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2/ We are not being martyred; we are not being persecuted. The temporary restrictions under which we operate, are laws, facially neutral as to religion, of general applicability. That is not persecution. We are not called to resist it as martyrs.
3/ To the contrary, to resist were to endanger our neighbors, whom we are commanded to love as we love ourselves. To strike at a neutral law of general applicability is to strike at our own protections against becoming persecuted.
4/ We in the West have our liberties secured by law; and the courts, especially the courts of appeal, remain open to grant us redress if our liberties are infringed, e.g. by police overreach.
5/ It is frankly absurd and offensive for Christians in the West to go on about how persecuted we are. It must cause wry smiles in the Church Triumphant;
6/ Our living – and too often dying – fellow Christians in Nigeria, in Egypt and throughout the Middle East, in communist mainland China, in Pakistan, and elsewhere, should have some human excuse to be frankly insulted by our claims.
7/ We may be despised. We are not persecuted. And if we are despised, the question is, for whose sake? Were it for Christ’s sake we should and ought to rejoice. But it commonly isn’t.
8/ Instead, it’s our own deserts. A considerable portion of the church has earned the derision, the contempt, of the world by fifty years’ worth of accommodation with the secular: with the world, the flesh, and the devil.
9/ We have failed to convert the world; we have allowed the world to convert us: we have spent half a century in acting out the meme, How do you do, fellow kids.
10/ Much of the rest of the church has spent that time thundering out anathemata: which might almost pass for our doing our duty,
11/ were it not that we proceeded straight to condemning our neighbors for not doing what we never taught them to do and what we by our own un-Christian actions made noisome to them.
12/ We have not first modelled or preached the gospel: even, in the last resort, and only as necessary, by words. We have handed out inoculations against the gospel by our behavior. We cannot then condemn those whom we have made immune to it.
13/ If the world knows we are Christians, it is not by our love.
14/ And we cannot blame this, the alternating appeasement and anathematizing, on our co-religionists, within our own denomination or, more comfortably yet, outside it.
15/ So far as any of us knows, knowing as we do only one heart and one soul, our own, we are each of us forced to recognize that, to our knowledge, there is no greater sinner then our self, and the failure is ours alone, individually.
16/ And yet we are not in any meaningful sense persecuted. We are assuredly not being persecuted by the current restrictions.
17/ Death is the king of terrors only to what is mortal in us; and that king of terrors was dethroned 2000 years ago. Or, 2000 years ago to our view, living as we must, in this mortal life, sequentially in time. To God, all times are now.
18/ And Christ our Lord is the lamb slain, sacrificed, for us from before the foundation of the world. In this mortal life, we are, like so many baseball fans in this time of pestilence, but watching rebroadcasts of the game which is already in the books and marked as a win.
19/ What are we actually complaining of? Why in the world – and out of it – are we dismayed on this joyous Easter Sunday?
20/ We cannot for the moment access our parish churches. We cannot gather together as a parish for matins, for evensong, or for Holy Communion.
21/ We have lost a sense of fellowship in person, in corporate worship. We cannot perhaps attend funerals, or christenings. We cannot physically approach the physical altar. Very well. Why in the world – and out of it – are we dismayed?
22/ We cannot approach the altar? Oh, but we can. We live upon it. An altar is a place set aside, consecrated, sanctified, for divine service; commonly dedicated to and formerly almost always containing the relics of a particular saint, the patron saint of the parish.
23/ The whole of the earth is *at need* an altar: For the earth is the Lord’s, and the fulness thereof. It was created by God; it was sanctified through the Incarnation; and it has its relics.
24/ The Church Triumphant, the faithful departed, the blessèd company of all faithful people, is composed of saints. And everywhere you have gone, everywhere you have ever dwelt, every place where you have lain down to sleep, has its relics.
25/ The great Pagan statesman, Pericles of Athens, knew this by the light of natural theology (see his funeral oration for the Athenian fallen of the Peloponnesian war);
26/ by the light of revealed theology, the great John Donne, went further: see Sermon LXXXI.
27/ The fellowship of corporate worship? Consider the creeds you have recited all your life.
28/ All the company of heaven, the saints, the angels in their orders, the Church Triumphant and At Rest, encompass you ’round, a cloud of witness, at all times and in all places, interceding for and with you. ‘Ye watchers and ye holy ones…’.
29/ We cannot for the moment access our parish churches? Certainly, there is such a thing as a theology of place. And yet, in emergency, we do well to remember:
30/ “Howbeit the most High dwelleth not in temples made with hands; as saith the prophet;”
31/ “God that made the world and all things therein, seeing that he is Lord of heaven and earth, dwelleth not in temples made with hands;”
32/ “Know ye not that ye are the temple of God, and that the Spirit of God dwelleth in you?”
33/ For God, all times are now: as shall be to us when we shall be with him in his immediate presence. Somewhere, always, even in mortal time, the sacrifice, the Eucharist, is being celebrated for us all.
34/ If for a time we cannot commune physically, that is a mere local issue, an accident, of mortal time. Chronos and kairos intersect, but they are not the same.
35/ It is a grave deprivation. And yet.... Were souls lost for want of communion during interdicts? During wars which made it impossible to carry on divine service?
36/ What of the souls of those physically unable to swallow the consecrated elements in either kind? What of those physically unable to go and receive?
37/ What of those who should be physically able to receive but by reason of infirmity or poverty – or persecution and surveillance – cannot make it to the parish church, or a church which they can attend in good conscience, in times of general health and prosperity?
38/ It is not a good thing not to be able to take communion. But it is not a fatal thing.
“Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword?”
“Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword?”
39/ We do not face the sword. We are not persecuted in any meaningful sense of the term.
40/ And if those things, and tribulation, and distress, and famine, and nakedness, and other perils, and death, and life, and angels, and principalities, and powers, and things present,
41/ and things to come, and height, and depth, and any other creature, cannot separate us from the love of God, then a coronavirus and the ensuing temporary closure of the parish church and interruption to divine service, including even the Eucharist, cannot and shall not.
42/ The Imitatio Christi is a call to follow his example, not to go about in a beard, long hair, and sandals, mouthing platitudes: that is not the imitation of Christ, that is signing up to canvas for the Liberal Democrats in Bath or Bristol or Bermondsey.
43/ Think back to Good Friday. God enduring separation from God. The horrors of judicial execution by a method which has given us the word excruciating.
44/ That is what we are now – lightly and partially, by not taking communion –, and may at any time be, called to in Imitatio Christi. And we now are complaining of what, exactly?
45/ We are assuredly complaining of nothing which we should endure were we truly engaged in Imitatio Christi.
46/ Certainly, we are complaining of nothing which can separate us from the love of God. It was the bloodiness of the Crucifixion which was the point of the Incarnation and the price of our redemption sealed by the Resurrection and blazing the way for us forward in the Ascension.
47/ And, therefore, this Easter Sunday like all Easter Sundays is glorious. It is joyous. Mere temporary, local, physical accidents are immaterial.
And, by a severe mercy, these local, physical accidents of place and time may call us back to our duties.
And, by a severe mercy, these local, physical accidents of place and time may call us back to our duties.
48/ It were a severe mercy should this pandemic remind us of the importance of the Eucharist, that it is not workaday, drive-thru fast-food for the soul.
49/ It were a benefit should it remind us of the resources we possess, in the BCP, for private observance and private devotion, reading Mattins and Evensong and the antecommunion at home.
50/ It were a special grace should it recall us to our duty to our neighbors: to chivvy the rector, vicar, priest in charge, or any other description of incumbent, to take communion to any unremarked or overlooked shut-in;
51/ to aid however you may, from prayer to politics to protest, the persecuted Christians abroad;
52/ and, without recrimination or resentment, to carry to church, in our own parish or otherwise, those who could get *through* divine service if only they could get *to* it.
53/ It were a joy in heaven should this recall to us that the communion of Saints is a real thing, and that we are compassed about at all times with a cloud of witness, unreliant upon our physical neighbors and fellow parishioners of the Church Embattled and Militant.
54/x And, therefore, I say again, this Easter Sunday like all Easter Sundays is glorious. It is joyous. Mere temporary, local, physical accidents are immaterial.
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