God's people are always called to be faithful and to proclaim the
gospel, as the Apostle says, and to "be ready in season and out of
season," or "whether the time is favorable or unfavorable" (II Tim.
4:2). The verse continues, "reprove, rebuke, and exhort, with complete
patience and teaching." Why? "For the time is coming when people will
not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate
for themselves teachers to suit their own passions and will turn away
from listening to the truth and wander off into myths" (vv. 3, 4, ESV).
The call to faithfulness, however, is a call to "endure" sound teaching
when others will not, to continue to listen to the truth, even when
others "turn away" from what they once had. This is our singular
call--in season and out of season. There are times in the
history of the Church when God blesses his people with the burden of
faithfulness out of season. Our time today is one of those moments. We
Anglicans in particular seem to find ourselves in a unique place in
God's Economy, so that what occurs now will indelibly affect the
trajectory of the Anglican Way.
Our past is full of other unfavorable eras. The Trinitarian and
Christological controversies of the Fourth and Fifth Centuries should
be added here. While we are tempted to look back on this time
triumphalistically, as if recalling some golden age, the fact is that
these early centuries were full of discomfort in the Church. When agreeing to disagree may
have been tempting, our forebears could not escape the truth that ideas
have consequences. So, when challenged by false teachers from within
the Church--including many bishops, priests, and deacons--it became
necessary for us to clarify that unique relationship shared by the
Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. It became necessary for us to
affirm in detail the belief that the Christ of God fully participates
in both realities of Deity and Humanity, so that the two estranged
parties--God and Humanity--might be reconciled. The Fathers of the
Church believed that that truth affects our salvation, causing them to
conclude that "that which has not been assumed has not been healed." If
the Divine Christ was not fully human, then we humans have no salvation.
In our own Anglican history, tumultuous times brought us to the Synod
of Whitby in A.D. 664, which ultimately united Celtic and Anglo-Saxon
Christians into one church. Other such moments in Anglicanism would
include the English Reformation of the Sixteenth Century, when through
the faithful sacrifice of many we recovered the great doctrines of
grace and faith founded upon the authority of Holy Scripture. When the
English church faced the danger of splintering like the continental
Protestants, the Elizabethan Religious Settlement of 1559 left us with
a church that understood itself uniquely as Catholic, but reformed.
When threatened by institutionalism and doctrinal and spiritual
indifferentism, God ignited the Evangelical and Wesleyan Revival of the
Eighteenth Century to turn our hearts back to our First Love.
There is no doubt that other events in the life of the Church could be
added--inside and outside of our Communion--and there is no disputing
that the above-mentioned periods came with a few warts. Not all of the
players arrived with holy agendas. Sin got in the way definitely, but
not ultimately. Sometimes the call to faithfulness looked, in the
world's eyes, like failure. Those times included much suffering. They
were not easy and the transitions were not smooth, but God blessed
these burdens to help shape the Anglican Way of being Christian.
Once again, we find ourselves in a time when many who sit in high
places have, as the Apostle prophesied, accumulated for themselves
teachers to suit their own passions. For instance, a bishop can, with
impunity, write and publish books that deny every unique teaching of the Christian faith. Another man who has a same-sex live-in lover can be elevated to the sacred Order of Bishop.
Yet another bishop, who is charged "to give instruction in sound
doctrine and also to rebuke those who contradict it" (Titus 1:9) can endorse and bless
both of these above mentioned expressions of unfaithfulness--and has
even permitted the noncanonical blessing of same-sex coupling--and can
then be elected as Presiding Bishop and Primate of an Anglican Province.
Not all of our shame makes it into the local paper or the national news
broadcasts. The average North American Anglican may not know of the
leaders who, in violation of official church teaching, allow the non-baptized (even those committed to non-Christian religious beliefs) to partake of the Eucharist. Not everyone knows of the west-coast joint celebration of a Hindu service with a Christian Eucharist--which included an apology for those who try to share the Christian gospel with Hindus. Few are aware of how many bishops and diocesan conventions support blessing sexual unions outside of Christian marriage--even designing liturgies
for Anglicans to use to bless these unions. Many Anglicans would be
shocked by the public statements of bishops who have said that since we
wrote the Bible, we can rewrite the Bible, or that if we have to chose between heresy and schism, we should choose heresy every
time (as if God gives us an option to chose one over the other!). And
then, finally, there are those in the highest seats in western
Anglicanism who have been clear that the new sexual agenda will ultimately prevail and
that the rest of the Communion will just have to catch up to it, or
that believing that Jesus' words that he is "the Way, the Truth, and
the Life" and the only way to the Father is putting God in a box. Although we should be prepared for such things, since every writer of the New Testament
tells us that there will be false teachers in the church, the mandate
to "contend for the faith that was once for all delivered to the
saints" (Jude 3) can be troublesome. It can cause a major disruption to
the burdens of every day life. Many of us are simply trying to make
ends meet. We are trying to raise our children and strengthen our
marriages. Perhaps we face illness or unemploymArialent. And now, we have to
step out of our comfort zone and stand up to false teaching? Are we
really ready to, as the ApostLargele wrote, "reprove, rebuke, and exhort"
those who, with well designed excuse-making, "will not endure sound
teaching?" Should we even, as more and more are saying, become part of a new reformation?
We are called to be faithful in season and out of season--whether the
time is favorable or unfavorable. The Jesus who told us that if we do
not take up our cross and follow him, we are not worthy of him (Matt.
10:38) is the same Jesus who told us that his yoke is easy and his
burden is light (Matt. 11:30). The Jesus who told us to remain
faithful to the end, even after we are persecuted and hated by all
nations from without and suffer from false prophets within (Matt.
24:4-13) is the same Jesus who promised to be with us to the very end
of the age (Matt. 28:20). Jesus tells us in the above mentioned passage
from Matthew 10, "Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever
loses his life for my sake will find it" (v. 39, ESV). Embedded in
these words is the promise that the burden of faithfulness is, in fact,
a blessing--especially when we are faithful out of season. The only question left is--Who's willing?