Sandy Hook

One of our friends has a grandchild who attends Sandy Hook Elementary School. She was not physically harmed; the horror of Sandy Hook is difficult enough to contemplate without it being brought into stark relief through personal involvement. This is what our friend wrote:

This is to let you know that all is well but we must go on praying for all the community there. They are truly suffering.

A few days before this horrible tragedy took place, our daughter in law (Nancy) went to see one of the mothers with whom she had become friendly while they were both living in the same Apt. house. Both their husbands work for the same company. She told Nancy how good it felt to have finally moved and settled into their new home….. A few days later their 6 year old daughter came to such a tragic end wearing Katherine’s old clothes Nancy had brought over for her a just a few days ago.

Katherine’s class was in a dark room for 2 1/2 hours before they could be sent home.

Katherine’s father spent some hours at the airport watching this all on TV and only got a message that there was  shooting at a school in Newtown Hartford. They gave them no more information. But thank God they are all home safe now.

No understanding of what happened at Sandy Hook is possible without acknowledging the existence of evil: personal evil, an evil that lurks in the heart of every man. What took place at Sandy Hook Elementary school was an act of undiluted personal evil. Whether the murderer was mentally ill, whether he should not have had access to guns or whether the principal should have had access to a gun – none of these can alter the tangible reality of the evil that was on display.

While the parents of the murdered children should, eventually – for their own sakes – forgive the murderer, it is right for the rest of us, for Christians, to hate the evil; it is even commanded. It is right to want justice – God’s justice. It is right that there should be a hell where God’s perfect justice will be satisfied. It is ironic that the mainline denominations that are obsessed with justice have, for the most part, ceased to believe in hell, one of the only two places where perfect justice will be found; the other is on the cross.

The suffering of the innocent was something that Dostoevsky dealt with in the famous Grand Inquisitor passage in Brothers Karamazov. I have to admit that, even re-reading it as a Christian, I find Ivan the atheist’s argument against a God who makes the suffering of children a necessary part of his creation  – compelling.

David Bentley Hart attempts to address the problem in his article: Tsunami and Theodicy:

Famously, Dostoevsky supplied Ivan with true accounts of children tortured and murdered: Turks tearing babies from their mothers’ wombs, impaling infants on bayonets, firing pistols into their mouths; parents savagely flogging their children; a five-year- old-girl tortured by her mother and father, her mouth filled with excrement, locked at night in an outhouse, weeping her supplications to “dear kind God” in the darkness; an eight-year-old serf child torn to pieces by his master’s dogs for a small accidental transgression.

But what makes Ivan’s argument so disturbing is not that he accuses God of failing to save the innocent; rather, he rejects salvation itself, insofar as he understands it, and on moral grounds. He grants that one day there may be an eternal harmony established, one that we will discover somehow necessitated the suffering of children, and perhaps mothers will forgive the murderers of their babies, and all will praise God’s justice; but Ivan wants neither harmony—“for love of man I reject it,” “it is not worth the tears of that one tortured child”—nor forgiveness; and so, not denying there is a God, he simply chooses to return his ticket of entrance to God’s Kingdom. After all, Ivan asks, if you could bring about a universal and final beatitude for all beings by torturing one small child to death, would you think the price acceptable? . . .

I do not believe we Christians are obliged—or even allowed—to look upon the devastation visited upon the coasts of the Indian Ocean and to console ourselves with vacuous cant about the mysterious course taken by God’s goodness in this world, or to assure others that some ultimate meaning or purpose resides in so much misery. Ours is, after all, a religion of salvation; our faith is in a God who has come to rescue His creation from the absurdity of sin and the emptiness of death, and so we are permitted to hate these things with a perfect hatred. For while Christ takes the suffering of his creatures up into his own, it is not because he or they had need of suffering, but because he would not abandon his creatures to the grave. And while we know that the victory over evil and death has been won, we know also that it is a victory yet to come, and that creation therefore, as Paul says, groans in expectation of the glory that will one day be revealed. Until then, the world remains a place of struggle between light and darkness, truth and falsehood, life and death; and, in such a world, our portion is charity.

As for comfort, when we seek it, I can imagine none greater than the happy knowledge that when I see the death of a child I do not see the face of God, but the face of His enemy. It is not a faith that would necessarily satisfy Ivan Karamazov, but neither is it one that his arguments can defeat: for it has set us free from optimism, and taught us hope instead. We can rejoice that we are saved not through the immanent mechanisms of history and nature, but by grace; that God will not unite all of history’s many strands in one great synthesis, but will judge much of history false and damnable; that He will not simply reveal the sublime logic of fallen nature, but will strike off the fetters in which creation languishes; and that, rather than showing us how the tears of a small girl suffering in the dark were necessary for the building of the Kingdom, He will instead raise her up and wipe away all tears from her eyes—and there shall be no more death, nor sorrow, nor crying, nor any more pain, for the former things will have passed away, and He that sits upon the throne will say, “Behold, I make all things new.”

h/t First Thoughts for the David Bentley Hart quote.

 

St. Hilda's Christmas Dinner 2012

More here

We have been ejected from our building and our rectory has been sold, but nothing stops us eating or celebrating the arrival of the Incarnation, the Word made flesh.

Collecting the tickets:

 

The MC:

 

The people:

 

The tuba lesson:

 

The Three Tenors:

 

More here

Diocese of Niagara sells St. Hilda's rectory

The Diocese of Niagara took possession of St. Hilda’s rectory as part of the negotiated settlement between St. Hilda’s and the diocese. The settlement boiled down to the congregation of St. Hilda’s giving the diocese of Niagara the church building and rectory; in exchange the diocese would stop suing the congregation.

In the last few weeks, the diocese sold the rectory for $650,000, $50,000 over its minimum price.

Heavy metal Christmas Carols at Grimsby Minster

According to the clergy lady in the video below, the Metal Culture has a lot in common with Christianity. Who knew?

Using what people are familiar with to introduce them to Christ seems to me to be a good idea – after all, St. Paul did it.

I’m not sure that that is what is going on here, though; it could be just be a measure of the church’s desperation to lure people into its sanctuaries – and once they are there, not know what to do with them.

Is, as the event organiser Simon Cross says, the Incarnation really about having “a bit of a laugh for Christmas”?

From here:

The Very Heavy Christmas Carol Service was first held last year and is claimed by its organisers to be the only one in the UK.
As well as carols, the service on Saturday evening will include specially written “Punk Poetry” lessons.

Event organiser Simon Cross said the service was a “a bit of a laugh for Christmas”.

Here is last year’s production:

And now for something completely different: homosexuals mocking the Nativity

Gay JosephsThe Virgin Birth stretches the imagination of many western Anglican clergy beyond the breaking point.

The problem has been solved by a homosexual Columbian couple who have concocted a nativity scene with two gay Josephs and no Virgin Mary.

From here:

A gay couple has sparked outrage for displaying a ‘homosexual nativity scene’ in their Colombian home.

Andrés Vásquez and Felipe Cárdenas have come under fire for their all-male manger – where the baby Jesus has two father Josephs and the Virgin Mary is nowhere to be seen.

The country’s Catholic Church has labelled the display, in the northern city of Cartagena, as ‘sacrilege’.

Men are leaving mainline denominations

From here:

Rev. Nancy Talbot feels like one of the more blessed female clergy.

When the North Vancouver minister looks out on the pews on any given Sunday, she feels fortunate her small congregation is slowly growing and that at least men make up roughly three in 10 of those at worship.

The gender imbalance could be far worse. The minister at Mount Seymour United Church is painfully aware men have been quietly, but in huge numbers, streaming away from many of North America’s Christian churches.

“I don’t think many of us have answers to why it’s happening,” says Talbot, who has led Mount Seymour United for eight years while raising two boys in a same-sex relationship with her partner, Brenda.

Rev. Talbot remarks in the last paragraph that she has no idea why men are not coming to church. Nancy and Brenda have made it clear that men are redundant in their personal lives. Why would it be otherwise in the church?

At least homosexual men should feel at home in the United Church:

And, given the United Church began ordaining homosexuals in 1992, some of the denomination’s gay clergy expect that roughly half of the small cohort of remaining male ministers will be homosexual.

An irritating misquote

‘Till death do us part.

It is supposed to be: ‘Till death us do part, a contraction of: until death us do depart.

An older version of the final phrase is “and to obey, until death us do depart” where “depart” means “separate”. “Until death us do depart” had to be changed due to changes in the usage of “depart” in the Prayer Book of 1662. In the 1928 prayer book (not authorised) and in editions of the 1662 prayer book printed thereafter “and to obey” was retained (in the 1928 book an alternative version omitted this).

Anglican Journal to be editorless, left wafting hither and thither on a miasma of politically correct religiosity

The current Anglican Journal editor, Kristin Jenkins – whom I met briefly in 2010 and rather liked in spite of our radically different perspectives – is abandoning the Anglican Journal to the tender mercies of Paul Feheley.

In the face of certain cuts for Anglican Journal staff, one can hardly blame her.

As the article below notes, the budget for the Journal will be more conservative; what is left unsaid is that the content will undoubtedly be less conservative – you may think that an impossibility, but with a herculean effort from the stragglers still employed by the paper, I am certain a way will be found.

From here:

Following the resignation of Editor Kristin Jenkins, the Anglican Journal will adopt an interim management structure and not hire a new editor until late 2013 at the earliest. Sam Carriere, director of Communications and Information Resources and Resources for Mission, shared this news with General Synod staff on Dec. 13.

Editor since 2009, Ms. Jenkins will leave the Anglican Journal on Jan. 7, 2013 to become director of advancement at Albert College in Belleville, Ont.

“It is my feeling, supported by advice I have sought and received, that I should not engage in a formal search and hiring process for an editor of the Anglican Journal until next year’s restructuring work is behind us, at the earliest,” said Mr. Carriere in an email to staff.

In November, the Council of General Synod passed a transitional budget for 2013 and agreed to establish a more conservative budget for 2014 in response to declining revenues. Throughout the next year, General Synod leadership will consider ways to restructure the national office, including the Anglican Journal.