All posts tagged Anglicanism
I'm not always wearing my full habit...
People would pull up next to us on the freeway and look inside the truck at us. Then they’d drop back and snap photos of Jesus. I heard that somebody put one of the photos on the Internet and said, ‘Jesus is driving on the freeway.’
Luis Garibay, building superintendent at the Cathedral Center of St. Paul in Los Angeles, about the 6-foot Jesus statue carried in the bed of a pickup truck to the Episcopal-Anglican Eucharist at the border wall between Tijuana and California
There are no walls that can separate us from God’s loving grace. There is no border that can do that.
the Right Reverend Diane Bruce, Bishop Suffragan of the Diocese of Los Angeles, after a service of Holy Communion at the border wall between Tijuana and California.
Two 20-foot high steel walls between Tijuana and San Diego made seeing and touching each other all but impossible, but they couldn’t stop Episcopalians and Anglicans on both sides of the border from celebrating the Eucharist together April 2.
The display of unity aimed a spotlight at the plight of the undocumented and on unjust immigration laws that separate and divide families, said Bishop Suffragan Diane Bruce of the Diocese of Los Angeles and Bishop Jim Mathes of the Diocese of San Diego.
With U.S. Border Patrol helicopters circling overhead, the two bishops blessed bread and wine at a 3 p.m. service on the U.S. side of the border at Friendship Park in San Diego. A few yards away across the border wall, clergy from the Anglican Church of Mexico did likewise.
This is a wonderful story, both sad and joyful. I hope you go read the whole thing.
Anglicanism could be seen as a family: in families, you don’t expect everyone to think in exactly the same way. You listen, you shout, cry, talk, compromise. You do not show the door to one member of the family, just because you don’t agree with them. Now Anglicans can start listening afresh.
(Source: waste-my-days, via ebbingusually)
For those in ministry: An exam for the contemporary Christian
This is wonderfully hilarious! A sample…
3 hours. No talking, mobile phones or proselytising.
1. Why would you not want to be the next Archbishop of Canterbury? (Use no more than 6 sheets of paper)
2. A small Methodist chapel has six members. With the aid of compasses and a protractor, draw a diagram of the inter-relationships of the committees they are on. Use no more than four dimensions.
3. Using a sketch-map of the world, explain the Anglican Covenant. (Do not colour countries in pink. We don’t own them any more).
4. A URC chapel has 20 members. Draw the typical seating arrangement at 10.29 on a Sunday. (Use the back row only)…
Go! Read the whole thing! And laugh, because we all need more laughter on Mondays.
Our world is facing problems - poverty, HIV and Aids - a devastating pandemic, and conflict. God must be weeping looking at some of the atrocities that we commit against one another. In the face of all of that, our Church, especially the Anglican Church, at this time is almost obsessed with questions of human sexuality.
It is a perversion if you say to me that a person chooses to be homosexual. You must be crazy to choose a way of life that exposes you to a kind of hatred. It’s like saying you choose to be black in a race-infected society.
If God, as they say, is homophobic, I wouldn’t worship that God.
the Most Reverend Desmond Tutu, retired Archbishop of South Africa
Undercover Nun is with you, Abp. Tutu. If God would condemn even one person to hell because they were born with gender or orientation that doesn’t quite fit cultural norms, well, then I would choose not to worship that God.
(Source: BBC)
Exactly the same love and commitment are possible between two people of the same sex as between two people of different sexes, and it is not immediately clear why the Church should regard such a relationship as ethically or spiritually inferior to a heterosexual marriage.
The fact that fifty years on [after the decriminalisation of homosexuality] the Church is seen as Enemy Number One of gay people is a disaster, both for our own morale and for our mission to the country. We have become the last refuge of prejudice.
(Source: telegraph.co.uk)
Dear Archbishop Williams,
Let me see if I’m reading this correctly. You state that it would be wrong to extend marriage equality to same-sex couples, because passing this law would offend other people. So the “human right” to not be offended by a law trumps the right of all people to marry and enjoy the privileges of marriage? You know, privileges like being able to be together in the hospital when your husband is sick, like being able to pick up your wife’s child from school without hassle, like knowing your joint bank account will be accessible to your spouse if you die unexpectedly. All of these things, you say, are less important than the “right” to unobjectionable legislation!
Wow.
So in the mid nineteenth century, you might have argued that it would be wrong to outlaw slavery. It would be wrong because a law to grant freedom to all persons would offend others by “forcing unwanted change” on them.
I call shenanigans.
Archbishop Williams, Undercover Nun is praying for your immortal soul.
In Christ’s love,
me
Luke 11:27-28 As Jesus was saying these things, a woman in the crowd called out, “Blessed is the mother who gave you birth and nursed you.” He replied, “Blessed rather are those who hear the word of God and obey it.”
Clearly, Undercover Nun is an Anglican, because I saw this and my first thought was:
Does it really have to be rather? Why can’t it be both?
It’s pretty clear that Mary has had some blessings in her life, though she’s had some really tough challenges, too. Now I want to see a word-by-word translation and look this up in my commentary.
(Source: bluemtnmarc, via radioteopoli)
A letter to God
There’s a charming article in [the April 22] Times by Alex Renton, a non-believer who sends his six-year-old daughter Lulu to a Scottish church primary school. Her teachers asked her to write the following letter: “To God, How did you get invented?” The Rentons were taken aback: “We had no idea that a state primary affiliated with a church would do quite so much God,” says her father. He could have told Lulu that, in his opinion, there was no God; or he could have pretended that he was a believer. He chose to do neither, instead emailing her letter to the Scottish Episcopal Church (no reply), the Presbyterians (ditto) and the Scottish Catholics (a nice but theologically complex answer). For good measure, he also sent it to “the head of theology of the Anglican Communion, based at Lambeth Palace.”
The best part of the story? His Grace, the Most Reverend Rowan Williams, primus inter pares among the bishops of the Anglican Communion, responded. Not with a letter of thick theology that most adults wouldn’t even get, but simply and clearly and beautifully, as you would talk to your own granddaughter. Having read some of the ABC’s densely-packed theology, I was amazed to see this expressed so clearly.
Here is the response that +++Rowan sent to little Lulu:
Dear Lulu,
Your dad has sent on your letter and asked if I have any answers. It’s a difficult one! But I think God might reply a bit like this –
‘Dear Lulu – Nobody invented me – but lots of people discovered me and were quite surprised. They discovered me when they looked round at the world and thought it was really beautiful or really mysterious and wondered where it came from. They discovered me when they were very very quiet on their own and felt a sort of peace and love they hadn’t expected.
Then they invented ideas about me – some of them sensible and some of them not very sensible. From time to time I sent them some hints – specially in the life of Jesus – to help them get closer to what I’m really like.
But there was nothing and nobody around before me to invent me. Rather like somebody who writes a story in a book, I started making up the story of the world and eventually invented human beings like you who could ask me awkward questions!’
And then he’d send you lots of love and sign off.
I know he doesn’t usually write letters, so I have to do the best I can on his behalf. Lors of love from me too.
+Archbishop Rowan
I can’t imagine a better gift to this young girl — nor to the rest of us — than this sweet and authentic letter. I absolutely love the image of God writing a storybook, making up the story of the world. The good Archbishop did not say this, but God made humans to be co-creators with God… so we get to write in God’s storybook, too!
What will you write in God’s storybook today, little child of God?
