Good morning. What I have been asked to do this morning is to report on where we are at this point of time in the Anglican Communion. It’s a fairly complicated picture so I hope I will be given the gift of clarity as I talk to you about this. Since the last time I reported to Synod on these matters, six things have happened. I want to delineate those six things and comment on them and then conclude by talking about a situation which at the moment is absolutely no threat to the Uganda Link but is a potential cause of difficulty in relation to our relationships with the Church of Uganda.
The Bishop of Bristol's Diocesan Synod Address
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As connected to reality as this Bishop … http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/religion/6671075/Wishing-Happy-Christmas-could-be-an-obscenity-warns-bishop.html … and in the same sort of way. Neither as entertaining as the one throwing toys out of a car while intoxicated. The amusement factor is so much lower! What are CoE bishops for anymore?
#1,
I’m a little puzzled about your link, where the following quote can be found:
[i]While Advent was meant to be a season of preparation and expectation “too often”, he said, “that means things like shopping and decorating: working to create a domestic cocoon in which to be ‘Happy’ with friends and family.” He continued: “But Advent is not supposed to be about ‘Happiness’ or comfort. In fact it’s deeply uncomfortable. It’s about judgement and what’s wrong with the world.”[/i]
This seems a perfectly proper sentiment. If this is the worst example of episcopal folly that you can find . . .
Jeremy Bonner (#2) I agree with you that the sentiment– the Bishop’s understanding of the meaning of Advent– is quite proper. I am a bit baffled by dwstroudmd’s comment. I do not know this particular Bishop. But his address to his Synod seems to me to be fairly benign, as far as it goes. And though I consider myself to be orthodox and rather conservative (both politically and theologically) the bill being proposed in the Ugandan parliament is a patently hideous piece of work. EVERY Christian should speak out against it, in my opinion.
“The Right Reverend Humphrey Southern, the Bishop of Repton, said it was a “hollow” greeting to make to those who were suffering.
People should not “simply make a cocoon of happiness for ourselves and our loved ones” at Christmas, he said.
Writing in the monthly Derby diocese newsletter, he said: “This is the ‘Happy Christmas’ month. Yet to many that greeting will be hollow, coming as an insult, or even an obscenity.”
The bishop, 49, went on to ask: “What can ‘Happy Christmas’ mean in a family whose father has been killed in a military operation in Afghanistan that fewer and fewer people understand (still less support)?
“How do you wish ‘Happy Christmas’ to a community in the Indian Ocean who can probably count on the fingers of a couple of hands the number of Christmases they will see before their home disappears under water, victim to global warming?
“What could it possibly mean to the victim of bullying, ostracism or racial intimidation in your workplace or neighbourhoods or community?” ”
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/religion/6671075/Wishing-Happy-Christmas-could-be-an-obscenity-warns-bishop.html
Interleave with the Diocesan report.
Executive Summary of the Bishop’s Remarks:
1. Lots of unusual things are happening all across the Anglican Communion, but nothing to get worked up about here in our local chapter…
2. The Ugandan parliament might take up a measure we might or should find offenseive, and so get worked up…
3. But not too worked up about any of the offensive things other provinces are doing in the Anglican Communion to our fellow Anglilcans, where the membership committee has everything well in hand to make sure nothing offensive happens, and remember
4. What we say to former colonials isn’t all that important any longer anyway because they really don’t care and, in fact, neither do we…really unless it upsets the membership committee.
dwstroudmd, I sort of understand that you see this bishop as being a bit of a revisionist “stick-in-the-mud,” as it were. But the remarks that you cite are hardly incendiary– and, as far as they go, they represent fairly reasonable Christian sentiment.
Brien, (#5) The Ugandan Parliament going to consider a bill that is more than offensive– it is, in my opinion, explicitly demonic and hideous. I’m not sure what you are getting at in your comment, but if you are critical of this bishop for not doing/saying more about this Ugandan bill, then I would like to know what you think he SHOULD do/say about it.
The Bishop of Repton (#4) sounds a complete ass. Of course a family suffering tragic loss will feel it more poignantly at such a season, and we should be aware of and sensitive to that. Their loss, however, doesn’t cancel out God’s love as demonstrated in Christ coming into the world, and for that inestimable blessing, we should feel, among other things, if not exactly “happy,” then joyful.
His quote seems to be using the suppossed outrage at the phrase “Happy Christmas” as a convenient segue into a litany of leftist rants.