Then the priest materialized, a middle-aged man whose facial expression reminded me of someone with a fish allergy in a seafood restaurant. But that didn't matter as long as the congregation and the choir sang their carols lustily and the lessons were read.

The joy ended, though, when the Reverend read monotonously and almost inaudibly - he couldn't be bothered to climb into the pulpit - an inane tale linking Christ's incarnation to the Sermon of the Mount. Theologically this can be done, of course, but he did not do it well; in fact I doubt he had written it himself. Clearly this blighter had not spent much time preparing his homily - and this was Christmas!

At first the agony seemed short-lived. A warden interrupted him, asking if there was a doctor in the congregation. There wasn't. Imagine - a sizable English congregation at Christmastime and not a physician in their midst! It used to be that doctors counted among the most faithful of Christians.

Anyway, here is the reason for this interruption: An elderly man had collapsed in a rear pew. Wouldn't you have thought that the priest might have approached him, said a little prayer, given him a blessing, asked the congregation to pray for him or softly sing a hymn as he was being carried out?

No, he hopped discontentedly from foot to foot, asking, "May I continue with my story now?" Alas, he eventually did. The reference to the Sermon of the Mount might given him an opportunity to say something appropriate about the sick man now waiting in the narthex for an ambulance.

But, no, this did not occur to the Reverend. He did not even mention this suffering congregant in the intercessory prayers. With misgivings I went forward to take Communion. At least I did not receive with my lips as I normally would.

I just grabbed half a host seemingly floating on his moist palm, and thought of it as an act of penitence on my part. Later, at the exit, the Reverend stood aloofly not asking any of the strangers where they had come from and what they were doing in Sapperton on this blessed Christmas Day. Just two days before on the ferry from Calais, I had read that in 2007 more people had attended Catholic than Anglican churches in England for the first time since the Reformation.

At first I was inclined to attribute this to the sodomite crisis in the CofE, a crisis that seemed to have reached a climax when the Archbishop of Canterbury was found out having attended a secret Eucharist organized exclusively for homosexual, bisexual and transgendered people in St. Peter's Church on London's Eton Square - a theological absurdity. In Sapperton, Gloucestershire, it became clear to me that the crisis was much deeper.

I realized that the CofE's implosion was not just caused by fiends in clerics but probably even more so drippy priests like this country vicar who was so little endowed with any sense of pastoral care that he could not find words of blessings and prayers for an elderly congregant who collapsed in his church on Christmas Day.

May God have mercy on this once wonderful Christian country now cursed with a clergy who show so little compassion even now, at this late hour, when it is threatened from within by a belligerent alternative faith determined to devour it!

---Uwe Siemon-Netto Ph.D., D.Litt. is Director of the Center for Lutheran Theology & Public Life. He can be reached at:
(O) 314-505-7237
(F) 314-505-7228
(C) 202-957-3044
Email address: center1@csl.edu