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The Sunday before last I was in Washington for the Annual General Meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature.  Some years ago, when this meeting was being held in Boston, I played hooky from the conference long enough to take in the breath-taking exhibit at the Museum of Fine Arts, entitled “Pharaohs  of the Sun.” 
            This exhibit featured the art of the Amarna Period in Egyptian history, presided over by the so-called “heretic pharaoh” Akhenaten.  Akhenaten took the revolutionary step of abolishing the old Egyptian gods and substituting in their place the worship of the solar disk, called “Aten.”  Akhenaten’s monotheistic religion is thought by some to have influenced Moses in moving the Jewish people to worship the one God, Yahweh. 
            But Akhenaten’s revolution did not last. His son, Tutankhamen, better known as King Tut, turned back to the traditional religion, and in all the surviving inscriptions from Akhenaten’s reign, his name has been systematically obliterated. 
            Akhenaten’s revolution reminded me of a conversation I had some years ago with a younger colleague in the priesthood.  When I asked her what she considered to be the most pressing problem for Anglicanism today, she replied simply: “Old church, new church.”  This proposal was not simply for change but for a radical break with our religious past, just what Akhenaten had attempted, and I have to wonder whether the outcome will be any happier for us than it was for the heretic emperor. 
            Anglicanism has always been open to accepting whatever is of value in other religious traditions.  But this eagerness to adopt the practices and traditions of other Christian faiths may blind us to the value of what we have outselves.  On another occasion, I was with a group of clergy who were insisting on all that we needed to learn from Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy.  Finally, I felt I had to intervene. I asked, “Is there nothing in 400 years of Anglican history which you would consider worth preserving?”  The only response to my question was an embarrassed silence. 
            We are all painfully aware of the declining membership which main-line Protestant faiths are experiencing in Canada today.  But surely the solution cannot be for us to turn our backs on our own religious history.  Why would anyone want to join a church which saw nothing of value in its own past? 
            Today, on the First Sunday of Advent, we are entering upon the most traditional season of the Christian year, a time when people who otherwise never darken the door of a church feel the stirring of religious instincts.  Some years ago my wife and I were attending the First Vespers of Christmas at. St. James Cathedral.  The church was completely packed.  For half an hour before the service was to begin, it was standing room only.  When the time came for the sermon, the preacher began with the extraordinary statement: “I really don’t know why you people are here.” 
            We need to understand why people want to be in church at Christmas, and why they don’t want to bother at other times of the year.  We need to value those things in our tradition which stir the hearts of men and women, and we need to be williing, at times, to wear our own hearts on our sleeves.

December 3, 2006

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