When Others in Need Come to Mind

This week, as I write, people in the town of Jasper were allowed to “come home” and assess damages. They had a one-hour time frame to be there as the fire still raged some distance away.

Imagine coming back to your town to see your lot empty. No house where it once stood, shiny and clean, but now a grey dusty patch over perhaps a cement foundation. Bare earth where grass once grew. Everything gone! And if you drove as far as the park, the road into it was a charred mess of black sticks, all that’s left of a once beautiful forest.

I watched the online video. Section after section of homes burned to the ground. Some homes and businesses sustained less damage, but the town was rather empty, aside from RCMP and a small contingent of staff.

Interviews with people who’d lived there, or had planned to, showed a mix of people who wanted to come back and start over. Others planned to move somewhere else. One of those people interviewed was a leader in the town, a daughter of a retired writer I know.

Wendy had just started a new job there and her mom wondered how often that kind of job comes around. In our messenger conversation, I said I was glad they got out safely. But what about work? One needs a job in order to live. I promised I would pray for her daughter and family.

My own resources may be limited to a small donation at times like this, but God is bigger. Not diminishing the need for many of these families, I pray that they will get the help they need to get back on their feet and be able to earn a living again. I pray when Wendy and that community come to mind. It certainly isn’t hard, since they are in the news as much as the war in the middle east.

What can we do? Pray! Sometimes it’s all we can do, and let the people know we are praying for them.

 

 

 

Archbishop Thomas Cranmer, shaper of the Anglican Way

-an article for the Light Magazine

By Rev. Dr. Ed & Janice Hird

If you have ever been to a wedding service, you can thank Archbishop Thomas Cranmer for his contribution of these new words:  ‘to love and to cherish.’ Cranmer beautifully translated from the Latin Sarum rite these now familiar vows: “to have and to hold from this day forward, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness, and in health, to love and to cherish, till death us depart.”  He had a liturgical gift, a poetic ability to develop English-language worship services, marriage services, and funeral services that still speak to people over five hundred years later. 

Cranmer birthed an English Reformation that was not only the via media (middle way) between Catholic and Protestant, but also the via media between Luther and Calvin.  Cranmer was not the first Archbishop of Canterbury, but rather the 67^th and the first Protestant Archbishop of Canterbury. As of today we have had 105 Archbishops of Canterbury. The Anglican Church was not created by Cranmer, but rather reformed and renewed. He has been described as the most mysterious person in the English Reformation.

Born in 1489 at Aslockton Nottinghamshire, he was sent at age 14 to Jesus College, Cambridge after the death of his father.  During his Master's degree, Cranmer studied the Renaissance humanists, Jacques Lefèvre d'Étaples and Erasmus. Shortly after receiving his Master of Arts degree in 1515, he was elected to a Fellowship of Jesus College. Many are unaware that Cranmer had initially been kicked out of Cambridge University in 1515 for the ‘sin’ of getting married.  To support his new wife, he worked as a reader at Buckingham Hall in Cambridge.  After his first wife Joan died in childbirth, all was forgiven and Cranmer was allowed to return as a lecturer at Jesus College in Cambridge.  In 1520, Cranmer was ordained as an Anglican priest.  Continuing his studies, he received his Doctor of Divinity in 1526.  Cranmer was a brilliant scholar who read not only Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, but also French, German and Italian.  As one of the most learned men of his age, he had a private library larger than the Cambridge Library, with nearly all the writings of the Greek and Latin Fathers.

King Henry 8^th, who needed a divorce in order to marry Anne Boleyn, liked Cranmer’s idea of consulting with leading European university theologians. After unsuccessfully appealing to Rome, Cranmer was appointed the resident ambassador at the court of the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V.  While negotiating in 1532 with the Lutherans on behalf of King Henry 8^th, Cranmer married his second wife, Margaret, the niece of the famous Lutheran theologian Andreas Osiander. Unexpectedly, King Henry 8^th chose Cranmer as the new Archbishop of Canterbury, a position in which he served for twenty-three years.  With the implicit knowledge of Henry 8^th, Margaret was smuggled into England. King Henry 8^th kept changing his mind about whether clergy could be married, so Margaret was smuggled back to Germany when it was too dangerous.  Given King Henry 8^th’s extreme volatility, it was a miracle that Cranmer survived, especially with so many enemies seeking to take him out.  In 1543, Henry 8^th denounced Cranmer as ‘the greatest heretic in Kent’, alluding to his secret marriage, and allowed the opponents to charge Cranmer with heresy. Then he put Cranmer in charge of the investigation, after personally giving him his royal signet ring of protection.  After Edward 6^th became the next King, Margaret was allowed to openly be Cranmer’s wife with their two children Margaret and Thomas. 

Cranmer wrote the English Prayer Book in two versions, 1549 and 1552, the first one more catholic, the second more protestant.  He brought change slowly and cautiously.  The compulsory usage of the new English Prayer Book, however, resulted in a Prayer Book rebellion in Devon and Cornwall where Cornish was spoken rather than English.  Queen Elizabeth, after the death of her sister Queen Mary in 1558, combined her late godfather’s two prayer books into one: “The body of our Lord Jesus Christ which was given for thee, preserve thy body and soul unto everlasting life (1549); Take and eat this in remembrance that Christ died for thee and feed on him in thy heart by faith with thanksgiving (1552).” Cranmer affirmed the presence of Jesus by the Holy Spirit in Holy Communion, which must be fed on in the heart by faith with thanksgiving: “Doth not God’s Word teach a true presence of Jesus Christ in the sacrament is a spiritual presence?”

                In the Prayer Book, Cranmer restored the giving of both bread and wine to the congregation, not just the clergy. He also wrote a healing service in the Prayer Book, focused directly in praying to Christ, rather than to the saints. Cranmer wrote 25 of the 70 collect prayers in the 1552 Book of Common Prayer. This helped people meditate on the Word of God, ‘to read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest his Word.’ Professor Simeon Zahl of Cambridge recently described Cranmer’s Prayer Book as a ‘technology of the heart’ that helps us psychologically experience the consolation of the Holy Spirit. 

Cranmer wrote the preface for the Great Bible, the first English bible ever used in English Churches, an adaptation of William Coverdale’s translation. To protect the bible, it was chained to the lectern desk.

He gave refuge to many European Protestant scholars like Martin Bucer, Peter Martyr, and Bernardino Ochino who were invited to teach at English universities.  In March 1552, Cranmer invited the foremost Continental reformers, Heinrich Bullinger, John Calvin, and Philip Melanchthon to come to England and to participate in an interdenominational council. Sadly, none were able to come.

The death of 15-year-old King Edward 6^th from tuberculosis left a leadership vacuum. First cousin Lady Jane Gray only lasted as a Protestant Queen for nine days.  Then Mary was made Queen, and Imprisoned Cranmer for over two years. He was charged by Mary with sedition, treason, and heresy.  During that time, she burned over 300 protestants at the stake, giving her the nickname ‘Bloody Mary’, the same as the drink.  Forced to watch the burning of his two fellow bishops Latimer and Ridley, Cranmer renounced the prayer book six times before he was burned at the stake. 

Was Cranmer a weak-willed, flipflopping, compromiser, or was his real issue his strong allegiance to obey the King/Queen?  Was this what caused him to recant the Prayer Book? Was he much like the Apostle Peter who denied Jesus three times, yet turned back and helped others? (Luke 22:32)

In his final sermon, he renounced his renunciation, before being rushed off to be burnt at the stake at the same location as his fellow Protestant Bishops Ridley and Latimer. As he was being burnt, he intentionally put his right hand in the fire so that it would be burnt first: “And forasmuch as my hand offended in writing contrary to my heart, it shall first be burned…”  Cranmer's death was immortalized in Foxe's Book of Martyrs, placed beside the Bible by Queen Elizabeth the First in every English Cathedral. The Anglican Communion commemorates Thomas Cranmer as a Reformation Martyr on 21 March, the anniversary of his death.

As he was being burned at the stake, he prayed: “Lord Jesus, receive my spirit.” Cranmer finished well on a fiery stake, faithful to God at the end, despite his vacillating.  Perhaps this is a hopeful metaphor for the struggles of contemporary Anglicanism.  May the rediscovery of Cranmer help both Anglican Christians and the wider Christian community to also finish well.

Rev. Dr. Ed & Janice Hird

 

COMMUNICATING THE STORY by Eleanor Shepherd

 Recently I read a FaceTime post from a friend who was reflecting that the removal of all of our Christian influence from the schools. She recognized this means that children are growing up without the stories that were familiar to us and influenced so much of the classic literature we knew.

As I thought about that, I realized that these were the stories that also created the values that are important to us and knit us together in many ways. They gave meaning to our lives. This morning in my private prayer time, I was reminded of one of the stories that I have always appreciated.

It is the story that John recounts about the woman who was getting some water at a well in a town called Sychar, when Jesus stopped there to rest. He asked her for a drink of water, and she was quite surprised that he addressed her, as she was a Samaritan and He was Jewish.  Usually, the two groups kept their distance from one another. Not only that, but she was also a woman, and he was a man who was not part of her community and for him to speak to her was rather unorthodox, let alone ask her to give him a drink.

What I like about this story is that as their conversation continues, she discovers that this is a man that she can talk to, and he listens and answers her questions respectfully. In reading her story, I found that it was easy for me to image the backstory, listening to the conversation she had with Jesus. What I loved most of all was that when he asked her about her husband, she told the truth, and Jesus confirmed it, even if it was not the whole truth.  She said that she did not have a husband. Jesus affirmed that what she said was true, by letting her know that he was aware that she had had five husbands and that the man she was living with now, was not her husband. Knowing all of this about her, he still spoke to her with respect, and this convinced that this was no ordinary man.

I used the backstory that I created about her from what I read in the Bible, in my book, More Questions than Answers to show how Jesus was able to use the questions that people have about faith to help them to discover who God is and how much He loves them. This is the good news of the Bible and why I regret that today people do not have the opportunity to find themselves in such stories.

There are so many people who, like this lady so long ago in Sychar, are searching for love in all the wrong places. We who have been exposed to the powerful message of love know that there is One who loves us unconditionally and His story and His presence have transformed our lives. Often, because we have failed in living out what we have believed and discovered, folks around us do not know the depth of love that they could experience. Since the Bible is not popular, perhaps we will have to be clearer in showing the love that it expresses. We can graciously communicate the message to those we meet. Maybe for us that will be a way that we can offer them a drink of living water that their thirsty souls long for.