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When the Sabbath was over, Mary of Magdala, Mary the mother of James, and Salome bought some spices, so that they might go and anoint the body of Jesus. And very early on the first day of the week they went to the tomb, after sunrise. They were saying to one another: “Who will roll away the stone for us from the entrance of the tomb?” But, on looking up, they saw that the stone had already been rolled back; it was a very large one. Going into the tomb, they saw a young man sitting on their right, in a white robe, and they were dismayed; But he said to them: “Do not be dismayed; you are looking for Jesus, the Nazarene, who has been crucified; he has risen, he is not here! Look! Here is the place where they laid him. But go, and say to his disciples and to Peter ‘He is going before you into Galilee; there you will see him, as he told you.’” They went out, and fled from the tomb, for they were trembling and bewildered; and they did not say a word to any one, for they were frightened; (Mark 16:1-8)

Back before Advent I mentioned in passing “…my brother’s unfavourite Episcopal minister”.  Looking at this passage reminds me of same minister, because it involves the subject he taught me: modern Biblical scholarship, and this passage–or more accurately what follows–is one of those he discussed.  But some background is in order.

Until I went to the one and only Episcopal educational institution I ever attended, the Bible was pretty straightforward.  But same institution required two semesters of theology, and this minister taught the first one.  While regaling us with source theories (Torah and Gospels,) problems of authorship (he stated that John was an “old codger” when he wrote his gospel) and the like, he entertained us with stories like how he became a Vegas show stopper by wearing his dog collar on the front row of a production where the performer came out singing “Never on Sunday.”

It was evident to him that I wasn’t exactly bowled over by him or his German-fuelled erudition in modern (we weren’t post-modern at that point) Biblical studies, so I wasn’t his favourite student.  But he left after that year and went to the military school where my brother was attending.  He told my brother point blank that “I didn’t like your brother, and I don’t like you.”  My brother and I were very different people, but he was upset at this man’s attack on me, and told him so.  My brother’s grade suffered as a result, something he could ill afford at that point in his life.

This man was our school chaplain to boot: I ultimately responded to him and his successor (who had issues of his own) by swimming the Tiber.  But we must get back to the passage at hand, which concerns the first Easter morning.

Current manuscript evidence tell us that the best copies of the Gospel of Mark end at verse 8, the end of the passage above.  That’s a pretty abrupt ending, even though the Greeks were adept at abrupt endings.  It’s led to much speculation about what (if anything) is supposed to come after.  There is more than one possible candidate, although I believe what traditionally appears as vv. 9-20 are canonical.  (I leave it as an exercise to my Evangelical friends to demonstrate how we know this is so.)

Ultimately, however, ending the narrative at v. 8–“…for they were frightened”–is highly untriumphalistic for an event that really justifies triumphalism.  The women–the first ones to discover the Resurrection–were told the truth by the angel, but their reaction to both angel and news was entirely understandable.  It was Our Lord’s task in the time he was on the earth after the Resurrection to settle them and others down and to prepare them for the beginning of the mission that was to come.

The women who first visited the tomb, however, were and are not the only ones frightened by the Resurrection.  As N.T. Wright likes to point out, the powers that be in those days didn’t like the idea either.  It is the ultimate statement that we who follow Jesus Christ in this life and through our own resurrection into eternity will bodily transcend the control of those who think they are the gods of this world.  In a time when the authority of the state grows daily, it’s little wonder that Christianity–with its promise of a new earth–is concomitantly attacked.

But for those of us who are called by his name, the resurrection–his and ours–is not frightening but the ultimate hope:

But, in truth, Christ has been raised from the dead, the first-fruits of those who are at rest. For, since through a man there is death, so, too, through a man there is a resurrection of the dead. For, as through union with Adam all men die, so through union with the Christ will all be made to live. But each in his proper order-Christ the first-fruits; afterwards, at his Coming, those who belong to the Christ. Then will come the end-when he surrenders the Kingdom to his God and Father, having overthrown all other rule and all other authority and power. For he must reign until God ‘has put all his enemies under his feet.’ The last enemy to be overthrown is death; For God has placed all things under Christ’s feet. (But, when it is said that all things have been placed under Christ, it is plain that God is excepted who placed everything under him.) And, when everything has been placed under him, the Son will place himself under God who placed everything under him, that God may be all in all! (1 Corinthians 15:20-28)

As we celebrate the Resurrection on Easter and throughout the year, let us take comfort that we can and will triumph with Our Lord, and not be frightened.

We’ve been told that this doesn’t happen, but now we know better…

During a Sunday morning service at Trinity Church last summer, a longtime parishioner looked around during the reading of the Gospel and counted the worshippers. By her tally, there were 49 people in the pews of the historic lower Manhattan church – a meager turnout for the storied, 314-year-old parish.

She was puzzled, then, when the next week’s church bulletin reported attendance at 113. Trinity’s rector, the Rev. James Cooper, had decided that tourists who wander in and out of the chapel should be counted as well, she was told. “That’s just a little snapshot into the way he presents everything,” said the parishioner, who was also a member of the governing board until she resigned in protest.

It’s pretty much standard fare amongst the left that “TV evangelists” and other conservative preachers are nothing but money-grubbing charlatans who will say just about anything for a buck and an audience.  And I’ve always looked at “preacher math” with a jaundiced eye; in the Church of God, we infelicitously refer to such hyperbolic rhetoric, esp. re numbers of people, as “evangelistically speaking.”

The liberals aren’t going be left out of the competition. Although the numbers of people are smaller, the money is a different story.  And Rev. Cooper isn’t shy about taking that in too:

Instead of helping the poor, Cooper’s helped himself – with demands for a $5.5 million SoHo townhouse, an allowance for his Florida condo, trips around the world including an African safari and a fat salary. Rather than building an endowment, he is accused of wasting more than $1 million on development plans for a luxury condo tower that has been likened to a pipe dream and burning another $5 million on a publicity campaign.

Cooper, 67, whose compensation totaled $1.3 million in 2010, even added CEO to his title of rector. He began listing himself first on the annual directory of vestry members. The atmosphere has become so poisonous that nearly half the 22 members of the vestry, or board, have been forced out or quit in recent months.

The only good news in this sad situation is that Cooper is spending God’s money on African safaris rather than undermining the orthodox Anglicans on same continent, which is what his superiors at “815” would like for him to do.  But the TEC left, which has never taken the challenge of sell all or shut up, will, through mismanagement and corruption like this, end up with neither voice nor funding.

Visitors to Stand Firm in Faith, had they not heeded the warnings, were probably surprised to see the entirely new format yesterday evening.  And it was a pleasant surprise; the changes take Stand Firm into a new dimension as a blog and in reality as a news source.

As Greg Griffith explained, the changes are more than cosmetic:

I have said for years that the battle being fought in the Episcopal Church mirrors in many ways the battle that’s being fought in America: In the church, the battle is over what it means to be a Christian; in the nation, the battle is over what it means to be an American. The battle lines, the formations, the nature of the skirmishes, the casualties… all are eerily similar.

Add to that the fact that the battle to which we’ve had front-row seats all these years is one that several other denominations – the Methodists and Lutherans, for example – are just beginning to fight, and I believe the future direction of this site becomes inevitable: We must take this show and lift it above Anglicanism, to confront more directly the forces that are trying to do to other religious bodies what they have already done to the Episcopal Church, to offer comfort and camaraderie and counsel to our allies on other fronts.

One reason why I decided to enter the Anglican/Episcopal web world (before 2005) and blogosphere (after that date) is the realisation that the Episcopal Church, where I grew up and had seen these battles fought in Round I, was to both make the connection between what has been going on in and around TEC for years was in advance of what is now happening both in the general culture and in other churches.

I should also add that I believe that, although Greg mentions the Methodists and Lutherans, Pentecostal and Charismatic churches are not as far from facing the same issues–in the West at least–than they think.  I find an irritating unwillingness to discuss these issues amongst my bretheren there, but just because we’re unwilling to discuss things doesn’t mean we won’t have to, if for no other reason than our ever-expanding government will force us to.

Did I say bretheren?  Stand Firm, in its blogroll, lists Positive Infinity as an “Anglican” blog.  I am honoured by the designation.  It’s a sign that this attempt to take the church a step forward in its “John 17” challenge in a meaningful–not the sappy, inchoate ecumenism we see so many other places–way has succeeded.

God bless everyone at Stand Firm as they move forward.

Rowan Williams’ resignation/retirement as Archbishop of Canterbury has generated a great deal of comment within and without the Anglican/Episcopal world.  It’s not been a happy tenure of the seat of Becket and Cranmer (it ended badly for them, too, from a temporal standpoint) and everybody knows it.

But life is too short to make all of the mistakes we need to learn from, so let’s consider the lesson here.  And it’s simple: “Anglican Fudge,” that time honoured skill honed by generations of Anglican/Episcopal ministers and prelates, just doesn’t work any more.  That was obvious to some of us before but Williams’ tenure has only given us an outsized object lesson.

For the uninitiate, “Anglican Fudge” is that quality of thought and discourse whereby ministers and bishops say things in a mellifluous way that have the tone of gravitas and serious thought but which in reality say nothing.  Generations of Anglican/Episcopal people have been nurtured on this kind of “spiritual food” and thought themselves superior to the rest of Christianity–to say nothing of humanity–for ingesting it.  For harder headed people, it came across as vacuous, which is why people like my father seldom found themselves passing through the narthex.  For me, it was a big reason why I went to Rome forty years ago–when you need crisp answers for life, Anglican Fudge is the last thing you eat.

Williams, however, had an Anglican academic’s consummate skill at coming out with Fudge.  He could make statements that had the sound of gravitas and in some ways a sense of verisimilitude, but in the end either said nothing or missed the point completely.  A classic example of this was his recent gaffe over people wearing crosses to work, where his implied comparison of Christian people who lost their jobs to superficial Christians who only wore it as a decoration was otiose at best and offensive at worst.

To be fair, Williams’ situation both in the Church of England and the Anglican Communion wasn’t very happy from the start.  The usual troublemakers, the Episcopalians, along with their Canadian counterparts, had cleverly used the Fudge to obscure the real trajectory of their church, which is why the 2003 ordination of the openly gay V. Gene Robinson as Bishop of New Hampshire came as such a shock–and a wake-up call–to many.  On the other side, the highly un-Anglican confrontations at Lambeth 1998 had stirred the Africans in particular to realise that many of their Anglican counterparts in the West had abandoned the faith behind the cover of Fudge and that something needed to be done.  That “something” was the numerous border crossing efforts, starting with the AMiA and continuing to this day.

It should have been obvious to any long-term observer that what we had here were irreconcilable differences between two world views.  Given his past opinions on the subject, and given the course of his own country, the logical thing to do for Williams was to basically tell the Africans and other conservatives that “good” people were going towards “tolerance” and that they would be left behind if they didn’t.  That wouldn’t have sat well with the intended audience but it would have least brought honestly and clarity to the discussion, saving the Communion a lot of heat without light and overseas travel expenses to boot.

But purveyors of the Fudge don’t always think logically.  Williams’ basic approach was to put the Communion through endless meetings and summits, crowned by the indaba-based Lambeth 2008.  (Personal note: I have worked for Africans for the last three years, and we haven’t had an indaba about anything.)  His idea was that he could gum the Communion to death they would come to some kind of meaningless consensus and everything would be good again.  It didn’t work on either side.  You can eat the Fudge without teeth, but the Africans rightly know that, with Islam and the other challenges of life in reality, you cannot live on Fudge alone.  On the other side, the Episcopalians chose Katharine Jefferts-Schori as Presiding Bishop, who left behind a Fudge-laden approach for a more smashmouth (and expensive) way of ruling her church.

It’s tempting to say that a “real leader” could have done better.  Given the irreconcilable differences we have both in the Communion and in the world at large–and especially those in a Britain overshadowed by militant secularism and Islam–it’s unlikely that a stronger leader could have brought meaningful reconciliation.  What one could have done is to have brought the conflict to a more definite climax and conclusion.  The last thing that Rowan Williams wanted to do, however, was to preside over the dissolution of the Anglican Communion.  On paper he has succeeded, but the present reality will doubtless assert itself in the days ahead as it has in the recent past.

But most of us will go on living after Rowan Williams is burrowed at Oxford.  The lesson that we who profess and call ourselves Christians must take to heart is that, in a world where those who hate us outnumber those who love us–or at least are better positioned in society to shove that hatred down our throats:

But Jesus answered: “Scripture says–‘It is not on bread alone that man is to live, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.’”  (Matthew 4:4)

And that goes for the Fudge, too.