The Rector’s Chronicle

Fall 2025

The Rector’s Chronicle

Dear Friends in Christ,

This past Sunday, at our glorious Homecoming service, I shared the old proverb: “For want of a nail, a shoe was lost; for want of a shoe, a horse was lost…” We reflected together on how small choices shape great outcomes, and how each day we face the choice set before Israel by Moses: life or death. To choose life is to cling to God; to choose death is to turn away from Him and drift into emptiness. In the film The Shawshank Redemption, such a choice is stated simply as “Get busy living or get busy dying.” Jesus describes it in Luke 9:23 in terms of the Cross: “Then he said to them all: 'Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me. For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will save it.”

Two reflections I read recently brought this home with painful clarity for me.

Denmark is said by some to be one of the world’s most secular nations in the world. As Denmark seeks to increase its military in light of a more threatening environment in Europe, Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen has dared to acknowledge what most Western leaders will not: that many young Danes are unwilling to fight. Some openly admit they wouldn’t die for Denmark – not for democracy, not for the flag, and certainly not for a modern welfare state. Frederiksen seems to be acknowledging that people will only suffer and fight for what they hold sacred. Having hollowed out the Church’s public role and reduced religion to private choice, Denmark now finds itself with young citizens unwilling to defend their own nation. Denmark is not alone in the West in this. The Prime Minister’s plea for the Church to step back into public life is not a matter of religious conviction or romantic nostalgia—it looks very much like it is an admission that, without faith, meaning collapses, and with it the will to endure.

The recent Minneapolis shooting can be described, not only as a horrible tragedy, but as the symptom of a cultural pathology: nihilism, born of resentment and disillusionment. Today’s mass shooters, like Robin Westman, no longer even act out of ideological hatred; instead, they embody what has been called “slop violence,” acts of chaos fueled by cynicism, despair, and the actual hatred of innocence as the ultimate rejection of life. Westman idolized the Sandy Hook killer, Adam Lanza. Online subcultures, detached from

any transcendent moral vision, feed off irony and desecration, turning even childhood into material for perverse mockery. In a culture where nothing is sacred, violence becomes both spectacle and statement: the destruction of meaning itself.

Taken together, these Perspectives suggest that the West has built systems of comfort, rights, and freedoms, but, cut loose from God, these systems offer no reason to sacrifice and no framework for hope. They cannot sustain courage in Denmark’s geopolitical peril, nor can they resist the descent into nihilistic violence in America’s heartland. Rights, liberties, and happiness are the fruit of a deeper tree—one rooted in transcendence. Severed from that root, societies drift into fragility, despair, and desecration.

The fundamental problem, then, is not the issues that are commonly talked about in relation to these terrible incidents. As these two events, one in Europe and one in America, indicate. It is the absence of God in public and private life that lies at the heart of the problem. In Denmark, it leaves the next generation with nothing worth defending. In Minnesota, it left one young man surrounded by nothing but darkness and evil.

Our culture often tells us we can build life on comfort, progress, or personal freedom alone. But without God, these collapse under the strain. As the Psalmist says, “Unless the Lord builds the house, those who build it labor in vain.” (Psalm 127:1) That is why Moses’ call and Jesus’ command remain urgent: Choose life. Not comfort. Not ideology. Not mere survival. Choose the living God, who alone offers hope and gives

strength to endure. There is indeed a lot of toxic religion in our world that pulls people toward the darkness almost as much as rejecting God altogether, but the cure for toxic religion is not atheism. We can see where that is leading all around us now, and our parents saw it in the unparalleled carnage wrought by the atheist ideologies of the 20th Century, Fascism and Communism. The cure is only to be found in a pure, authentic, and wholesome Faith in which we can see reflected the person and life of Jesus Christ.

This is the choice before us as individuals, as families, as a parish, and indeed as a nation in its 250th year. In a time when so many drift into anger, resentment, and disillusionment, we are called to be a people who bear witness that life is found in Christ alone.

I am absolutely not normally one for modern hymns, but the words of this hymn by Adrienne Camp and Geoff Moore express this well. The tune is powerful, also if you care to Google it.

In Christ alone, my hope is found

He is my light, my strength, my song

This Cornerstone, this solid ground

Firm through the fiercest drought and storm

What heights of love, what depths of peace

When fears are stilled, when strivings cease

My Comforter, my All in All

Here in the love of Christ I stand

There in the ground His body lay

Light of the world by darkness slain

Then bursting forth in glorious Day

Up from the grave, He rose again

And as He stands in victory

Sin's curse has lost its grip on me

For I am His and He is mine

Bought with the precious blood of Christ

No guilt in life, no fear in death

This is the power of Christ in me

From life's first cry to final breath

Jesus commands my destiny

No power of hell, no scheme of man

Can ever pluck me from His hand

Till He returns or calls me home

Here in the power of Christ I'll stand

So let us rise each day with the words of Deuteronomy on our lips: “I have set before you life and death… therefore choose life.” Let us “get busy living” the life Christ has won for us, and invite our neighbors into that life. For only in Him do we find the strength to endure, the courage to sacrifice, and the joy that no darkness can overcome.

Faithfully yours in Christ,

Fr Tim

Rector