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An Advent Message from Bishop Peter E. Hickman

During this holy season of Advent I am once again reminded that we are a people of Anticipation.

During this season we are called to pay attention, to be alert to the signs that God is at work among us, to hear the voice crying out from the wilderness, calling us to prepare ourselves for what God is about to do in our midst.

As a people of anticipation we begin to feel the rising of deep joy from within as the reality of what God is about to do in us begins to take hold.

As a people of anticipation we are called to lift up our eyes to the horizon to behold the first light of the dawning of a new day, the day of the coming of the Lord!

In some small, yet mysterious way this is precisely what we are witnessing as we reflect upon our present experience within our beloved Communion.

I have been blessed with the privilege to travel throughout the country and have had the opportunity to be with many members of the ECC and with many others who are now being drawn to our communion. It has become evident to me that God is indeed at work among us.

It can be hard at times to see, due to the struggle that is so characteristic of our collective broken humanity. But with the prayerful eyes of faith our sight begins to penetrate the veil of our darkness to behold the ever present glow of God’s holy and hidden activity in every soul. May God give you the eyes to see!

As I continue with you in this holy endeavor of creating a new expression of this holy communion of love that we call the ECC, I do so not because it is a good idea. Nor do I do so because it seems like the practical and just thing to do. I do so because I am convinced and can see that it is the hidden work of God in our midst preparing us for something that is about to happen, something that God is about to do that is so grand, so marvelous, that we cannot begin to imagine what it will look like. It would stagger our minds.

We cannot begin to comprehend what God intends for us as a people and as a communion of communities.

Let us lift up our eyes in faith! Let us lift up our hearts in prayer! Let us be among ourselves and for the world a beacon of undaunted hope, a sign of enduring peace, a light of unrestrained joy, and a new dawn of holy love!

This is what the Ecumenical Catholic Communion must be about if we are to be faithful witnesses of what God is doing among us and what God is about to do through us! We are, indeed, a people of anticipation!

(Easter Greetings)

The Mystery of Faith and the Glory of Easter

“Dying you destroyed our death; Rising you restored our life, Lord Jesus, come in glory.” Embodied in these words from the Holy Liturgy, in which the gathered community intones upon hearing the call of the deacon, “Let us proclaim the mystery of faith,” is the very heart of the Christian experience. The Mystery of Faith, which we encounter in the very act of celebrating the Eucharist, is summed up in these very words which we sing or recite week after week at the table of Jesus Christ.

This is the Paschal Mystery of Christ in which we participate every time we gather as the People of God to partake of the Eucharistic bread and wine that has become for us the body and blood of Christ, that is, the very life of Christ among us and then within us. This is the moment when our holy communion with God and one another is fully realized in the Risen Christ. It is the moment we recognize Christ is truly among us in the breaking of the bread and the sharing of the cup, his body broken, his blood poured out. It is a sacred moment when we glimpse the inbreaking of the “age to come” into the here and now of our lives in this present age of suffering and death which is already passing away as God’s new creation is now coming into being in our very midst.

The paschal Mystery of Christ is that decisive act of God in Christ that saves God’s beloved humanity from the tyranny of death and sin. In some mysterious way that we cannot even begin to fully comprehend, the suffering and dying of Jesus sets us free from our complicity with evil, of which our many sins are but the evidence of humankinds’ “yes” to the angelic lie of the evil one who has held us hostage throughout this present evil age. And by rising from the dead Jesus delivers the decisive and fatal blow to death itself. In so doing He restores to us the essence of life, which is His life in us.

We participate in this saving action of Christ by our baptism in the waters whereby we die with Christ in his death and are raised to new life in Christ through the gift of the Holy Spirit which is the divine garruntee to us that God will complete our salvation by the resurrection of our own bodies when this age finally passes away and we behold the New Heavens and the New Earth with the descent of the Holy City of the New Jerusalem coming down from out of heaven to rest upon the Earth in which God will dwell forever with the human race, the perfect consummation of the communion of heaven and earth, of divinity and humanity, the ultimate divinization not only of the new humanity but of the whole universe. Salvation is inclusive of the entire cosmos not just a few million human souls. Our salvation is the coming of the new creation where all evil and the power of death will be no more. The thought of the coming of this new world, this new age, is incomprehensible to us for all we have ever known is this present existence. It is staggering to even try to imagine this new creation. And yet it remains our deepest hope and our greatest longing.

At Easter we celebrate anther part of this mystery, namely the resurrection of Christ from the dead. The resurrection is not merely God’s validation of the person and work of His holy son, Jesus, but it is the very beginning of the new age. Christ becomes the first fruits of the new creation which now has already come upon us in him. This also marks the beginning of the end of the old creation that has been held in bondage to corruption and decay for countless millinia.

Oh, my beloved sisters and brothers in Christ, this is the Mystery of Faith that we proclaim. It is this mystery which is already at work within us, and to which we are called to live out in the here and now of our lives. It is this mystery that enables us to become co-workers with Christ and one another in the ushering in of this new creation. We have become agents of God’s light illuminating the darkness of the world through our faithful witness to this coming reality of God’s reign and the ongoing work of bringing God’s justice and peace to our broken and suffering world. This is the Mystery of Faith. It is the Gospel we proclaim. It is the witness we bear to the world concerning that mystery “which is Christ in you the hope of glory.”

So let us never cease in praying the words of this prayer, for in so doing we proclaim the glory of the Easter we celebrate: “Dying you destroyed our death; rising you restored our life; Lord Jesus, come in glory.”

Yours in the service of the Gospel of Jesus Christ,

+Peter

Pastor of Saint Matthew Church of Orange California

Presiding Bishop of the Ecumenical Catholic Communion

(Third letter for Lent)

Greetings to All the Sisters, Brothers, and Friends of the Ecumenical Catholic Communion!

In the cover of the darkness of night Nicodemus, a Pharisee and a distinguished rabbinical scholar of Torah, secretly sought an audience with Jesus while in the ancient holy city of Jerusalem. The Gospel According to John records this clandestine conversation between the two rabbis and what unfolds is some of the most startling words ever spoken by Jesus. So staggering were the things that were said by Jesus that Nicodemus was incredulous yet at the same time he was strangely drawn to to what seemed to be a new revelation of the coming Kingdom of God in the person of this obscure teacher from Galilee.

It was during this exchange that Jesus utters the words of one of the best known and most often quoted verses of the entire Christian Bible, "For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, so that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life."

Within these words of Jesus, Christians throughout the centuries have recognized the heart of the Gospel of Christ.

In these words we are told that the ultimate being, God, who is the source of all reality, all forms and all particular things, is also the source of the highest and noblest dynamic in all existence, the the power of love.

Love has its ultimate beginning in the hidden mystery of the Divine Life. What we glimpse of God in these words is that the Son is begotten within this hidden Life of God. We are also shown that the Son is the Beloved of God, the God who created the world and proclaimed it good; the God who formed humanity from the dust of the earth and breathed into humanity the breath of divine life so that we would the bearers of the image of God to the whole of creation, the "Imago Dei." This Divine creator is also the God who called forth Abraham the father of the people of Israel. This is the same God who spoke to Moses at the summit of Sinai in the midst of the holy fire and smoke of the divine glory, the Shekinah. This same God, whom the people of Israel worshiped in holy awe, is now revealed in the person of the Son, Jesus the Christ, to be a being of pure and Holy love. "God is Love." And as such this God , we are told, loved, and is loving continuously the world, the entire cosmos, the whole of the universe which is the masterpiece of the divine creator.

We learn from the Torah that the whole of creation, both spirit and matter, was declared good by her creator from the very beginning. We now learn from Jesus that this same creation is the object of the Creator's love. It is revealed that the whole of the created world along with the human race, indeed, especially because of the human race, is the beloved of God.

But in some mysterious way, for reasons we cannot fully comprehend, God's beloved creation became subject to death. The whole universe along with humanity, the divine image, became hostage to the entropy of corruption and mortality. "Death reigns." All things die, all things pass away. Everything perishes. The whole of the universe is disintegrating into oblivian.

But this simple verse of the Gospel tells us that this God could not stand by and allow this to happen. "God so loved the world..." In the depths of the divine wisdom, Hagia Sophia, God determines the unfolding plan of His eternal will, and that divine plan was determined from the very foundation of the world. God would redeem the whole of creation and He would begin His redemptive work of love within the human race.

God would send the divine Son, the eternal Word, the Beloved One, into the created world to bring the message of the Gospel to humankind. This was done so that those human beings who would believe this Gospel and put their trust in the person of the Son, the Word made flesh, would once again have eternal life and would no longer be perishing, would no longer be subject to corruption at the hands of that grim reaper called the Death, ha Thanatos.

Through this saving action of God in Christ death would be overcome. "The last enemy to be destroyed is Death." With this new life, given to us by grace and received in faith, we are now enabled to be agents of God's redeeming love in the world. We, the human race, now play an indispensable role in the salvation of the whole world. Salvation is not limited to a few human beings, but involves the entire universe. Salvation is not merely individual but it is cosmic, it is the saving act of God for the whole of His beloved creation.

As human beings who's hearts have been transformed by the divine act of God in Jesus Christ, we become co-workers in the divine act of saving the world. We are to be beings filled and transformed by God into creatures of perfect and holy love. As such we are called to love all creation and we are to love everyone into becoming loving beings as well. We are to love a hostile universe into loving. Love is infectious and we are to become the agents of this infection of divine love.

It is now through us that the redeeming love of God for the universe is brought to manifestation until that time when Christ's victory over all evil and death is fully manifested and then humanity in Christ will hand all things over to God "that God may be all in all." This is our eternal destiny.

No wonder poor Nicodemus was incredulous and at the same time was irresistibly drawn to this Gospel of which the person of Jesus was the embodiment in the temple of his body. This is why Nicodemus was there the day the broken and dead body of Jesus was taken down from the cross. This is why Nicodemus with tears in his eyes, tenderly washed the battered and bruised body of Jesus and along with Joseph of Arimathea, carefully wrapped the lifeless body of the Son of God and laid Him in a tomb. They left the tomb after sealing it shut with no idea of what universe shaking event was to take place in just three days time, the beginning of the new creation in a way they could have never imagined.

This is the Story. This is the Gospel story that is summed up in the few simple words, "For God so loved the world..." We become a part of that larger story. The journey of Lent reminds us of that. During Lent we make our way into the ultimate Love Story, the eternal story of God's love for the world. We do this every time we act in obedience to the love of God. For whenever we perform a loving act for another, especially for those who are at the bottom of human need, we have joined our stories to the Divine Story. Whenever we perform an act of love to an animal or plant, to the earth or any aspect of creation, we are living out the mystery of God's Love Story in the midst of our own personal story. That is what full redemption is all about.

Attached is the third chapter from tha classic Christian devotion, The Imitation of Christ as well as my Third Lenten Message that you have just read.

With Love,

+Peter

LentenGreetings to All the Sisters, Brothers, and Friends of the Ecumenical Catholic Communion!

The Holy Season of Lent has begun! This ancient Christian observance is the the forty day period of time preceding Easter in which the People of God prepare for the celebration of the Paschal Mystery of Christ, His suffering, death, and resurrection, in the Liturgy of the Triduum during Holy Week. In this great mystery Christ offers Himself for the life of the World.

We are now invited to walk with Christ in the Lenten journey. The Gospels remind us that Jesus set his face toward the Holy City of Jerusalem to make the final journey of this life, a journey to His appointed encounter with death. In Lent We are invited to participate in this same journey of Christ. It is a journey of the Spirit. It is a journey that is not without it's own peculiar kind of suffering. It is a journey that culminates in that fateful encounter with the mystery of death.

Is death then, the final destination of our life's journey? It may seem to us that death is our final destiny but our faith in Jesus tells us otherwise. The Paschal Mystery of Christ tells us that there is something beyond the horizon of death. It is a new kind of life, a transformed life, an eternally abundant life with unending possibility. This is so because it is the divine life, the life that is in Christ. This superior kind of life has now become our life that is hidden in God in Christ. Lent reminds us that we are in Christ.

So now we carry within us, through God's grace, the dying of Jesus so that we may share in the rising of Jesus to that ever new and glorified life which is impossible for death to overcome. During the journey of Lent we are invited to embrace death, to wrestle with the angel of death in the desert of our lives. It is the death of our "self-life", the death of the egocentric life which ever seems to be our natural inclination. As we die to our selfishness, our self interests, our "rights" we experience the power of the dying of Jesus within us so that the abundant life of Jesus may also become manifest in us. This is not only true in the future day of our resurrection but it must be true even now in our present life. It is a realized eschatology. It is in the here and now of our lives that we are called to realize the manifestation of the uncreated light of Christ's life. Like the experience of MountTabor we are to be transfigured so that the light of Christ illuminates our world of the here and now, the extraordinary in the midst of the ordinary, the divine in the midst of that which is the essence of our humanity.

Therefore let us bear holy fruit as the evidence that we are with Christ on His journey to that great rendezvous with destiny, the of the cross and the ultimate victory of the resurrection. Let us bear the fruit, in this Lenten Season, of love, joy, peace, patience, and self control. This is the fruit of the Holy Spirit. It is the fruit that bears the seed of this eternal life found in Jesus the Christ.

We cultivate this fruit of the Spirit in our deliberate and mindful observance of the Three Lenten Practices: prayer (both in personal devotion and in the communal celebration of the Liturgy), giving to the poor (the sharing of our gifts with others who cannot repay in kind), and fasting and abstinence ( a practice that strengthens the life of Christ within us).

We have begun this Lenten journey, on the day called Ash Wednesday, with the distribution of ashes marked as a cross upon our foreheads with the words "Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return.". This reminds us of our mortality, it reminds us of the death of Christ. It also reminds us of that blessed hope of our share in the resurrection of Christ to a new and glorified life.

Attached is a reading from The Imitation of Christ, a classic in Christian devotional literature, with more to come throughout the Lenten Season.

May God bless you as we journey together with Christ and one another into the deeper life of God!

PS log on to our website, www.ecumenical-catholic-communion.org click on the link "History" and there you will find a brief article on the historical development of the practice of Lent.

From Bishop Peter: Greetings