as much now—because it’s so wonderfully sacramental.

God did become one of us. “Like us in all things,” St Paul reminds us, “excepting sin.” In one of his sermons preached on Christmas Day many hundred years ago, St Cyril of Alexandria poked at the same truth: “God wore diapers for our sake.”

The Lord Jesus’ feet stick out from the clouds on Ascension Day to tell us “it’s true! He did come. Really come like you and me. He’s been through the wringer, just like each of us goes through it—and He went back “to prepare a place for us.”

I love Ascension Day. I love it’s truth and I love its depiction. ‘Cause it means someday (deo volente) my feet, and yours, too, will be sticking out from the clouds.—Fr Gregory Wilcox

O Come, Let Us Waste Our Time with the Lord

We Americans, since first bumping against Plymouth Rock, have prided ourselves on our practicality. Leaving behind the monarchies and hierarchies of the Old World, we set out to make a society where men and women were valued not on who their ancestors were, but on what each of us did with ourselves. We like to think of ourselves as heirs of that tradition. When a Britisher looks down his nose at American culture as “utilitarian,” we rightly feel a certain excusable pride.

Our “practicality” invented the light-bulb, cracked the atom and put men on the moon (okay, that was with the help of smuggled-in Nazi rocket scientists). When we look at a question, Americans don’t ask “is it true” but “will it work?” We’re the sort of people who get things done, but sometimes we don’t stop to ask if we should do something just because we can do it.

This “practical” approach touches everything we do, even the worship of Almighty God. When we talk about worship, (“weorth-schyppe”), we do so in utilitarian terms. Worship is worth-while if we “get” something out of it: if it entertains us, makes us feel good about ourselves, if it helps us “grow” spiritually, gives us a break “from the madding crowd.” In other words, we worship because it does something for us—benefits us some way or other. If we "get" something from it (you choose what), that makes it worth-while; it justifies the time we spend doing it.

If that’s so, then we’re not worshipping God, even if we tell ourselves we are. If, as we talked about in last week’s post, “woerth-schyppe” is focused on (W)who we value, and we worship because it benefits us, then who, beloved, are we woerth-schypping?

We don’t worship because it’s good for us, makes us feel good about ourselves, lets us lay down our burdens, because the priest is handsome or the choir is splendid or the communion-wine is really good; we worship because God is God—He Who Is——and we have, from time to time have, if not caught a glimpse of Him, at least seen traces of His presence. We worship Him—not for our sakes—but for His.

Worship isn’t practical, it’s un-utilitarian. God doesn’t need it. He doesn’t feel better about Himself if we say nice things to Him. We justify it as entertaining or educational or emotionally satisfying (and it can be those things, but they’re incidental). In the best sense of the word, worship is “useless.” It doesn’t benefit us in ways that we can see. But at its most basic level, worship makes us truly human. It raises us to what we were made for—communion with our Creator. To be, as St Thomas said, “friends of God.”

Worship is not about us, but God. It is utterly useless to us—and it’s the thing—more than any other thing, which raises us to be who we were made to be. –Fr Gregory Wilcox

Woerth-schyppe

The Prayer Book teaching is plain: “It is my bounden duty…to worship God every Sunday in His Church” (BCP page 291). Give or take a few Sundays, Christians have been worshiping God every Sunday for the last 102,856 Sundays. It all started the First Sunday, the day of His Resurrection, when He appeared to His disciples and they worshiped Him. That same day He’d met two of His disciples on the road to Emmaus (though they didn’t know who He was), spent the afternoon talking with them and, when they sat down with Him to eat, He “was known to them in the Breaking of the Bread.”

He’s known to us in the same way. This Breaking of the Bread remains for the last 102,856 consecutive Sundays as the distinctive thing Christians do when we gather to worship. “As often as you eat this Bread and drink this Cup, you show forth the Lord’s death until he comes,” St Paul wrote to the Corinthians. The Mass, the Eucharist, Divine Liturgy, Lord’s Supper, the Holy Communion: called by whatever name, Christians have gathered Sunday after Sunday, century on century, to follow His command that we “Do This.” It sets Christian worship apart from all other worship.

That means Christians understand worship differently than other people.
To see what’s distinctive about Christian worship, we need to consider the idea of “worship” itself.

Worship comes to us as a combination of to old Anglo-Saxon words—not as in “White Anglo-Saxon Protestant” but as in the Germanic tribes of Angles and Saxons who conquered Celtic Britain in the fifth and sixth centuries after Christ. “Woerth” is value, or worth. “Schyppe” is the Old English word for “the state or condition of something.” Worship, then, is when we acknowledge the value of something. Some of us worship our car (or, in Texas, our pick-up), some of us worship our bank accounts, some of us worship the image we see in the mirror.

To worship God, is to give honor or praise-or at least-recognition to the Being each of us says fits our definition of “God.” Some people say they can do this better on the Golf Course or on a mountaintop than they can in church. They’re right, they can. It’s just that the God they’re worshiping on the Golf Course isn’t the same One Who said “Do This.”

The god of the Golf Course has an altogether different set of commandments than the Ten with which we’re familiar. He’s much more popular—there are no “Thou shalt nots” in his commandments. Even the “thou shalts” of the Golf Course god are more pieces of avuncular advice that rules.

The first basic notion of Christian worship is that we don’t know God. We can’t. He’s utterly and completely different than us. We are creatures, with limited minds and hearts. He is Uncreated, Unmade, Unknowable—except to the extent that He reveals something of Himself to us. St John of Damascus says “the few things we can say about God are all things He has shown us of Himself. God Himself, however, is completely beyond human understanding.”

When Christians worship God, the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost, we join with Angels and Archangels and All the Company of Heaven in woerthschyppe—in showing what matters most, not merely to us, but to all creation—and before Whom all creation can only kneel in adoration, singing words beyond our comprehension: “Holy, Holy, Holy, Who Was, and Is, and Is to Come.”

The uniqueness of Christian worship is grounded in the Uniqueness of God. We “Do This” because all other “doing,” all other worship, is just stuff we’ve made up, made to order for the gods we make up.—Fr Gregory Wilcox

Why Are You an Anglican?

Most of our parishes are small. Many of our parishioners are “retirement-eligible,” a new euphemism I heard this week. The language of our worship, tracing back before Shakespeare, isn’t easy to follow, the majority of tunes in our Hymnal aren’t very catchy, our Faith seems to be more fitted to times past than a Faith for the present—or the future. So why are you an Anglican?

In a sense, of course, there may be as many answers to that question as there are Anglicans. Each of us has our own reasons for believing, our own experiences of faith.

Anglicanism points us to the past. That’s an essential part of Anglicanism, its tradition. It insists that the past matters. Anglicanism, like Christianity itself, is grounded in history. “I believe in God…and in Jesus Christ, His only Son our Lord…Who was born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate…the third day He rose again…” We recite these words, day after day, because they’re true, historical facts, like the Battle of Waterloo or Charlie Chaplin’s birthday. We look back to discover who we are.

For all its backward glances, though, Anglicanism also insists we take our place in the present. We face the same questions everybody else does. And that’s just how God wants it. All of us have friends or relatives, for example, who are homosexuals. Even if we wanted to, there’s no way to avoid the issue. Our world is rife with inequalities and injustices, with undeserved pain and unpunished vice. Today piety is mocked and evil admired. Our faith doesn’t allow us to ignore these challenges—on the contrary—it requires us to face them. It takes either a genuine faith or a profound ignorance to believe that Anglicanism enables us to confront today’s world.

Obviously I believe Anglicanism is not only “up” to the challenge, but that it has special gifts to meet the challenges of the past, present and future with beauty and God’s Grace.

The antiquated language of the Prayer Book—indeed, even the notion of a Book of Common Prayer itself, a worship stretching back to the first centuries of the Church, an ethical life embedded in living reality of the Gospel words spoken by the Lord Jesus so long ago, the doctrines of a Faith “once delivered to the saints,” and the life of prayer, the struggle with sin and growth in Grace, these are the great treasures of the Catholic religion, of which Anglicanism is a most happy part.

“Jesus Christ is the same, yesterday, today and forever.” That truth our Faith not only enshrines, but brings us into, nurtures us in, and grows us to a maturity which will blossom in eternity.

That’s why I'm an Anglican. Why are you?

-Fr Gregory Wilcox

Christ is Risen! Alleluia!

The customary greeting extended towards
fellow Christians through the Easter Season is:
"Christ is risen! Alleluia!"
The ancient reply is:
"He is risen indeed, Alleluia!"