Reflections from Saint Paul's Church

Anglican Identity - Part IV
One of a series of sermons on the roots and character of Anglicanism, this sermon was delivered at St. Paul's Church, Salem, on Sunday, 12 February 2006.

At the end of my sermon last week, I said, in reference to the way we read the Bible, that our faith is "not the dead faith of a book of answers, but the challenging faith of the Book of Life." When we read the Bible, we need to read it as a conversation in which we are taking part, a conversation and a personal encounter with the God of the Bible.

In a similar vein, one of my seminary teachers (Jaroslav Pelikan) has written that "tradition is the living faith of the dead; traditionalism is the dead faith of the living." I like phrases like this. They are helpful ways of summing up important ideas. But there is always a danger in the well-turned phrase, just as there is danger in a clever slogan. We can allow ourselves to be so impressed by the ingenuity of the phrase that we miss the point that is being made.

The Bible and tradition help to define who we are as Christians and who we are as Christians who follow a particular way of being Christian. As Anglicans, we believe that the Bible contains everything one needs to believe in order to be saved, in order to be whole, which is literally what it means to be saved. But that does not mean that we are required to believe everything in the Bible literally. Today, for example, we have two stories of miraculous healings. They are powerful stories. Imagine having leprosy, a disease that disfigured people so much and frightened people so much, that lepers were banned from human society and lived as outcasts and beggars. Naaman was an exception. He was such a good general that his king would not give him up, but Naaman still had to cope with the physical effects of his horrible disease and both he and his king were excited about the possibility of a cure.

Some people have difficulty believing in all of the miracles that are found in the Bible. Some people get very nervous about miracles. Frankly, I do not understand that. If God really is God, miracles are no big deal. How miracles happen may be more complex than the stories of the Bible tell us, but I am sure that miracles do still happen. I have experienced miracles. Even so, my faith is not based on miracles. The miracles in the Bible may indeed be factual, but they are not the real point of most of the stories in which they happen. Focusing on the miracles is a case of reading the Bible as a dead book of answers, proving the right things for the wrong reasons.

In the Old Testament reading, Naaman gets healed, not because the prophet performs some impressive religious ceremony, which he doesn’t, but because Naaman takes the risk of believing. His first reaction is, "Wash in the Jordan? Why should I wash in that muddy little creek, when we have good clean, impressive rivers back home? The very idea is absurd!" It is only when he puts aside his personal attachments, his prejudices, his arrogance, his self-reliance–only then does Naaman get healed, when, in effect, he finally takes God seriously. And then, he is changed, and not just physically, but spiritually. He becomes a new man. To be a leper was to be trapped in a living death. Naaman was quite literally given an entirely new life. He was resurrected.

So also with the leper in the Gospel. Yes, he was healed, but more importantly, he got a life, a real life. In his case, he believed from the beginning. He knew Jesus could do it. All he had to do was get the chance to meet Jesus face to face, and ask to be healed. He had to convince Jesus to do it, but he did, and once he was healed, he made sure that the world knew what knowing Jesus can do.

The personal encounter with the living God, with Jesus Christ: that is what the Bible is about; that is what tradition is about; that is what being a Christian is about. Unfortunately, it is not necessarily what all Christians are about. Tradition is the living faith of the dead. Tradition is the name we give to the great accumulation of experience and wisdom which has been passed down from generation to generation in the Church. Before a single word of the Gospels was written down, it was tradition, living tradition, that told people that Jesus had risen from the dead. I would suggest that, to this very day, we do not believe that Jesus rose from the dead because we read about it in the Bible. We believe in the resurrection because the women came back from the tomb and said to the apostles, "We have seen the Lord." We believe in the resurrection because people to whom he appeared and who were transformed by that encounter told others and, through them have told us. Those people, long dead, are still witnessing to us through a living tradition. People continue to be changed because their news is a tradition that still lives today.

On the other hand, Traditionalism is the dead faith of the living. The best way to sum this up is in the phrase, "We've always done it this way." These are sometimes known as the six deadly words. They have the capacity to kill both individuals and even whole parishes. Traditionalism is our collection of attachments, the habits and opinions and possessions which we hold onto so tightly in order to preserve our comfortable private worlds. Naaman could have washed every day, seven times a day, in the holy rivers of Syria which he loved, but they would never have healed his leprosy. The kingdom of Syria was strong and successful in war. Quite probably, Naaman and his king believed that they were successful because they had been faithful to their own gods. But in the end, it was clear that all of the sacrifices to the gods of Syria, and even all the king’s horses and all the king’s men, were not able to do the thing that was most important: they were powerless to heal Naaman and give him a real life.

And so it can be with us, if we are not careful. St. Paul tells us that he handed on to us the tradition that he received–the tradition, not the traditionalism–the living tradition that on the night he was betrayed our Lord Jesus Christ took bread, gave thanks, broke it, and gave it to his disciples, and said, "Take, eat, this is my body which is given for you. Do this in remembrance of me." That tradition comes directly from the source, the words and acts of Jesus Christ himself, received by the apostles themselves, and handed down to us. Two thousand years later, we continue that tradition every time we gather at the Altar. Insofar as the tradition continues, insofar as the tradition comes directly from Jesus himself, it is a powerful living tradition. But we have the ability to reduce it to a dead traditionalism if we do not use it in the way it was given.

There is a prayer in the Prayer Book that asks God to "Deliver us from the presumption of coming to this Table for solace only, and not for strength; for pardon only, and not for renewal." It is the difference between merely being and miraculously becoming. We can be content to be what we are. That is the comfortable choice, the easy choice: "I’m OK, you’re OK." The way we are is just fine. We don’t need to change a thing. But if that is our choice, chances are we will rarely, if ever, recognize that we meet Jesus himself in the Bread and Wine of the Eucharist. We will be like Naaman before he was healed: alive, but just barely. Or, we can acknowledge and accept the power of the Sacrament to renew us, to become something more, to enter into new and endlessly renewed life in union with Jesus Christ and in fellowship with his Body, the Church.

It all depends, very simply, on whether we choose to read the Bible as a dead book of answers, or to find in it the challenge of new life. It depends on whether we will persist in doing things the way we have always done them, or open our eyes to the new things that God will do with us and in us. It is all there, we simply need to open our eyes, and our hearts, to perceive it and know it.

One of the ways we may read the story of Naaman is as a metaphor of baptism, and of sacraments in general. In some churches, the two great sacraments, Baptism and the Eucharist, are described as "ordinances" or "memorials". They are regarded as ceremonies that fulfill a commandment of Jesus and may teach us valuable lessons and possibly even help us spiritually, but have no concrete effect on us. But the tradition which we have received is that, just as Naaman was literally healed and given new life by washing in the Jordan, so we are literally given new life in Baptism and literally become one with God in the Holy Eucharist. In fact, we believe that the sacraments always do what they claim, even when we are not aware of the way we have changed.

So-called believers’ baptism is something that some churches reserve for people who have had a personal conversion experience. For them, you only get baptized after you have had a spiritual rebirth. So, for them, there can be no such thing as infant baptism. But for us, baptism is not an afterthought, it is the beginning. When an infant or an adult is baptized, new life is given. The change is not necessarily obvious. In fact, it is more like a seed that is planted deep in the ground and must grow before it is seen and comes to maturity. Like a seed, the power of baptism may be hidden, but it is not ineffectual. Transformation, what the theologians call sanctification, may be gradual, we may even resist it, nevertheless it is a power that is at work in us, even when we are entirely unaware of it.

So also with the Eucharist. For the non-sacramentalist, the value of the Eucharist is personal, individual. To receive communion is a statement of faith, but the bread and wine are believed to have no more effect on the recipient than crackers and a glass of wine before dinner–and probably less since the quantity is much smaller. But according to the living tradition we have received and experience, the tiny piece of bread and the smallest sip of wine in the Eucharist is the very life of Jesus Christ entering into us. It can even be dangerous. It is the same holy food of heaven whether we receive it reverently or not. It is always a very direct encounter with Jesus Christ himself. So, if we receive it in faith, properly prepared to encounter our Lord and our God, it can be very much to the health of our soul. But if we receive it unprepared, casually, irreverently, it can be blasphemy and deeply injurious. As the letter to the Hebrews reminds us, "it is a terrible thing to fall into the hands of the living God."

In my first sermon on Anglican identity, I spoke of the curious fact that the Anglican way is rooted, seemingly oddly, in "an understanding of the Church not as one Christian denomination among many, but of one Church as the spiritual center, one particular Church as the spiritual identity of a whole nation." That is how the Church of England perceived itself in earlier times. One of the very important implications of that tradition is what it says about the purpose of religion and faith. The Anglican way understands that the goal, the purpose of the Church, is not the conversion of individuals. Rather, the purpose of the Church is the transformation of the world.

That may not seem so clear now, but look at history. What has Christianity done? It converted the whole western world and made inroads into cultures beyond the West. Western civilization is Christian civilization. Even in the so-called post-Christian era in which we live, our civilization is still deeply imbued with the values and the marks of Christianity. And how did that happen? It certainly required the conversion of individuals, but it never meant to stop there, and it didn’t. Those converted individuals built a Christian society. It was never perfect and today the Christian roots of our civilization seem very fragile. But the goal is the same.

The Church started with a handful of fishermen from Galilee, and transformed the world. They did not receive the Gospel as a personal gift to be hidden away in the secret places of their hearts. They received the Gospel as a tradition that could only have meaning if it was shared, as a power that could give life not just to individuals but to the world. The Church today is just a handful of people, but our purpose is to do the same thing: to transform the world. And we do that by first of all being transformed ourselves, by hearing and believing the words of the women from the tomb, "We have seen the Lord." We do it by encountering him ourselves, by receiving the living tradition and the sacraments that challenge and transform us, by following Paul’s advice and exercising the equivalent of athletic discipline and living lives directed towards the only goal that is worth having. We are offered life in communion with God through his Son Jesus Christ. We are called to loving fellowship with one another in the Church. We are called to be the Church not only in the Church but in the world, so that the world, too, may be transformed, and we all may become one with God.

The Very Reverend Gary W. Kriss

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