ON DISTRACTIONS

This is a meditation that I wrote and published on Brad Drell's blog on November 1, 2006. I plan to post a meditation every week or so starting after final exams are over next Thursday. Enjoy this rerun in the meantime:


Last week, my daughter asked me what shoes she should wear to our Community Mass. I told her, and five minutes later, after much wailing and gnashing of teeth, she agreed that she should wear the shoes I told her to wear in the first place. It struck me at that moment that we had just spent five minutes going round and round and ended up right back where we should have been in the first place. That was five minutes of our lives that we will never get back. Five minutes that could have been used for better things.

I had intended the paragraph above to be the beginning of a meditation on the importance of obedience, and our need to discern, with the guidance of the Holy Spirit, to Whom our obedience belongs. Maybe that will still come along at some point in the future, but something happened yesterday to change my application of this opening paragraph somewhat.

Last evening, my wife and I had the extreme honor of attending a small dinner party for The Baroness Caroline Cox. Anyone who does not know about Baroness Cox or her organization, Humanitarian Aid Relief Trust (HART), should immediately go to her website, www.hart-uk.org. The Baroness is a committed Christian who has dedicated her life to reaching out to the forgotten and the persecuted in the world. HART is currently operating projects in Uganda, Nigeria, Burma, Armenia, Sudan, and East Timor. Hers is an active ministry of mission to those who risk their very lives to believe and proclaim the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

My daughter and I lost five minutes arguing about what shoes she was going to wear. The Episcopal Church has lost more than 30 years to an equally meaningless argument. For whatever reason, we in ECUSA have taken it upon ourselves to push the envelope of theology and doctrine even to the point of schism with the majority of the Anglican Community. ECUSA seems to be very proud of its progressive reinterpretations of Scripture, rejection of tradition, elevation of human reason separate from the Scripture, and the introduction of experience as a necessary part of our re-evaluation of the Divinity of Jesus Christ.

Like the pride of Adam and Eve (Gen 3:6) and Moses’ hubris at the rock in Meribah (Num 20:11), ECUSA’s actions have exacted an extreme cost, both in the United States and around the world. Average Sunday Attendance in the Episcopal Church has been on a steady decline since the middle 1960’s. Young people are staying away from the Church in droves. Countless numbers of believers have left the Church for other denominations. Some have stopped going to church at all. More and more parishes are seeking Episcopal oversight from overseas Bishops because they refuse to compromise their traditional, orthodox, Anglican Faith. The Church has fragmented, and the Unity of the Body of Christ that St. Paul so clearly advocates is no more.

Baroness Cox made a very astute observation in commenting about the state of the Church today. She described our current troubles, both in the U.S. and the U.K., as a “diabolical distraction”. I do not think that her words were flippantly chosen nor were they wrong. For while we spend our time voting in General Convention to place evangelism third on the list of spending priorities, the forces around the world which are arrayed against God’s people are making steady progress. “There is no neutral ground in the universe; every square inch, every split second, is claimed by God and counter-claimed by Satan.” (C.S. Lewis)

What do we do? We stop playing around with the Word of God. We stop reinventing Christ every generation or so. We recognize that the Holy Spirit is not going to guide us to do something that is expressly prohibited in Scripture.

We are the Church Militant. It is our responsibility to reach out to the suffering people of the world and render assistance, but more importantly, we are called to bring them the Good News and show them that Christ is the way to God (John 14: 6). Christ died on the Cross for all mankind, and now we are the ones who must make sure that all mankind has an opportunity to hear and believe. We cannot do that if we as a Church cannot even articulate a clear and powerful vision of the Gospel of Christ.

If we want to bring people back to the Church, we must be able to give them answers to their questions.

We must be able to affirm that Jesus Christ is Lord, and that Holy Scripture is His Word and His Testament.

We must know Scripture.

We must live Scripture.

We must proclaim Scripture even to the point of our own martyrdom.

There is nothing more important that we will do with our lives than to give ourselves completely to God’s Will and His service. Maybe this was a meditation on obedience after all.

To God be the Glory.

Your brother in Christ,
Michael W. Millard
Nashotah House ‘08