"The Church of the Ages": A Sermon Preached for the Anglican Military Ordinariate

Preached at the annual gathering of the Anglican Military Ordinariate of the Canadian Armed Forces, Cornwall, Ontario, 6 June 2018

Texts for the Commemoration of Wliiiam Grant Broughton, First Anglican Bishop in Australia: Ephesians 3:14-21, Psalm 112:1-6, Matthew 7:24-29

"I pray that, according to the riches of his glory, he may grant that you may be strengthened in your inner being with power through his Spirit, ¹⁷and that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith, as you are being rooted and grounded in love."  Ephesians 3:16-17

 

When I first started coming to Cornwall, the preachers at the AMO (Anglican Military Ordinariate) eucharists were doddering old chaplains in the twilight of their careers. …  I just never thought that that my turn would come so quickly.

 

Nevertheless, I was excited when I learned that I was to preach on the day of the commemoration of a pioneering colonial bishop.  As a boy at St. John’s School of Alberta, I paddled in a voyageur canoe named Bishop Bompas, after the first Anglican Bishop of Selkirk.  As a theology student, as part of my indoctrination into the heroes and legends of Wycliffe College, I learned the story of Isaac Stringer, famously known as the Bishop who ate his boots.   As the second Bishop of Selkirk in the Yukon, Stringer escaped starvation during a long snowstorm by boiling and eating his sealskin boots.     It sort of went without saying in the college ethos that any good Wycliffe grad would do the same for the sake of the gospel.   Fortunately in my ministry I’ve never had to eat anything more than some ill-advised words or to have swallowed anything more than some pride, both of which are part of a good spiritual diet.

 

The William Broughton, who we commemorate today,  was not however a heroic or especially eager colonial bishop.  It’s true that not every bishop cuts an heroic, swashbuckling figure.  In fact Broughton was one of those English country parsons that you find in a Trollope novel.  A scholarly type, Broughton at first thought himself fortunate to gain the Duke of Wellington, the hero of Waterloo, as a patron.  Sometimes however, a powerful patron can be a mixed blessing, because the Duke decided that Broughton should be the Archdeacon of New South Wales in Australia.  Sometimes it’s stay grey in the shadows.  Broughton doesn’t seem to have wanted this assignment very much - he said at the time that 'there is no ground for congratulation on my appointment’.   Furthermore, it appears that the Duke exaggerated the size of the stipend he would receive - in fact it just barely covered his expenses.   Also, Broughton also discovered that what he thought would be a short posting was anything but - he would in fact stay for as long as the British government wanted, and it would in fact be his life’s work.  Those of us who have ever been beguiled by the seductive words of a staff check during posting season can probably relate to him.

 

Despite being lame and dependent on a cane, Broughton was willing to travel the long outback circuits of his archdeaconry, frequently being away from his home and family in Sydney.   The editors of For All the Saints certainly included him for his pastoral devotion, as well as for his diligent leadership.  The choice of today’s gospel reading from Matthew, (7:24-29) with its image of a house solidly built on rock, would warm the heart of any church administrator.  Broughton, like his contemporary Bishop Strachan in Upper Canada, laid the foundations for the Anglican church in England.   He worked with missionary societies to recruit and train clergy to serve a small and scattered population.  As the first Bishop of the colony he was a champion of education and built synodical structures for the church in Australia which would become a model for the communion.

 

So why is any of this important?  As Rowan Williams has observed, church history is God’s history.   The church across the ages, from generation to generation, is nothing less than God’s doing in the world.  The church is not human activity, and sometimes the church flourishes despite us.   William Broughton was a pioneer, but not all his plans were successful.  His dream of an independent seminary in Sydney failed, and he was disappointed by the Crown’s hands-off attitude to the colonial church.   In this respect, Broughton would have had much in common with his Canadian contemporary, Bishop Strachan. Both were high churchman in the political sense of wanting Anglicanism to be the national and established faith of the state, both were out of step with their age.  There would be no established church for the colonies.  Having lost these battles, both ended up believing that for the church to flourish, it must be solely dependent on the power and promises of God, on God’s word faithfully preached by a diligent and learned clergy, and on administrative and leadership talents of its bishops.

 

A perennial danger of our lives as clergy is to think that we are engaged in a human project, the success of which is largely based upon our efforts and skills.   The annual exercise of the brag sheet reinforces this mindset, as does the accrual of coins, diplomas, commendations, decorations, promotions, and all the other bric a brac of the successful career in military chaplaincy.    Were he here today, I am sure that Bishop Broughton would remind us that our business, if self-dedicated, is like the house built on the sand, soon washed away and forgotten. 

 

In his first charge to his clergy in Australia in December 1829, Broughton spoke of the priest, as “ministers of Christ and stewards of the mysteries of God:a “ pledged by engagements so awful that every one of us by whom they are regarded with becoming seriousness must tremble, in [our] attempts to fulfil them, under a sense of [our] insufficiency”.  Surely one of the great satisfactions and even inspirations of church history is realizing that others stood were we do now, contemplating the heavy spiritual lifts of the day, and realizing their own inadequacies but for the grace of God.   Broughton went on in his charge to say that the only reason he could “with any degree of confidence undertake the duties with which I am here entrusted …was because of his “assured belief that God, whose Providence has guided my steps, will give me grace and power … faithfully to take the oversight of his church , and rightly to divide the word of truth unto all followers of Christ Jesus, our Lord”.

 

Today’s reading from Ephesians was surely one of the texts that Broughton was drawing on for this assurance.   The Apostle Paul, so often accused of bombast and arrogance in our day, actually speaks of his profound dependence on the power of the gospel and the gift of grace to proclaim it.   Our strength to get out of bed and put on the uniform, our faith in our vocations, our love for those who come to us for counselling - where could we find these things if they were not given to us by the Spirit?  How terribly empty and tired we would be were we not “filled with all the fullest of God” (Eph 3.19).

 

In closing, let me fast forward from colonial Australia to very recent history, a hot afternoon in May in Hamilton as the church gathered to commend one of its own to God.  Those of us privileged to be at the funeral of our brother Rob Fead heard Bishop Spence speak luminously of how Rob held up the light in the darkness, showing it to his parishioners, to his reserve regiment, to the friends and family of Nathan Cirillo, and to so many others.   Rob was a strong man, but it was not his light, or his strength.  It was the light of Christ, the love of God, and the strength of the Spirit that dwelled within Rob as gifts which enabled his remarkable ministry.   Rob used them well, and now he has passed from our church to the church of the ages, to take his place with Broughton and Strachan and all the others, the heroic and the unlikely, who God has enabled and used for his good ends.  So may it be said of us after our time, that God was able to accomplish in us “abundantly far more than all we [could] ask or imagine” and so ^“to [God] be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus to all generations, for ever and ever. Amen.”

Book Review: Adam Montgomery, The Invisible Injured: Psychological Trauma in the Canadian Military From the First World War to Afghanistan

Here is a link to my review of the subject book, which appeared on The Strategy Bridge (TSB) this week.   For those of you who aren’t familiar with it, TSB is an excellent online journal for anyone interested in military history, contemporary military issues from doctrine to ethics, and foreign policy.  

https://thestrategybridge.org/the-bridge/2018/5/28/reviewing-the-invisible-injured

Disclaimer: while I am an associate editor for TSB, I had nothing to do with the selection of this piece.

 

MP

 

A Sermon For Ron Steffler and Pentecost

Late putting this up, but I preached this just after the funeral of a beloved and longtime servant leader of the parish, and was reflecting on how Pentecost gives us resources for spiritual resilience as Christians and as church.  MP+

Preached at St. Margaret of Scotland Anglican Church, Barrie, Diocese of Toronto, Pentecost Sunday, 20 May, 2018

Lections:  Acts 2:1-21, Psalm 104:24-34,35b; Romans 8:22-27, John 15:26-27, 16:4b-25

"When the Advocate comes, whom I will send to you from the Father, the Spirit of truth who comes from the Father, he will testify on my behalf. You also are to testify because you have been with me from the beginning. John 15:26-27

 

 In John Donne’s famous poem, “No Man Is An Island”, he writes that “any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind.” Funerals can make us feel this way.  St. Margaret’s will feel like a diminished place for a while.    As Father Simon said on Friday at Ron Steffler’s funeral, there are many many ways in which we will miss Ron’s love, Ron’s service, and Ron’s gifts.  He won’t be sitting back there at Mission Control as he did on many Sundays, running the audio-visual display.   We’ll miss his care for the building, his attention to the website, and all of the many acts of help and assistance that Ron gave to so many of us - and so many of us can talk about something that Ron did for us.   The place will seem poorer without him.  As someone said on Friday, we’ve had enough funerals a St. Margaret’s for a while.  We’ve said goodbye to Ron, and Kay, and Randy, and others in the last six months.   Enough grief.  Enough sad memories.   Fortunately for us, it’s Pentecost. 

 

Our gospel reading today speaks to those of us with sorrow in our hearts.  It reaches out to us who may still be struggling with the grief and the memories that a funeral can trigger.  Jesus in John’s gospel is bidding farewell to his disciples, who will be left behind, but he promises them that he will not leave them.  He will send another, who he calls “the Holy Spirit, the Advocate”.   The Spirit will be God’s ongoing presence with his people.  The Spirit will be be a comforter, but it will be more than that.  The Spirit will enable God’s people to be a community with a very specific character and purpose.   Pentecost is about how God creates a community that has the faith, strength, and hope, to rise above adversity and to go on, even after the funeral of a beloved member.

 

So this Sunday, Pentecost, is about how we are here because God is all about community.  The story of the appearance of the Holy Spirit is a story of God creating a community with a certain shape and character - let’s call it a Pentecost community.   What are the hallmarks of a Pentecost community?   

 

First, it’s a diverse community.    It’s gathered up out of all sorts of people, different languages and backgrounds, different walks of life.  The Pentecost community is not Wonder bread.  It has the same diversity that we see at St. Margaret’s, very different people indeed, who are all here because God wants us to be here.

 

Second, the Pentecost community is a called community.  It began in a core group of disciples, who were all called by Christ, but different people are constantly being added to the story, like the crowds attracted to the disciples in Acts.   Think of how the community of St. Margaret’s and St. Giles is constantly growing and changing.  Some of you remember the heroic days in the storefront and portable, but to many of us, who came later, those are inspiring stories.   Whatever stage in the story we arrived at, we were called to be here.

 

Third, the Pentecost community is a gifted community.  The Spirit was incredibly generous to the disciples, equipping them with gifts of languages so they could be heard by people from all over the known world.  We too have gifts and talents, and we know something about God’s abundance.   As we prepared for Ron’s funeral, I heard people talk about how they never saw food run out at a church function.   That doesn’t surprise me, since our Saviour knew how to make a little bread and fish go a long way.  But think how people of this parish also turned out to help feed and welcome the people who came to see the Deanery Play Saturday a week ago.  Think too of all the gifts that came together in that play, and of how much money it raised for the Busby Centre, $6 thousand dollars.  The same day Sarah Ash ran a golf tournament for her late father, Randy Packham, and raised over $7 thousand dollars for cancer research.   The Spirit’s abundance works with our gifts in so many ways in our community, if we care to look for it.

 

Fourth, the Pentecost community is a community with a story to tell about God.  In Acts the people in the crowd say that “we hear [the disciples] speaking about God's deeds of power”.   This gift of tongues and gift of communication is in keeping with what Jesus ways of the Spirit in John: “he will testify on my behalf. 27 You also are to testify because you have been with me from the beginning” (Jn 15:26-27).  A Pentecost community tells people about God and about our hope in God.  I think of Ron’ Steffler’s work maintaining the parish website and fixing the church and helping with the audiovisual so that people could come and hear God’s word spoken and preached, and I think he got this.  His ministry had a lot to do telling God’s story.

 

 Finally, the Pentecost community is a hopeful community.   Peter says to the crowds in Jerusalem that “everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved”.  We are hear because our Saviour rose from the dead.   The resurrection tells us that death will not have the last word.  We may be well schooled in death looks like.  We may be uncomfortably aware of what cancer can do to the human body.  We may see some among us seen to diminish and become frail, but we are undaunted.  We are a resurrection people.   We know that nothing can separate us from the love  of God.  We believe that God is not finished with us, that his work of creating the world is not yet done. 

 

What that new world will look like, we are not sure, but we know that it will be a world without sin and death or cancer or any of the other things that we struggle with.  We know this because the resurrection of Christ is a sign of God’s determination to rid us of these things.   We may not know clearly how this will happen, but Paul says in Romans 8, in one of the most wonderful passages in scripture, “We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now; and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies” (Rom 8:22-23).

 

So we are a Pentecost people.  Our community is the church, which has carried on across the centuries, forming and reforming, speaking to us in our time.   Our funeral liturgy speaks of how we go the grave singing our Alleluias, because we know that death does not write our ending, but is only the beginning.  We baptize the newborn in the promise that they will have their gifts, their part to play in God’s life of abundance.  And what abundance it is.  This weekend I met Miriam, who was then celebrating her second day on earth.   She really has no business being her.  Her mother had a partial hysterectomy several years ago and was told she would never have children.  And here Miriam is, a sign of God’s abundance and of the Spirit’s work in the redemption of our bodies.     And so we say, as a Pentecost community, as we do each Sunday, Glory to God, whose power, working in us, can do more than we can ask or imagine.  Glory to God from generation to generation, in the church and in Christ Jesus.  Amen.