Homilies

Back to Homilies menu

            Last Wednesday evening I watched an excellent public TV broadcast on “The Life of the Buddha.”  The Buddha started life as Siddhartha, a prince brought up in a royal palace and shielded by his father from any knowledge of the outside world. 
            One day Siddhartha ventured outside the palace and encountered the realities of sickness, old age, and death.  He left the palace, his wife and infant son, and embarked on a course of extreme asceticism, torturing his body and subsisting on one grain of rice a day.
            Then one day, during meditation, in a moment of enlightenment, Siddhartha discovered “the middle path,” which he taught to his disciples.  Buddhism has been known as “the middle path” ever since. 
            Anglicanism too has known itself by this term: it is the via media, the middle way, between Rome and Geneva, between Roman Catholicism and Protestantism.  It is not easy to “stick to the middle of the road.”  Indeed, if you are a motorist, it is a dangerous thing to do. 
            But just as Siddhartha’s discovery of a middle path between luxury and asceticism was the result of his personal story, so Anglicanism’s identity as the middle way comes out of the history of the Church of England, from which we have descended.  It represents what we are. 
            In the 30 years since I returned to the Anglican fold, the middle way has certainly  not been the top priority in our church, and our ecumenical efforts have helped erode any particular Anglican identity or ethos, a word one doesn’t often hear these days.  For if the important thing is what we all hold as Christians, what point could there be in stressing what makes us different as Anglicans? 
            But imitating other religious traditions is a strategy for failure.  When the BAS came out in 1985, it was modeled on the Novus Ordo of Pope Paul VI.  Last Tuesday, at the deanery clericus, I learned that the Roman Catholic eucharist is veering off course linguistically, coming to resemble, of all things, the Book of Common Prayer!  Even the venerable response “and with thy spirit”  is making a comeback. 
            I believe that, for all our problems, Anglicanism has an essential role to play in world-wide Christianity, but only if we remain who and what we are, Henry VIII and all.  When the Jesuit order, to which I belonged for 30 years, was veering off course, the pope at the time gave the admonition, “Let them be what they are, or let them cease to be.” 
            Bishop Spong’s mantra is “change or die,” but change for the sake of change will only hasten our demise.  We must be what we are, or we will cease to be, because we will have become irrelevant. 
            The Swiss psychologist C.G. Jung has given us the following advice:
                        At the time when our most valuable spiritual possessions are being
                        squandered, we would do well to consider very carefully the
                        meaning and purpose of the things we so heedlessly seek to
                        cast overboard.
            Next Sunday is Good Shepherd Sunday.  Some years ago I heard it said that whatever one did about the Book of Common Prayer, the Prayer Book lectionary had been definitively replaced by the Common Lectionary and could no longer be used.  That would have been the end of Good Shepherd Sunday.  For next Sunday derives its name from the gospel for the Second Sunday after Easter in the Prayer Book lectionary.  The fact that we are still celebrating it as our patronal feast demonstrates our intention to remain who and what we are. 

April 11, 2010

back to top