Since the Reformers, there has been an impulse within Western Christianity to erase particular marks of sacred time and space. The desire ranges from a fierce iconoclasm that sees idolatrous popery as the bane of true religion to a polite bourgeois discomfort with physicality or difference. In contemporary American religion there is also the particularity of our inherited discomfort with anything that resembles hierarchy or appears undemocratic.
Within the Episcopal Church we see these impulses in a variety of places. Watch the distrust of the House of Deputies for the bishops of the Church and you can see that democratic impulse alive and well. Read the justification for Holy Women, Holy Men – everybody is affirmed and the concept of sainthood is redefined as setting a good example. Listen to the debates over Communion and Baptism and you can also hear the discomfort with difference as there seems to be incredulity that we should set any bar, let alone a high one, to participation in sacred mysteries.
This is the point – for many there is no such thing as a sacred mystery anymore. The notion that particular people, places, moments, or things can be set aside as blessed (as different) is increasingly deemed retrograde.
The danger of this sort of liberal Protestantism is that when we cease to see particular moments as communicating something of the divine then we will, eventually and I believe inevitably, cease to see that movement anywhere.
There is a commendable impulse that underlies much of this – the desire to see all of life as sacred and all people as blessed and valued by God. It is and they are! Absolutely!
Yet, we also believe that God is doing something new with people in Baptism. Even if your understanding of the Fall is a muted one there is still some bit of redeeming grace that we expect in that moment. In the Eucharistic feast we expect that God is coming among us is some special way even if Real Presence is a step too far for some.
God does something unique with the common in particular moments. These moments are the means by which we have sure and certain hope – they are the means given to us by Christ for the sanctification of humanity. After them, we are different. We are changed as we become a new creation. We are set aside as we are no longer that which we were.
The concept of holiness necessarily requires a sense of and belief in difference. The Church invites people to a different life – a renewed existence in the Body. The Sacramental life of the Church is the means by which we see and know that God makes use of the simplest of elements to transform our very being. If we can’t articulate this simple fact, that God changes things, then we are left in a profoundly disconcerting theological place for we are left with human device and the limits of reason as the sole measure of God’s action in the world.
Current trends in the Church point toward a revolution of profound and disturbing significance. We no longer seem able or willing to say how it is that God transforms us as individuals and as a Body because we are uncomfortable with difference. The underlying message of the Diocese of Eastern Oregon’s proposal to endorse Communion without Baptism was first that we have failed to bring new people to the Church and second that the failure really isn’t that important because people are fine as they are and not in need of Baptism.
The message of the Church cannot only be “you’re fine as you are.” This kind of undifferentiated affirmation results not in an inclusive community but in a community without an understanding of its own purpose, message, identity, or goal.
I am not advocating that we return to fire and brimstone or rest our teaching on moralizing about private lives but I do think we need to be honest that God is calling us to be different, to change, to be transformed. Christ’s message was not one of affirmation alone but an invitation to die. It was an invitation not to live today as we did yesterday but to know our old selves as dead. This was the invitation of Baptism. This was the difference.
The Church comes together to celebrate Sacred Mysteries. It exists to say the Mass together and share in the sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving – in Communion with Christ. It exists to baptize new believers into the Body. It exists to be a Body of reconciliation and forgiveness. It exists to call people into union with one another in Christ. It exists to heal and to offer hope for the life to come.
The Church exists to change us and all those around us in sacred moments by sacred mystery. It exists to make us different – to make us one in Christ.
That difference is expressed in our liturgical seasons, in our rites and Sacraments, in our service in our communities, in our work of love and reconciliation, in our life of prayer, and in our self-sacrifice. A Church which denies difference denies its own calling and fails in its essential witness to bring others to consecrated life.
Understanding ourselves as changed and transformed is not hubris – it is an act of profound humility that recognizes that it is not we ourselves who bear witness to God but Christ living through us.
Just as the common becomes holy on the altar, we creatures become holy at the altar rail. We become another part of the feeding of God’s people even as we are fed. Each Baptism and Communion is part of the striving toward the Kingdom of God, the yearning that echoes in time and memory, and promises that human frailties and fractions can be bound up in the laboring grace of the divine and consecrated to God’s use.
This is the difference.
Baptism prepares us to be servants of God in the world as we are bound together in grace and sustained in love. We receive this grace and become agents of God’s reconciliation in our communities. The peace we receive from Christ is one that is grounded in overflowing abundance even as it demands that we offer all as we serve and thus find perfect freedom.
In Baptism we are different. We are changed. Thanks be to God.
Robert+
A Desert Father 
Another astute analysis! The great danger of politically correct theology and practice is that the doctrines of creation and redemption are twisted into distortions that meet the expectations of current Western society by ignoring or subverting the Biblical and historical witness. You have hit the nail on the head, again.
Robert+, You give me hope. I am setting off with my spouse, a Deputy from NH to GC via our VW bus tomorrow with lots of books, for I am frightened of what will be going on. I ordered and read Linda Grenz’s little book Water, wine and Bread on the resolutions to remove …essentially, Baptism as the initiatory sacrament into the Body of Christ…as I posted to someone…don’t they teach Anthropology in seminary…never mind scripture, tradition and common sense…Thank you for this post…It is Liberal Theology…not political correctness….those of us who are solid (Catholic) Anglicans must argue theologically, with a good knowledge of the Tradition…I’ll have more to say, also re “museum”…but got to pack. God bless you,
Ellie McLaughlin+
ps there are some good, thoughtful, faithful essay in the thin Grenz volume, a gift to the Church
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Preach it brother Robert!
So sorry for the negative comment about Holy Women, Holy Men. I thought the title of the article meant there was going to be an affirmation of differences, diiferent ways to serve God, and how people at so many times and places have risen to their calling to serve where they were, often heroically. Perhaps some of the people added aren’t saintly the way those in previous calendars have been, but why is “setting a good example”–a wonderfully good example, in most cases–and more than an example, they’ve made a difference–thought of as a trivial thing? Why isn’t a good thing to read not only about edifying people in the Bible and before the Reformation , and saintly Anglicans after the Reformation–but also Christians in other countries? I start most days on the computer with the Daily Devotions, then the Bible readings in the Daily Office, and then the bio of people who have been recognized on particular days. Why is reading about these people not considered a worthy part of our devotions–or at least a good postlude to them?
I am so sorry to read the negative comments about _Holy Women, Holy Men_. Is it “politically correct” to care about people in parts of the world–or eras–we may not have heard of? I thought the article was going to affirm differences (because of the title), not belittle them. It may be that the new people mentioned aren’t all saintly in the way that those on previous calendars have been, but many of them are–they might not be Anglicans even though post-Reformation, but people like the Spanish priest who worked against slavery of indigenous peoples in the Caribbean in the 16th century enrich our lives knowing about them. And the African American musician in Erie (his picture in stained glass in the cathedral there) who made it so all of us became familiar with spirituals. And the translator mentioned this week who made it possible for us to know more about the Russian Orthodox church. And Sam Shoemaker, the great Episcopal evangelical who brought so many to Christ in the 1950s and spent the last years of his ministry at Calvary, Pittsburgh. Why throw cold water on such a positive endeavor as this volume? –I start most days with the Daily Devotions and the daily office Bible readings. As a post-devotional practice, one might say, I read about whoever is being commemorated that day. I think we give glory to God by honoring a good many of those people. –And what’s wrong with reading about people who “set good examples”? The Bible is full of people who set good examples. Scripture has long affirmed that God’s work in the world, and those who work in the world carrying out his commands, are worthy of knowing about.
What makes us uncomfortable about it is that the apparent criteria for inclusion (and therefore what is said about the various people) are way outside standards of the past. Several of them are agnostic or even explicitly anti-Christian; others are people who explicitly rejected Anglicanism. And as with seemingly everything that SCLM puts out these days, the odd forms of the prayers represents a rejection of the language of prayer which we’ve used for two millenia. Why should we commemorate them? And where did these ideas about commemoration and liturgy come from?
Where did the ideas come from? Many people, like me, asked that question about the BCP changes in the 1970s. For a long time, I thought that they were influenced at least in part by Dom Gregory Dix. Then last week I heard a taped overview of liturgical reform given (in 1971?) by Massey Shepherd at Sewanee, which added to what I knew, and I read Urban T Holmes III’s chapter in the 1981 book about Shepherd called _Worship Points the Way_. Holmes, also at Sewanee, said that the liturgy was written to express a theological change in the church, but I don’t know whether other liturgical scholars agree with that or not. In any case, it appears at least some of the impetus for the changes came from Sewanee. Dr. Ruth Meyers, professor of homiletics at Church Divinity School of the Pacific, is on the HWHM committee. I think she will be academic dean there in July. So perhaps one could say that at least some of the impetus for the present changes comes from CDSP. Reasons for who should be commemorated in HWHM are spelled out in the book. —I agree with you that it’s questionable whether self-professed agnositcs should be included , but not with the idea that the whole volume should not be used because of those few people. During the year the blog was being conducted people gave their opinions forthrightly. What the SCLM is asking for is another three years of gathering those opinions. At that point revisions will be made.
Sorry for the double comments. Word Press indicated that the first one hadn’t been accepted because I hadn’t logged in.
“God does something unique with the common in particular moments.” Beautiful!
Boom!
Then why do the Quakers lead generally admirable lives? How could they do this without baptism or communion or even vestments?
About Quakers and generally admirable lives–I do know that it took quite a bit of preaching by John Woolman to get the Quakers to change their views on owning slaves while being members in good standing in their various meetings. Each meeting had to be convinced that you couldn’t have it both ways, and Woolman’s eloquence finally won. As you probably know, Quakers had (and may still have?) the threat of being “read out of meeting” to keep their members’ actions in line with Quaker ethical teaching. They followed the leading of the Holy Spirit (within the aformentioned discipline), thinking that rituals, liturgies, vestments, etc. were distracting. I had an ancestor who was read out of meeting for fighting in the American Revolution. However, I don’t think his father, who treated his sons cruelly, was ever disciplined. –Quakers would probably be more interested in reading _Holy Women, Holy Men_than following our liturgy.
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