Wednesday, February 22, 2012

Ash Wednesday

Prayers from the Service of Commination (for Ash Wednesday) from the BCP 1662.
"O LORD, we beseech thee, mercifully hear our prayers, and spare all those who confess their sins unto thee; that they, whose consciences by sin are accused, by thy merciful pardon may be absolved; through Christ our Lord. Amen.

O MOST mighty God, and merciful Father, who hast compassion upon all men, and hatest nothing that thou hast made; who wouldest not the death of a sinner, but that he should rather turn from his sin, and be saved: Mercifully forgive us our trespasses; receive and comfort us, who are grieved and wearied with the burden of our sins. Thy property is always to have mercy; to thee only it appertaineth to forgive sins. Spare us therefore, good Lord, spare thy people, whom thou hast redeemed; enter not into judgement with thy servants, who are vile earth, and miserable sinners; but so turn thine anger from us, who meekly acknowledge our vileness, and truly repent us of our faults, and so make haste to help us in this world, that we may ever live with thee in the world to come; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

TURN thou us, O good Lord, and so shall we be turned. Be favourable, O Lord, Be favourable to thy people, Who turn to thee in weeping, fasting, and praying. For thou art a merciful God, Full of compassion. Longsuffering, and of great pity. Thou sparest when we deserve punishment, And in thy wrath thinkest upon mercy. Spare thy people, good Lord, spare them, And let not thine heritage be brought to confusion. Hear us, O Lord, for thy mercy is great, And after the multitude of thy mercies look upon us; Through the merits and mediation of thy blessed Son, Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

THE Lord bless us, and keep us; the Lord lift up the light of his countenance upon us, and give us peace, now and for evermore. Amen."

Sunday, February 19, 2012

Guest Post: Ideas About Landscape

A Guest Post by Alison Moffitt. Originally Posted Here.

We're home now. During our long drive we saw lots and lots of beautiful landscapes and I spent a lot of time mulling over the things I saw. Link

Often I get sad thinking about how the beautiful landscapes I love now might disappear when Jesus comes back. When he makes the new heavens and the new earth, who's to say it will look like the same?

But then maybe when we are completely and finally sanctified and standing with Christ we won't want to look at these landscapes anymore. We turn a blind eye to it now - it's easy to forget that these beautiful landscapes are marred by sin. How many people have been dispossessed for others to take and shape the landscape? How many workers have been oppressed to clear fields and build the dams that divert the water further up the catchment? How many habitats have been ruined and how extensive the environmental degradation for the sake of turning a profit? When you think about it, many of the beautiful landscapes we revel in now are tainted with the greed and opression of past generations.

I'm sure that in the new creation we will have landscapes which are just as beautiful as the ones we love here, but where no one's blood is crying out from the soil.

For behold, I create new heavens and a new earth,
and the former things shall not be remembered or come into mind.
But be glad and rejoice forever in that which I create;
for behold, I create Jerusalem to be a joy, and her people to be a gladness.
Isaiah 65:17-18

Sunday, February 12, 2012

20 Centuries in 20 Posts Part V a

The Coming of Christendom

Intro | Part I | Part II | Part III | Part IV | Appendix

It is no exaggeration to say that the fourth century had (and continues to have) an impact on the church. For three hundred years Jesus words “If they me persecuted me, they will persecute you” had been a feature in the life of the church inside and outside Roman Empire. Yet, as we saw in the previous post, the more the church was persecuted, the more it grew. “The blood of the martyrs,” declared Tertullian, “was the seed of the church”.

The imperial campaign against the church continued in the fourth century. However, by the close of the fourth century Christianity had moved from being an illegal, “destabilising” movement within the empire to the imperially endorsed religion of the state. The paradigm of how the church had related to society and the government for three hundred years suddenly changed. The coming of Christendom, as we now know it, turned the old realities on their head and created a moment of confusion for the Church. Many readers will be familiar with the theological reverberations this caused; the fourth and fifth centuries witnessed intense and often violent theological debates about the nature of Christianity. Who is Jesus, and how does he relate to the Father? We’ll explore these debates much more fully in the post five. In this post, I want to focus on the impact the fourth century had how the church conceived of government and itself. Firstly, let me set the scene.

Background
When Diocletian died in 311AD, the outlook for Christians within the Roman Empire looked grim. As Emperor, Diocletian had instigated a wide spread campaign persecution against the Christians in 303AD, which continued unabated after his abdication in 304AD. What we now know as the Diocletianic or Great Persecution was the last imperial persecution of Christians. It was also the widest ranging and the most violent.

It is said that Diocletian was inspired to renew the anti-Christian actions of the third century when, on a visit to the prophet in Didyma to obtain a divine oracle, he was told the presence of Christians in the empire had rendered the god silent. Beginning on 23 February 303, the feast of the Terminalia, for Terminus, the god of boundaries, the program to terminate the Christian presence within the empire began. In a series of edicts, Christians gradually lost their rights: churches and Bibles were destroyed, Christian senators and soldiers lost their rank, former slaves were re-enslaved, and Christians lost the right to properly defend themselves before the courts. Christians were also forced to make sacrifices to the Roman gods; those who refused faced imprisonment, torture and even death. The fourth century writer Eusebius records that the Roman prisons could not handle the volume of Christians being arrested and ordinary criminals had to be released from prison.



Diocletian’s successors continued to wage war on the Church after his abdication, even through six years of civil war. The decisive moment came in 312AD when the Emperor Constantine defeated Maxentius in the Battle of Milvian Bridge, leaving Constantine as the sole ruler of the western empire. However, Constantine claimed to have freed Rome from the yoke of tyranny in the name of Christ – his soldiers having fought at Milvian Bridge with standards that displayed the "Chi-Rho" symbol ☧, formed from the first two Greek letters of the word Christ.

Over the next 25 years of his reign, Constantine not only made a large impact on Roman politics, uniting the empire under his rule; he has played an important and increasing role in the life of the church: he officially ended the persecution of Christians (in the western empire through the Edict of Milan in 313, and in 324 in the eastern empire); launched a large scale campaign to build churches throughout the empire (such as the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem and the original St Basilica’s in Rome), moved the capital city to Byzantium (dedicating the city as Constantinople solely to Christ and not the ancient gods of Rome); and organised the first ecumenical council to determine the theology of the church at Nicaea in 325.

With one exception, Constantine’s successors continued these policies; in 380 Christianity was effectively declared the state religion of the empire. In 392, with the structure that had supported it for centuries crumbling around it, pagan worship was banned within the empire. Rome – long the persecutor of the church, was now lead by Emperors who not only endorsed but also sought to actively promote the interests of the church.

How would the Christians respond to these new circumstances?



Images:

Top: Christ Between Peter and Paul, 4th century; Catacomb of Saints Marcellinus and Peter on the Via Labicana. "Christ with the book of the Gospels is seated between Peter and Paul. Below, the Lamb is standing in the centre on a hill, from which flow out the four symbolic rivers of Scripture. To the sides are the most venerated Martyrs, with their names: Gorgonius, Peter, Marcellinus, Tiburtius, all acclaiming the Lamb" (Christian Catacombs of Rome).

Middle: The Battle of Milvian Bridge, by Giulio Romano. From the Vatican City, Apostolic Palace.

Bottom: A coin of Constantine (c.337) showing a depiction, and on the reverse his labarum with the "Chi-Rho" symbol ☧ spearing a serpent.

Friday, February 10, 2012

Church and the Word


"The community is confronted and created by the Word of God. It is the communion of the saints because it is the gathering of the faithful [believing]. As such it is the confederation of witnesses, who may and must speak because they believe.

The community does not speak with words alone. It speaks by the very fact of its existence in the world; by its characteristic attitude to world problems; and moreover and especially, by its silent service to all the handicapped, weak and needy in the world. It speaks, finally, by the simple fact that it prays for the world.

The community does all this because this is the purpose of its summons [into existence] by the Word of God. It cannot avoid doing these things, since it believes." - Karl Barth, Evangelical Theology