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By your endurance you will gain your lives. Luke 21:29

            Two years ago the Sunday before Advent fell on the third Sunday of November, and since our practice here is to use the Book of Alternative Services on the third Sunday of the month, in 2005 we celebrated, on November 20th, the feast of “The Reign of Christ.” 
            Today we are celebrating “The Sunday next before Advent,”  known as “’Stir up’ Sunday,” from the first two words of the Prayer Book collect.
            It was Vatican II which first introduced the feast of “Christ the King,” to be celebrated on the last Sunday of the church year, and in 1985 the BAS followed suit.  The introduction of the Common Lectionary in 1969 was hailed as an ecumenical breakthrough, since all the churches that used it would be reading the same scriptural passages. 
            But I have to wonder how much practical difference this “breakthrough” has made in the relations between our separated communions.  From the beginnings of the ecumenical movement we have heard it said, “In essentials, unity; in non-essentials, diversity; in all things, charity.” 
            But as the Anglican Church, in its separation anxiety, strives more and more to assimilate itself to the Church of Rome, diversity in non-essentials, such as the observance of “’Stir up’ Sunday,”  tends to get short-changed. 
            Assimilation is a tricky business.  European Jews sought to assimilate themselves to the cultures of the countries in which they were living, so even when Adolf Hitler came to power, German Jews thought they would be safe.  After all, they were Germans first and Jews second.  But their assimilation did not save them from the Holocaust.  Even Edith Stein, who had converted to Catholicism and entered the Carmelite order, perished in a Nazi extermination camp. 
            The assimilation of Anglicanism to Roman Catholicism will obviously not lead to a holocaust, but neither will the result be the union of our two communions as equal partners.  Rather, those Anglicans who do not have a special agenda, such as women’s ordination or gay marriage, will find themselves attracted more and more to the world-wide church from which the Church of England originated in the 16th century. 
            This may be the right move for those involved, but, sooner or later, it would mean the silencing of a unique voice within the Christian movement which, I believe, still has an important role to play. 
            So I offer our Anglican Church the same advice which a pope once gave the Jesuit order:
                        “Let them be what they are, or let them cease to be!”              

November 25, 2007

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