Month: May 2018

In the world ye shall have tribulation;
but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world

Jesus’s words seem to imply a conflict between the things of the spirit and the things of the world. But that would be, I think, a mistake. Rogation Sunday is really part and parcel of the Easter message which is not about a flight from the world but the redemption of the world. That is an essential feature of redemption, about our being returned to God and abiding in his love. We only live when we are alive to God. Our relation to the world belongs to that understanding. The world is God’s world. Redemption cannot be a negation of creation but its fulfillment.

Rogation Sunday provides us with a wonderful theology of the land. We are greatly exercised and concerned about our relation to the land, to what we call the environment. But how we use words greatly affects our thinking and our living or acting, a point which The Epistle of St. James clearly indicates. “Be ye doers of the word and not hearers only.” What does it mean to be a doer of the word? It means actions, yes, but actions that are themselves words in motion. We are to act upon words that are heard and if heard, then words that are spoken and proclaimed. The Epistle points us to a fundamental feature of the Christian religion and beyond, namely, the idea of a way of life predicated upon a way of thinking.

What kind of way of life? A way of life which embraces an ethical approach to the land in which we are placed. Rogation refers to prayer, to the prayer of asking. That immediately challenges our assumptions about our relationship to the land and to one another by bringing both into relation to God. It challenges the various assumptions that belong to our understanding of ourselves in relation to the natural world.

Eight years ago in 2010, someone somewhere schlepped off a farm one day and moved into a city and suddenly the world tilted and changed. Globally speaking, 2010 marked the moment, statistically, when there were for the first time in history more people living in urban settings than in rural places. This profound shift has lead to a raft of different questions and concerns, one of which is what is called the ‘nature deficit,’ a sense of disconnect with the natural world. This modern malaise is wonderfully captured in Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poem, God’s Grandeur.
(more…)

Print this entry

In the world ye shall have tribulation;
but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world

Jesus’s words seem to imply a conflict between the things of the spirit and the things of the world. But that would be, I think, a mistake. Rogation Sunday is really part and parcel of the Easter message which is not about a flight from the world but about the redemption of the world. That is an essential feature of redemption, about our being returned to God and abiding in his love. We only live when we are alive to God. Our relation to the world belongs to that understanding. The world is God’s world. Redemption cannot be a negation of creation but its fulfillment.

Rogation Sunday provides us with a wonderful theology of the land. We are greatly exercised and concerned about our relation to the land, to what we call the environment. But how we use words greatly affects our thinking and our living or acting, a point which The Epistle of St. James clearly indicates. “Be ye doers of the word and not hearers only.” What does it mean to be a doer of the word? It means actions, yes, but actions that are themselves words in motion. We are to act upon words that are heard and if heard, then words that are spoken and proclaimed. The Epistle points us to a fundamental feature of the Christian religion and beyond, namely, the idea of a way of life predicated upon a way of thinking.

What kind of way of life? A way of life which embraces an ethical approach to the land in which we are placed. Rogation refers to prayer, to the prayer of asking. That immediately challenges our assumptions about our relationship to the land and to one another by bringing both into relation to God. It challenges the various assumptions that belong to our understanding of ourselves in relation to the natural world.

(more…)

Print this entry

“Ye believe in God, believe also in me”

The most provocative, the most challenging, and the most controversial of Jesus’ so-called “I am” sayings in John’s Gospel, at least with respect to interfaith dialogue is where Jesus says, “I am the way, the truth and the life.”

Yet the things which Jesus says and does are the works which manifest the truth and the life and the way of God. And how are we to participate in that? Through prayer. “If ye ask any thing in my name, I will do it.” All prayer is about nothing less and nothing more than asking the Father in the name of the Son by the power of the Spirit. All prayer gathers us into the fundamental orientation of the Son, “because I go unto my Father.” Here again, and providentially, we have the recurring Easter refrain, “because I go to the Father.” Everything is rooted and grounded in the life of God, the holy and blessed Trinity.

Are there not other ways to God, the ways belonging to other religions, for example? No doubt, the other great religions have much to offer in the way of wisdom and truth, and wonderfully and profoundly so, it seems to me. Each of them, whether it is Judaism or Islam or Buddhism or Hinduism and so on, has important and distinctive insights. So, too, does Christianity. The point is to be able to respect the integrity of each religion and not reduce them all to some common political, social or psychological idea, subjecting them, in other words, to some feature or other that contemporary secular culture finds amenable with itself. The point for Christians in honouring what is distinctive about Christianity is not to deny and diminish the claim that Christ is “the Way, the Truth and the Life,” but to connect other insights to that idea and to realize that there can and must be a respectful dialogue among the religions of the world only in and through what belongs to each.

The centrality and the uniqueness of Christ is an essential doctrine of the Christian Faith. For Anglicans, this is captured in Article XVIII of the Thirty-nine Articles; the only anathema in all of the articles concerns the denial of the centrality and the uniqueness of Christ. It is only through the centrality and the uniqueness of Christ that Christians can and must engage the religions of the world as well as the forms of contemporary culture.

(more…)

Print this entry