October 18, 2003
Incarnation
A sign on a parish convalescent home announced, “For the sick and tired of the Episcopal Church.” Underneath hung a smaller one that read, “SRO.”
The old church militant has become the church irritant and again for all the wrong reasons. Paul Tillich said that the Incarnation is the peculiarly Anglican heresy. Maybe it was because we talk about it so much and always seem so uncomfortable with it. We get all precious with John’s brilliant insight that the Word became flesh. But inevitably, we do so at the risk of overlooking the rest of the saving miracle — that the flesh allowed it to.
Humanity — even Jesus’ humanity — keeps on surfacing in one form or another, and every time it does, we panic. It’s like the English Don sat looking at his supper, saying, “This mutton is harder to take than the lamb of God.” We make biblical authority the stalking horse, when the real issues are about humanity — race, women, sex in one facet or another. Maybe the one thing that keeps Anglicans together is that for us, anguish has become a second language.
The primary prelates hurried into London last week with the common mind it seems that everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler. They left letters and statements and interviews and the usual obfuscation that results whenever we try to exegete for the world our oxymoronic notions about what old Caroliner H R McAdoo called our “ordered freedom.”
The charm — and frustration — of Anglicanism, like love and faith, is that just as it gets out on the cutting edge of risk, somebody always wants to turn back, forgetting that the less you bet, the more you lose when you win.