Bishop Marc

Dispatch from Quito

Being here in Quito and having background reading assigned on William Temple seemed odd to me, until the first of our speakers on the topic of “Scriptural Bases for Prophetic Proclamation to the Least”, Don Compier, began his talk. He told us that an eminent liberation theologian, one of his own teachers, credited Temple with being a major fountainhead for the creation of an approach to theology that would come to be called Liberation Theology. As Don put it, Liberation Theology had an Anglican birth!

After Don, the next speaker was our own Companion Diocese Bishop, Naudal Gomes. Bishop Naudal has been deeply shaped by both Liberation Theology and by the spirituality of the Franciscans. It was interesting to be a listener and hear Bishop Naudal talk about the  mission of their diocese, about the common mission between California and Curitiba, and about the Dominican Republic environmental sustainability gathering we co-hosted last fall.

He reminded me about something I learned from the Guarani people I visited this past spring. The Guarani, the first people the colonizing Portugese meet, were nomads, but there was always a general direction to their movment – they moved towards the East, because they believed that there was a land of unending life in the East.

Bishop Naudal told us that he said to a Guarani chief he met (the same one who was so hospitable with me), “Then we are walking together; I too am always moving East, the direction of eternal life, of resurrection.”

MHA

Sacred Space at St. Dorothy's Health Camp

The children and young people, thirty-seven of them ranging in age from 8-18, were gathered outside in a ragged circle around a stylized tree, covered with wooden leaves, each one decorated with paint, markers, and glitter. Around the young people towered living redwoods. One by one children spoke up: “My family is on the Tree,” “Music,” “Creativity,”…”My heart,”…”My liver.”  Finally, one young person spoke up; “St. Dorothy’s, this is sacred to me. As much as my family loves me, as great as my friends are at school, this is the only place on earth where I’m at home, where I’m understood, and totally accepted.”

This was the final day of Health Camp 2 at St. Dorothy’s this summer, a camp for young people who have received major organ transplants: heart, bowel, kidney or liver. I had was the chaplain for the week, joining an extraordinary team of counselors and volunteers, most of whom were there for the whole summer, and a team of nurses from the Lucille Packard Stanford Children’s Hospital.

Katie Evenbeck and I agreed on Health Camp 2 as the best time in the summer for me to really be part of the summer camp experience this year, something I have been eager to do since coming to be Bishop of California. While serving as a priest in the Diocese of Virginia I spent four hectic but exhilarating and deeply satisfying summers as the chaplain at Shrine Mont, one of the camp and conference centers in that diocese (they are enormously blessed, as are we, by having not only one center, but two). I could paraphrase Robert Fulghum and say that everything I learned in life I learned at camp, but the learning came later in life.

Anyway, there was a challenge to being chaplain at this particular camp, that went even beyond the campers’ fragile health and the strictures this placed on camp practices (diet restrictions, sport restrictions, times for getting medications, as examples) – this was a secular camp. Being chaplain for a secular camp session…

Katie did tell me that the theme for the whole camp season this year was “Finding the Sacred in Our Lives.” I carried this around in my heart all spring, thinking of what we could do for chapel time during Health Camp 2. And then Sheila and I went for another visit to the Bali exhibit at the Asian Art Museum.

For a three week period three artists of the sacred sat on a platform in the central hall of the museum, fashioning clay plaques in eight different colors. The plaques were mounted on a framework of wood and chicken wire, and when completed it was the Tree of Life, the sacred cosmos.

Perfect! We could create our own Tree of Life during the week of Health Camp 2. I floated the idea to Katie, and we were off! Ben Evenbeck and two of his carpenter friends made a beautiful frame and a bunch of wooden leaves. I worked with the campers each day, deepening and broadening the idea of the sacred in everyday life: What is universally sacred? What is personally sacred? What is sacred for this camp?

Late on Friday night, the last night of camp, Katie and I and two counselors sat with a group of teens in the velvety darkness on Lydia Point, the shadowed land falling away beyond us, a group of people perched on the edge of the world. They wanted to talk about their grief over the death of one of their friends, a camper who had come for years, but died suddenly before Health Camp 2 in 2010. Their conversation was loving, funny, deeply touching for me. At the end Katie began a circle of prayer, which I ended, lifting all of this up to God, the one as near us as the night, and who yet fills the whole universe.

The next day, on one of the last leaves placed on the Tree of Life, our picture of the sacred universe, there was the name of their friend who had died. Evergreen, alive in God’s infinite, beautiful cosmos.

The tree of life as it appeared at San Francisco's Asian Art Museum (above), and our version at St. Dorothy's Health Camp 2 (below) with Katie and Ben Evenbeck.

We don't choose the moment of apocalypse

We are in an apocalyptic moment. By definition such moments are hard to recognize. An apocalyptic moment is to our world as Baptism is to an individual: “You have been baptized into the death of Christ, that you might be raised with him.” In Baptism I am asked to recognize those things in my life that are in the realm of death, that hold me back from receiving the life God is always waiting to give me, if I make room for it by clearing the dead away.

 

In an apocalyptic moment the world is tested to manifest the Body of Christ, the Christ of the world and not only of my family, tribe, or nation. One of the marks of a living Christ in the world is how we treat our enemies. Last Friday the largest congregation in history heard a reading from the New Testament. Three billion people listened as James Middleton read with careful enunciation and emphasis a passage from St. Paul’s Letter to the Romans. In part he read, “Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse…Do not repay anyone evil for evil, but take thought for what is noble in the sight of all.”

 

Osama bin Laden qualified himself as our enemy, and indeed as a world enemy. I believe our President is right when he say that bin Laden received justice. Now then comes our moment, when the many of us, myself included, who say “Lord, Lord” are judged not by our words, but by our deeds (the reference is the Gospel of Matthew, chapter 7, a chapter that begins with “Do not judge, so that you may not be judged. ²For with the judgement you make you will be judged, and the measure you give will be the measure you get.”)

 

My prayer is the prayer that ends the Book of the Apocalypse, “Amen. Come, Lord Jesus.” Be manifest in our world, our whole world, our world whole.

 

 

Chrism Mass Sermon

You are God's field.

On Tuesday during Holy Week, the clergy of the Diocese of California come together at Grace Cathedral to renew their ordination vows. At that service, I bless the oils of Infirmarum (for healing) and of Chrism (for Baptism and other blessing), and then the oil is divided into small bottles for the clergy to take back to their congregations.

The sermon that I preached at that service is available here.

The road to Easter, through Tunis, Alexandria, Montgomery, Birmingham...

The Rev. Dr. Kortright Davis, famous Anglican theologian and priest, exponent of emancipation and liberation, especially among African peoples, was the preacher yesterday at our annual celebration of Absalom Jones and Richard Allen. After an intriguing wind-up on the poetics of the Bible and the poetics of faithful people being the ongoing instrument of inspiration for those longing and working for liberation, he poetically chanted, “Pre-pare today for the freedom tomorrow! Pre-pare today for the freedom tomorrow!” An affirmative, prayerful, thankful “Amen!” leapt from me, as I have been thinking about this continuously through these stirring days of transformation in North Africa and the Middle East, and perhaps in other places too.

“This” is the need to prepare for nonviolent social movements. All the great nonviolent movements had prior periods of careful preparation before action. It is most interesting, however that the popular portrayal of nonviolent movements and actions is that they were spontaneous actions, individual or collective, of people who had just had it, were fed up and had to do something.

Working backwards, we’ve learned in the last week from New York Times reporting that the galvanic movements in North Africa and the Middle East had a two-year buildup with conscientious study of the works of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Gene Sharp, among other sources.

Last summer I had the honor of being one of the community readers for the Freedom School in Marin County. Carson Perez, then a staff member of the Children’s Defense Fund, suggested I use Nikki Giovanni’s well-known book, Rosa, about Rosa Park’s initiation of the Montgomery Bush Boycott. It is beautifully told and illustrated book, but finally misleading. Rosa Parks is portrayed as a woman with great personal integrity and dignity who finally would no longer be pushed around by segregationist racists. She simply refused to move from her seat on the Montgomery bus after a long work day…and so it all began.

The truth is that Rosa Parks had spent time at the famous Highlander School in Monteagle, Tennessee, in workshops on nonviolent social change, and had been involved in the NAACP for several years before the crucial day that got the bus boycott going.  So, far from a spontaneous action, we might view Ms. Park’s action as a point of fulfillment of her intention, for which she had prepared.

 

Better known, interestingly, is the fact that Martin Luther King, Jr. himself prepared carefully for nonviolent actions, and was part of a well-prepared movement as well. I’m not sure why we know more about the prepared nature of the Civil Rights Movement, but I’m grateful, as it stands as a model and source for other movements. Here is what Dr. King wrote, in his letter from the Birmingham Jail about preparation for nonviolent action: “In any nonviolent campaign there are four basic steps: collection of the facts to determine whether injustices exist; negotiation; self purification; and direct action. We have gone through all these steps in Birmingham.” (Martin Luther King, Jr., “Letter from the Birmingham Jail”

And I suppose you know the great story of Les Chambon-sur-Lignon, in the Haute-Loire, France, the tiny village that saved the lives of about 5,000 Jews during World War II? The story would make a charming movie, with simple, yet clever villagers outfoxing the Nazi sympathizers,  if one didn’t look at the background of preparation that made the definitely heroic response of the villagers possible.

First, Pastor André Trocmé had established  Le Collège-Lycée Cévenol International in 1938.  This was an international school that taught, in addition to traditional school subjects, nonviolence. So there was a culture of non-violent activism alive within the community at the advent of WWII, and the founder of the school was pastor of the Protestant Church in the village – there was a continuity of leadership. In Les Chambon the preparation for non-violent action was a potent combination of what Christians might recognize everywhere; the returning again and again to the formative stories of the Old and New Testaments, along with training in the techniques that changed the political landscape of the 20^th Century and the still-new 21^st Century – non-violent action. Pastor Trocmé was the figure who held both the old and new together and helped Les Chambon prepare for its role in history.

Let’s pause for a moment and say how remarkable that Egypt, Tunisia, Montgomery and indeed mid-20^th Century America, and the village of Les Chambon have all been presented as the scenes of spontaneous non-violent actions and uprisings, when in fact in all cases there was a background of careful preparation. Is this simply because it is easier to believe that great change can come about without dedication, sustained focus, and hard work?  This seems a likely explanation to me, and an understandable though dangerous one.

Dangerous because idealists will be tempted to “follow” the seeming-examples of those who have gone before in the non-violent movements of history without doing the necessary work, perhaps over a period of years. The danger is wasted effort, the failure of the movements, and the continuation of oppression.

And it is Holy Week, 2011 now and we need to turn to the fountainhead of peaceful action, world-changing action, the purposeful life of Jesus of Nazareth. Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan gave me yet one more new view of the Pioneer of my faith in a few years ago when I read their superb book, The Last Week. The big, pure nugget of learning that has stuck with me was that the entry of Jesus into Jerusalem, which we re-enacted this morning at St. John’s, Clayton as Christian churches world-wide did in Palm Sunday liturgies, that this stirring story was an event of political theater, a perfect non-violent action, which must have been carefully planned.

Here is how Borg and Crossan re-contextualize Palm Sunday: the Roman governor didn’t live in Jerusalem at the time of Jesus, but rather in a pleasant coastal palace. He came to Jerusalem, however during the Jewish holy days, in order to ensure calm in the city, to head off unrest. So, at the start of the Passover week, Pilate was entering Jerusalem from the west, in a show of Roman force, in a company of armed soldiers, with strong horses trained for war. On the same day, Jesus made his entry into Jerusalem from the opposite direction, on a young untrained donkey, with an army of unarmed people, many probably from among the poor of the country. An unmistakable, stark contrast was deliberately laid before Jerusalem by Jesus.

The entry of Jesus into Jerusalem is the culmination of a life dedicated to the total liberation of the cosmos. The breaking of political, emotional, economic, physical, and spiritual chains was the life of Jesus of Nazareth. To “set his face towards Jerusalem” is the biblical phrase that sums up his resoluteness, and I think that every saving encounter we read about in the Gospels is part of “setting his face towards Jerusalem,” keeping his eye on the goal at all times, in each encounter of his adult life.

And with this focus on the liberation of each and of all and with Jesus’ commitment across time too, we move into a new area, so far beyond the necessary work of prepared non-violent action, for the end of Jesus’ sustained effort, his martyrdom, was not an end, but rather a beginning, the Resurrection.

The Resurrection, this enormous surprise that has been hope beyond hope for multitudes across the centuries, but also the most insurmountable stumbling block for many others, is not made understandable, but is believable when seen in the light of Jesus’ life. The import of Martin Luther King, Jr’s. phrase from his “I have a dream”speech, “But there is something that I must say to my people, who stand on the warm threshold which leads into the palace of justice: In the process of gaining our rightful place, we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds. Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred. We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline. We must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence. Again and again, we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force.” And then, in a connected thought from the same speech, “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”

The content of Jesus’ character, his absolute commitment to the path of peace and total liberation, letting go of all other proximate goals, even the most basic human goals of a home, or a job, it is this which allows us to go the precipice of our rational understanding and open ourselves to receive the truth of the Resurrection. As C.H. Dodd said, it is Jesus’ extraordinary life that makes belief in the Resurrection possible. And it is the Resurrection, the divine gift of new life extended through Christ to all of creation that set firm the course of the cosmos towards justice, peace, and liberation. It is this path all who love Jesus in the unfurling centuries seek to discern through all confounding, competing currents and winds, and having discerned it to follow it. Following the path of Jesus is another way we might express the preparation for non-violent action.

 

Cascavel, Brazil, Day 2

After the remarkable coming together of landless people, indigenous farm workers (representatives of the Guarani tribe), the bishop of the diocese, local parishoners of Ascension, Cascavel, with their totally committed, dynamic rector, Carlos Gabas, on Saturday (all in the previous blog entry), it was time on Sunday to visit a landless community and a group of the Guarani.

The landless people are not like the homeless in San Francisco and across urban America, in that they have shelters — wooden shacks made with cast off planks, with earthen floors. These basic shelters are on land they do not own, or even rent from the great agricultural landowners, so they are not like tenant farmers in this country either.

There is a simple but attractive Anglican chapel in the landless community, built by Ascension led by Fr. Gabas, but it is not the first Anglican chapel on the sight.  The previous chapel was bull-dozed down by people working for the landowners. Fr. Gabas and these landless people do not give up, thankfully, and we worshiped in a rebuilt chapel.

The chapel was packed, the lunch following the Eucharist was delicious and plentiful, and it humbled me, once again, to be the recipient of so much hospitality.

After lunch, Bishop Naudal, Michael Tedrick, and the great translator who had helped me through the weekend, Marcel, left for Curitiba. And then, the seeming joke was set up (by God, it seems) — the bishop, the priest, the communist, and the software engineer all got into a car headed to visit an indigenous tribe. But the lives of these 85 Guarani is no joke, neither from the standpoint of their advanced spirituality, nor from the standpoint of people coping with rural poverty of an acute nature I had never before seen.

This group of 85 Guarani lives in a remnant of the once-vast forests. The adults are agricultural workers, like the landless people we visited in the morning. But here, in the forest home of the Guarani there is no electricity, and only minimal water. The challenge, however, is not to mistake physical deprivation as a marker for spiritual, cultural primitivism — the Guarani have maintained their language, their social system, and their religion.

Four shamans are in this small group, and one chief. While I was there they held a ritual service of great power, humor, and numinous presence. I had only mere inklings of its meaning, but I was swept up in the experience, and felt a collective kindness and  acceptance from people who could be filled with resentment for anything coming from Western culture.

Again, as with the landless people, the Anglican Church is standing with these Guarani. Bishop Naudal, Fr. Gabas, and the people of Ascension Parish are working with some young university professors to help the Guarani in Cascavel advocate for their rights. They are also seeking to create a coalition between the landless people, the Guarani, and the parish for grassroots change. This was Anglican Christianity at its most inspiring for me.

 

A Wounded Earth & A Crucified Christ

Friday, April 22, 2011  •  6 p.m.

Grace Cathedral, 1100 California Street, San Francisco

 

You are invited to a unique event of sacred expression — an interactive service of music, dance, and art exploring the rich meaning found in the conjunction of Good Friday and the observance of International Earth Day. Over the centuries, people of Christian faith have meditated on the life of Jesus and the scope of divine love — Jesus’ simple and profoundly powerful acts of including all the dispossessed at the table. Christ is understood to embrace the whole earth within self-giving love.

The service is open to all people seeking to gain spiritual strength for the great work of environmental justice and to all people of faith who feel called to explore this profound moment.

—   Bishop Marc Handley Andrus of the Episcopal Diocese of California
www.diocal.org

— Grace Cathedral
www.gracecathedral.org

 

 

 

Featuring
Omega West Dance Company  •  www.omegawest.org
Sam Jackson "Vibrant Stillness" Singing Bowls  •  www.vibrantstillness.com
The artwork of Mel Ahlborn  •  www.illuminationstudio.org

 

Episcopal USA – Anglican Church in Brazil Bilateral Meeting, Day 1

Writing from the Episcopal USA-Anglican Church in Brazil Bilateral Meeting, Day 1, Saturday April 2:

After a long flight from the House of Bishops meeting (March 25–30), through D.C., to Sao Paulo, a regional air flight to Iguassu Falls, and then a two-hour drive to Cascavel, I have to admit that I was bracing myself for what had been billed as an all day “diocesan synod meeting.”

Instead, I’ve been elated all through this warm day as extraordinary groups of landless young adults, indigenous people, and priests of the Anglican Church in Brazil have been coming together in their common commitment to Christ and to the cause of environmental justice.

The young adults were born in the camps of landless agricultural workers, and are taking part in a great education effort, wherein young people teach other young people. These young women and men attend intensive classes at a university in Cascavel for two months — all day throughout the week — and then return to the camps to teach other young people. One of the young men was wearing a red thread around his wrist. I asked what it signified. He replied, “I tied it on my wrist when I began this program, and it will stay on until I complete this work.”

A priest told a story about one of the indigenous men at the meeting: “A priest came to the community to celebrate the Eucharist. When the service was over, the indigenous people started to sing. The priest was talking to another person while they were singing. Peter came to the microphone and said, ‘Stop! We listened while you prayed. All our songs are prayers; why won´t you listen while we pray?’ ’’ Then one of the indigenous men himself stood in our meeting and said, “We are like the landless agricultural workers because our rights to the land have never been recognized.”

All of these movements, whether of the young, or the indigenous, or the environmentalists — all are based in a heart-felt love for Jesus Christ. As one young woman said, “Our faith is for the whole world because it comes from the same earth on which we all stand; it is a popular movement because we welcome everyone; and it is Christian because we follow Jesus. We never greet one another from across the room, from far off, because Jesus has brought us close and given us a life together — we always come to each other and hug.”

I promise I will always look forward to Church meetings from this time forward!

   

A prayer for Brazil

The people of the Diocese of California are holding the people of Brazil in our prayers as the flooding disaster that devastated the Rio de Janeiro area has moved to affect the Santa Catarina area. The Diocese of California is in a Companion Diocese relationship with the Diocese of Curitiba, the Brazilian state of Parana. Most recently, the two companion dioceses hosted an Anglican Climate Justice gathering in the Dominican Republic during the U.N. Climate Change Summit in Cancun. During that important gathering we heard passionate witness regarding the devastating effect of climate change throughout the hemisphere, and the creative response of Anglican dioceses throughout the area to respond to the ensuing suffering.

Loving God, you are our companion in all things, helping us bring meaning out of events that throw us into chaos, mourning, and confusion. By your Holy Spirit comfort the people of Brazil as they continue to cope with devastating flooding. Help all of us who care for them to know how best to support the Anglican Episcopal Church in Brazil as it responds to the great need there. May we all commit ourselves to work towards climate justice, and end practices that make the poor ever more vulnerable to climate-related disasters. All this we ask in the name of Christ. Amen

Jesus and MLK cast a wide net

The Greensboro, NC sit-ins of 50 years ago, wherein an initially small group of young people protested racist segregationist policies quickly grew into a genuine movement, was provocatively contrasted with so-called Twitter and Facebook revolutions in Iran by Malcolm Gladwell in a 2010 New Yorker article.

Gladwell told the moving story of this brave group of young people working in a pre-social networking environment as a way to debunk the idea that social networking had much, if anything, to do with social revolutions around the world in the last few years.  Rather, he proposed that the reason why the Greensboro action became a movement is that the people involved had “strong ties” with others who were involved.  This was in contrast to the experience in Iran, wherein friendships were only a layer of electrons deep on the Facebook screen display.

Naturally, there has been a host of folks in the social networking world who have decried Gladwell’s hypothesis. On the other hand, a recent article in the New York Times Op-ed section by Oxford researcher Richard Dunbar seems to me to lend weight to Gladwell’s argument. Dunbar carried forward long-term research of his own networks of friends into the social networking, online milieu and proposed that one can maintain about 150 actual friendships, in whatever medium. Thus, it seems to me, that even though one has many, many online friends, the ability to motivate them to do something risky and dangerous, no matter how worthy, might run against this barrier of our seeming capacity for genuine friendship (“Dunbar’s number” – 150).

And then Tunisia happened.

As the New York Times said about the mass movement that toppled President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali this last Friday, “…the protests came together largely through informal online networks…”.  Was Gladwell wrong?

I don’t think so. Instead, the stunning events in Tunisia hinge on a factor that lies outside Gladwell’s analysis, or that of his critics. The Tunisian protests were galvanized by the action of one young man, Mohamed Bouazizi, who immolated himself to bring attention to the despair of many like him, who suffer from joblessness, despite high levels of education. Such an act can have great power, and can apparently move people into a “strong ties” sort of behavior, beyond the expected bounds of what friends might do for one another.

It would be a terrible mistake, though, to see the chain of events in Tunisia as posing a recommendation for similar self-sacrifice on the part of others. Moahmed Bouazizi’s death is a tragedy and a loss--his death a result of despair. If you think the underlying arc of this article is to compare such a death with that of Jesus, you’re mistaken. I do not think that my great Pioneer of Faith, Jesus, sought death to protest the Romans. Rather, it seems that Jesus set himself on a course that he well knew might have dire consequences.

It is really this, the magnetic quality of a life dedicated to love, that is I think the genuine power to create “strong ties” over a large population. We can look at the life of Siddhartha, Gautama Buddha, whose path today has over 300 million followers. The Buddha lived a life of supreme dedication to the relief of suffering in the world, over a period of 40 years, finally dying at the age of 80. Closer to our own time, the great attraction that Mother Teresa’s life has had is unrelated to any single act of self-sacrifice.

This weekend many of us in the United States remember with gratitude the life and witness of Martin Luther King, Jr. His life, modeled on the life of Jesus, exemplifies the principles I’m searching out in this article. Yes, he died a martyr’s death, a death he knew might be the consequence of the path he chose. But for me, it is the walking of his path that inspires and motivates me to try and do similarly. Again and again I go back to Dr. King’s “Letter from the Birmingham Jail,” and remember his principles for considering a non-violent protest action, the second of which is “purify your motives.” A life lived by such standards has the power to attract and transform many, perhaps, as in Jesus’ case, a world.

Self-giving love can create strong ties beyond the expected boundaries of the intimate ties most of us can create and maintain. And, I would suggest that lives that take the course of bravely staying in life, holding to the course of love against all obstacles can create the strongest ties of all--genuine community that continues beyond cataclysmic protest, yet is given to social change characterized by real peace.