“The Clear Call” is the title–listen to it all.

Courage…is the indispensable requisite of any true ministry…. If you are afraid of men and a slave to their opinion, go and do something else. Go make shoes to fit them. Go even and paint pictures you know are bad but will suit their bad taste. But do not keep on all of your life preaching sermons which shall not say what God sent you to declare, but what they hire you to say. Be courageous. Be independent.

—-Phillips Brooks, Lectures on Preaching, the 1877 Yale Lectures (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1969), p. 59

Southwark Cathedral’s new dean, the Very Revd Andrew Nunn, used the sermon at his induction service on Saturday to affirm Southwark and South London’s role at the heart of national life.

“This cathedral community is proud to be the mother church of the Anglican Diocese of Southwark for south London and East Surrey,” he told a large Southwark Cathedral congregation on Saturday afternoon.

In comments prompted by recent press comment on the church’s activities in south London, he said: “We are proud to be part of the melting pot of south London and stand proudly on the south bank looking across to the City of London and our sister cathedral St Paul’s.

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Four churchwardens have resigned from a small rural parish in Kent in a long-running saga in which the diocesan bishop was forced to intervene.

In their extraordinary joint letter of resignation the four churchwardens accuse their rector, Dr David Attwood, of “poor personal relationships with several leading parishioners” and of being “extremely verbally aggressive” on a visit to one former churchwarden.

The four ”” Penelope Bell, Trevor Champ, Roger Flint and Michael Moore ”” say that when he arrived in 2002, having overcome an original rejection, the three parishes of Sundridge, Ide Hill and Toys Hill near Sevenoaks were thriving, with growing congregations and healthy finances.

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Let us return again to the theme of witnessing. In the second reading the Apostle John writes: “It is the Spirit who bears witness” (1 John 5:6). He is referring to the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of God, who bears witness to Jesus, testifying that he is the Christ, the Son of God. This is also seen in the scene of the baptism in the Jordan River: the Holy Spirit descends upon Jesus like a dove, revealing that he is the Only Begotten Son of the Eternal Father (cf. Mark 1:10). John underscores this aspect as well in his Gospel when Jesus says to his disciples: “When the Paraclete comes, whom I will send from the Father, the Spirit of truth who proceeds from the Father, he will bear witness to me; and you too will bear witness to me, because you have been with me from the beginning” (John 15:26-27). This is a great comfort to us in educating others in the faith because we know that we are not alone and that our witness is supported by the Holy Spirit.

It is very important for you parents and also for you godfathers and godmothers to believe strongly in the presence and the action of the Holy Spirit, to call upon him and welcome him in you through prayer and the sacraments. He is the one in fact who enlightens the mind, who makes the heart of the educator burn so that he or she knows how to transmit the knowledge of the love of Christ. Prayer is the first condition for educating, because in praying we create the disposition in ourselves of letting God have the initiative, of entrusting our children to him, who knows them before we do and better than us, and knows perfectly what their true good is.

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Father Clarke, formerly on staff at Holy Communion, Charleston, began a new ministry yesterday at Holy Cross, Stateburg.

You can find the audio link here (about 22 minutes).

If the Ordinariate in the United States is a Vatican effort to poach disgruntled Anglicans, Sunday-golfing ex-Anglicans or never-were Anglicans, its newly appointed leader has not received that memo.

In fact, says the Rev. Jeffrey N. Steenson, Anglican does not appear in the new body’s formal name, the Personal Ordinariate of the Chair of St. Peter, because members will make no pretense of remaining Anglicans. And anyone who wants to enter the Ordinariate because of anger toward Anglicanism rather than a desire for deeper communion with the Roman Catholic Church probably ought to wait.

Steenson, who was bishop of the Episcopal Church’s Diocese of the Rio Grande from 2004 to 2007, will be invested as the first Ordinary of the Ordinariate during a Mass at the Co-Cathedral of the Sacred Heart, Houston, Feb. 12.

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“Be fruitful and multiply”. There is one man in England who has taken this old biblical call too seriously. His name is Ian Hellyer and together with his wife Margaret is raising not one but nine children. He is also more than well acquainted with the Holy Scriptures, being a Roman Catholic pastor. Yes, that is right, he is both a father and a priest, and yet there is no excommunication on the horizon for him. The story appeared a few days ago in English daily newspaper The Guardian. Beware though, the Fr. Ian affair is no theological trick. The 45 year father of nine was an Anglican priest until last year and following a spiritual journey and a course of study, he decided to convert to Catholicism.

Fr. Ian belongs to the Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walshingam in England and Wales. Ordinariates were established two years ago by the Holy See: they are essentially new organisations and canonical structures that allow Anglican “defectors” who wish to join the Catholic Church, to keep some of their liturgical traditions. Above all, however, the Ordinariate grants former pastors special “permission” that authorises them to stay married. According to information obtained by the Vatican Insider from the Ordinariate and the English Episcopal Conference, there are currently 57 former Anglican pastors who have joined the Catholic Church. Forty two of these are married and Hellyer is one of them.

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A groundbreaking course from Church Mission Society in partnership with the Oxford Ministry Course at Ripon College Cuddesdon has received official approval as a training pathway for Ordained Pioneer Ministry in the Church of England.

For the first time, candidates for ordained pioneer ministry in the Church of England will be able to train on a course that has been designed entirely for pioneer leaders by Church Mission Society, one of the country’s leading mission agencies, in partnership with Cuddesdon.

The Church of England’s ministry division has given the CMS Pioneer Mission Leadership Training course its official seal of approval as a training pathway. C of E mission leaders and pioneers alike have expressed delight at the news.

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You can find the speakers and agenda here. You all know enough about a conference like this to know that there is much more to it than simply the presentations. Please pray for the speakers travel and ministry here (a number are serving in Sunday worship after the conference locally), the time to develop new friendships and renew old ones, for the Bishop and his wife Allison in their hosting capacity, and especially for the the Rev. Jeffrey Miller of Beaufort, who has the huge responsibility of coordinating it all–KSH.

The Very Rev Jeffrey John, Dean of St Albans, has instructed an eminent employment lawyer to complain to Church officials after being rejected for the role of Bishop of Southwark.

Sources say the dean, one of the most contentious figures in the Church, believes he could sue officials under the Equality Act 2010, which bans discrimination on the grounds of sexuality. Such a case could create a damaging new rift within the CoE.

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[Sara] Ritchey provides some useful historical background that outlines the early medieval shift to an all-celibate clergy. But I was struck by her naive ignorance of the recent history of the Catholic Church. The existence of Priests’ wives should, she tells us, provide the occasion on which “a real conversation about the continuation of priestly celibacy might begin.”

Might begin?…

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The priest’s nuclear family was also seen as a risk to the stability of the church. His children represented a threat to laypersons, who feared that their endowments might be absorbed into the hands of the priest’s offspring to create a rival clerical dynasty. A celibate priest would thus ensure donations from the neighboring landed aristocracy. Furthermore, the priest’s wife was often accused, along with her children, of draining the church’s resources with her extravagance and frivolity. Pope Leo IX attempted to remedy this problem in the 11th century by decreeing that the wives and children of priests must serve in his residence at the Lateran Palace in Rome.

Given this history, I caution the clerical wife to be on guard as she enters her role as a sacerdotal attaché. Her position is an anomalous one and, as the Vatican has repeatedly insisted, one that will not receive permanent welcome in the church. That said, for the time being, it will be prudent for the Vatican to honor the dignity of the wives and children of its freshly ordained married priests. And here, I suggest, a real conversation about the continuation of priestly celibacy might begin.

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Episcopalians make up one of the smaller mainline church denominations in Kansas, with about 15,000 members statewide.

For that reason alone, the Rev. Don Davidson said he found it highly unusual that Episcopal clergymen have been selected three times in a row for the post of state chaplain of the Kansas National Guard.

“That is weird,” Davidson said, “because the Army doesn’t care if a chaplain is a Baptist, a rabbi or an imam.”

He said, only half-jokingly, that Episcopalians make up only about “0.0002 percent of the population of Kansas.”

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Listen to it all should you wish to.

As we reflect on this there is the danger around us, which is the tendency within our culture to attempt to turn the incarnation into a sweet scene. In reducing all of this to a sweet scene we miss the gravity of our human condition and the grandeur of the divine response. In trying to make it overly sweet we sentimentalize and miss the substance.

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Something else would be different about these clergy meetings: they would be organized and led by a trained group facilitator who was herself a respected pastor. The agenda for the group would be open, decided by the members of the groups themselves, but the meetings would not simply be a series of random discussions.

So a peer group was started. The first meeting was devoted to letting participants share at length how they had come to ministry and where their journeys in ministry had taken them. They talked about their hopes for the group and what each of them needed for this group to be helpful to them.

They decided to meet on a monthly basis, and they agreed to make attendance a priority, recognizing that the group would be diminished if anyone missed a meeting….

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Out of the thousand things which follow directly from this reading of John, I choose three as particularly urgent.

First, John’s view of the incarnation, of the Word becoming flesh, strikes at the very root of that liberal denial which characterised mainstream theology thirty years ago and whose long-term effects are with us still. I grew up hearing lectures and sermons which declared that the idea of God becoming human was a category mistake. No human being could actually be divine; Jesus must therefore have been simply a human being, albeit no doubt (the wonderful patronizing pat on the head of the headmaster to the little boy) a very brilliant one. Phew; that’s all right then; he points to God but he isn’t actually God. And a generation later, but growing straight out of that school of thought, I have had a clergyman writing to me this week to say that the church doesn’t know anything for certain, so what’s all the fuss about? Remove the enfleshed and speaking Word from the centre of your theology, and gradually the whole thing will unravel until all you’re left with is the theological equivalent of the grin on the Cheshire Cat, a relativism whose only moral principle is that there are no moral principles; no words of judgment because nothing is really wrong except saying that things are wrong, no words of mercy because, if you’re all right as you are, you don’t need mercy, merely ”˜affirmation’….

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…the religious leaders of Jesus’ day regarded God….[chiefly in terms of His holiness] ”“ [they viewed him as]…a God set apart from His world and separate from everything that might be unclean and messy and unworthy.

So the emphasis is on the importance of dignified worship, carried out in church buildings with due reverence, awe and majesty which nothing must interrupt or disturb ”“ the world kept at a respectable distance so that it doesn’t sully what is going on inside the sacred space. The holy must not be contaminated with the unholy, or the spiritual with the material or political.

But it is precisely this view of God’s holiness that Jesus shattered. He spent most of His ministry out of doors, not in synagogues or temple but preaching to ordinary people, attempting to relate ordinary everyday events to God. He saw everything within that world as having a connection to God such as treasure in a field, a lost coin, a lost sheep, a lost son. And He was born in a cowshed amidst the mess and smell of animals. God, in the midst of the warp and woof of real human existence; the link between holy and unholy, inextricably joined.

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This is a time of great anxiety about what lies ahead. The global balance of power is changing and here at home at a time of financial stringency there is an urgent search for how human beings and communities can flourish at a time when having and consuming more and more things no longer seems a plausible road to happiness.

Today’s good news is that God so loved the world that he was generous and gave himself to wean us away from our obsession with power over things and people. The way of Herod the Great and the way of the Emperor who decrees that “all the world should be taxed” is contrasted with the future opened up by the infant king born into a poor family. He comes to initiate us into a way of generous living; in love with God and his world which involves loving ourselves and our neighbours equally.

A few years ago the former President of the Royal Society published a book about the prospects for the human race worryingly entitled “Our Final Century” ”“ without a question mark ”“ although he has ascribed this to a publisher’s error. There is a question about whether we shall develop the wisdom to channel the power we have acquired from the scientific knowledge and discoveries of the 20th century? Where indeed, to quote T.S.Eliot, is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge and the knowledge we have lost in information.

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The Bishop of St Albans, Dr Alan Smith, said that “those of us in Weste­rn Europe cannot go on con­suming more and more when so much of the world has so little.” He called for “a new moral vision of what we do with our wealth and how we ensure that everyone has a fair share in it”.

The Bishop of Whitby, Dr Martin Warner, in a Christmas message on his website, said that Britain was “riven by inequality of opportunity and the enjoyment of material wealth. . . This year we should be concerned not only about the rise of unemployment towards the three million mark but more particularly about the fact that so many young people are bearing the brunt” of it.

The Bishop of Bath & Wells, the Rt Revd Peter Price, preaching at Bath Abbey, said: “There is a sense of the very fabric of society being torn apart. Accompanying this is a feel-ing of loss about the way we used to live our lives, the way we managed our relationships, the way education was. . . There is something missing.”

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…in all of our giving, even in our best gifts, there is always, to a greater or lesser degree, there is always a gap ”“ a gap between the sign and the thing signified, between the gift and the giver. We say “it’s the thought that counts” because we have to, because the thought and the gift can never be identical.

But here’s the thing. Again, here is Christmas: God does not give us something external to himself; God gives us himself. In this child born unto us, that gap between the Gift and the Giver has disappeared. That baby is not a gesture. In this Gift, it really is the thought that counts, because in this gift the Thought, the Heart, the Logos, the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us.

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In one of the original episodes of Law and Order, some 15 years ago, I’ll never forget the scene of the three cops doing an all-night stake out from their parked car. It’s 3:00 AM or so and over black coffee they’re talking about the regrets of their lives. The guy in the front under the wheel said he regretted being a jerk to his wife most of their married lives before she died. The cop riding shotgun said he regretted chronically stealing money as a teenager from this hard-working father’s wallet. The third cop is in the back with his eyes closed, half-asleep. And they said to him, “Hey sergeant, what do you regret?” And he finally mumbled out, “I regret everything.”

There’s just a little part of me that can identify. I have my share of sin and regret that stem from a self-centered heart. And the message of the angel, that “to you is born a Savior who is Christ the Lord”, is the most wonderful news I ever heard. Would you agree?

I don’t care how low you’ve sunk, there is no reason to give up or think only somber, gloomy thoughts. I’m with you in that I cannot undo my past. But I am privilege to point to a Savior that can wash us clean. Jesus never once in the narrative of the New Testament turned away a helpless sinner who fled to him….

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Christmas is an epiphany ”“ the appearing of God and of his great light in a child that is born for us. Born in a stable in Bethlehem, not in the palaces of kings. In 1223, when Saint Francis of Assisi celebrated Christmas in Greccio with an ox and an ass and a manger full of hay, a new dimension of the mystery of Christmas came to light. Saint Francis of Assisi called Christmas “the feast of feasts” ”“ above all other feasts ”“ and he celebrated it with “unutterable devotion” (2 Celano 199; Fonti Francescane, 787). He kissed images of the Christ-child with great devotion and he stammered tender words such as children say, so Thomas of Celano tells us (ibid.). For the early Church, the feast of feasts was Easter: in the Resurrection Christ had flung open the doors of death and in so doing had radically changed the world: he had made a place for man in God himself. Now, Francis neither changed nor intended to change this objective order of precedence among the feasts, the inner structure of the faith centred on the Paschal Mystery. And yet through him and the character of his faith, something new took place: Francis discovered Jesus’ humanity in an entirely new depth. This human existence of God became most visible to him at the moment when God’s Son, born of the Virgin Mary, was wrapped in swaddling clothes and laid in a manger. The Resurrection presupposes the Incarnation. For God’s Son to take the form of a child, a truly human child, made a profound impression on the heart of the Saint of Assisi, transforming faith into love. “The kindness and love of God our Saviour for mankind were revealed” ”“ this phrase of Saint Paul now acquired an entirely new depth. In the child born in the stable at Bethlehem, we can as it were touch and caress God. And so the liturgical year acquired a second focus in a feast that is above all a feast of the heart.

This has nothing to do with sentimentality. It is right here, in this new experience of the reality of Jesus’ humanity that the great mystery of faith is revealed. Francis loved the child Jesus, because for him it was in this childish estate that God’s humility shone forth.

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This is a wonderful resource.

Tonight we proclaim with joy the birth of Jesus, Saviour of the world. We do so in many ways: by blessing the crib, depicting that precious moment itself; by the resonant words we hear: ‘The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light’; by the music that fills this cathedral ‘O magnum mysterium’; by the solemn announcing of the Gospel: ‘And here is a sign for you: you will find a baby wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger’ and by our presence here at this midnight hour.

‘What’s going on?’ passers-by might ask. We are proclaiming the birth of Christ, two thousand years ago, yet as important today as it was then, for he is Saviour of the world.

We are proclaiming that Jesus Christ is the eternal Word of God come in our flesh and blood, conceived by the Holy Spirit, and born in Bethlehem of the Virgin Mary.

This is our faith. This is the joy of this night, rich beyond all others, for in these events the course of human destiny is made clear and our sense of purpose in life changed.

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Go here and find the class for December 11th.

…[How] then are we to…[approach]… this King Jesus?….[In part] by understanding the significance of the birthplace of Jesus. Bethlehem is not only the Kingly City of David. It is called the ”˜house of bread’. How fitting that the ”˜Bread of Life’, the ”˜Bread of Heaven’, was born in that city. How fitting that this king of peace would give his own life, his own flesh to feed the hungry with bread. He who would spiritually feed the world with the sacrifice of his flesh, was born in the ”˜House of Bread’.

St Bede says this of Jesus’ manger throne ”“ a cattle’s feeding and drinking trough: “He, whose throne is in the heavens, confined to the narrowness of a manger, so that he might open wide to us the joys of his eternal kingdom. He that is the Bread of Angels, reclines in a manger, that we as sanctified beasts might be fed the corn of his flesh.”

And St Cyril says: “He found that man had become a beast in his soul, and so he is placed in the manger, in the place of fodder, that we, changing from our animal way of living, may be led back to the wisdom that becomes humanity: stretching out, not towards animal fodder, but to the heavenly Bread of Life of his body.”

Let us turn from our beastly ways and turn to the God who shows us what it is to be human….

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