Sermons

One of the most important things I have learned about preparing and delivering sermons since I've been ordained is that 80% of the sermon is delivery. There are brilliant and godly men who have many important, timely, and provocative thing to say when they preach, but fail miserably at communicating them because they mumble, are monotone, or just plain dull. If you do not believe me just watch EWTN. Conversely, there are men who have very little of substance to say, yet they take what little they have and package it very nicely so people will not only listen and get excited about what they are saying... they will come back to hear more! If you do not believe me, just watch Joel Osteen or TBN. Whenever I have a sermon that I feel is a little weak (which happens to all preachers from time to time) I work extra hard at honing the delivery, and almost without fail I get a better response from those sermons than I do from the ones that I think have better content! Good delivery is key, and I don't think we honor God's Word when we take delivery lightly. Of course it goes without saying that content is supremely important as well. In the end, good content and good delivery go together.

Stick to the Basics

I am slowly learning that I should never presume that parishioners will know some doctrine, or aspect of Church teaching, that I know (and take for granted that I know). Case in point, in my Tuesday morning class we are studying angels. I thought that it would be topic that people knew everything about, and knew all the biblical passages, and traditional theology of angels, and so on, but to my surprise many did not. There were many misconceptions that the participants had (not all of them, mind you). So on our first session we were able to clarify, among other things, that angels are not humans who have passed on; and that demons and devils were created by God because they were angels (which along with everything else was created by God). That is stuff that I thought everyone just "knew". Boy was I wrong! And I am sure more questions will arise as we delve into angels and Thomism in a few weeks. There already was a question as to why it matters in Thomistic philosophy that each angel is its own race (now that is something that I would be surprised if everyone knew off the bat). Anyway, it's a good lesson for me. It is always good and worthwhile to stick to the basics; to teach, and reteach, and reteach again.

Happy Lent

A blessed Lent to everyone. I am going to be doing some special Lenten reading - a book called "All For the Love of God: A Holy Cross Omnibus". It was published in 1956 by the Order of the Holy Cross, and was a selection of the Episcopal Book Club. It has all sorts of short essays written by members of the order on topics such as the incarnation; the Mother of God; angels; what "catholic" means; the eucharist, etc. The essays were taken from various issues of the Holy Cross Magazine going back to 1906. I am sure it will be very edifying and enlightening in many ways. I have had it for years, but never read it. (I do pride myself on the fact that will eventually get around to reading all of my books!) This was one of many classic out-of-print anglo-catholic books that I acquired by chance in seminary. Someone donated a ton of them to the seminary library, which didn't want them, so they sold them for $1 each, and yours truly was there to snap them up!

How long does it take to become an Anglican?

A wise priest colleague remarked to me once that it takes ten years for a convert to become an Anglican: that is, to be truly formed by the liturgy and ethos of the classical Book of Common Prayer and the English spiritual tradition. Having been on this journey myself for so long now I definitely agree with that. Anglican formation is a very long and slow process. It involves a complete reorientation of ones general thinking, theological method, and spirituality. It is so slow, in fact, that half the time one doesn't even know it is happening! Once one is formed in the tradition, though, he could hardly imagine being anything else, and such a strong and solid base has been established that the spiritual life beings to really blossom. By far the critical error people make is thinking they know something of Anglicanism after just a few services, or a few years of membership in an Anglican parish, but after brief time, in frustration, they leave. It takes so much longer than that to really explore and experience our tradition.

On a related note, I wonder if it is even possible for anyone to get a truly Anglican formation in the Episcopal Church anymore, since that body has abandoned on a local and institutional level the classical Anglican tradition and rule of life. Because of that, I tend (perhaps wrongly) to be very leery of people who come to us from TEC proudly boasting that they are "life long episcopalians". I wonder what, if anything, they have learned about English spirituality in TEC - even if it is "conservative" parish. Lord knows they know nothing about BCP in many cases, and they certainly have not read even popular Anglican writers like C.S. Lewis, much less the classical divines, such as Jewel, Taylor, Thorndike, etc.

Our formation process is slow, and I think sometimes people get impatient with it. But things that grow slowly grow strong. And I think having strongly formed Christians is much better than having great numbers of poorly formed souls, which is, sadly, what many other churches focus on these days.

Back in the Black

Due to popular demand, I think I am going to resume this blog. I will keep my art blog for talk about my art, and this blog for talk and discussion about the wonderful world of continuing Anglicanism.