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You would have had to live in a cave for the last several years, or been in a Rip Van Winkle type of sleep not to have been aware that the Church has been plagued with much false teaching which disrupts, confuses, and misleads the people in the pews. In many ways, we have been on the forefront of concern and action against false teaching at The Good Shepherd for many years and during the rectorships of a number of my predecessors.

We love the Lord, the Church, and have embraced the faith once delivered to the saints which is why we make responses when strange teachings appear. We respond because we care.

The Lord God has given me a love of preaching. The man whose immortal soul we commend to God’s eternal keeping in this Requiem Mass (Dr. Archibald Cameron Elias, Jr.) instructed me to preach today, not eulogize. His written instructions (which he read over to me a year ago) were: “No eulogies – only the officiant’s homily.” Again, I love to preach sermons and homilies, but how I wish that I could eulogize just a bit. But that will have to wait and possibly be done after Arch’s body is committed to the ground (earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust) when we gather at the Philadelphia Cricket Club, or maybe at a more quiet, intimate setting at a later time.

Clergy of our time (especially in the Episcopal Church) aren’t very good at obeying orders, and some of that is because those above them (bishops) who give orders cannot be obeyed without a compromise of conscience. Regrettably and sadly, many a bishop and priest is so full of himself that his modus operandi is to do what he wants to do regardless of what the people under his charge have entrusted him to do and what is for the common good and what glorifies God rather than man.

Last Saturday, I drove to Basking Ridge, New Jersey to ordain a man to the priesthood who was a deacon in the Reformed Episcopal Church. He had devoted himself to the study of Church history, and from such study sought to embrace the fullness of the catholicity of the Church as a priest in the Anglican Church in America. His knowledge and understanding of the Church was most impressive in the answers he gave in his canonical exam. He serves as the Chaplain for a large senior citizen complex known as Freedom Village in Basking Ridge.

After I laid my hands upon him to make him a priest, I untied the diagonally positioned deacon’s stole and placed it in the cross-chest and cross-stoled position of a priest, and said: “Take the yoke of the Lord. For his yoke is easy and His burden is light.”

A priest wears a colored stole around his neck (the color of the particular Church season) as a symbol of a yoke, as would be placed around the neck of an animal for labor as the animal pulls a plow. Without the yoke, the plow cannot be pulled where the farmer directs his beast of burden.

A priest, or any Christian, is to “wear” the yoke of Christ to pull the message of the Gospel and Apostolic teaching forward into the world so that good seeds are planted for a plentiful harvest of Christian produce.

My dear people,

I have been asked by a number of parishioners to comment upon the recent Global Anglican Future Conference in Jerusalem; and in particular, the Jerusalem Declaration released at the Conference’s conclusion. In response to this request, I commend to your careful reading the analysis of GAFCON by Father Samuel Edwards.

Father Edwards, a very dear friend of mine with whom I have worked for many years, is a consummate theologian gifted with the ability to see things in the Church as they have been and as they are, who writes with the type of critical thought and clarity that very few do within the Church.

Please read his analysis of GAFCON, and feel free to speak to me if there is need for more clarification and or if you have concerns that you think should be addressed.

+DLM

I thought it wise not to transfer the Feast of St. Peter and St. Paul that falls on this Sunday to a weekday because I have for the last two Sundays preached on the Apostles and Apostolic teaching in light of the gospel passages we have had and heard, but more so because we can profit much from thinking about these Holy Apostles as to who they were as men called to give their lives to Jesus Christ for His work in the Church for the world.

The question could be asked, “What would the Church be without these two Apostles and their teaching?” And the answer would be , “Sorely bereft.”

It wasn’t easy being a Christian in the early Church’s first three centuries. It was an underground movement that was quite costly. The early Christians had found Truth in Christ Jesus, were filled with joy and shared in a rich common life centered in the Eucharist, and were working out their salvation with fear and trembling because they understood the proper fear they were to have of God, trembling in their souls when they offended Him and hurt each other, and at the same time having the human fear and trembling of heart as persecution was assured and martyrdom common for their obedience to Christ their King above all earthly rulers.

Jesus’ call to twelve disciples to be apostles from the larger group of men and women who were following Him is expressed in a variety of ways in the four Gospels. We hear of men being called from their vocation as fishermen to be “fishers of men.” We hear of Jesus spotting a man and then calling him to follow, as it happened with Levi (Matthew), the tax collector. We hear of Jesus seeking and finding a man and saying “Follow me,” as it happened with Philip.

We know from the Gospels that Jesus was led by the Father to establish the New Israel in taking the Jewish order and tradition of the leaders of the twelve tribes of Israel to a new level and place with the creation of the Apostolic band of twelve men.