Sacrament of Heresy
The point of conflict at old my church home (and many others, I'm sure) revolves ultimately around the understanding of the sacraments of the church. As a parish that likes to think of itself as Anglo-Catholic in nature, St. John Somnambulist has a high regard for the sacraments (or at least most of them).
With a divorced priest, and many divorced and remarried people in the congregation (my wife and I being among them), and with a few couples living together sans the benefit of Holy Matrimony, Marriage has been diminished a bit. We only let priests touch the elements of the Eucharist, so that covers our attitude toward Ordination pretty well. We have two confessionals, but both are used for storage (one for broken furniture, the other as a temporary safe for the collection plates on Sunday). Confessions are heard, but by appointment only, so we sort of hold Reconciliation up.
We baptize babies without asking too many questions, and we make sure 12 year olds know that Henry the VIII didn't really found our church (Elizabeth did). So we honor Baptism and Confirmation. Our priests make hospital calls for Viaticum, usually in hopes that your next journey will be back home, not straight to God. So Unction is covered (our priests also anoint people's foreheads with oil at our Wednesday night "healing service"... little is expected and little happens).
We celebrate Holy Communion ten times a week, so we're home free there. Or so many of our parishioners think.
I say that because during a recent Sunday School with the Rector on the basics of the Anglican Faith, one of our Charter Members asked if it wasn't true that one should receive Holy Communion at least once a week to keep your Salvation in effect. The Rector neither agreed nor disagreed with the statement, but instead expressed again the importance of receiving Holy Communion. Those so inclined left feeling that regular reception was the means by which we are continually being saved. How could they think that, you ask?
A quote from the Catechism of the 1979 Book of Common Prayer:
The Sacraments
Q. What are the sacraments?
A. The sacraments are outward and visible signs of inward and spiritual grace, given by Christ as sure and certain means by which we receive that grace.
Because Salvation is inseparable from God's Grace, it's understandable how the Catechism's statement can be read to mean that the sole means by which we receive God's Grace and Salvation through His Grace is through the sacraments. While most clergy would never claim that, many are willing to let it be thought.
After all, as the authorized agents of that Grace, they can find themselves placed in a pretty exalted position (the flesh being weak, we are all tempted). And if they are so tempted, how much more will their Overseers be tempted?
The wife of a bishop expressed to me her pleasure and excitement that their son was going to be a priest in the Episcopal Church (even though he had yet to go through any interviews or a discernment process, this was a foregone conclusion). My too honest response to her was, "That's one of the reasons the Medieval Church required a celibate priesthood: to eliminate the professional priesthood, handed down from grandfather, to father, and to son." Her response was that her husband couldn't hand anything down to their son. Oh no?
Look around the church at the number of bishops and cardinal clergy (especially those we might call apostate) who stand in a long hereditary line of clergy and bishops. Start at the top. We have an episcopacy and priesthood of hereditary aristocrats, heirs by birth to the means by which many believe we receive God's grace. Some are better than others; some are even faithful. But it should cause us to either rethink carefully the process by which people become ordained, or to reconsider the arguments in favor of the divine right of kings (and thus, the sinful and disobedient nature of our Founding Fathers).
WARNING: I am forced to post a caveat and a disclosure here. Any and all comments and observations I make regarding the ordination process of ECUSA are going to be tainted (if not tempered) by the factual history that I was once an aspirant for Holy Orders, who was rejected with prejudice by a psychiatrist turned priest (who is on public record as saying a Buddhist can be a good Episcopalian, but a Biblical Fundamentalist can't) chiefly because I disagreed that all therapy is Christ-centered (and disagreed strongly, seeing such a statement as blasphemy). I cannot claim to have no axes to grind, regardless of my later and current feelings about having survived that near-death experience. I might still have a dog in this fight.
We have inherited an episcopacy of dubious authenticity, not based upon the Holy Spirit moving powerfully upon men and women, but upon some silly notion of who's hands were laid on whom, and too often based upon the same reason that lawyer's children often become lawyers, and doctor's offspring often become doctors. It's the family business, and you make dad (or mom) happy by following in their footsteps.
Because Episcopal Elections are such beauty contests, those with the best pedigree stand out (seen "Best of Show" yet?). The faithful then have as their overseers hereditary gentry, whose primary reason (regardless of the sincerity of their beliefs) for holding their office is that dad (and soon, mother) held that office before them.
A true calling by the Holy Spirit is not even seriously considered. Instead, a panel of laity and clergy assemble to see if the applicant matches the profile of those who have gone before. In certain parts of Arkansas and the Appalachians, it's called inbreeding. In ECUSA, it's called discernment.
What we end up with are people with no clear understanding of a calling, acting sort of as Jehovah's Pharmacists. Sin bothering you? Read the instructions (the liturgy), take this, and chase it with a sip of wine. Hopefully, you will remember God when you do it. Go now, and come back next week for your scheduled dose.
Instead of shepherds, we have pharmaceutical nurses. The churches contain stupefied and drugged congregations. Faithfulness to our Lord Jesus doesn't bring them back Sunday after Sunday, but addiction does... addiction to cheap sentimentalism and the means of cheap grace: cheap sacramentalism. That's why they don't care that the words they read (or have read to them) have no bearing on the way they live their lives. That's why they don't care that nothing in the church resembles (or effects) the world outside the church.
Marx was not entirely wrong when he called religion the opiate of the masses. Martin Luther, John Calvin, and Thomas Cranmer could have said much the same thing. Religion is an opiate, and too many of our churches are little more than opium dens. The Gospel of Jesus Christ, however, is life to the dead.
How does all this relate? The sacraments are everything, and more, that the Catechism says they are (well, at least two of them are). But we have developed an episcopacy of men and women who try, by control of the sacraments, to regulate Salvation. How is it relevant? Kathryn Marshall once said that the church has no grandchildren. But in ECUSA, apparently bishops do. In ECUSA, we have developed an elitist, esoteric religion... a religion of, by, and for professionals.
When someone with the right cultural background visits our churches, they might be moved by the liturgy, the music, or the architecture to want to become an Episcopalian. But have we created a church where someone could come in and be moved to become a Christian?
But so as not to end this rant on a sour note, this story does have a happy ending.
From the Catechism of the 1979 Book of Common Prayer:
The Holy Spirit
Q. What is the Holy Spirit?
A. The Holy Spirit is the Third Person of the Trinity, God at work in the world and in the Church...
...even now.
Come, Holy Spirit. Come quickly!
----
P. Michael Summer
simul iustus et peccator
