January 23, 2007
Pretense
John “Honest to God” Robinson, the British bishop who brought such fresh air into the church in the 1960s, often said that the pulpit is too much already six feet above contradiction. These words come back today as we remember Bishop Phillips Brooks, one of the church’s outstanding preachers for whom pretense was poison.Would that it were so for more in these times. Servant leadership, both in church and state, seems almost a thing of the past. Episcopal arrogance and the clones such a posture raises up among the presbytery approaches pandemic stages altogether contrary to our Anglican collegial heritage. This same sort of hooliganism has, as well, infected our national heritage of checks and balances that is so often disdained in these times.Brooks was said to be a moderate churchman, not given to puffery. One of his choice bon mots was said to be, “Orthodoxy is, in the Church, very much what prejudice is in the single mind. It is the premature conceit of certainty. It is the treatment of the imperfect as if it were the perfect.”A probably apocryphal, but no less real story is told of an occasion when he was to speak at a parish fund-raiser in one of his more “high-church” congregations. He arrived in the rector’s study attired in a dark suit, white shirt, and maroon tie. The rector lamented, “Bishop, I’d so hoped you’d wear your clericals on this occasion.”"By all means,” the bishop replied. Then, opening his brief case and taking out a black tie, he promptly re-vested.
No Comments »
RSS feed for comments on this post.
| TrackBack URI
You can also bookmark
this on del.icio.us or check the cosmos