Bishop Marc

Parish As Neighbor – How Those Outside See Us

When we lived in Virginia, and I was serving as rector of Emmanuel Church, Middleburg, I saw several maps of the Diocese floating around that showed parish boundaries. Though we were Emmanuel Church, in the 19^th Century we had birthed another congregation in nearby Aldie, and together we made up what was called Johns Parish. The parish map was a bit strange at first, as it asked one to look at the diocese in a new way, not along civic boundaries, or larger church boundaries, like deanery, but with boundaries encompassing neighborhoods, in our case, a village and the farmland surrounding it.

At this point in time, this map of the Diocese of Virginia had little use except when people became worried about trespass; some new congregation or Episcopal ministry was springing up within established parish boundaries without having followed the procedures to allow for this.

The work we all have been doing together in the Diocese of California has transformed the view of parish boundaries I received from experience elsewhere in the Church. Rather than being a boundary to not be crossed from the outside, the parish (or mission) borders in the Diocese of California are places of possibility, where we learn to become neighbors.

When I was a student at Virginia Seminary, in the very first, new, disorienting and exciting days of the first semester there, the dean told the incoming class that we should spend that first semester visiting as many different sorts of Episcopal congregations as we could, and to deliberately go outside of the sort of congregation to which we were familiar and with which we were comfortable. If one were used to simple liturgy, vestments, clear windows in the church building – in other words, Low Church, then check out one with smells and bells. If you came from a rural parish, see what urban feels like, etc.

Sheila and I took the dean’s recommendation to heart and over the next ten weeks or so we sampled a variety of Episcopal congregations far beyond what we imagined to exist within our Church. One of these was an urban congregation in the District, St. Stephen’s and the Incarnation. It was the first time we had been invited up out of the pews to stand around the Holy Table for the Eucharist and there were colorful banners hanging from the ceiling to nearly the floor in the sanctuary. But these liturgical features, though I’ve remembered them were not what impressed me the most. There were poor people, working poor and street people worshipping side by side with the “normal” Episcopalians that Sunday, and during the coffee hour (some things are consistent) I had a conversation with some of them. What they said to me has stayed with me all these years: “St. Stephen’s and the Incarnation is our neighborhood church. Everybody in the neighborhood feels that way, even if they don’t go to church here like we do. Everybody in the neighborhood wants to be buried from this Church.” I was told by some other parishioners that members of the Kennedy family, staunch Roman Catholics that they were, sometimes attended St. Stephen’s and the Incarnation because it was so clearly in solidarity with its poor neighborhood, and thus was so clearly on the side of justice, a stand that mattered to the Kennedy’s despite denominational affiliation differences.

The very word, parish, is one I’ve used so long and so often that until I was working on this address to you I had not inquired as to its root meaning, its etymology. To my great delight, the original meaning of parish is…neighbor, “para,” meaning nearby, combined with “oikos,” home or house, to give the sense of the neighbor and neighborhood.

Being a parish, then, is about being neighborly among neighbors. Being parish isn’t about good fences making good neighbors as a central reality, whether the fence is out at the border of the parish or the physical walls of our church buildings.

 

Letting in the Light

What I want to talk about is letting in the light, which you need from your neighbors as they need it also from you.

You remember that the narrator of the poem is speaking to his neighbor over the stonewall that divides their land, just as they are about to undertake the spring-time chore of repairing the wall. The narrator questions the purpose of the wall

My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, "Good fences make good neighbors."

At the least, Frost is subverting mindless re-enactment of traditions that no longer serve a positive purpose, or even questions the continuing allegiance to traditions that perpetuate negative patterns of life. Parish boundaries, church walls as the equivalent of Frost’s New England stone wall are where much of the Episcopal Church seems to have been for some decades.

The poem that speaks to how we are parish, neighbors among neighbors, rather might be Jesus’ Parable of the Good Samaritan. The rhetorical question thrown at Jesus by a doctor of the law, “And who is my neighbor?” isn’t far off from the hide-bound neighbor’s quotation of, “Good fences make good neighbors,” in Frost’s poem: a way to shut down the conversation, get out of something uncomfortable and hard to think about, something potentially life changing.

Jesus’s response to the stone wall of a question to open a perceptual door that continues to inspire and provoke through the ages since he spoke it. Jesus, like Frost so many years later, first questions the often conventional answer: my neighbor is the person I recognize as being like me, of my social class, going to the same church, educated in the same schools, voting as I do, my kind of folk. Rather, as Jesus guides us to understand, the major lesson we remember from the parable is that neighbors are those who act neighborly, and are not neighbors by category. Neighbors are as neighbors do, we might say, to sum up this part of Jesus’ teaching in the Good Samaritan.

I think, looking at the history of the Diocese of California and our constituent congregations, from our earliest days right up to the present, we have heard the lesson of the Good Samaritan and have heeded it. We have sought to be neighborly, to show compassion to those in need.

Let’s try a thought experiment. Don’t the words of the across-the-wall neighbor and the doctor of the law seem to suck the light from the room and from within our hearts? And, by the same token, doesn’t the action of the Good Samaritan lighten the landscape, and our hearts? So, imaginatively let us look at a map of the Diocese of California, first divided up with parish boundaries, and all of us in a discussion about new ministries that have sprung up, one in each deanery. And somehow, as in a bad dream, we find ourselves wrangling about impropriety of all this boundary crossing. We can feel the lights going out, within and without as the acrimonious discussion grinds on.

Now, let us think about the same map, showing how you have actually been neighbors to those around your congregations. The food banks, the gardens, the tutoring projects, the preschools; the visits to nursing homes, the use of your church buildings for temporary homes for the homeless, and the list goes on and on. We can see and feel the light and warmth radiating out around each of your beautiful congregations, coming forth from being neighbors by showing compassion.

I hope you take as much pleasure as I do in contemplating this luminous map that charts the neighborly efforts of our forebears in faith, and your own in serving our neighbors in the Bay Area.

 

The New Light Pattern

Let me suggest though, that there is a new light pattern showing up all across the Diocese of California, a way of being neighbors that is hidden in the heart of the Parable of the Good Samaritan, and that has been brought to life in our Church through the use of the 1979 Book of Common Prayer and its Baptismal Covenant.

First, hidden in plain sight in the Parable of the Good Samaritan is a difficult paradox, that Jesus insinuates that it is not the doctor of the law questioner who is the neighbor, offering his compassionate care from on high to someone on the outs, but rather the exact reverse; it is an observant, culturally central Jew who is in desperate need and the neighbor, the one offering compassionate care is the outsider, the other.

This is a critical point – we serve, with our own wounds, our own needs and God meets us in the humble movement of our hearts – the other, the one whom receives, is an instrument of love and grace to us.

Place this deeply challenging idea of Jesus’ next to the formative promise we make in the Baptismal Covenant,

Celebrant      Will you seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving your neighbor as yourself?
People          I will, with God’s help.

As we have lived into that promise over the last thirty years, we have been formed, shaped to hear this inner message of the Parable of the Good Samaritan. Love, wisdom, truth do not only flow out from a center, our congregations, but also move in to us from unexpected sources, from all who share life with us in the neighborhood, the parish.

Think about our thought experiment again, with light filling in the map of the parish and mission boundaries in the Diocese of California. In contrast to some places in our great Church, light has dilated over the last 160 years of our diocesan history – more and more light coming out of our church centers. That radiating light continues, but I think more and more we are witnessing the light of compassion filling in the parish and mission areas because of a mutual recognition of Christ in each other, that all are capable of being neighbor to the other, that the church member or even the congregation as a whole may be the injured, wounded man in need of neighborly compassionate love…from outside, from the outsider.

Stories of Blessings from the Outside

I am a deeply blessed man. I along with the Diocesan House team with whom I share care of our diocese am privileged to visit each of your congregations, and I am here to tell you that this beautiful new pattern of dawning light is showing up with great strength and beauty all over our diocese.

I’ve invited two people to share a public narrative, a dynamic, compact story of what has been happening in the Diocese as we live into the spiritual principles of the Beloved Community. First you’ll hear from the Rev. Este Cantor about community engagement, about parish as neighborhood at Good Shepherd, Berkeley and Holy Trinity, Richmond. Then you’ll hear from a young adult lay leader, Ms. Peggy Lo at our cathedral, who is a witness to how Being the Beloved Community is being manifested within this unique congregation so important to us all.  

After their brief remarks, I will return with closing comments and some lively images for you to enjoy from the community engagement work going on in both of these congregations, and a view of how I see us moving into the future.

 

Closing:

In closing, I want to bring to your attention cards on each table that will help you connect to resources for church vitality.  These videos can be viewed individually or together.  All the lessons from last year are easily accessed on either Vimeo or the DioCal website, excellent and free.

The year in progress offers teachings on becoming an invitational church, leadership for dynamic change, and engaging our neighborhoods. 

These are but tools, but tools to help stir your minds and hearts as we enter into learning prayerfully. 

But what I call you to do, as your bishop, is to continue your intentional, faithful work of ministry.  Let’s continue to cast light from the center, and, formed by Christ through Baptism and its promises, let us learn to receive light from others. Look with me within our parish and mission borders and rejoice to see the light gathering and growing, filling in.

I would love to have the time to tell you and show you the many beautiful new ministries I have the pleasure of witnessing across our diocese. Trinity and St. Peter’s, San Francisco coming together to make a vibrant new start in an old and significant building…the unfolding area ministry in Southern Alameda, becoming more responsive and creative in serving the wider community with each year…a courageous new beginning for four congregations in East and Central Contra Costa, using the tools of the See::Community initiative to visualize their common life as a planning tool…Good Shepherd, Belmont and Holy Family, Half Moon Bay choosing to stay connected and deepen their relationship during the uncertain times of an interim. These are just a few, suggestive examples.  But I’d like to invite you to watch some images from the neighborhood engagement of Grace Cathedral and from Good Shepherd, Berkeley, whose inspiring public narratives you’ve just heard.

And then, I invite you to enjoy a brief closing video that expresses to you some of the joy, excitement and possibility I feel about our common work and life. 

My experience at the installation of Archbishop Cordileone

A post to clarify my experience at the installation of Archbishop Cordileone at St. Mary's Cathedral, San Francisco.

I was dropped off at the cathedral at 1:30PM by my assistant. After making my way around protestors and showing my invitation to security guards, I was in the lower level area to which I was directed by 1:40.

The instructions the Archdiocese had given my assistant were that I should be at St. Mary's by 1:45. The service was scheduled to begin at 2.

I identified myself to an assistant to the archbishop, who spoke to someone through a headset, saying, "Bishop Andrus is here."

I saw the Greek Metropolitan, a good colleague of mine, who was in the same room with me, several Greek Orthodox priests, archdiocesan employees and security guards. I greeted the metropolitan and we spoke briefly.

An archdiocesan employee attempted to escort me upstairs with the Greek Orthodox group, but was stopped from doing so by the employee to whom I had first identified myself. This person, who appeared to be in a superior role, instructed another employee to stand with me.

At this point no other guests remained in the downstairs area. The employee and I chatted while waiting. I began to wonder about the time holdup. I checked my phone; it was 1:50PM. I asked the employee standing with me if the service indeed started at 2, which she affirmed.

At 2PM, when the service was to begin, I said to the employee, "I think I understand, and feel I should leave." Her response was, "Thank you for being understanding." I quietly walked out the door. No one attempted to stop me. No attempt was ever made to explain the delay or any process for seating. I arrived early, before the time given my assistant, and waited to leave until after the service had begun.

My intention for attending the installation was to honor our ecumenical and interfaith relations in the Bay Area.

Letter to the Diocese of California concerning the installation of Salvatore Cordileone as Archbishop of San Francisco

Dear Ones,

On the Feast of Saint Francis, patron saint of our city by the bay, Salvatore Cordileone will be installed as the Roman Catholic Archbishop of San Francisco. The announcement of his appointment by Pope Benedict has come with mixed reactions and feelings from San Franciscans of all or no faith tradition.  Bishop Cordileone was an active supporter of Proposition 8, which I and the other Episcopal bishops throughout California opposed.

Despite this difference of opinion and support, I look forward to working with Archbishop-designate Cordileone when and how we can, remembering as the Apostle Paul writes that we are one body, united by one Lord, one faith, and one baptism. Christianity has a long tradition of the faithful disagreeing with one another yet working together for common mission for the building of the Reign of God.

Archbishop-designate Cordileone's predecessor and I have worked closely and fruitfully on reducing extreme poverty globally through the Millennium Development Goals. At the same time as we did this important work together, we took very different public positions on Proposition 8. We can and must both work together for the world's good, and it is equally important, as I say in most of my blessings at the conclusion of the Eucharist, that "we make no peace with oppression."  The recognition of the dignity and rights, within civil society and the Church of lesbian, bisexual, gay and transgendered people, and of women are as core to our proclamation of the Gospel as our solidarity with the poor, with victims of violence and political oppression, and with the Earth.

Archbishop-designate Codelione and I share concerns for the treatment of immigrants to this country and reforming the United States’s immigration policies. Working to alleviate global poverty and change systems that disenfranchise all people are the concerns of those who follow our brother Christ, and that work is not limited to the work of bishops.

In working together with the Archdiocese of San Francisco, however, I will not change my course with regard to the full inclusion of all people in the full life of the church. I hope that public disagreements can be handled respectfully and that criticisms of public statements may be met with mutual respect. Some Catholics may find themselves less at home with Salvatore Cordileone’s installation and they may come to The Episcopal Church. We should welcome them as our sisters and brothers.

Even as we welcome those who may join us and look for ways to work with our Roman Catholic siblings in the faith, we will not be silenced in our proclamation of God’s inclusion. Our ecumenical partnership should be founded in our following Christ and shared service. It is our Christian duty to take stands in public or from our pulpits when others — especially those of our own faith — are in error and trying to suppress the rights of others who, too, have been created in God’s image. 

I hope that we may move forward together in ministry and faith in a way that bears witness to the unity of Christianity without necessitating uniformity.  I look forward to attending Salvatore Cordileone’s installation as Archbishop of San Francisco and working with him in the future.

+Marc Handley Andrus
Episcopal Bishop of California 

Facing into Climate Change: The Possible Impossible

“President Obama promised to begin to slow the rise of the oceans (pause for mocking laughter) and heal the planet. MY promise is to help you and your family.” Mitt Romney, acceptance speech, Republican National Convention, 2012. Let us leave aside Clint Eastwood's speech at the RNC, 2012, which was anything but the ramblings of an elder in his twilight years, and concentrate on the single most troubling, misleading, false statement made in that evening; a statement made by the Republican presidential candidate himself, and said in way that was meant to bring laughs - in other words, addressing global climate change is not even worthy of direct criticism but rather only of mocking derision. Here is what is wrong with Mr. Romney's statement, in which he promises to help me and my family rather than address global climate change as our President, Mr. Obama promised to do four years ago: first, our president has done very little to fulfill that promise, and secondly, and more importantly, the best thing either candidate could do for me and my family and you and yours would be to make climate change the focus of our great resources of creativity now, this moment, and continuing for as long as it takes to minimize the catastrophe that is imminent. There is no need for me to try and convince you, or the American public in the main about the seriousness of the climate crisis. I say this because of how studiously we are ignoring the problem. Such paralysis and denial in the face of evidence supporting the reality of climate change, evidence which is abundant, even overwhelming, and which has been coming for decades, is proof not that we don't believe in the problem, but rather that we believe and are perplexed and afraid. We should wonder what is behind the social dislocations of states like Arizona and Texas. These states, as filled with great Americans as any, continue to make unaccountable social choices because, beneath these choices, relevant to us, within our species, is the terrible subconscious knowledge of being on the front line of climate change, with intolerable heat and drought setting in as the norm rather than the exception. And, rather than face the degradation of the earth where they live, these strange, out of character choices are made on the human level. The fine people of such impacted states are making odd choices because they are averting their gazes from that which makes their hearts constrict. There is no need for fear, even though the problem of climate change is unprecedented. We are a species whose capacity for inventiveness outstrips our tendencies for complacency and stubborn stolidity. We are a people who revel and take joy in meeting problems and solving them, more than we like lamenting the state of affairs. And we are a people who have a nearly unbounded capacity for compassion and love, for children, for the poor, for other species and for "this fragile earth, our island home." The brilliant scholar, Peter Kingsley, has written that for the ancient Mongolian shamans and for Tibetan Buddhists of the same time period, facing the fact that a situation was impossible was the prelude for finding a way through. As long, they believed, as we refused to call something impossible, we would go on with small, inadequate fixes for the problem. We look at the problem of climate change squarely and acknowledge that we have never faced anything like it in history, then we are ready to do the impossible. It is time to lower the levels of the oceans and heal the planet for you and your families. Marc Andrus Episcopal Bishop of California

9/11 reflections: God sends music in the world to heal our traumas

There are two things I’ve been thinking lately about the nature of the universe. First, it was begun as an act of love. Secondly, the universe seems to be created in such a way that when a trauma occurs, big or small, galactic or at the personal level of the circle of our lives, music emerges to bring healing.

 

Brian Swimme and Mary Evelyn Tucker recount in their engrossing recent book, Journey of the Universe, that radiating out from the Great Flaring Forth was not only all the matter of the universe, but also stupendous waves of sound. The sound coursed through the expanding matter and literally gave shape to the universe. Thus, Mary Evelyn and Brian concluded, Pythagoras was right when he said the universe was created by music.

 

Today, the 11^th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks is the day that Holy Women/Holy Men has designated to  remember and honor Henry (Harry) Thacker Burleigh. Mr. Burleigh was an African American musician – vocalist and composer – who was born in 1866 and died 81 years later.

 

As a little boy, Harry spent lots of time with his grandfather, a former slave who had been blinded in a savage beating by his owner. His grandfather gave him the gift he could give him, from person of extremely limited financial and material resources, the priceless treasure of African American spirituals.

 

Harry Burleigh became, extraordinarily, a student at the National Conservatory in New York, headed in those decades by Antonin Dvořák. It is virtually certain that Harry Burleigh gave Dvoŕák Goin’ Home and Swing Low which made their way into the beautiful, unforgettable, and yes, healing 9^th Symphony, From the New World.

 

As significantly, Burleigh’s own compositions and concerts, which were popular and strongly attended, brought African American Spirituals to a broad American audience. Most prominently, the beautiful Deep River, which was so great a comfort to the great progenitor of the Civil Rights Movement, Howard Thurman, was orchestrated and popularized by Burleigh.

 

From an underprivileged and thus unlikely and obscure source came healing music for the sickness and trauma in the American soul that was racism towards African Americans. Love in the form of music healing a great trauma.

 

I am the Episcopal Visitor for a great order of nuns in New York, in both Harlem and in Brewster, the Community of the Holy Spirit. Sr. Hèléne Marie, a member of the order and one of the Council that governs the order is a superb, sensitive, alive musician. After the 9/11 attack, Hèléne Marie and other sisters made their way to St. Paul’s Chapel, immediately across the street from the Twin Towers. How to help in the face of such a tremendous shock and tragedy? In addition to many other ways of helping, my friend made this contribution: she began playing Bach to sooth and offer healing to first responders, survivors, and families of victims. She kept up this ministry of music for several weeks, and also enlisted other musicians from all over Manhattan, and so the healing was amplified.

 

The universe was created in an act of love. Music is an extension of the originating love, bringing healing to all our traumas, great and small. And know that all speech, all our sound, insofar as it emanates from the heart as compassion voiced may be viewed as improvisational music.

 

Chrism Mass sermon: "When I am lifted up..."

Tuesday, April 3, 2012, 12:10 p.m.

Chrism Mass at Grace Cathedral

Ser_20120403

Calling on the Spirit in Unsettling Times - a new book by Bill Countryman

I witnessed an Anglican-style conversion worked by God through Bill Countryman in a country church in Virginia. Bill, an Episcopal priest and scholar, is not a pyrotechnics preacher/teacher – quite the contrary. He is soft-spoken, and precise; full of humor, but not broad humor. You are asked, implicitly, to live up to your “better angels” when you are in his class or congregation. And there in Virginia a retired businessman, a trucking company owner, found himself undergoing a spiritual transformation as he listened to Bill talk about poetry, and the Bible, the Church and faith.

 

Bill has been helping many of us out over the years. One of his less-well-known books, The Mystical Way in the Fourth Gospel, was a text I used to teach the Gospel of John twenty-five years ago when I was first ordained. That book remains among the most insightful I’ve every read on that most insightful of gospels.

 

Now Bill Countryman has a new book out, Calling on the Spirit in Unsettling Times. It is a slender volume in a series, Canterbury Studies in Anglicanism. I recommend it to you. In it Bill explores some of the traces of the Spirit moving through what we all recognize as unsettling times. Some of the ways we may apprehend the Spirit’s presence among us include images of Jesus, and the communion of saints. Typical of Bill, both these categories of experience, so well-trodden as to seem ho-hum to some, get face lifts in this lively book.

 

With the images of Jesus, Bill take us on journeys through time and space, in sixth-century Ravenna, and medieval Florence, and ending up in Lucca. The bookends, Ravenna and Lucca, startle us with images of Jesus that are not meant to stir up gilt but rather awaken the sense of being loved.

 

The communion of saints is expanded to include not only angels like Yosemite and our redwood forests, but also – you and me. “…this more ordinary sainthood…this is nothing to be scoffed at. This is the warp and woof of the fabric of human community, the fabric of human life. This is where everyday human reality lives and breathes…The Spirit never stops breezing through us like the wind, never stops breathing new life through each of us into our neighbor.” (p. 69)

 

And if you and I are in this group of the “great haloes,” then we had better be ready to be called to action. “…the [Spirit] has no qualms at all about sending raw recruits out to the dirty work. So no matter how sure you are that you have nothing to offer to this task, do not imagine that you’re safe. You remember the Pentecost story. The Spirit descended upon the disciples. She made them behave strangely. She outed them in a hostile environment. She forced them into action.”

 

Bill, a poet and lover of poetry, frames this book with the prayers and poems of Christina Rossetti. He makes the point that she lived in unsettled times too (but who hasn’t, I wonder). It is a pleasure to be introduced to helpful prayers and poems from this person who wrote one of our most beautiful hymns, which I have deeply loved for years, “In the bleak midwinter.” The core of one of her prayers, that Bill gives us to meet these times, is “Rule all hearts by Thy Most Holy Spirit.” Use Bill’s book to both learn to recognize this elusive but always-available Spirit, and to ask her to rule in all our hearts.

 

+MHA

Anglican Covenant statment made at the House of Bishops meeting

At the most recent House of Bishops meeting at Camp Allen in Texas, I made the following statement about the proposed Anglican Covenant:

 

“First, I want to remember the late Bishop Bob Anderson, who, when an Anglican covenant was first proposed within the recommendations of the Windsor Report, warned the House of Bishops that if the Anglican Covenant became a reality, it would change the nature of Anglicanism. I took him to mean that we hold together as a spiritual body, whose bonds are more than affection, but are the love of Christ, the vivifying blood that reaches each community of the Communion equally. To put in place a covenant to codify this love is to ratify the fear that inspired the Windsor Report itself.

 

I also want to remember the statement of the Primate of Korea, who with two other primates addressed our House of Bishops on the subject of the proposed covenant. He strikingly said that the province he served would reject the proposed covenant, because, in their considered opinion, to accept would be to internalize the colonialism the has inhered in the historical relationship between the Anglican provinces of the West and their province.

 

My own memory is of having participated in the Lambeth Conference, 2008, a conference where it was made widely clear that we would have a non-legislative meeting – no voting. There were a series of meetings held on the proposed covenant, all of which I attended. The points of view expressed about the fourth part of the proposed covenant, which contains a mechanism whereby errant (in the judgment of some larger part of the Communion) provinces could have their status as full and equal members of the Communion reduced, were strongly negative. In our daily Indaba groups (discussion groups of about 40 bishops each), the proposed covenant was a discussion topic on one day. Though there was no voting, as advertised, amazingly the report that came out from Lambeth regarding the content of the conference said that a majority of participants favored an Anglican covenant. No mention was made of the opinions expressed in the meetings focused on the proposed covenant.

 

I also want to note that the fourth part, the part ‘with teeth,’ has stayed in every draft of the covenant – we must take it to be a firmly fixed, constituent part of the proposed covenant. Accepting any part of the covenant will be taken to mean approval of the fourth part as well. We must be aware of this.

 

Finally, it has been argued that by approving some portions of the proposed covenant, The Episcopal Church could signal its desire to be at unity with the Communion as a whole. Let me say that each of you here, and the dioceses you serve, through your formal companion diocese relationships and your many lines of mutual ministry and service that stretch in every direction across the whole of the Communion have sent the strongest, most positive message possible about our solidarity with the Communion. Affirming the Covenant, besides the negatives factors I have mentioned, is totally unnecessary to tell our sisters and brothers that we love them.”

 

Marc Andrus

forum with matthew fox and adam bucko

A Place for Everyone, but the Choice is Theirs

There is enough energy -  human, the earth’s, the infinite energy of the divine, to cope with the enormous problems of the world today, chiefly climate change and related human poverty and suffering. It is necessary, though for this energy to be applied and applied wisely for the saving effects to be brought forth. It is too bad that the Roman Catholic Church has chosen to expend funds of its available energy (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/02/us/catholic-church-unveils-order-for-ex-episcopalians.html) including what might be viewed as a kind of low-level creativity on making a national refuge for disaffected Episcopal priests and the lay people who follow them.

 Make no mistake, these angry ex-Episcopal priests and their flocks are not victims; they have not suffered persecution of any sort other than that they are repulsed by the stance of The Episcopal Church on the status of women and of lesbian, gay, transgendered and bisexual people in the Church and in the world. I can speak with some authority on this, having served in the Episcopal House of Bishops since 2002, a period spanning the explosive events around the election, confirmation, and consecration of Gene Robinson as Bishop of New Hampshire.

 Throughout this tumultuous decade of The Episcopal Church’s life I have seen the large majority within the House of Bishops act with kindness (understood as a strong virtue here, harkening back to its root that links it with “kin,” such that being kind means recognizing our commonality with others), respect, and charity towards the vocal, active minority, including Jeffrey Steenson, the new head of the ersatz diocese for the unhappy. I was present in the House of Bishops when Mr. Steenson announced his resignation as Bishop of the Diocese of the Rio Grande, and announcement which was met with tears, hugs, and, as Mr. Steenson walked out of the assembly, a standing ovation of affirmation for him.

 The principled stands of The Episcopal Church regarding the status of women and LGBT people did not appear by direct revelation, but they are also not whims of fancy. Rather, they reflect the way Episcopalians have come to understand God – as staying with the world throughout everything, as never abandoning us. Because we, week after week, experience this transforming presence with us in the sacraments of the Church, we understand revelation to be a process of unfolding.

 No, the Church did not ordain women for the bulk of the last two millennia, but in an Episcopalian view of things while we honor (that is, examine carefully, thoughtfully) the deposit of tradition as we seek to make a response to the needs of the world today, we do not assume that the tradition is always right. The Church has been in error on slavery, on women, on LGBT people, and currently I feel it is making only the faintest effort overall on climate change, but the Church has, under the influence of a God who travels with us, reformed time and again.

 Another comment about how we spend our energy: there has been quite a lot of debate within The Episcopal Church about our energy budget, meaning, do we work on HIV/AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa or do we promote the recognition of the rights and dignity of women and LGBT people. To think that a choice must be made between these is false on every count I’ve heard put forward. Conservative African bishops will not work with us if we continue down the path we’ve been on in solidarity with LGBT people: Is there not a great enough fund of suffering in Africa and are there not enough potential partners to work with in addressing this suffering to fill any void left if we were cut off by some Church leaders there? The real justice front is with global poverty, not with the recognition of the rights of women and LGBT people: Such an assertion usually conveniently avoids looking at the systemic disempowerment of women and LGBT people globally, and definitely avoids looking squarely at the shocking levels of violence to which both groups are subjected. Finally, there aren’t enough resources to go around, we have to prioritize: Only in some world where we have made a god that is not the God of the universe and its infinite power of love.

 I value my partnership with the Roman Catholic Archbishop of San Francisco on forwarding the Millennium Development Goals, to cite one prominent example of our work together, and I debated with myself as to whether a response to this latest egregious action by the Roman Catholic central authority was worth the energy (see my opening sentence). Overall I concluded that something that gives credit to the amazing laypeople, deacons, priests, and bishops of The Episcopal Church who have courageously held to a course that follows that faintly shining tract through time to which the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. pointed (“The arc of history bends towards justice.”), and have done so with malice towards none and charity towards all – that such an effort was well worth it.

 

Sincerely,

+MHA