Christ Church

‘Nothing has changed’
A statement about same-sex marriages in the light of the decision of the General Synod and Archbishop Ron Cutler’s response

It is incumbent upon me, for what it is worth, to say something about the recent decisions of the Anglican Church of Canada with respect to the question about same-sex marriages. Simply put, nothing has really changed. The Anglican Church of Canada remains caught in the confusions and the contradictions of contemporary culture about the politics of identity. Yet the General Synod, meeting in Vancouver, ultimately voted against equating same-sex marriage with the Christian doctrine of marriage articulated most clearly in the Book of Common Prayer. The result of a long and drawn out process of discussion, this was the result, whether or not one agrees with it, or, for that matter, whether or not one agrees with the assumption that national and diocesan churches have anyauthority to determine on such matters of doctrine, in this case, moral doctrine.

Councils “may err and sometimes have erred, even in things pertaining unto God,” as our Articles remind us (Art. XXI), and so Councils will err though sometimes, too, they may be right. There is also the question about which councils and upon what issues. Archbishop Ron Cutler of the Diocese of Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island notes that this issue can be revisited within the institutional structures of the Anglican Church of Canada. Everything, it seems, is endlessly ‘provisional’ especially when one is in pursuit of a predetermined end which only then becomes, mirabile dictu,definitive. Thus, despite the decision of the General Synod, he has declared that Diocesan local option takes precedence against it. Same-sex marriages will be allowed where desired in the Diocese of Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island. At the same time, we are told, no parish or priest will be forced to marry same-sex couples. Nor can they be. And so the division continues and endlessly so.

We live with the confusions and complexities of our age about identity, about what it means to be a self. What matters are the assumptions underlying such decisions. Marriage, according to the Archbishop, and in this he simply reflects the assumptions of the culture, is fundamentally about ‘committed relationships’. If that is so, then there can be no discussion, no debate. And while commitment is an important concept, the question is, commitment to what? After all, one can be in a ‘committed relationship’ with any number of things, including oneself, and to any number of social constructs of whatever sort. While we would all want to agree about the importance of commitment, the classical understanding of Christian marriage is not simply or even primarily about commitment beyond a commitment to the character and nature of marriage; in short, to what it is. We cannot be of one mind if we cannot say what something is; in this case what marriage is. At issue are the principles which govern our understanding about the meaning of our humanity as found within the doctrines of creation and redemption in which marriage is located as oneof the ways of living out the Christian faith.

Nothing has changed inasmuch as the institutional church remains caught in the controversies of identity in our contemporary culture. And nothing has changed with respect to my own contributions to the debate theologically. “The sad tragedy of the Anglican Churches” continues to be “the inability … to distinguish between two different things: marriage and the blessings of friends.” I continue to be committed to upholding the principles of Christian Faith doctrinally and morally as they have been received by the Anglican Churches insofar as they lay claim to be and are an integral part of the Catholic and Universal church regardless of the statements of Synods and Bishops. We live in a divided church but prayerfully and, I hope, charitably with respect to these divisions.

Rev’d David Curry
July 18th, 2019

Click here to download the Calendar of Services and Events for the period Fall 2019 through Spring 2020 (pdf document).

The collect for today, the Feast of Saint Swithun (d. 862), Bishop of Winchester (source):

Almighty God,
by whose grace we celebrate again
the feast of thy servant Swithun:
grant that, as he governed with gentleness
the people committed to his care,
so we, rejoicing in our inheritance in Christ,
may ever seek to build up thy Church in unity and love;
through Jesus Christ thy Son our Lord,
who liveth and reigneth with thee,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.

With the Epistle and Gospel for a Bishop or Archbishop, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

The Epistle: 1 Timothy 6:11-16
The Gospel: St. Luke 12:37-43

Artwork: Saint Swithun window, Winchester Cathedral, Winchester, England.

“Forgive and ye shall be forgiven”

Forgiveness. It is the hardest and yet one of the freest things, perhaps even one of the simplest things in our lives. It undoubtedly belongs to that most free of all things: the power of God’s praise which overcomes human pride and presumption. Forgiveness  is the power of God’s love moving in human loves. There can be no love that is not constantly love-in-renewal and there can be no renewal-in-love without forgiveness. Divine forgiveness empowers human forgiveness. Yet how hard it is for us to let go of ourselves and of the illusions of our self-image and our assumptions about others.

What makes forgiveness so hard? Quite simply, it is our hypocrisy. This is the point of the Gospel. Hypocrisy is not just our saying one thing and our doing another, not just our doing one thing and thinking another; it is about a profound presumption, an illusion about who we think we are.

We are divided within ourselves against ourselves, against one another, and against God. We are in the ‘far country’ of our self-estrangement, in ‘the region of unlikeness,’ to use Augustine’s image, separated from the truth of ourselves in God. There is our blindness and there is our judgmentalism splendidly illustrated in the Gospel. “Can the blind lead the blind? Shall they not both fall into the ditch?” That powerful image leads to the next: “Cast out first the beam that is in thine own eye, then shall thou see clearly the mote that is in thy brother’s eye.” This is the prescription for our presumption, our prejudice, meaning pre-judgment, our claim to know what we do not know. It is not just our ignorance, but our arrogance that is the problem. It is a willful blindness, a kind of refusal to see what, in fact, we have been given to see and know, for instance, in the witness of the Scriptures. But then, again, we frequently refuse to act upon what we do see and know. It is not just our knowing that is the problem. There is our capacity for willful destruction, the will to nothingness, as it were. We close our eyes to the truth before us, at once hypercritical of the minor faults of others (the mote or speck of dust) while utterly blind to the major faults and failings in ourselves (the beam or log). We do not know ourselves or others very well.

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The collect for today, the Fourth Sunday after Trinity, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

O GOD, the protector of all that trust in thee, without whom nothing is strong, nothing is holy: Increase and multiply upon us thy mercy; that, thou being our ruler and guide, we may so pass through things temporal, that we finally lose not the things eternal. Grant this, O heavenly Father, for Jesus Christ’s sake our Lord. Amen.

The Epistle: Romans 8:18-23
The Gospel: St. Luke 6:36-42

Artwork: Domenico Feti, The Parable of the Blind Leading the Blind, 1621-22. Oil on panel, Barber Institute of Fine Arts, Birmingham.

The collect for a Bishop or Archbishop, on the Commemoration of Stephen Langton (c. 1150-1228), Archbishop of Canterbury from 1207, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

O GOD, our heavenly Father, who didst raise up thy faithful servant Stephen Langton to be a Bishop in thy Church and to feed thy flock: We beseech thee to send down upon all thy Bishops, the Pastors of thy Church, the abundant gift of thy Holy Spirit, that they, being endued with power from on high, and ever walking in the footsteps of thy holy Apostles, may minister before thee in thy household as true servants of Christ and stewards of thy divine mysteries; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee in the unity of the same Spirit, one God, world without end. Amen.

The Epistle: 1 Timothy 6:11-16
The Gospel: St. Luke 12:37-43

Artwork: Stephen Langton, stained glass, Southwark Cathedral, London. Photograph taken by admin, 20 October 2014.

“Cast all your care upon him, for he careth for you”

Compelling words. Compelling readings that speak directly to our souls and culture in disarray. These words and readings counter the despondency and despair that inhibits and negates life and in particular our individual lives. Why and how? Because they call us back to God in the deep meaning of God for us and for our lives. 1st Peter reminds us of the truth of God, the God who cares for us in the midst of the world’s sufferings and pains, a world in which there is much evil and darkness. That has to be faced and not just wished away. Peter here reminds us profoundly about the realities of suffering, about “[our] adversary the devil,” the very principle of evil, and that “the same afflictions are accomplished in [our] brethren that are in the world.” The Christian Faith does not mean that you are inoculated from suffering. No. It is about a way of thinking through suffering.

God cares. This is a strong statement about the goodness of God but it is a statement which we cheapen by reducing God to ourselves and our concerns, making God subject to us. This is not what Peter is saying and not what Luke is showing us in the Gospel. After all, we are bidden to “humble [our]selves” and to “be subject one to another.” Being “clothed with humility” is the condition of grace, the grace which alone exalts and lifts us up. Such things point to a kind of spiritual activity in us, a movement of the goodness which belongs to the essence of God. That God cares, theologically speaking, does not mean that God is measured by our sense of well-being, but that we are alive to his goodness, his power, and truth. God is always more and greater and beyond comprehension by definition. To know that God cares is to be open to the transcendent and transforming power of divine love, the love that is shown to us in Christ.

That is the point of the Gospel. It illustrates the strong meaning of God’s care for us in the face of the sufferings of our world and day, sufferings that arise from our evil. God’s care requires our repentance. Repentance is the strong term for our being turned back to God. We can only be turned back to God by virtue of God’s turning to us.

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The collect for today, the Third Sunday after Trinity, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

O LORD, we beseech thee mercifully to hear us; and grant that we, to whom thou hast given an hearty desire to pray, may by thy mighty aid be defended and comforted in all dangers and adversities; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Epistle: 1 St. Peter 5:5-11
The Gospel: St. Luke 15:1-10

Artwork: Godfried Schalcken, Parable of the Lost Piece of Silver, c. 1675. Oil on canvas, Leiden Collection.

The collect for today, the commemoration of Sir Thomas More (1478-1535), Lord Chancellor of England, Scholar, Reformation Martyr (source):

Almighty God, who strengthened Thomas More to be in office a king’s good servant but in conscience your servant first, grant us in all our doubts and uncertainties to feel the grasp of your holy hand and to live by faith in your promise that you shall not let us be lost; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.

The Epistle: 1 St. Peter 3:13-16
The Gospel: St. Mark 12:13-17

A meditation of Thomas More, written in the Tower of London a year before he was beheaded:

Give me your grace, good Lord, to set the world at nought,
to set my mind fast upon you and not to hang upon the blast of men’s mouths.
To be content to be solitary.
Not to long for worldly company,
little and little utterly to cast off the world, and rid my mind of the business thereof.
Not to long to hear of any worldly things,
but that the hearing of worldly fantasies may be to me displeasant.
Gladly to be thinking God,
busily to labour to love him.
To know own vility and wretchedness,
to humble and meeken myself under the mighty hand of God,
to bewail my sins passed;
for the purging of them, patiently to suffer adversity.
Gladly to bear my purgatory here,
to be joyful of tribulations,
to walk the narrow way that leads to life.
To bear the cross with Christ,
to have the last thing—death—in remembrance,
to have ever before my eye death, that is ever at hand;
to make death no stranger to me;
to foresee and consider the everlasting fire of hell;
to pray for pardon before the Judge comes.
To have continually in mind the passion that Christ suffered for me;
For his benefits incessantly to give him thanks,
to buy the time again that I before have lost.
To abstain from vain confabulations,
To eschew light foolish mirth and gladness;
To cut off unnecessary recreations.
Of worldly substance, friends, liberty, life and all–
To set the loss at nought for the winning of Christ.
To think my worst enemies my best friends,
for the brethren of Joseph could never have done him so much good
with their love and favour as they did with their hatred and malice.

Source of collect: For All the Saints: Prayers and Readings for Saints’ Days, compiled by Stephen Reynolds. Anglican Book Centre, Toronto, 2007, p. 215.

Artwork: William Frederick Yeames, The Meeting Of Sir Thomas More With His Daughter After His Sentence Of Death, 1863. Oil on canvas, Historic Royal Palaces, Tower of London.

The collect for today, the Feast of the Visitation of the Blessed Virgin Mary to Elizabeth (source):

Almighty God,
by whose grace Elizabeth rejoiced with Mary
and greeted her as the mother of the Lord:
look with favour, we beseech thee, on thy lowly servants,
that, with Mary, we may magnify thy holy name
and rejoice to acclaim her Son our Saviour,
who liveth and reigneth with thee,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.

The Lesson: 1 Samuel 2:1-10
The Gospel: St. Luke 1:39-56

Artwork: Domenico Ghirlandaio, Visitation, 1491. Tempera on panel, Louvre, Paris.