As you all likely noticed, this year’s cohort of Anglican History students joined us last weekend. For the last three years, I have had the pleasure of teaching this class to clergy, ordinands, and lay leaders from the churches of our diocese and beyond. One theme that seems to leap off the page each year is worth sharing with you all, because it has been an encouragement to me.
You can’t read a lot of church history without realizing that there have been long seasons of stagnation in the church. The list of causes for these seasons of stagnation is long: Corrupt clergy, disinterested laity, foreign invasions, lack of engagement with the surrounding culture, too much mimicking of the surrounding culture, pagan opposition—basically, everything you might guess has been the cause of stagnation in the church, at one point or another. The church has low points, when worship, discipleship, and evangelism fade, moments when the church looks like anything but the light of the world.
In each and every one of those seasons, though, God has stirred up people through whom the revival of the church has arrived. That is encouraging! But the real encouragement to me—the point I want to share with you—has been the fact that, in each season, it only took one or two people to shift the direction of the entire church. In each of those moments, God didn’t use a multitude; instead, one or two people faithful to him and willing to wait on him in prayer was all that he was waiting for. Through the ministries of individuals and tiny groups, revitalization and revival spread across kingdoms and dioceses.
The stories of the men and women—people like St. Aidan, Alfred the Great, Theodore of Tarsus, Richard Rolle, Julian of Norwich, Elizabeth I, John Wesley, Hannah More, Edward Pusey (and many more)—whom God has used are an encouragement to me, because it reminds me how much God loves to work through tiny groups of humble people. When we are faithful to him, when we pursue him in prayer, when we seek to conform our lives to Jesus Christ, there is no limit to what God might do with us. In many of the stories, the people probably didn’t even realize how much God was doing—in hindsight, we can see it, but they were just saying “yes” to him in humility. Many of them battled fear, opposition, and false accusations. They were clergy, monarchs, professors, ordinary lay men and women—God didn’t need a particular status or background; all he was waiting for was one man or one woman faithful to him.
I earnestly believe that God does far more with the lives of the few who give him everything than we could ever expect. Much of it may be invisible to us, but from the standpoint of history, from God’s perspective, it is more than we might imagine.
In Christ,
Steven+
Seasonal Reflections
My journal entry for February 6, 2022 reads in part: “It’s hard to imagine life without Sunday worship with our family at Incarnation—and all too easy to imagine dreariness and loneliness in its absence.” It seemed so certain a prediction the year before we moved to Kazakhstan—and yet! Sunday services here, both with our Kazakh church and the English service we do in our home using your order of service, have been life-giving, just as they were (and are! And will be!) for us at Incarnation.
In his book The Two Towers Tolkien describes waybread made by elves and given to the party of hobbits and others as they continued on their way to destroy the evil Ring of Power. Their waybread, the elves explained, would sustain them more and more fully as their other food supplies ran low and they were required to rely on the waybread more fully. That picture has come to mind often as I join with my family and the few others the Lord has brought to our English services. Especially in that first winter when we had been stripped of so much and could not yet see how the Lord would renew any of it, I anticipated and yearned for those times of Sabbath worship “as in a dry and weary land, where there is no water” (Psalm 63:1). And the water our Father provided us within those services—even himself!—was truly life-giving: water turned into celebratory wine, wine made for us into the life-giving blood of our Savior.
In this season of Epiphany, we remember how Jesus grew “in wisdom and in stature and in favor with God and man” (Luke 2:52). What would it look like for us to grow as Jesus did, to be so fully dependent on the Father that we are able to receive fully, unmixed with any food of our own making, the nourishment He offers? In her book Sacred Seasons Danielle Hitchen urges: “If we want to be conformed to the image of Christ, then we must spend time doing the things that Jesus did: He practiced prayer, solitude, and silence, routinely desiring time away to be with his Father. He prayed with and for others. He fasted (forty days in the wilderness). He served others. He went regularly to the temple and synagogue for communal worship and to learn the Scriptures (Luke 2:41-52). He kept sacred time, remembering the Sabbath as well as the Jewish calendar of feasts. These are the spiritual disciplines. If you want to be like Jesus, do these things. These habits formed the rich inner life of Christ that shaped his visibly abundant outer life.”
As we consider our resolutions for this coming year, we do well to consider how our Lord lived his life. Resolving to attend Sunday worship and to prayerfully attend to the Scriptures might seem too little, as unassuming as the little wafers of the elves’ waybread. But in so doing, we will be following the example of our Lord Jesus, as well as our brothers and sisters in the faith whose story we heard read from Nehemiah 8:1-12 this past Sunday. As they listened to Ezra and the other priests and Levites read and explain the Scriptures, those men and women (and children!) worshipped and wept—and then feasted with joy as they were commanded to. There will be times for all of us when that command, “do not be grieved, for the joy of the LORD is your strength” (Nehemiah 8:10) will seem harsh and out of reach. And yet! “This God—his way is perfect; the word of the LORD proves true; he is a shield for all those who take refuge in him” (2 Samuel 22:31).
In her explanation of Epiphany, Hitchins says: “As image bearers of God who take up Christ’s specific call to be the light of the world (Matthew 5:14-16), we are transformed into walking epiphanies, mini-manifestations of God shining forth in the dark world.” What a beautiful vision! Would you shine more brightly, reflect more faithfully the light of your Savior? Take these children’s songs to heart: “[Go to church!], read your Bible, and pray every day, and you will grow,” for, “Jesus loves me this I know, for the Bible tells me so.”
Give us grace, O Lord, to answer readily the call of our Savior Jesus Christ and proclaim to all people the Good News of his salvation, that we and the whole world may perceive the glory of his marvelous works; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
Hannah
Better Wine
The master of the feast called the bridegroom and said to him, “Everyone serves the good wine first, and when people have drunk freely, then the poor wine. But you have kept the good wine until now.” This, the first of his signs, Jesus did at Cana in Galilee, and manifested his glory. (John 2:9b-11a)
If you read the book of Hebrews, you will hear (many times!) that what God has done in Jesus is better than what he did in the previous ages. The later wine is better than the prior wine, in other words. Jesus’ priesthood is better than that of Aaron, his role as a son is better than Moses’ role as a servant, the sacrifice he offers is better than the old sacrifices, the altar he offers us to eat from is better than the altar in the temple—the list of “better wine” in Hebrews is long. God’s later work is better than his former work, not because the former work was inadequate, but because he keeps outdoing himself with a better perfection.
We take for granted that Jesus’ sacrifice is better than the sacrifices of the old covenant. But how often do we forget that there is still better wine to come? How often do we live as if the wine we have received so far is as good as it gets? How often do we treat what God has done in our lives so far as the end of the story? There is a later work that God will do that will completely surpass what he has done so far—there is better wine still to come!
The Bible ends (before the closing valediction) with the cry, “Come, Lord Jesus!” I have oftentimes thought of this (and prayed it) as a cry of desperation. But what if we heard it as what it is—not a cry of desperation because of the brokenness of the world, but instead the ecstatic cry of the bride awaiting her groom? What if we said it with joyful longing for the better wine to come? In other words, what if our cry, “Come, Lord Jesus,” were driven by eager hope, not frustration and sadness?
There is better wine to come. When the bride is united to the bridegroom, we will see the glory that God is still waiting to reveal in Jesus Christ, glory that is full of grace and truth.
Steven+