As I said yesterday, as a special treat to both myself and you, I thought I’d do my regular Sunday blog here just this once. And, as if to bless such a propitious choice, the internet, as it were, delivered up to me one of those rare moments where someone directly refers to a biblical text that then ends up being the apportioned lection. Those of you who listen to the Stand Firm podcast will have heard the guys talking about this article (I haven’t listened yet, but I plan to when I get past a stressful bit in the murder mystery I’m in the middle of).
Essentially, a priest of the Anglican Church of Canada moved to Texas to serve a TEC (The Episcopal Church) congregation in the Diocese of Texas and discovered that there are a whole lot of ACNA (Anglican Church in North America) churches all around. It would seem from the article that this TEC priest must be conservative—ish. The way he describes the errors of TEC indicates that he probably thinks that marriage, for example, ought to be reserved for one man with one woman. At the same time, he displays astonishing ignorance about the last twenty years of Anglican upheaval, and then, he goes on to use a Biblical image to say the opposite of what Jesus meant when he used it. So let’s take the article first and then wander over to the Gospel lesson for Proper 12.
The writer of the piece, Cole Hartin, begins this way:
Since ACNA did not really have a presence within hundreds of kilometers of where I was serving in Canada, I did not think much about the problem of competing Anglicanisms except as theoretical. But now that I am here, I am starting to think about this problem of our divided churches in more concrete ways. And to that end — as an exercise in thinking out loud — I want to suggest a number of theses about the ACNA and Episcopal schism that might be stating the obvious. But stating the obvious in this case — I pray — might be a witness to the truth.
Here is the first of his theses:
Both TEC and ACNA are diminished churches because of the schism. No one’s hands are clean and no one has the higher ground — at least on the ecclesial level. That the founding churches of the ACNA felt pressed to separate from TEC is a failure of both bodies. Both lacked the will and imagination to bear witness to Christ together. TEC has pandered to the worst of liberalism for decades, and this came to a head with an abandonment Christian sexual ethics in favor of the values of Hollywood. As far as I can tell, TEC has sided with those in power once again, with views on marriage and family that would be lauded in centers of power in America — from elite colleges to the hubs for the most fashionable entertainment. On the other hand, the ACNA — in an effort to preserve pure Christian teaching — has left many queer Christians out in the cold. Moreover, the rigorist separation from swaths of siblings — the wheat and the tares together — is just as reprehensible as the values from which they are trying to flee. No one has done right, but all of us like sheep have gone astray.
This must be some version of the power of positive thinking. If one wants something very much, and visualizes it, perhaps even making a vision board, maybe it will come into being. If only TEC, diminished as it is, could be reunited with the equally diminished ACNA we would all be less diminished. Everyone is a little bit wrong. Everyone should just say sorry and kiss and make up.
Observe the two “problems” he names. TEC has “abandoned”—his word!— “Christian sexual ethics in favor of the values of Hollywood.” And “the ACNA—in an effort to preserve pure Christian teaching—has left queer Christians out in the cold.” These two sets of phrases illustrate, though the author himself apparently cannot see it, two different and conflicting views of the world and the nature of truth itself. Which is to say, the Reverend Hartin is contradicting himself. If a church “abandons” something the Bible teaches as a matter of salvation and begins teaching the opposite thing, that church departs from the faith. It can no longer be considered a true Christian church. Those who left TEC to form the ACNA weren’t trying simply to “preserve pure Christian teaching,” they had to leave because it is unloving to let people run full tilt into perdition without warning them about where they are going. It might appear loving to go with them, but, in fact, it is not.
Furthermore, TEC purports to invite all “Queer Christians” in out of the cold, but once they’ve come in, TEC opens all the doors and windows, so that winter also joins the party, and all those inside the building starve and freeze. Whereas, if you have a real church, with real doors and windows, and nice food inside, and you invite everyone to enter, even “queer” people can come in, though, like everyone else, they must repent and believe the gospel, including relinquishing all those identities that corrupt and destroy the creatures of God. This is so very basic, it’s hard for me to see how any publication in the year of our Lord 2023, especially one that presents itself as orthodox, wouldn’t be able to find someone who could articulate it.
Once again, for those in the back, what happened between the ACNA and TEC wasn’t a schism. Schism happens when a group of Christians leaves or sets itself apart from the genuine Church. What happened, in this case, is that a once faithful church body (TEC) fell headlong into heresy and apostate ruin, leaving the true Church. Some people who were members of the ruined apostate former church then left the apostate body so that they might form a valid assembly (the ACNA) and thereby remain members of the true Church. The two groups are not “siblings,” though the Wheat and the Tares reference is interesting and we will return to it in a moment. Carrying on, here is the second of his theses:
The only genuinely Christian teleology for the two churches is reconciliation and reunification. I understand that this may not be on the horizon of many of our minds. But, keeping in view Jesus’ prayer for unity in John 17 and the reality that separation from individual sisters and brothers in Christ is purgative, “so that their souls might be saved in the day of the Lord,” this means that reunification in Christ ought to be the goal for the ACNA and TEC. This must always be on the table. And we cannot have a Christian vision of the future unless it includes some kind of movement toward wholeness. More practically — unless some kind of scheme for reintegration is on the horizon as churches plan and discern for the future, we have lost the plot.
I hate to be the sort of Anglican to drag Jesus into it, but our Lord’s Prayer for Unity must be the most confusing text for everyone everywhere. Still, it is possible to understand what he is praying for, in context, on his journey from the Upper Room to the Garden, with his disciples who were about to scatter through the dark streets of Jerusalem in terror and woe. His prayer doesn’t mean that a church that is not a church ought to reconcile with a church that is a church. Rather, Jesus prayed in advance that the coming of the Holy Spirit would join individuals into the mystical union of his own Body, that the Spirit would unite the Church through time and space in an unbreakable way. Then he went to the cross and wrought the reconciliation of the creature with the creator by his own blood. Then he ascended into heaven. Then the Holy Spirit came, and since then, there has always been the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church over which Jesus rules as King and head. If you read the New Testament, which I wish lots more people would do, you will observe a great deal of division and teaching about division. The apostles did not want their churches to let heresy fester inside their Sunday Morning Worship Times (or whatever you want to call the Divine Liturgy). If someone came preaching another gospel, Christians across the known world were to have nothing to do with that person. Not even to have a burger and a beer to catch up on old times.
I do sometimes worry that some portions of the ACNA are losing that plot, but that is a matter for another time. We carry on. Here is the third one:
Time is of the essence. The longer TEC and ACNA wait for formal, institutional mutual repentance and recognition, the more difficult it will become. This is a purely pragmatic reality. Each church will continue to develop its own institutional structures, be solidified in their own liturgical traditions, and struggle with decline. This latter point is especially important. While the decline narrative within TEC is ubiquitous, post-pandemic numbers show that ACNA is facing the same issues, if to a different degree. There are no winners here. Putting off conversations about how churches can work toward common ground is only to delay the inevitable, even if those conversations begin as ecumenical dialogues.
Actually, I don’t think the ACNA is in sharp catastrophic decline. From what I’ve seen, most ACNA congregations have recovered from covid and many are growing. Sure, as a denomination, it’s tiny, but rebuilding a church takes generations and generations. It will take the quiet digging of the spade into the hard ground to get up to the exultant numbers of TEC today. How many people go to church on Sunday mornings in TEC? I can’t remember but I know they fell by nearly half since 2019. Here’s a thing, though, denying the gospel doesn’t bring church growth. It might assemble a crowd and finance an auditorium and a gym, but not a church. Jesus builds his Church, and if you’re not a church, he’s not going to bring people to you. Preach the gospel in season and out of season, using many words, and the Church will grow, however slowly. We carry on to number four:
We have all the time of in the world. I must also point out that God does God’s work in God’s time. The work of reconciliation is not linear, and through fits and starts it will continue to go on. It took Lutherans and Roman Catholics almost 500 years to converge on the doctrine of justification. It may take 500 years for Anglican convergence in North America. Likely, it will at least take the retirement of the shell-shocked leaders in both churches who still bear the wounds of the initial split.
Sure, we will all die and then the young’uns will take over and, at least from this angle, throw all that hard work into the rubbish bin of history. Except I don’t think so. The demographics are not on Cole Harkin’s side. Young people want the truth, for the most part, and they want to be able to trust that the person standing up in the pulpit every week isn’t going to throw it all away for the next drab flag. But yes, I suppose we do have all the time in the world because we don’t govern time, and we don’t govern the world. On another note, I don’t think that Lutherans and Roman Catholics have actually “converged” on the doctrine of justification. I think some Lutherans and Catholics have tried to do that, but they don’t represent the grand unification that apparently the Reverend Harkin thinks they do.
Anyway, let’s skip the last one and stagger over to the Gospel lesson, which is, you guessed it, about the Wheat and the Tares. Jesus has been using the most ordinary, basic elements of life to explain to his disciples what work in the Kingdom is like. I suppose if he were here today, trying to make the same point, he would say something like, you know how your Facebook and Twitter feeds are filled with both sane people and crazy people? Well, you can’t weed out all the crazies or you’d never have time to brush your teeth. You’re just going to have to live with the jumble, and at the very end, I’ll come along and sort everything out for you. You, in other words, don’t have to be the arbitrator of the judgment and wrath of God. You don’t have to know the motivations and inclinations of every single person who sits in the pew. You can’t “weed out” all the wicked people because, at a very practical level, you’d have no one left. But let’s listen to Jesus in his own, agricultural words:
He put another parable before them, saying, “The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a man who sowed good seed in his field, but while his men were sleeping, his enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat and went away. So when the plants came up and bore grain, then the weeds appeared also. And the servants of the master of the house came and said to him, ‘Master, did you not sow good seed in your field? How then does it have weeds?’ He said to them, ‘An enemy has done this.’ So the servants said to him, ‘Then do you want us to go and gather them?’ But he said, ‘No, lest in gathering the weeds you root up the wheat along with them. Let both grow together until the harvest, and at harvest time I will tell the reapers, “Gather the weeds first and bind them in bundles to be burned, but gather the wheat into my barn.”’”
You might be able to see the disappointing irony of the Reverend Harkin’s appeal to this parable. The servants who want to pull up and burn up the Tares, separating them from the Wheat, are not “reprehensible” (his word). Wheat and Tares are no more siblings than goats and sheep are. Rather, “the enemy” sowed weeds in with the true grain. And this was very bad. But also exactly what you would expect, and what you will have observed if you are in any kind of church situation. True Christians mostly want to worship Jesus, however tepidly, and are often conflict-averse, and don’t like to make a fuss, and are often humble and don’t like to judge the hearts of the people sitting around them at coffee hour. They know they are sinners too, desperately in need of the grace of God. Satan always has an easy time sowing error in the church for all these reasons. And he’s done that sort of thing from the very beginning, which you will notice if you read the Bible more. Nevertheless, observe that Jesus, in telling his apostles that they shouldn’t seek out every unrepentant sinner in the world with a zealous fury, only says that because he plans to do it himself at the end. But, and here’s the key, just because Jesus doesn’t want Christians to run about trying to identify the tares and then purging them out, that doesn’t mean he’s fine - in his Church - with notorious public sin which spreads like gangrene if unchecked or with actual wolves (to mix metaphors) ravaging and consuming his sheep (as he makes clear elsewhere). There’s a difference between people going along quietly being unregenerate sinners and people in the context of a church leading other people to hell. So the parable of the Wheat and the Tares doesn’t mean that true Christians are going to be allowed to be complacent and not deal with notorious sin and theological errors. This text does not contradict the rest of the New Testament. Anyway, the disciples are confused and want an explanation, which Jesus happily provides:
Then he left the crowds and went into the house. And his disciples came to him, saying, “Explain to us the parable of the weeds of the field.” He answered, “The one who sows the good seed is the Son of Man. The field is the world, and the good seed is the sons of the kingdom. The weeds are the sons of the evil one, and the enemy who sowed them is the devil. The harvest is the end of the age, and the reapers are angels. Just as the weeds are gathered and burned with fire, so will it be at the end of the age. The Son of Man will send his angels, and they will gather out of his kingdom all causes of sin and all law-breakers, and throw them into the fiery furnace. In that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. Then the righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father. He who has ears, let him hear.
Observe how it gets worse for the Tares when the Son of Man comes back on the scene. I wouldn’t recommend trying, on purpose, in the manner of TEC, to be a Tare at all cost. But that’s just me. The bit I like best, though, is that the “righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father.” That is such an astonishing thought as I muddle along, trying to trust God to sort out all my own murky motivations and troubles. It’s not up to me to purify the church, but I do have to be faithful. Until TEC repents and returns to the Truth, to Jesus himself who gets to set the parameters of doctrine, belief, knowledge, and worship, no Christian can find justification for breaking bread of any kind with those who knowingly and persistently are leading the Lord’s little ones into sin. I pray for the Reverend Harkin and all others who seem to be sincere and desirous of doing the right thing. Read the text a little more carefully, is my advice.
In the meantime, have a nice day, and go to church!
I went to the original article. It was published on the weblog of the Living Church, called Covenant, because they "support the Anglican Covenant (2009) and the ecclesial vision of The Windsor Report (2004; PDF), including its moratoria..." How quaint, that some people still even remember the Anglican Covenant and the Windsor Report. iirc, both got off the ground in a Hindenburg-esque fashion. You know, some people in the 1930s also supported the Maginot Line in France, including its moratoria.
So very good, bless you!!