NEWS
Newcomers Class: Saturdays from 11a-12p January 21-March 4
You are cordially invited to join us for our Newcomers class at St. Paul's Anglican Church. The class will take place on Saturdays from 11am-12pm, starting January 21 and running until March 4.
This class is designed for those who are new to the church or interested in learning more about the Anglican faith. We will be exploring the basics of our beliefs, practices, and traditions, and we welcome any questions you may have.
This class is open to everyone, even those who are already members. We hope you will join us for this opportunity to learn and grow in your faith. Please RSVP by contacting Fr. Wesley (wwalker@stpaulscrownsville.com; 919-830-2990) if you plan to attend. We look forward to seeing you there!
Winter Retreat: "My Soul Doth Magnify the Lord"
Mark your calendars for February 18, 2023, from 8:30-12:30pm for a special retreat focused on prayer. "My Soul Doth Magnify the Lord: The Benedictus, Magnificat, and Nunc Dimittis as the Entryway to Prayer" will be led by Fr. Wesley Walker, Pr. Carl Roemer, and Dcn. David Hodil, and will explore the rich history and meaning behind these beloved prayers that we as Anglicans pray daily at Morning and Evening Prayer.
Join us for a morning of reflection, worship, and deepening our connection to the divine through these ancient prayers. All are welcome, so invite your friends and family to come along. See you there!
Reflection: "Heaven"
“If ye then be risen with Christ, seek those things which are above, where Christ sitters on the right hand of God. Set your affection on things above, not on things on the earth.” -Colossians 3:1-2
Dante and Beatrice gaze upon the highest heavens; from Gustav Dore’s illustrations of the Divine Comedy
“If ye then be risen with Christ, seek those things which are above, where Christ sitters on the right hand of God. Set your affection on things above, not on things on the earth.” -Colossians 3:1-2
Heaven is a slightly less controversial topic than judgment or Hell. Still, our thinking about eschatology is often imprecise. It’s admittedly a difficult topic because the Scriptures use disparate and complex images to describe what Heaven will be like. Many people like to create mental pictures of what they think Heaven will be like. We see this in the proliferation of books like Heaven is for Real, Proof of Heaven, To Heaven and Back, etc. These books are helpful in providing testimonies that counter many of the materialist assumptions of our modern age, but they heavily rely on experiences rather than the Scriptures or the teachings of the Church. This is a topic that we could talk about at length, but for today, there are three important lessons about Heaven that are especially helpful because they have practical implications for how we live.
Last week, I mentioned that Hell is both an eternal destination and a present reality. The same is true about Heaven. Heaven is often associated with the term “eternal life” which is usually interpreted to be a quantity, a never-ending paradise. It is that! “Eternal life,” however, also refers to a quality of life. When we grow in grace and virtue, when we live in accordance with God’s design for human flourishing, when we participate in the sacramental life of the Church, we experience a preview of what is to come for those who love and serve God. “The kingdom of God is within you” (Luke 17:21).
Heaven may conjure up images of floating on clouds and playing on harps. This caricature often distracts us from the real nature of Heaven. Heaven is where we experience the Beatific Vision where we see God, our Creator. In Scripture, humans are not allowed to see God. In Exodus 33:18-20, Moses was only allowed to see God’s back because “Thou canst not see my face: for there shall no man see me, and live.” Yet, we also have the words of our Lord in the beatitudes: “Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God” (Matt 5:8). St. Paul anticipates this vision in 1 Corinthians 13:12, “For now we see through a glass darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.” This is what you were made for! This is what we were all made for: intimate union with our Creator.
If it’s true that Heaven is breaking into the present and if it’s true that it can be characterized by the Beatific Vision, then it means right now is significant because we have our end goal in mind. When you take a road trip, the destination determines your route. If our ultimate destination is the Beatific Vision, then that determines the choices we make now. It’s important to note the words of Jesus in Matthew: “the pure in heart shall see God.” For us to arrive at purity of heart, we must embark on the journey of sanctification. Abbot Moses exhorted John Cassian and his companion Germanus to, “follow completely anything that can bring us to this objective, to this purity of heart.” This means that “anything which pulls us away from it must be avoided as being dangerous and damaging…With this as our continuous aim, all our acts and thoughts are fully turned toward its achievement…For a mind which lacks an abiding sense of direction veers hither and yon by the hour, and by the minute is a prey to outside influences and is endlessly the prisoner of whatever strikes it first.” Heaven, the Beatific Vision, and sanctification are different ways of expressing our goal; the Christian life is about acquiring the virtues that will help us along that trajectory.
It’s hard to believe Christmas is almost here. On Christmas, we celebrate the fact that the Word of God, the Second member of the Trinity, assumed a human nature by uniting a body and soul to his Person. In the Christ child lying in the manger, we see the convergence of Heaven and earth. He shows us who we are supposed to be. He was effectively constantly in the Beatific Vision, experiencing perfect union between humanity and divinity. So as we celebrate this wonderful festival, we must remember that being conformed to his image is the most important thing. “If ye then be risen with Christ, seek those things which are above, where Christ sitters on the right hand of God. Set your affection on things above, not on things on the earth” (Col 3:1-2).
Our Christmas Service Schedule
Here at St. Paul’s, we love to celebrate the Nativity of Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ! Here’s how we’re doing that this year!
Almighty God, who hast given us thy only-begotten Son to take our nature upon him, and as at this time to be born of a pure virgin; Grant that we being regenerate, and made thy children by adoption and grace, may daily be renewed by thy Holy Spirit; through the same our Lord Jesus Christ, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the same Spirit ever, one God, world without end. Amen.
Reflection: The Four Last Things - Hell
By Fr. Wesley Walker
“Between us and you there is a great gulf fixed.” -Abraham to the Rich Man in St. Luke 16:26
“Hell” in “The Last Judgment” by Fra Angelica (c. 1425)
The existentialist philosopher Jean Paul Sartre once remarked that “Hell is other people.” From a Christian perspective, this couldn’t be more backwards. Hell isn’t other people; it’s isolation from community and a rejection of God’s continual offer of love. Today, we are talking about the third of the four last things: Hell. Much like last week’s topic of judgment, Hell is certainly not a popular doctrine in our modern context, but faithful Christians must grapple with its reality since it’s a common topic in Our Lord’s teachings. Hell is the ultimate deprivation that results from turning inward away from God and others. The fact that hell is real provides us an opportunity for reflection and prayer.
We often think of Heaven and Hell as eternal destinations. They are those; however, they’re also present realities. Being separated from God through sin is Hell, albeit in a foreshadowing of an ultimate reality that will be fully unveiled after the final judgment. What this means is that Hell as an eternal destination is the culmination of a present trajectory that refuses God’s love now. It’s true that people who aren’t Christians can often appear happy—they may have loving families, good jobs, lots of money, they might be productive members of society, etc.—but in the end those things will fall away and the misery that’s shrouded under a thin veneer of temporal success, materialism, and hedonistic indulgence will be experienced in full force. Still, when we see people who reject the Gospel—explicitly or implicitly—there is a sense in which they are experiencing Hell now. We experience Hell now when we reject God through sin.
What this means is that CS Lewis was right when he said that “the doors of Hell are locked on the inside.” God doesn’t arbitrarily send one group of his creatures to Hell while allowing the other group into Heaven; we choose Hell when we persist in rebellion and reject his love. God is “not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance” (2 Pet 3:9). He “will have all men to be saved and to come unto the knowledge of the truth” (1 Tim 2:4). At the same time, God gives us what we want. Rejection of him calcifies our hearts and makes us increasingly resistant to the Truth. We choose Hell when we turn inward, away from God and away from others.
Ultimately, Hell is the anguish of rejecting God’s love. In Scripture, God’s presence is often depicted as a fire. In a positive sense, the fire of his presence burns away our impurities. He is the refiner’s fire. In a negative sense, however, this fire is a torment for those who spurn God’s love. There can be no greater torment than knowing than the intentional rejection of what is True, Good, and Beautiful.
As I mentioned above, the doctrine of Hell usually doesn’t play well in our modern context. For us, however, Hell offers a chance to reflect on our lives and to pray for others. Theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar explains that the Church’s teaching on Hell “is to be contemplated strictly as a matter which concerns me alone.” In other words, our job is not to decide whether other people are going to Heaven or Hell. We should hope that the Gospel reaches and saves every soul. Still, we should heed St. Paul and “work out your own salvation with fear and trembling” (Phil 2:12). So the reality of Hell should be the ultimate impetus for us to reflect on our own lives by which we assess what trajectory we are traveling. Even more, the doctrine of Hell gives us a reason to pray by interceding for souls, recognizing that the sacrifice of Christ is “a full, perfect, and sufficient sacrifice, oblation, and satisfaction, for the sins of the whole world” (BCP 80).
Reflection: The Four Last Things - Judgment
“Christ painting the Four Last Things in the Christian Heart” (1585) by Anton Wierix
Judgment does not make for light conversation. This is especially true in our culture which carelessly throws around the phrase “Judge not lest ye be judged” as an avoidance tactic. Yet, the Scriptures assure us that judgment is coming. We confess this every week: “He shall come again, with glory, to judge both the quick and the dead.” Judgment is one of the four last things that help us “number our days” so that we can “attend to wisdom” (Ps 90:12).
To rightly order ourselves in light of the coming judgment, it may help to inquire about the nature of that judgment. The first thing to recognize is that we will be judged on our disposition and actions toward Christ. The main criteria is the presence of the theological virtues of faith, hope, and love. Faith trusts in God, hope expects God to be faithful, and love (also called charity) is friendship with God. These virtues are infused into us at baptism and must be cultivated and tended. We become increasingly like Christ as these virtues grow in us. They become a rubric against which we can assess ourselves. It is also important to remember that these virtues are not developed privately between us and God. These things work themselves out in social contexts with other people: “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me” (Matt 25:40).
Scripture seems to speak of two judgments. On the one hand, we have passages like 1 Corinthians 3:13-15 where the judgment seems individual: “Every man’s work shall be made manifest: for the day shall declare it, because it shall be revealed by fire; and the fire shall try every man’s work of what sort it is. If any man’s work abide which he hath built thereupon, he shall receive a reward. If any man’s work shall be burned, he shall suffer loss: but he himself shall be saved; yet so as by fire.” This seems fairly straightforward: each of us will have to answer for everything we have done. We can expect to receive rewards for the good things while the “wood, hay, and stubble” get burnt off. There is a second aspect of judgment in the Scripture which seems corporate. The famous “sheep and goats” passage in Matthew 25:32-33 illustrates this: “before him shall be gathered all nations: and he shall separate them one from another, as a shepherd divideth his sheep from the goats: and he shall set the sheep on his right hand, but the goats on the left.” The sheep will be invited into the Kingdom while the goats will be turned away. These are not necessarily separate, but they do remind us that judgment is related both to what we do and who we are. Being a sheep means being under the Good Shepherd and if that is my identity, it should shape what I do.
It is quite possible that, when it comes to judgment, we are our own worst enemies. This is what is left unsaid in half-hearted quotations of Matthew 7: “with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again.” Jesus’ words should not be prooftexted to avoid the tough tasks of discerning or evangelizing, as they often are. However, it is important that our judgment of other people should be tempered by these verses. First of all, we know that God works in unexpected ways and that, while he has the whole picture, we do not. Second, it’s helpful to remember St. Paul’s words in the Comfortable Words at Holy Communion from 1 Timothy 1:15: “This is a faithful saying, and worthy of all acceptation, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners;” and then the part we leave out: “of whom I am chief.” All of us can insert ourselves into St. Paul’s “I.” And this means that if there is no hope for someone else, there is no hope for me, the chief of sinners.
Just as we saw last week that the fact of death can bring comfort, so the reality of judgment can bring us comfort too. This is because, while we know we have a just judge, we also have a merciful judge. “We have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous: And he is the propitiation for our sins” (1 John 2:1-2). Our judge is our advocate, our High Priest is our sacrifice. As St. Paul asks in Romans 8:31, “If God be for us, who can be against us?”
Reflection: The Four Last Things - Death
By Fr. Wesley Walker
“And it is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment.” -Hebrews 9:27 (KJV)
"The Seven Deadly Sins and the Four Last Things" by Hieronymous Bosch (1500)
During the Advent season, it is common for Christians to reflect on the Four Last Things: Death, Judgment, Hell, and Heaven. It was common for the sermons during the Advent season to focus on them. As we wait in expectation during Advent, it benefits us to meditate on our mortality, on the fact that Christ “shall come again with glory to judge both the quick and the dead,” and the reality of hell and heaven. As a result, we will be focusing on the four last things in our Reflections the next few weeks as we inch closer to Christmas.
Today, we begin with death. Death has often been called the “Great Equalizer” because it does not discriminate: all of us will die. What we mean by death is that the soul and body are separated. For Christians, the soul is immortal and cannot die, but the physical body can fall into disrepair and ultimately decay away. The great promise of the resurrection is that our souls and bodies will be reunited! The fact that death is a universal for all humankind provides us three points for reflection: (1) death is a reminder that we inhabit a broken and fallen world; (2) death brings urgency to the now; and (3) death is an enemy overcome.
Death is a reminder that we inhabit a broken world because it is the result of sin. We see this very early in the Scriptures. Death is the result of sin. Things were not meant to be this way. It’s why, when we attend the funeral of a Christian, there is a sense of celebration because we know that person is with Christ, but also a sense of mourning, because we feel their loss. We know, in those moments that this is not natural, this is not the way things should be. Eastern Orthodox philosopher and theologian David Bentley Hart beautifully expresses the tension a Christian feels when confronted with the dissonance of death:
“The Christian should see two realities at once, one world within another: one the world as we all know it, in all its beauty and terror, grandeur and dreariness, delight and anguish: and the other world in its first and ultimate truth, not simply ‘nature’ but ‘creation,’ an endless sea of glory radiant with the beauty of God in every part, innocent of all violence. To see in this way is to rejoice and mourn at once, to regard the world as a mirror of infinite beauty but as glimpsed through the veil of death; it is to see creation in chains, but beautiful as in the beginning of days.”
In other words, we see in all things, by virtue of their createdness, a spark of the divine while at the same time recognizing that our vision is fleeting and dim because we live “in the shadow of death.” This peculiar dual vision causes us to yearn for a day when things will be restored and put aright, a day when death will not longer be.
This brings us to a second point of reflection: the reality of impending death brings significance to the now. A good illustration of this point comes from Jesus’ parable in Luke 12:16-21: “The ground of a certain rich man brought forth plentifully: And he thought within himself, saying, What shall I do, because I have no room where to bestow my fruits? And he said, This will I do: I will pull down my barns, and build greater; and there will I bestow all my fruits and my goods. And I will say to my soul, Soul, thou hast much goods laid up for many years; take thine ease, eat, drink, and be merry. But God said unto him, Thou fool, this night thy soul shall be required of thee: then whose shall those things be, which thou hast provided? So is he that layeth up treasure for himself, and is not rich toward God.” If it is true that we will die, then what we do right now matters. Of course, most people, Christian or not, agree with this. However, what becomes significant is that if we maintain a Christian view of death, it gives a distinctively Christian shape to our lives: the now is not primarily about hedonistic pleasure, wealth acquisition, shoring up political power, or other, lesser pursuits. The now is about pursuing the things that matter. As we will see on Sunday, Isaiah urges the people of Israel to “Seek ye the Lord while he may be found, Call ye upon him while he is near” (55:6). That we will die one day is a springboard for us to contemplate how we organize our lives in the present.
The beauty of the Gospel is that death is an enemy that has been overcome. St. Paul taunts death in his epistle to the Corinthians, “Death is swallowed up in victory. O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?" So while death is a reminder of our fallen world and our own mortality, it is also a reminder that the grave could not hold our Lord. Just as the Cross is the great symbol of victory, so death becomes an insistence that this is not all there is, that this is not the end.
And so as Christians, we situate ourselves within two overlapping realities. Death is inevitable and we will die. In the same breath, we insist that death has been trampled under foot by our Lord who has conquered death by death. It is important that we engage in the practice of momento mori because it helps bring significance to what we do now. To avoid despair and the risk of nihilism that sees life as an absurdity, we also reflect on the resurrection, knowing that death does not have the final word. And the beauty of the Gospel is that the same God who destroyed death is working to finish the good work he began in us (Phil 1:6).