From the Rector

Dear Friends in Christ,

One of the gifts of being in a multi-staff parish with lots of educated and faithful folks is that you get to experience a variety of preaching.

I generally find that the Holy Spirit does something with each sermon offered for someone here. There are times when I preach and think it a lame dog of a sermon but hear someone tell me it’s the best they’ve heard or what I said really spoke to them that day.

Of course, there are other days when I think I’ve turned in something praiseworthy and excellent but it goes over with all the energy of a flan in a microwave.

I thought about preaching after Deacon Tom’s message this past Sunday. In it he posed big, challenging questions. My general take is that if our faith is so wobbly that a little gust of doctrinal turbulence pushes us into the depths of the Fall then we probably need to pray harder.

There have been times in my life when that sermon was exactly what I needed to hear. I was wrestling with what it meant to be a person who took both evidence at face value regarding things like evolution, climate change, and the like and was also willing to look beneath the evidence for the deeper, truer patterns of cosmic ordering.

I needed permission, somehow, to do that searching at those points in my life. Any faithful person needs those periods in their faith life. Anything worth loving is worthy of deep contemplation and worthy of assessing with that most basic question, “What do I believe?”

The wonderful thing about Christianity is that it is not built only on what we believe but who we believe.

We get to decide whether we will believe the promises of Christ.

We get to decide whether we will believe in the Father’s love for us as we are welcomed as siblings and heirs with Christ.

We get to decide whether we will believe that the Holy Spirit has spoken to the Church across two millennia and more guarding its unity and guiding its faith—and holding it to account when it errs.

Christ tells us simply that he is the way, the truth, and the life. He tells us of the Spirit and of the Father both. He welcomes us into this divine dance between these parts of what we know as God. He welcomes us to decide whether we believe what has been revealed to us in the Word made Flesh. That can sound rather heady but it’s really the most essential fact of human history.

God walked among us and raised the dead.

That is a fantastic claim. In the full sense of that word. It should challenge every fiber of our rationality and strain our credulity to breaking. It should elicit from us an immediate “That’s ridiculous! It’s impossible!” We should not accept, at face value, a doctrinal claim that defies common sense.

In this case it is not about accepting a doctrinal claim of the Church—we need accept only the claim of love. The same claim a child lays to a parent or a wife to a spouse or a grandfather to a grandchild is the claim made of us and upon us in Christ.

God walked among us and raised the dead.

I’ve needed periods of utter rationality and dispassionate analysis in seasons of my life. I needed to know that the Church is capacious enough to hold all that doubt and more.

And beyond that, and perhaps most deeply, I now need the Good News: God walked among us and raised the dead.

Episcopalians needn’t check their minds at the door (nor should any faithful Christian) because the gifts of the whole person are to be used in seeking and serving Christ.

I believe Jesus, who he claims to be, and what he offers as lasting and true.

That’s enough for me right now. That’s the stability I need in this hour. Through days of doubt and through fresh faith’s revival alike, I pray it will always be enough for us all.

Yours in Christ,

—Fr Robert