The Evangelical Ascetic

Thoughts on spirituality in practice from Bishop Stephen Scarlett

Ascetic: One who engages in a pattern of spiritual exercise to pursue holiness and grow closer to God.

A Meditation for Advent Lessons & Carols, 2018

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Our redemption is the culmination of a story that we walk through in our service of Lessons and Carols. It began with the creation of man and woman. In their state of original innocence, they stood “naked and unashamed” before God (Gen 2:25). Their state of innocence was shattered by the first sin, the result of demonic temptation combined with human distrust and disobedience. We heard the first prophesy of our redemption; the seed of the woman would bruise the head of the serpent (Gen 15, cf. Rom. 16:20). This seed would sit upon the throne of King David and his kingdom will have no end (Is. 9). God will give us a sign of our deliverance: “The virgin will conceive and bear a son and his name shall be called Immanuel” (Is. 7). This “rod from the stem of Jesse” will judge righteously and bring peace: “They shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain: for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea” (Is. 11). He will bring forgiveness: “Speak ye comfortably to Jerusalem, and cry unto her, that her warfare is accomplished, that her iniquity is pardoned” (Is. 40). We heard the angel Gabriel announce the birth of the seed, the Holy Child, to Mary; we heard Mary respond with the “yes” that answers the “no” of Eve: “Behold the handmaid of the Lord. Be it unto me according to thy word” (Luke 1:38). We heard how John the Baptist, in womb of Elizabeth, recognized the Lord Jesus in the womb of Mary and leapt for joy and expectation. In Advent, we wait, with John, in joy and expectation for Jesus to come. And, in obedience to John’s message, we repent and prepare to receive him.

Of course, Jesus is with us now. Jesus does not go away every year and then come back again at Christmas. Rather, we experience time in Christ in a progressive cycle; past and future continually meet in the present. We remember his birth again and look forward to his coming in glory as we prepare to receive him in a new way right now. Advent is a time to prayerfully examine our lives, repent and turn away from all sin, and practice good works that show our repentance is genuine (Luke 3:8-9). If we prepare in this manner, Christ will come to us to pardon our iniquity and reward the good works we have done in the Spirit—this year at Christmas, and at the end of time.

Our good works start at home. We must not be content to do our good works “out there” while we settle for animosity in our close relationships. We must practice the peace we proclaim. Our good works will include support for good works being done by others. During Advent and Lent we often focus on a particular work and raise support for it. This year in Advent we are focusing on Mama Mirriam, a woman who founded and operates an orphanage in South Africa. I visited her orphanage about six years ago, and we have supported her work since then. Mama Mirriam is woman of great faith. She experienced trauma in her life, but she found grace through our Lord Jesus Christ to turn that trauma into ministry to others. She is a worthy woman and her work is worthy of our support and our prayers, as we turn from sin and do good works in preparation for the coming of Jesus.

Learn more about Mama Mirriam and support her by clicking here.

Advent and the Comings of Christ

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One of the paradoxes of Advent is that it seems to call us to get excited about the prospect of Christ’s coming. Yet, we cannot adequately prepare for the coming of Jesus by temporary excitement. Few things discredit the church more that Adventist movements that exhort people to urgent action by saying that Jesus is coming soon. They are invariably followed by disappointment when Jesus doesn’t come as expected. Enthusiasm then gives way to disillusionment.

Unfortunately, such movements and messages do not pay attention to what the Bible says about how to get ready for the coming of Jesus. For example, in the Parable of the Wise and Foolish Virgins (Matt. 25:1-14) and The Parable of the Talents (Matt. 25:14-30), Jesus emphasized that we get ready for his coming by being continually faithful in the things God has given us over long seasons of time. As the master in the parable of the Talents said to the man who had been diligent with the money he had been given: “Well done, good and faithful servant; you have been faithful over a few things, I will make you ruler over many things. Enter into the joy of your lord” (Matt. 25:23).

Adventist movements that proclaim the coming of Jesus miss the central point of the church’s liturgy, which is that Jesus comes to us now. The Second Coming of Jesus is foreshadowed every Sunday in the Eucharist. The Bible tells us that at the end of time, Jesus will descend from heaven and his saints will be gathered to meet him. In the Sacrament of the altar, Jesus descends from heaven to meet us, and we are gathered around his presence at the altar to receive him now.

We meet Christ at that altar on the Lord’s Day to prepare to meet him in person on the Day of the Lord. Thus, we get ready for the final Advent of our Lord by faithfully preparing to meet him now. Perhaps one Sunday we will say, “Behold the Lamb of God” and we will see the Lord in person—rather than his Sacramental Presence. As Jesus said, “Who then is the faithful and wise servant, whom his master has set over his household, to give them their food at the proper time? Blessed is that servant whom his master will find so doing when he comes” (Matt. 24:45-46).

Trinity Season Spirituality

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We are finishing up the part of the year that walks us systematically through the way God has revealed himself to us in Christ (Advent through Trinity Sunday—Hymn 235 gives us a nice summary, see below). Each liturgical season has its characteristic spirituality. The Lenten fast and the Easter feast are the center and pinnacle. We are now entering the six-month Trinity season. Trinity reflects the challenge to remain faithful over the long haul—to not to drift into bad habits and unfaithfulness during a season in which there is no particular wake-up call.

The best way to avoid the drift away from God is to establish faithful patterns of prayer and spiritual discipline. Just about everything we do well we do according to some habit or pattern. Few people stay in good physical shape without an exercise routine, or maintain their skill level in an activity without habitual practice. Anglican faith and practice is Benedictine in nature. It reflects the Rule or pattern of prayer established by St. Benedict—adapted to life in a parish instead of life in a monastery. It is based on a three fold Rule of prayer: Participation in the Eucharist; praying the “daily offices” of Morning and Evening Prayer; and personal prayer, ranging from conversation with God, to meditation about God, to silent contemplation.

Sometimes people say they do not have time for prayer—that Rule is too big of a commitment. This is never true. We always do what we truly want to do. We grumble about 15 minutes of prayer, but have no problem with a 2 or 3 hour video game, sporting event or show. It is one’s personal choice to decide not to reorient one’s life around prayer, but this will be a conscious choice not to live the Christian life—which depends upon prayer. We feel a constant pull away from our prayer precisely because that is where the spiritual battle takes place. When we give up prayer, we concede that battle at the very beginning.

There are four practical points of emphasis that can us help us maintain our Rule of prayer during Trinity season:

One, commit to praying the daily offices. This is often the missing element. People go to church on Sunday and talk to God with some regularity, but are often missing the objective daily offering to God of prayer and praise. Yes, I know you get up early and don’t have time. I know the kids distract you. Yes, I know that Evening Prayer is hard to fit in at the end of a busy day. But if you want to, you will. And if you do, when you look back six months from now, you will be glad you did.

Two, practice some form of fasting at least one day a week. We observe Wednesday as a day of prayer and fasting for mission. It is of tremendous spiritual benefit to practice NOT doing and eating some of your favorite things one day each week. It helps us to detach from the consumer pattern and develop self control. You will see the benefit over the long run.

Three, create some space for silence in your life each day—time when every noisy thing is turned off. Even 15 or 30 minutes will make a big difference.

Four, connect with other Christians regularly for prayer or Bible study or just to hang out and talk. As the old story goes, the coal that sits alone burns out, but the coal that is connected to other coals burns brightly.

If you do things things habitually for the next sixth months as part of your Rule, Trinity season will be a time of spiritual progress—rather than a gradual drift away from faith.

Hymn 235

Advent tells us Christ is near;
Christmas tells us Christ is here!
In Epiphany we trace
All the glory of his grace.

Then three Sundays will prepare
For the time of fast and prayer,
That, with hearts made penitent,
We may keep a faithful Lent.

Holy Week and Easter then
Tell who died and rose again:
O that happy Easter Day!
“Christ is risen indeed,” we say.

Yes, and Christ ascended, too,
To prepare a place for you;
So we give him special praise,
After those great forty days.

Then he sent the Holy Ghost
On the day of Pentecost,
With us ever to abide:
Well may we keep Whitsuntide.

Last of all, we humbly sing
Glory to our God and King,
Glory to the One in Three,
On the Feast of Trinity.

Amen.

The Christian Hope of Resurrection

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The Christian hope of Resurrection is the certainty planted in our hearts by the Holy Spirit that our lives will follow the pattern of Good Friday and Easter. On Good Friday Jesus died. His spirit left his body (John 19:30, Luke 23:46) and went to the place of departed spirits. In the Old Testament, this place is called Sheol. In the New Testament, it is called Hades (translated in the Apostles’ Creed as “hell”). And his body was buried in the tomb.

On the third day this process was reversed. Jesus’ spirit was reunited with his body and he rose from the dead. The resurrection body of Jesus is a real body, with flesh and bones (Luke 24:39), visible scars (John 20:20) and the ability to eat (Luke 24:43). Yet, the resurrection body of Jesus is different. It passed through locked doors (John 20:19). It is not subject to the limitations of time and space and, most importantly, it is immortal; Jesus will never die again.

In the Nicene Creed we say, “I look for the resurrection of the dead: And the life of the world to come.” We mean that we look for the same thing to happen to us. We will all die. Our spirits will go to the place where the departed faithful go–a place the New Testament describes as “in paradise” (Luke 23:43)  “with Christ” (Phil. 1:23) and “asleep” (1 Thessalonians 4:13). But this is not our final state. Jesus “shall come again with glory to judge both the quick and the dead.” When Jesus comes, he will raise us from the dead and give us bodies like his own resurrection body (1 Cor. 15:51-57).

The state of the departed in Christ is an intermediate state. The dead, like the living, await the final coming of Jesus to judge the world and raise the dead. St. Paul tells us that the whole creation waits for this because it will lead to the renewal of the whole created order (Romans 8:19-21). God made the world and said, “It is very good” (Genesis 1:31). Sin brought death and corruption into the world. In the resurrection, Christ will restore the creation to the goodness God intended for it in the beginning.

Sometimes the Christian hope is reduced to the idea that we will “go to heaven” after death. Since this vague “heaven” is often described using platitudes that lack any foundation in the Bible, it feels like a consolation prize. When people lose the life on earth that they really valued, people will say they have gone to a “better place” called “heaven” to make everyone feel better. But no one is really longing for this vague heaven because it is not understood as the fulfillment of life; it is where you go when you lose life.

The Christian hope of Resurrection is not a consolation prize. It is the completion of the creation and the fulfillment of life in the body. When Christ comes and the dead are raised, we will experience union with God and each other in renewed bodies in a creation that is once again good. Thus, as St. Paul writes, “We… eagerly wait for the Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, who will transform our lowly body that it may be conformed to His glorious body, according to the working by which He is able even to subdue all things to Himself” (Phil. 3:20-21).

Some Thoughts on the Sacrament of Confession

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We complete our Lenten preparations for the Easter Feast by making a good confession.  We put to death the old Adam so that we may rise with Christ, the new Adam. One way we can do this is by making a sacramental confession to a priest. Some people object to sacramental confession. They say we can confess our sins directly to God and, therefore, do not need a priest. While we can and ought to confess our sins directly to God regularly, there are compelling reasons to make use of the sacrament of confession.

The objection to confession is an objection to mediators. Some say we do not need mediators to come between us and Christ. The Bible disagrees. The Bible teaches us that the members of the Body of Christ are given spiritual gifts to serve one another. When we use our gifts to serve others, we become mediators of grace for other people. We might just as well object, “I don’t need someone to encourage me when I am down. I can go directly to God for encouragement in my prayer.” While this is true, most Christians are thankful for believers whose gifts and presence mediate grace to us also.

The point of sacramental grace is not that you cannot get grace any other way. The point is that sacraments administered by those who bear the authority of Christ help us to receive grace more objectively and powerfully. When we confess our sins directly to God, we may feel forgiven based on the Scriptural promises. However, when we confess sins to a priest who hears our confession on behalf of the church and pronounces absolution with the authority of Christ, our forgiveness becomes a matter of objective, historical fact.

There is a communal dimension to forgiveness. We are saved as members of the church—not as isolated individuals. Our sin not only affects our personal relationship with God; our sin also impacts the whole Body of Christ. An example of this is the sin of Achan in Joshua 7. Forgiveness means being forgiven by God and being restored to the fellowship of the church. In the early church, confession was made to the whole congregation. When the growth of the church made this practice unwise, the priest came to represent the church in confession. The priest hears the confession for the church and gives absolution in the name of Christ.

There is a practical side to confession. We experience grace more fully when people are involved in ministering it to us. Most of us are afraid that people would reject us if they really knew us. When other people come to know us as we really are and forgive us, love us, and accept us anyway, God’s love becomes an experiential reality rather than a theological concept. Ideally, the whole church would live in this sort of honesty and authenticity. In real life, we do well to cultivate this with an inner circle of believers with whom we have developed trust. The sacrament of confession is a place to practice being known.

We encourage sacramental confession during the penitential seasons of Advent and Lent to prepare for the great feasts of Christmas and Easter, and whenever we fall into serious sin or feelings of guilt that require the positive, objective medicine of confession. The point is not that you must or that you can’t be forgiven if you don’t. The point is that confession is a powerful means of experiencing the grace of forgiveness.

The Non-Perfectibility of this World Apart from the Cross

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I Googled the Florida school shootings and found a brief biography of each victim. Reading something about each one helped me connect with the tragedy. They were no longer “17 dead;” they were Alyssa, Scott, Martin, Nicholas, Aaron, Jaime, Chris, Luke, Cara, Gina, Joaquin, Alaina, Meadow, Helena, Alex, Carmen, and Peter.

The process of my conversion began as a twelve-year old watching my 26-year old brother die of cancer. Two years earlier my mother had said the fateful words, “Your brother has a tumor.” It was the end of an idyllic childhood. Even at 10 I knew those words meant, “He is going to die.” Because of this formative tragedy, I have always been drawn to the pain of the world. Pain feels more real. Pain was the door to faith, the door to ultimate reality.

There is an impulse in visible tragedies to do something to fix the problem so that it will never happen again. The prime targets in Florida were guns, the FBI, the school system, the family—anyone who might have done something to prevent it. Part of this impulse is good. We all want to be safer. Those in positions of responsibility should learn every lesson to help prevent another tragedy.

However, another part of this impulse is an attempt to avoid the pain. We want to find someone to blame; a scapegoat upon whom we can pour out our anger. If it weren’t for him, or her, or them, all would be well. This keeps us from the mourning and grieving that are necessary for humans to work through the pain of life in a fallen and broken world. But, “Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.”

I Googled statistics on homicide. I found an annual total for America in 2016: 17,250. Dividing that by 365 yields an average of 47 per day. If we allow for improvements in those statistics over the last year, that still amounts to two Marjory Stoneham Douglas High School tragedies EVERY DAY.  Moving away from homicide to the human condition in general, there are over 2,000,000 deaths every year in our country. Improvements in drugs, treatments, and cures for some diseases can slow this rate down. However, it turns out that human condition is unavoidably fatal. No matter what we do, our mortality rate is 100%.

Lent began on Ash Wednesday with the words, “Remember, O man, that dust thou art and unto dust shalt thou return.” In Lent we reflect on our mortality and on the condition of sin that causes it. Sin is the condition of separation from God. Sins are merely symptoms of the condition of sin. Sin causes death. There is no way to conquer death or eradicate its effects in a fallen world apart from the remedy for sin that is the Cross of our Lord Jesus Christ. This is what Lent teaches us. We cannot get to Easter except through the Cross.

On the cross Jesus said, “My God, my God why have you forsaken me?” He tasted this condition of separation from God for us. We feel our condition of separation from God most acutely in our pain; pain can lead us to Jesus and the Cross. Thus, pain can become the door through which he enters our lives and we enter his kingdom.

I do not believe there is any better way to preach the gospel that to share in someone’s pain; to mourn with them over our common participation in the pain of life in a fallen world. The world runs from pain. We should run to it and face it head on because we know the answer for it. As we sit with people in their pain, we become a sign of the presence of Christ with them in it; our shared tears become the fellowship of Christ’s suffering (Philippians 3:10).

Our mourning in Christ is not despair. Our tears are tears of hope. The laughter of the world is often despair—the world trying fruitlessly to convince itself that things will be okay apart from the Cross. We weep with our Lord for the world’s brokenness, even as we know that God is making all things new through the Cross, which is the gateway to Easter and the New Creation, where “God will wipe away every tear from their eyes; there shall be no more death, nor sorrow, nor crying. There shall be no more pain, for the former things have passed away” (Rev. 21:4).

The Importance of Narrative to the Life of Prayer

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Many Christians live in the wrong story. The wrong story is the narrative that is bounded by time. It begins at birth and ends at death. Prayer in this story is aimed mostly at improving the quality of life between birth and death. Though “heaven” is sometimes invoked in this story, it carries with it a sense of a consolation prize. It is not the thing a person was deeply longing for; rather, it is something that will be talked about now that the person has lost the temporal life that was the real focus.

The narrative of faith begins with the new birth (conversion and baptism) and ends with “the Resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come” (The Nicene Creed). The New Testament is constantly pointing to these two events (cf. Rom. 6:3-4, 1 Cor. 6:11, Eph. 2:1-10, 1 Cor. 15:51-52, Phil. 3:20-21, 1 John 3:2-3). If we are living in the story that aims at the appearance of Christ and the hope of being transformed fully and finally into his image, prayer will take on a different focus. We will learn to see temporal things in terms of how they impact eternity. We will begin to see temporal pain and disappointment as spiritually formative events that develop virtues like perseverance (James 1:2-3). The overarching concern will be our growth in virtue and holiness, not only the achievement of temporal happiness (cf. Matthew 6:33).

In Anglican tradition, our life of prayer is governed by the Book of Common Prayer, which is the Rule of St. Benedict adapted to a parish setting. Our Rule is the way we train ourselves to live in the story of our redemption. Rule is rooted in the calendar. We do not live merely through annual cycles of bloom and decay until our own flower fades and we die—or through a yearly series of consumer sales events. Rather, we live through an annual cycle of the revelation of God in Christ that looks forward to our ultimate hope. We begin with the expectation of the coming of Christ in Advent. This leads to Christmas, “The Word was made flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:14). Then, we celebrate the various ways Christ is revealed in Epiphany. Lent shifts the focus to Easter. We prepare for the central Christian feast with disciplines of fasting and confession. This culminates in Good Friday and the commemoration of the death that accomplished our redemption. We enter into a renewed experience of forgiveness and new life in the celebration of the Resurrection— “He is risen” (Mark 16:6). Easter is a forty-day season that ends with the Ascension (Acts 1). During the ten-day season of Ascension, we pray for the Holy Spirit to come to us in a new way on Pentecost. The following Sunday is Trinity Sunday, on which we celebrate the Revelation of God as three persons, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Then there is a long, general teaching season of Trinity. As we experience time within this narrative, practicing disciplines that embody this narrative, we are formed by this story.

This is a “cyclically progressive” story. Each year we enter the seasons at a different place in our lives, having grown spiritually toward our goal. Each feast points to the coming of Christ. In Advent we wait for Christ to come both at Christmas and at the end of time. Epiphany focuses on how Christ is revealed now, and how he will be fully revealed at the end. Easter celebrates Jesus’ resurrection and looks forward to our own resurrection on the Last Day. Each year moves us closer to the ultimate event (Romans 13:11). Because the calendar focuses both on how the eternal comes into time and on how time will ultimately be fulfilled in Christ, living in the story defined by the calendar fills us with hope. This is the antidote for the despair that accompanies life lived in the wrong story of this fallen world, a story that always ends in death.