Lessons of a Not-So-Clever Priest

After nearly thirteen years serving as a priest in The Episcopal Church, I’ve learned a few things the old-fashioned way:

1. Nobody really cares about your professional credentials or seminary education, and everybody has an opinion about how you should be doing your “job.” Live with it.

2. You can crack jokes in sermons, meetings, and cocktail parties, and be the cleverest priest they ever met. You can be the best preacher and teacher in the world and the most erudite theologian and liturgist on the corner. But what they really want to know is, “Do you love us?”

3. Don’t expect anything to really happen until: a) someone is offering decent liturgy and preaching on a regular basis; b) people’s basic pastoral care needs are being met; and c) the parish’s administrative affairs are in order and are competently managed. If you can’t accomplish this yourself, find the help to make it happen, and don’t work on anything else until you do.

4. Politics, housing, and church life are truly all local. Don’t get caught up too much in the news about the wider church or its demise. When most of the people we serve hear “church” they think first and foremost of the congregation where they are a member.

5. Never put full credence in either your harshest critics or your greatest fans. Both change their minds on a dime, and both will lead you down blind paths if you let them.

6. There’s a lot of talk about “leadership” in the Church these days. Much of it is egotistical baloney. It’s always a good idea to shut up and listen. It’s also a good idea to authentically tend to your own faith journey and prayer life. Most real leadership flows from there.

7. Be curious about the people you serve. This is not about you.

8. Knowing your limits is just as important as knowing your power and responsibilities -- perhaps even more so.

9. Never go it alone, and always check your own counsel with people you trust.

10. Be courageous enough to make mistakes and humble enough to apologize for them.

11. Bullies need the same thing you do: honesty and accountability. Cultivate both.

12. The Church generally moves slower than molasses in Vermont in January before climate change. Learn to be patient.

13. The Church is not primarily a social service agency. Nor is it a mere sacramental grocery store. Never forget that Christ is at work here, somewhere, despite the best and worst you bring to bear. For this priest, that recognition is often Gospel.

Vexed by the Journey

Little vexed me more as an aspiring, struggling pianist many years ago than a trusted friend — also a musician — telling me to learn to “enjoy the journey.” It’s taken me nearly twenty years to even begin to grasp what he meant, noting my temptation towards quick fixes, thinking more often about arrivals, and craving a predictable stability in daily life that is worse than unachievable. It is entirely unrealistic. Worst of all, it is just another pet idol of mine.

Which brings me, of course, to the institutional church, from which we all benefit as we sit here this morning in the beautiful confines of St. George’s Chapel at the Bishop’s Ranch, bathed in a most blessed rain slowly eroding a long drought. How on earth — building on millennia of tradition with roots in Benedictine and desert spirituality along with Roman bean-counting governance and parochial proclivities — did we get the idea that Christianity should be institutional? At the very best, I suppose, we might say we need a vessel — and we might imagine that in the naval sense of the word — to help us sustain our essential needs while we attend to the inevitable spiritual journey of the inner and relational life. But I, as a parish priest and veritable church governance junkie, encounter too often the severe limitations of institutional Christianity, and I cannot quite convince myself.

This time of year, we remember a young woman, probably barely into her teens, literally bearing Christ not in the comfort of her own home in Nazareth with supportive, familiar faces and hands tending to her, but somewhere on the road outside of Bethlehem, in the midst of strangers. According to Luke’s account, at least, as a Galilean Jew, she had entered the somewhat foreign and hostile domain of her ancestral Judea with her betrothed, knowing full well she would bear her child, begotten under most dubious circumstances, while en route. I can only imagine what my wife might have said to me, in those interminable weeks leading up to the birth of one of our children, had I told her we were going on a long journey, and we would not be home before labor. There are probably more than a few suitable Japanese expressions for husbands spouting clueless ideas!

Yet Mary, the Godbearer, almost never has any significant interaction with Jesus in the gospels unless they are somewhere other than home. There is that precious glimpse of Jesus’ teenage years while on pilgrimage to Jerusalem, where he incurs Mary’s fury for worrying her when he lingers behind in the Temple. There is that argument in a kitchen in Capernaum over a wedding party running out of wine. And there is, of course, that image of Mary with her suffering son about as far from home as they might imagine ever being: on a hill called Golgotha.

“Madonna of the Bamboo Grove” from Four Japanese Madonnas, an online collection curated by The University of Dayton

Mary has been called the first Christian, and I suppose it is not just for her willingness to physically bear the Son of God. It is for her willingness to journey with him into the strange, unexpected, and even terrifying; carrying him at times even into the loneliness of a stable with only the company of a somewhat mystified but stalwart Joseph and a handful of stinky animals and shepherds; or receiving her son’s body in that most poignant station of death on Good Friday.

Our predilection to reify Mary may at times obscure her witness to what it means to be truly Christian. It is not simply a matter of sitting in comfort, as we can this time of year, and sing Veni Emmanuel, unless we mean it like an expectant mother in the midst of labor. Nor is it simply a matter of hanging out for the Second Coming in the beauty of our institutional churches, unless we expect that coming to mean not one beloved stone being left upon another. The only stability we are meant to cultivate is that radical trust in the promises of God. Institutions, comforts, and even homes come and go. They can be as fleeting as a long-practiced piece of music, the fading tones of a performance, or the echoes of applause.

The Christian life is like Mary’s, after all, uncomfortable and dusty on the road, with no room at the Inn and unexpected meetings with total strangers, and the comforts and faces of home only a wistful memory. Our idolatry of stability, of sitting comfortably on the laurels of our accomplishments and conquests, explains a great many things wrong with our civilization today and across the ages. Journeys are powerfully vulnerable moments in our lives, but also the most profoundly real as we are exposed to the elements and uncertainties of a capricious universe. And so it is there that Christ comes – sometimes to us, but more often because we carry him and give birth to him there. It is there we also vent our fury at his mystifying talk about God and something he calls a kingdom. We, too, are vexed by his wandering ways and upside-down teachings. . . and we sometimes find ourselves receiving his body after the world has had its way with him and our journey — along with his — seems to have reached an abrupt end.

I suppose my greatest struggle with music and journeys all those years ago was with the “dirty laundry” of missed notes and frustratingly difficult passages and the lonely hours trying to master an instrument, a phrase, a chord, and, above all, myself. The truth of my friend’s counsel was that there was no short-circuiting, no circumventing that process. And then my even harder learning was to value that long journey when at last I would push a piece out in front of an audience, knowing even then that it might fail or I might fall to pieces in a pile of nerves. But that, too, is the journey of the true Gospel, the true Church, and all of us when we are sometimes approaching what we might call true Christianity. No amount of institutional comfort can save us from the journey we must undertake in this pregnant time. No amount of bean counting and careful preparation can forestall or circumvent the dangerous, uncertain, and sometimes seemingly endless labor of pushing Christ out into the world.

But as vexing as that is at times, it is our calling. And we, like Mary, undertake the journey risking a radical faith in the whispers of angels and the ephemera of dreams. I still take no comfort in clichés like “the journey is the destination.” But then, who said I am to be comfortable? This late in Advent is an ironic call to discomfort (“Comfort, comfort ye my people”), because nothing new comes without upsetting the old and the known, and until we learn to leave our idols at home and carry the living God with us on the road of life, we will not know our salvation.

The Wild Ride of Repentance

Sermon notes for the Third Sunday after the Epiphany.
Audio of the sermon delivered at Church of Our Saviour, Mill Valley, California


Someone remarked to me this week that I had chosen – in this particular vocation of serving the Church – what he called the “wild ride.” I hesitated for just a moment, tempted as clergy are all too often to see our calling as elevated or separate from most other Christians. On the one hand, it’s true: being subject to the uncertain future of a relatively modest not-for-profit budget that relies almost wholly on others’ generosity; social forces well beyond my control that might make churchy business popular, unpopular, or indifferent tomorrow; being on call when people are facing life-altering events that few witness with any regularity. . .well, it is a “wild ride” at times, indeed!

But then I recognized that few, if any of us, can say with any validity that we are not subject to the uncertainties of the present state of the world, or that we are secure enough to weather social forces no matter which way they trend, or that our particular line of work will sustain us in two or five years, let alone ten. Truth is, all of us are confronted with a “wild ride” of one sort or another. And so I say again, paraphrasing Wesley in The Princess Bride: Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something!

On Facebook this week, I came across the perennial article remarking on how the institutional church is faltering: How it has failed and hurt many over the centuries, and whether or not it deserves to survive. The curious thing was that I read one article like this and then another popped up on my Facebook news feed, and then another, and then another! I wondered for a moment if everybody was starting to write again about the demise of institutional Christianity (a familiar and depressing thought for a guy like me). Maybe we really were going to at last go under. But then I realized Facebook was only doing what it was supposed to do – posting articles on my news feed similar to ones I’d already read. It’s the same kind of consumer-driven content selection that all our media and social outlets now employ at every turn, every mouse click.

What struck me about that is the rapidly distorting effect this has on our perception of reality. We can quickly find ourselves in an echo chamber hearing only voices that think about the same things we do, and think that therefore the whole world is discussing what we are; or worse, that a majority of the world thinks the same way we do! What makes this doubly troubling is the modern myth that with all our access to information these days, we are getting a more “unbiased” view of reality than did our ancestors.

The first piece of good news, then, in today’s gospel, is that we are in this way, at least, similar to Peter, Andrew, James, and John living on the shore of the Sea of Galilee. They didn’t have mass media or access to mobile devices to distort their view of reality with consumer-driven content. But it was still probably hard for them to imagine much reality beyond that which they already knew and talked about all day. Fishing was and remains another all-consuming “wild ride” subject to forces well beyond human control: weather and the almost complete mystery of the biology beneath the waves. Whether their catch would be big or small must have been a combination of seasonal guess-work, intuition, and fate into which a faithful fisherman might have injected a good dose of prayer. But no matter the size of the catch, there would always be the endless work of disentangling and mending the nets, countless hours of dropping them here or there in the waters and hauling nothing, and the gnawing uncertainty of whether even a good catch would sustain their livelihoods for another cycle of moons.

These first disciples, doubtless, talked, breathed, and dreamed fishing. It was what they knew best to their very bones. And so, when this itinerant teacher, filled with the Spirit of God from his venture in the wilderness, shows up and commands them to follow, I can only imagine their perplexity when he told them they would now “fish for people.” They will spend the next few years on this “wild ride” with Jesus, learning better what he means by that from the greatest teacher of them all: experience. They might even come to learn that this is no ordinary mystic, prophet, or teacher they are following. This might just be Someone who reveals God’s presence with us in the flesh.

For Jesus, his time has come, and none of the signs are good. John has been imprisoned, and no sensible person would believe anything other than Jesus was next on the hit list. It will take time for Peter, Andrew, James, and John – even a lifetime – to learn what Jesus has just learned in the wilderness through his confrontation with temptation: by rejecting the offer of the powers this world recognizes – the power to satisfy ourselves and lord it over others – Jesus has planted the flag of a new kind of community that will involve radical self-offering, radical non-violence, and, therefore, radical vulnerability.

This will not be a wild-ride in a chariot or alongside a marching legion or the grit of a violent insurgency. It will be a wild ride of profound vulnerability to people’s love or painful rejection; it will be a wild ride in the midst of a confrontation between the ways of a God who lovingly made all that is with a world that is too often hell-bent on distortion, dissension, division, domination, and destruction.

No doubt, Jesus saw this likely ending with a cross. Had Peter and Andrew really understood the reality they were stepping into, would they have dropped their familiar nets and followed? Would you? Would I?

Repentance for them was not simply getting it right with God so things could go back to the old and familiar. Paul must confront this very human temptation bearing bad fruit in the little clutch of Corinthian Christians today, and while his message is at times amusing (just how many people did you baptize there, Paul?) it is steel-edged with worry that the faith he gave them is being quickly sandblasted by the dry winds of familiar factionalism and quests for domination and control. They haven’t gotten repentance yet, and so they are at the same risk every formalized Christian community and every half-converted heart has been since: just going the way of thousands of other spiritualities and religious institutions across the millennia. And that is nowhere at all really, except back into the familiar teeth of a power-hungry and hell-bent world.

So when Christ calls us to repent, he is not merely telling us to be good Christians working on our own righteousness, finding the right cause and standing up for it, and then hoping to end our short lives having done good things. If that were the case, we could see Sundays as only a time to gather, utter faithful words, mend our nets, collect our rations at the altar, organize a bit, and then go out and simply do “it” better.

No, repentance is more like Jesus coming to the shore of our familiar lives and calling us out of our familiar but distorted, insular view of reality, and us daring to follow him into a wild ride that is truly unfathomable — a ride with God that, inevitably, will overturn everything we thought we knew about ourselves, the world, and even our most cherished values and beliefs.

Didn’t you learn that somewhere along the way? Maybe in Sunday School? No? Then the institutional Church, you see, is still trying to get its job right, and two thousand years later is still falling far short. Paul is addressing us as much as he is that quarreling little sect in Corinth all those centuries ago!

But not to worry. Our little community is rooted in grace, not institutional righteousness. And the school of repentance for Jesus was not confined to the synagogue. It was ever engaging its students at the side of the sea, at the booth of a tax collector, in the kitchen, seated at table with friends and enemies, under a tree, or even up a tree! For us, the school of repentance is found, too, out there in the world at least six other days of the week, when we each must grapple with our own “wild ride” and perhaps find ourselves called yet again out of the familiar, the predictable, and the ever budding arrogance of our own narrow judgments about reality. Here we gather in the hopes of being reminded of this humility and re-fueled for our journey by the life-blood and strength of our Savior, exhorted by word and sacrament not merely to do better, but be affirmed again that we are on this wild ride together with one another and our God.

And so we can truly repent by pursuing that journey that Jesus’ first disciples were on: where the flag of a new kind of community, a new kind of people, a new kind of world is carried...

A world built not on the foundations of power, but of radical self-offering and self-emptying...

So that we each may be filled with the love that God made us to have, a love that even promises to bring life beyond all death.

Tohoku, Tokyo, and Kansai Reflections

“Let beauty awake for beauty’s sake.”

– from Robert Louis Stevenson’s Songs of Travel

Azaleas bloom placidly in the midst of urban frenzy outside the Ichihara’s home near Rikkyo University in Ikebukuro, a suburb of Tokyo.

Sashimi presented as part of a beautiful dinner at a restaurant in Sendai, hosted by the Bishop of Tohoku.

With The Rt. Rev. John Hiromichi Kato, Bishop of Tohoku, The Rev. Shintaro David Ichihara, and Goh Saito, a student and acolyte from Rikkyo University. Bishop Kato attended CDSP while I was in my first year there, so the evening was a welcome reunion of sorts!

Mugiho Ichihara and Daniel compare their ABC’s and hiragana in Ikebukuro.

Korakuen Garden (後楽園), considered one of the great three in Japan, offers a famous example of “borrowed scenery.” Okayama-jo (岡山城) Castle is actually on the other side of the river from Korakuen, but here is integrated fully into the garden’s many perspectives.

A chikurin (竹林 – bamboo thicket) in Korakuen.

Okayama-jo Castle, the “Crow’s Castle”, looks forbidding over the Asahi-gawa River.

Central Okayama (岡山市) includes scattered bronze statues of small children, infants with their mothers, wildlife, and this combination near Okayama Station. The hato (鳩), pigeons, add their own life to the art.

The rooftops of Miyajima (宮島), a picturesque island off the Sanyo Coast near Hiroshima. It includes some of the most beautiful shrines and scenery in the whole country.

The great gate or torii (鳥居) at Itsukushima Shrine (厳島神社), Miyajima. At low tide, people can walk out to the gate. The shrine is accompanied by a beautiful pagoda and numerous other striking examples of classic Japanese architecture. Every other step offers a picture postcard view.

Todaiji (東大寺) Temple, Nara, is among the great ancient Buddhist sites of Japan, and one of the largest wooden structures in the world.

Accompanying the huge, ancient Buddha Vairocana is an eighteenth-century bosatsu (菩薩 – bodhisattva). Crowds of tourists and children attempt to grasp the wonder of this site.

St. Agnes, Kyoto.

The altar at Christ Church (Pro) Cathedral, Sendai.

Easter Amazement

Sermon for Easter Sunday
April 8th, 2012

Listen here.
Delivered at The Episcopal Church of Our Saviour, Mill Valley, California

Mark 16:1-8

I have a question for you: Why are you here?

Maybe there are as many answers to that question as there are people in the room. But I invite you to dwell on that question this Easter Day.

When I was growing up in the Midwest, I remember when I was six or seven years old piling into the car and driving thirty miles up the road to the Cathedral in Salina, Kansas. We were going to a one-man dramatic presentation of Mark, something a number of fine actors do around the country to this day.

I invite you this Easter to take a couple of hours, and read through the Gospel According to Mark in a single sitting. Mark is a fascinating gospel, and this day we heard the original ending to the book. It’s an ending which does not leave us with any grand proclamation or mission, but rather with the women fleeing with terror and amazement from the empty tomb. They are silent. They tell no one what they have seen.

At some point in the later first century or early second century, somebody came along and decided he didn’t like this ending to Mark, so he tacked on a new, little ending. Then again, another person or community came along a bit later and decided they didn’t like that ending, either, so they tacked on yet another longer one. For many years, when I would open my study bible, this original ending really bothered me, too. It didn’t sit well with me as I was searching in earnest for something more final, more definitive, more compelling to prove the Easter story.

But now, I have grown to like the original ending because it leaves us hanging. It leaves us with a question.

The beauty of Mark’s gospel is that it’s really pithy, short, and direct. In a way, you could say it could be titled “Jesus and the Three Stooges.” Jesus is out preaching, proclaiming, teaching, and healing, while the disciples are biffing and bopping one another and saying, “We don’t get it.” Mark understands that there is always another character in the story – perhaps the most important character of all (other than Jesus) – and that is Mark’s audience. He is always teasing us in a way, tickling us under our chins, contrasting our faith with that of the disciples’, our awareness of what this is all about in contrast with their comedic ignorance.*

What I most remember about the dramatic presentation of Mark at Christ Cathedral was the actor himself, a short man perhaps in his fifties, dressed in a simple tunic and pacing back and forth barefoot on the cold concrete of the chancel step, beads of sweat forming on his brow as he re-told the fast-paced narrative with a fiery passion. At the end of his telling I also distinctly remember a woman sitting nearby who said to someone sitting next to her in a pragmatic way that only a Kansan could, “Well! I’d be surprised if he didn’t catch pneumonia.”

Looking back on it now, I don’t think she quite got it.

But then, that’s the thing about Mark. Nobody in the gospel gets it. The women at the tomb don’t get it! We hear about them today approaching the tomb expecting to find a body, and thinking about very practical things, like how they might roll away the stone sealing the entrance to the tomb. They, like us, think they know how life should be, just as we think we know how life should be: We are born, we live what we hope is a decent life, and then we die. We spend a huge amount of energy building institutions, financial plans, and societal structures around this assumption, this assumption of the linear model of being human: birth, life, death (and maybe we end up with a plaque someplace with our name on it.)

The women were going to embalm the body of their Lord and Savior. They have walked with Jesus through his passion. In some ways, they have been more faithful than the apostles, who all betrayed Jesus and fled during his trial and execution. Who knows where they are? Sleeping in on a Sunday morning? Hiding out someplace out of fear? But the three women are at the tomb, and they are startled to be greeted by an open tomb and a figure inside who says, “He is not here.” In a way, he is asking the women, “Why are you here? Why are you looking for Jesus amongst the dead?”

These days in the secular press, it’s very clear in black-and-white that the Church is dying, along with so many other institutions in the West that are floundering. If you read only a little more deeply, you can easily reach the conclusion that there are ecclesiastical authorities who are more than happy, it seems, to help the Church die.

Why are you here? Have you come to look for Jesus amongst the dead? Have you come to a dying institution for sentimental reasons, for family reasons, or for the Easter Egg hunt?

Why are you here? Mark poses these questions to us in today’s Easter gospel. What are you looking for?

He is not here!

Jesus has gone out ahead. He is risen! He is not stuck here within these walls simply for you to come by and get your “Jesus fix.” What we’re about to do is give you a small portion of bread and share a common cup to remind you that Jesus is risen, but not to tell you that Jesus is stuck up here on the altar. Rather, we share in communion to remind one another that he is risen in our hearts and he is risen in the world out there, waiting to greet us where we are called to serve, just as he was waiting to greet his followers in Galilee!

I challenge you this Eastertide not to come to church simply to find Jesus here, but to look for Jesus out there: the work and the life of the Risen Christ waiting to meet and greet you in acts of mercy, justice, and compassion; defying death; confronting the world’s linear notion of life. Our life is not linear. Nor is it cyclic or karmic. It is instead what one of my spiritual directors calls the spiritual life of the spiral: the spiral upwards towards God’s heart. And that spiral driven more by questions than answers is an eternal journey that binds together all of the human family: living, dead, and yet to come in the Risen Life of our Lord and Savior.

And this Easter life is not what you’d expect. You will be amazed, you will be frightened, you will be inspired, and you will be devastated.
But you will be given new life.

For this is how we live, and how are called to be as an Easter People.
_______
*I owe this perspective in large part to The Rev. Dr. Katherine Grieb, Professor of New Testament at Virginia Theological School, and a retreat she led on Mark with the Brotherhood of St. Gregory in January, 2011.

Asking the Right Question

From a reflection at Episcopal Café:

Do we truly want to be made well?

It is incredibly easy to stay stuck in the pathological patterns of destructive suspicion, blame, and condescension that we pick up from the wider American – if not globally Western – political discourse these days. It is also incredibly easy to see our institution – as fragile, compromised, declining, and inept as it might be right now – as a problem to be fixed rather than a resource to be pressed into service for the sake of Jesus’ vision amongst the people: the Kingdom, the Reign of God.

What is wrong with The Episcopal Church? Lots. But the question itself I find wrongheaded. “Fixing” a temporal institution for today will inevitably sow the seeds of different institutional problems needing to be fixed tomorrow. If we haven’t learned this yet from the great secular financial crisis, we need to take a closer look. While we rush perpetually around to fix and adjust, the world’s real needs for healing might escape our distracted notice.

Maybe we need to start asking the right questions, and those for me begin with what’s working. Asking those questions puts us in the right frame of mind to channel institutional resources, focus, and leadership towards our strengths. 

Heremeneutics of Power

Both Katharine Jefferts Schori, our Presiding Bishop, and Marc Andrus, the Bishop of California, read the Archbishop of Canterbury's Pentecost Letter through hermeneutics of power -- colonial, imperial, and ecclesiastical -- and find it much wanting when held up against the Gospel and the story of Pentecost.

I find their perspectives remarkably clarifying: the sort of grace we so need during a time of conflict.

The Presiding Bishop:

We live in great concern that colonial attitudes continue, particularly in attempts to impose a single understanding across widely varying contexts and cultures. We note that the cultural contexts in which The Episcopal Church’s decisions have generated the greatest objection and reaction are also often the same contexts where women are barred from full ordained leadership, including the Church of England.

As Episcopalians, we note the troubling push toward centralized authority exemplified in many of the statements of the recent Pentecost letter. Anglicanism as a body began in the repudiation of the control of the Bishop of Rome within an otherwise sovereign nation. Similar concerns over self-determination in the face of colonial control led the Scottish Episcopal Church to consecrate Samuel Seabury for The Episcopal Church in the nascent United States – and so began the Anglican Communion.

We have been repeatedly assured that the Anglican Covenant is not an instrument of control, yet we note that the fourth section seems to be just that to Anglicans in many parts of the Communion. So much so, that there are voices calling for stronger sanctions in that fourth section, as well as voices repudiating it as un-Anglican in nature. Unitary control does not characterize Anglicanism; rather, diversity in fellowship and communion does.

We are distressed at the apparent imposition of sanctions on some parts of the Communion. We note that these seem to be limited to those which “have formally, through their Synod or House of Bishops, adopted policies that breach any of the moratoria requested by the Instruments of Communion.” We are further distressed that such sanctions do not, apparently, apply to those parts of the Communion that continue to hold one view in public and exhibit other behaviors in private. Why is there no sanction on those who continue with a double standard? In our context bowing to anxiety by ignoring that sort of double-mindedness is usually termed a “failure of nerve.” Through many decades of wrestling with our own discomfort about recognizing the full humanity of persons who seem to differ from us, we continue to work at open and transparent communication as well as congruence between word and behavior. We openly admit our failure to achieve perfection!

The Bishop of California:

The [2008] Lambeth Conference was explicitly advertised as a non-legislative meeting; indeed we voted on nothing. However, lo and behold, through a non-transparent “consensus building” process, the bishops present (and so, in Archbishop Rowan’s thinking, the Communion) have affirmed the three moratoria put forward by the Windsor Report.

Here it is also important to note that the Windsor Report itself has been reified and given the status of a central Anglican document of faith and order, not by the test of time and use, but by the Archbishop and those who agree with him saying so.

When an Empire and its exponents can no longer exercise control by might, an option is to feint, double-talk, and manipulate. Such tactics have been in the fore with Archbishop Rowan since the confirmation of Gene Robinson as the Bishop of New Hampshire in 2003. The deployment of the Windsor Report and the manipulation of the Lambeth Conference, as cited above, are prime examples. The archbishop’s Pentecost letter is the most recent example.

In the Pentecost letter, it looks like he is disciplining errant provinces of the Communion, while only a little concentration shows that the underlying goal is to assert his power to be the disciplinarian. Archbishop Rowan is intent on a covenant with punitive measures built in. The bishops of the Communion expressed their distaste for a punitive covenant, and so the archbishop has stepped up to be himself the judging authority he has been unable to build into a covenant.

Other examples in the Pentecost letter:

• All three moratoria are supposedly to be attended to, but the packaging of the letter on the Anglican Communion website makes it clear that it is Mary Glasspool’s consecration that has galvanized the archbishop into action.
• The archbishop says that primates of disciplined provinces are free to meet together. Surely these primates do not need the archbishop’s permission to meet together. This is another example of promoting the illusion of the archbishop’s power.
• By taking offending provinces out of the conversation with ecumenical partners, the archbishop subtly implies that such conversation is dangerous and contaminating, exactly as was done with Bishop Robinson and LGBT voices in general at the Lambeth Conference.

That this is Archbishop Rowan’s Pentecost letter, given the layers that are not meant to draw us into more and more limpidity, but rather to obscure, I am saddened by such an offering from a theologian who has produced work of great profundity and luminosity in the past.

I think the message is pretty clear. As far as The Episcopal Church is concerned, the Windsor-moratoria-covenant game is up.

And not a moment too soon.

Does it Really Matter?

Jim Naughton offers a clarifying piece over at Episcopal Cafe today:

Reflecting on Rowan Williams’ letter wasn’t a worthwhile use of my time; writing it was not a worthwhile use of his. The issues at stake have become so trivial—We are not debating right and wrong, we are debating whether there should be trifling penalties for giving offense to other members of the Communion.—that to engage them at all compromises our moral standing and diminishes our ability to speak credibly on issues of real importance.

This isn’t to say that we don’t have to make a decision about whether to accede to the archbishop’s proposal—and I suppose I think that we shouldn’t because it would only encourage him to make other such requests—just that whether we accede or not make very little difference to the world, to the Communion, to our ecumenical partners, to our church, or even to a Communion news junky like me.

Which is why I was of no use to the reporters I spoke to on Friday afternoon; because, God bless them, they had to write stories based on the mistaken notion that all of this stuff still matters, and increasingly, it does not. In attempting to ram through a covenant that marginalizes the laity and centralizes authority in fewer hands, Rowan Williams has unwittingly made it clear that the governance of the Communion is as nothing compared to the relationships within the Communion, and the relationships are beyond his control.

I can't imagine this being more clearly stated. The fact that The Archbishop of Canterbury has very limited authority to act is not a problem, but a blessing. The Communion, after all, is not the domain of prelates, as some would have it, but a fellowship of churches made up of millions of people in real, embodied relationships around common mission. And that common mission is not fundamentally about who's ordaining whom, but about who's fed, healed, and nurtured in the grace of God. This is what we have to offer a world in need, and what our leadership is called to nurture.

The rest is largely window dressing.

Measuring Consequences

The Archbishop of Canterbury has just delivered his Pentecost letter to the communion, which commends careful reading. Simon Sarmiento over at Thinking Anglicans offers the appropriate links along with the summary press release.

There will be plenty of response, to be sure, from all sides, but here are a few thoughts I offer upon initial reflection:

• This letter includes what many have been waiting for:the long promised "consequences" in response to the election and consecration of Bishop Mary Glasspool in the Diocese of Los Angeles. My critical mind notes that her name is the only one explicitly mentioned in the letter. That is a study in and of itself. It elevates her, however subtly or unconsciously, as a scapegoat, while bishops who have repeatedly violated jurisdictional boundaries (also in violation of the Windsor moratoria) remain personally unnamed. This scapegoating, this objectification, risks only feeding the trolls and says nothing about Bishop Mary Glasspool's gifts for this office or the discernment of the wider Episcopal Church in consenting to her consecration.
• Another troubling aspect of the letter to me is that it continues to empower and validate the self-proclaimed Global South in their meetings separate from the rest of the Communion. I am somewhat puzzled how this may best be reconciled with Archbishop Williams' call for more Communion meetings that he appears to believe would be reconciling. The separate Global South gatherings are, at least from this vantage point, manifesting the balkanization that is widening the chasms, rather than bridging them. The Global South has been seeking validation for their actions through recognition from Canterbury for a long time. Now, they are getting more of what they want.
• There will be a great deal of ink spilled on the proposed "disinvitation," but I suppose there are far worse consequences. Mark Harris over at Preludium, and Andrew Gerns over at Episcopal Cafe and related comments make a number of astute observations on this front. After all, what kind of Pentecost involves "disinvitation?"
• My critiques notwithstanding, I think the letter bears out what one colleague said in conversation at General Convention last summer: The Windsor process, however flawed, is the only formal game in town. For the Archbishop of Canterbury's letter, this is clearly in evidence, as Windsor is the measure he employs to draw the consequences, however unenforceable they may be due to the limits of his office's power to govern individual provinces of the Communion.
• Where I do see a great deal of hope is the letter's appeal to the processes of dialogue -- conversation, engagement at a personal and embodied level around our experiences shared and differing, rather than the more abstracted and more easily abusive dependence on legislating or reporting. Real conversation to reach some mutual understanding is about moving beyond the formal games and into something that may well be more incarnational, and indeed more profoundly Christian. The Indaba conversations at Lambeth 2008 helped begin an unfolding blessing of the Spirit that might have been better undertaken prior to any Windsor reporting or covenant generating -- perhaps long prior to the unsettled controversy over Lambeth 1998 I.10 and whether or not it really resolved, via a pseudo-legislative process, the "mind of the Communion" on human sexuality. But that, please forgive my indulgence, is what we like to call in America "Monday morning quarter backing" on my part. The Archbishop of Canterbury lives in the less-than-perfect world like the rest of us, and must make the best he can of the hand (or pass, if we continue with the American football metaphor) he has received.
• I am grateful for his careful words and recognition of the limits of his authority to "fix" the situation. I am thankful for his acknowledgment of conscience at work in some of our more controversial decisions. I am glad for the recognition -- healthy, in my view -- that each Province must decide for themselves what they can conscientiously undertake. My optimistic side sees these as early fruits of the Indaba process, a sign that the Anglican Communion might be starting to turn a corner.
• For our part in The Episcopal Church, I pray we will continue to be more just to the most vulnerable, and yes, chaste (there's that pesky word again!) -- that is honest and acting with integrity in our response.

Babel and Big Oil

From a Pentecost Sermon, and with prayers for those battling the slick these days in the Gulf of Mexico.

Audio

Lest we think God “fixed” us as a human family, neutered our pride in the primordial story of the Tower of Babel. . . the story continues to stand for a world still very much a part of our lives – one with which we are very much mixed up, whether we are still sorting out the mess brought upon us by the economic and financial crisis, or filling up at the gas pump as we all must while wrestling with our driving addiction to the black goo.

The Tower of Babel is as old as the human family is, and God, it seems, still comes down and shatters the tower, scattering us in our collective arrogance. The disaster in the Gulf, of course, is now all about finger-pointing between juggernauts like BP, the federal government, Transocean, and Haliburton. The fishermen scream for their livelihoods while shop owners, hotel managers, and environmentalists all together sing a chorus of pain even with the trauma of Katrina still all too fresh in their minds. We are like the people who built the Tower now scattered by our own different tongues and agendas while the black crude leaks into our hearts, threatening to poison us with our own arrogant tacit or explicit insistence on drilling deeper, faster, and more profitably. And who pays for the cost of the failed Tower of Babel? We blame big oil. We blame technological advancement. We blame lobbyists and inept politicians. The truth that virtually no media outlet will tell you is that it literally is no one’s fault. But, as we are in the process of discovering, the resulting mess, much like our economic crisis, now is most assuredly everyone’s responsibility.

But lest you think I’m just going to beat up on our shared secular arrogance, The Tower of Babel was very much part of the story of the institutional Church across the ages. Make no mistake. Think of the historic crusades and heretics burned at stakes, of popes, kings, and princes assuming totalitarian control over belief. We consider the dangers of declaring and judging what is orthodox – what is right teaching – and what is heterodox or wrong teaching – and then declaring our divine authority over the fates of other human beings. If that isn’t the arrogance and pride of Babel, I’m not sure what is.

We must consider the tired refrain these days in old ecclesiastical institutions like The Episcopal Church, where the old isn’t working so well anymore, our institution is struggling with too much expense, too little revenue, too little flexibility in an era of rapid change. We look at our Roman Catholic sisters and brothers struggling with yet another dreadful scandal built on a tower of power and control not unlike Babel’s. We look at our so-tired struggle with the wider Anglican Communion over sexuality – sexuality, you see, is far easier to fight over than the dreadful hungers and disease of a suffering world. We tried to build our own Tower of Babel in the heyday of Empire and in the post-war boom, and now some of us in the wider Church wring our hands and even go to battle over whether or not our Tower to God may be “going out of business.” But I say maybe the reality is that the God who abruptly ended the Babel building project is very much in our midst putting our institution as it was out of business. Why? Because, as Jesus taught us, in order to have new life, we must die to our old selves. In order to be in the business of the Gospel, we have to set aside our obsessions with the business of preserving an institution. That was a lesson of Easter, after all.

And the good news, the Gospel of Pentecost, is that God does not leave us babbling there at the foot of our crumbling edifices. For our Acts reading for Pentecost points us to a new primordial story that redeems the toppling of the Tower of Babel, and ushers in the new life of an ever new and renewed Church – not merely an institutional church mind you, but a new and ever renewed church born of water and the Spirit. The story of the Spirit coming amongst the disciples in Jerusalem centuries ago is about the birth of this new community – not one built on “too big to fail,” or “bigger, faster, better,” or even the hubris of demanding we all be or believe the same way, but built upon the diversity of the human family itself. Diversity is no longer a simple, harsh cure to our arrogance, but an avenue to the renewal of life, by the ways in which it undoes and remakes the old order – the way in which all is made new. And it is so crazy that we might be declared drunk on the wine of life, like the first apostles were. Yet it is only morning!

Is it not the Spirit’s unbounded wonder these days that we talk about diversifying our economy rather than relying on a handful of juggernauts to sustain us? Is it not the Spirit’s wisdom to suggest that the abundant energy around us demands a diversity of approaches rather than the singular dependence on drilling harder and deeper for more crude? And is it not the Spirit’s work that when communities like ours embrace our wide variety, our diversity of gifts, we grow, despite the declines of the larger institution?

And if you find that a little bit to “out there” to grasp, just look around you. Where today do you find community as wide-ranging as ours, where people young and old from every walk of life gather together in the generosity of common prayer and share from a common cup and a common plate. Where we break bread, splash water, and celebrate the new life we are offered by our unpredictable but ever-loving God. Where we are cured of our hubris not simply by the toppling of our Towers, but by the simple proclamation that our God in Christ lives. And how do we know that’s true? Not through simple deduction or force of saying it over and over. We know, because we see the many fruits of the Spirit in our lives, each in our own way: we feel the hope, we follow the thread of love. Even though it is often buried by all our concerns and worries, it breaks out of the tomb again. It blows among us, and alights upon us as a dove bringing promise of renewal. It is the challenge our diversity and difference brings into our midst that breaks through the stone of our hearts and causes us to offer our myriad diverse gifts and sing praise together in unison.

This Church, this Body in the Spirit, is the new community. It is the new creation after the ending of the Tower of Babel. We all know in our hearts the juggernauts that are “too big to fail” will indeed collapse now and in the future. We all know our empires will continue their cycle of rising and falling. We know that our dependence on oil will and must come to an end. We know that no institution, even a church institution, lasts forever. But the hope is what we celebrate this day – a promise not just for us, but the promise of the Gospel for all of the human family – for all of creation – in all of our glorious, abundant diversity of gifts. The gifts of ingenuity and imagination that the Spirit brings – gifts that will conquer the oil slicks and renew our common economic life. A Spirit that will restore health and justice to the planet and to our shared peace. A Spirit that will re-build our community for a new day, start our community afresh as it did to the scattered peoples gathered in Jerusalem that Pentecost almost 2,000 years ago. The Spirit that will wake us up to become the creatures of God we are called to be: each unique individually, but together, an image of our wonderful God who is creating new, diverse life for all eternity.

Ungracious Straining

The Episcopal Church's consent to Mary Glasspool's election as bishop suffragen in Los Angeles is raising the expected eyebrows while celebration is coming from many quarters. I celebrate while remembering the sober caution against the tendency of both press and controversy to distort Canon Glasspool into the narrow headline box of "openly lesbian bishop." She is rather an enormously qualified and gifted bishop-elect, a gift to the church, and yes indeed presents a gracious challenge to the narrow phobias, brinksmanship, and bigotries that continue to roil the Anglican Communion.

In truth, the fuss now is not about Mary Glasspool. It's about us as a yet unperfected Body struggling with our own shadows. Thankfully, Christ is with us in the struggle.

Lambeth Palace, meanwhile, has issued a most patronizing statement in response to the consent:

It is regrettable that the appeals from Anglican Communion bodies for continuing gracious restraint have not been heeded. Following the Los Angeles election in December the archbishop made clear that the outcome of the consent process would have important implications for the communion. The Standing Committee of the Anglican Communion reiterated these concerns in its December resolution which called for the existing moratoria to be upheld. Further consultation will now take place about the implications and consequences of this decision.

But is this "gracious restraint" from Lambeth Palace? More like "ungracious straining."

With the sieves and distortions that often come with the quest for eccesiasiastical control, I am reminded of Jesus' admonition to us all, Scribes and Pharisees that we can so often be:

For you tithe mint, dill, and cummin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faith. It is these you ought to have practised without neglecting the others. You blind guides! You strain out a gnat but swallow a camel! - Matthew 23:23-24

Mark Harris, Tobias Haller, and Father Jake all offer, as always, great insight.

A Thought for Deep Lent

The unfolding saga in the Diocese of South Carolina, one of the latest flash points of controversy in the Episcopal Church, generated a lot of comment at Episcopal Cafe this day in an article posted by Andrew Gerns. Proposed resolutions coming up at their specially postponed diocesan convention ring simultaneously of both the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries -- the former with its dueling claims of sovereignty and power, the latter smacking of secessionist fervor that helped lead to the American Civil War. The icing may be longstanding disputes within The Episcopal Church over the return of Catholic piety and liturgical practices. All are age-old battles that don't seem to fully die with time -- elephants in our shared living rooms that, if not cast under the light of self-awareness, tend to run the show when tensions rise.

In the midst of such complex historical and cultural roots fueling an ongoing fit of crisis, there's a lot of traffic and numerous accusations crossing the Mason-Dixon line from both sides these days. Amidst all the suspicions and unwillingness to wade deep into the messy business of relationships--which is what obedience is really all about, including our much vaunted doctrine and discipline as a Church--I am left to wonder how easily we all like to wear our grievances like a cloak, even when the Prince of Peace calls us to set aside such burdens for the sake of the Gospel.

So which, then, is a better Lenten discipline:

Lines in the sand or setting aside grievances in the quest of deeper relationship?

Marital Umbrage

A great deal of umbrage has been bandied about in recent days in the blogosphere over a recent pastoral letter. It was sent by Bishop Marc Andrus to the clergy and people of the Episcopal Diocese of California outlining pastoral guidelines for how we are to treat the new reality of same-sex marriage unleashed by the California State Supreme Court a few weeks ago. A similar, more succinct pastoral letter was sent by +Mary Gray-Reeves, the new bishop of El Camino Real, one of our three sibling Episcopal dioceses in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Not all of the umbrage has come from the usual suspects. This piece posted by Lisa Fox is one example among many that worry what has happened here has opened the door to further lawlessness in the church. Somehow now, we dare not claim any righteous indignation at our brothers and sisters who have flouted canons by writing The Episcopal Church out of their diocesan constitutions and are making a mad dash for the guilded red doors. . . and trying to take them, too, on the way out.

Perhaps we can no longer condemn that as vociferously as some of us have. Then again, that doesn't worry me too much. Righteous indignation is highly overrated.

Bishop Marc, it seems to me, has chosen along with his Diocese a very careful, tenuous path of grace in a conflicted Church. Following his recommendation, I informed my vestry yesterday evening that I would no longer preside over a marriage of any kind until The Episcopal Church has settled on a way forward that honors the covenants of all couples with equality. Rather, I will treat all couples who approach me for marriage equally by offering counseling and blessing, and referring them to the civil authorities to publicly declare their vows as legally binding. By equality, I don't mean political equality (although that naturally follows), but equality in terms of the recognition of God's grace.

A parishioner asked me yesterday if I was therefore withholding the sacrament of marriage. After reflection, I decided I wasn't because I can't. It is the couple who engage in the sacrament of marriage. At best, as a priest, I can only name it and declare it publicly. The sacrament of marriage between couples of all sorts will continue with or without my help in that particular way. In a curious sense, that's liberating Good News, as I fast from this part of ordained priesthood.

I believe in my bones that I must do my utmost to follow the discipline of the Church to which I have pledged a good deal of my life. Clearly the Book of Common Prayer and the canons as they are presently structured define Christian marriage as being between a man and a woman. I cannot, in good conscience, use the marriage liturgy of the greater Church to solemnize anything other. Bishop Marc appears to feel much the same way. Indeed, his authority is limited in that he cannot unilaterally change these definitions. I applaud him for that admission.

But nor can I ignore the fruits of the Spirit I see in my brothers and sisters who have heard God's call into a covenant that the Church does not yet, as a whole, recognize. So, where gender is the only measure of difference, to solemnize one coupling over another creates a hierarchy of goodness and grace that I no longer believe in. I'm not sure Jesus, given his proclivity to reach out to the very least among us, would believe in it either.

I am ever more convinced that we have mistakenly, for many centuries, hung a theology of marriage on two all-too-fragile constructs that have changed radically over time, cultures, and places: gender and the regulation of sex. As a married man for over eight years, I have learned that marriage is anything but about these two things. Gender is a highly malleable confluence of biology, sociology, and behavior. Sure, sexual intercourse is a fun gift, but outside the realm of addiction, it is an unpredictable occurrence that has very little air time in the overall scheme of a marriage. Moreover, reducing the validity of marriage to anatomy is the height of absurdity, given the beautiful fruits we see in marriages where sexual anatomy and intercourse have been compromised or even eliminated by infirmity, age, or mere genetics.

No, this is about covenant rooted in those pesky vows that all married people are tempted to shirk from time to time. Strangely enough, the vows say nothing about sex. Only the state, which tends to build laws around the measurable, physical, and quantifiable, will occasionally dabble in sex when it tries to determine the legitimacy of a marriage. It talks about consummation, which has that awful root found in "consume." But even then, it relies largely on the word of one or both parties. And all of us know that sex devoid of the often painfully hard work of love never saved a marriage. Indeed, most states have learned to get out of the business of regulating sex, treating it as a private matter between consenting adults, married or not. Only violence remains forbidden in most places with decent jurisprudence, and marriage is no excuse.

To talk about sex coldly and clinically for a moment: it is largely driven by seasons, moons, hormones, and the still mysterious science of attraction. Devoid of greater context, it can both give rise to life and death. Much of the time, of course, it does neither. Yet again, devoid of context, this strange gift woven by our Creator through evolution into the fabric of humanity seems to have very little moral character in and of itself. So here I agree with even the most adamant of the self-proclaimed orthodox: when sex happens and between whom is what really matters. That is what makes sexual congress moral or not. But even so, holy sexual intimacy is a humorous, capricious, and odd but familiar guest along for the ride in marriage, not the marriage itself. Sexual intimacy is just one manifestation among many of the mysterious joys that come through the growing knowledge of another human being imbued with the grace of Christ Jesus.

Sexual orientation appears to be given for some, malleable for others, but deeply shrouded in the mystery of life like the ephemeral nature of attraction itself. Why one sort should be favored over another appears increasingly strange to me, arbitrary and unreasonable, the creation of a hierarchy for hiearchy's sake. Specious claims of the species dying for lack of offspring still bounce around the web like spitwads in an undisciplined classroom. Every study of substance I have seen says that if we let everyone couple or not according their orientation and inclination tomorrow, there will still be a huge number of naturally conceived children to grow up and assume their place in the future.

And marriage is not ultimately about children, either. We all know couples who are happily married without children or the possibility of them. I have yet to tire of paraphrasing Ed Friedman in A Failure of Nerve when he reminds us that all good parents must learn that their salvation does not depend on their children. Children are only some of the strangers who benefit from a healthy household -- strangers in our midst who need love, care, and concern from a varitable host of folk -- not simply two parents with the right combination of sexual anatomy or social exhibition of gender. The nuclear family myth is dying in our culture. Let it, I say. Afterwards, there will still be plenty of mother-father families around nurturing happy families. So, too, will there be single-parent households and adoptive families, extended families, and blended families. All of them raising children will share one thing in common: they will need a great deal of help from the outside to be successful. Let us restore what the ancients knew without thinking: children need a whole community of households and mentors and a God to help them become generous, loving adults -- not merely life in a Norman Rockwell painting.

Rumor has it that the Roman Catholic Church is presently questing to theologically demonstrate that men and women must complement each other in marriage in order to be whole. I found a manifestation of this in a children's book on the Creation I pulled off a shelf in a California mission bookstore near my home a few months ago. It said that God created man and woman, and that they must marry each other in order to be fully human. Truly, this is a strange teaching, even if we set aside the terrible examples all around us of lives broken in unhappy marriages. For any cursory read of scripture and the Christian tradition leads to the conclusion that Jesus most probably wasn't married. Was he therefore less than fully human? To argue so would undermine a core doctrine of orthodoxy by virtually every Christian's standard. Moreover, where does this leave the celibate living in Holy Orders? Or the millions of single people of the world who have found fulfillment in their life with God and community?

No, the notion of gender complementarity has not the least bit convinced me that same-sex covenants are somehow unworthy of the Church's notice. Even less that they are unworthy of God's.

Marriage at its root is about covenant: upholding, nurturing, and honoring in a mutual, faithful, forgiving relationship. The pledge to build up trust over many years through thick and thin. To lead one another through the ups and downs of this life and to form and sustain a household together -- that little building block of the greater community that provides stability and hospitality. When marriages fail, the state talks coolly about breaking up households into smaller economic units. The Church in its sorrow talks about this, if at all, almost in terms of spiritual surgery. When Jesus talked about divorce, however necessary it might sometimes be, he appears to me to say that it is only a reflection of that which threatens to shatter all human relationships: the brokenness found in the human heart.

So even the best love in the world needs covenant: covenant that models loyalty, friendship, compassion, spiritual, emotional, and economic support, and all the other life-giving ways of relating that hold this little planet of ours together and mirror God's grace for us. Covenant rooted in stories that transcend gender and sex are easily found in our holiest writ: God, Abraham, and Sarah; Ruth and Naomi; Jonathan and David; Christ and the Church; Paul and those annoyingly fickle Christian communities he helped found. Marriage is meant to model covenants of all kinds. On the other hand, it is but one of many forms of covenant rooted in the water-is-thicker-than-blood theology of baptism. This is the same baptism that prompted Paul to write that our unity in Christ breaks down all distinctions, including this one: "In Christ there is no longer male and female. . ."

But we are where we are. The State of California has gone (perhaps temporarily, though I pray not) where we as a Church have not yet dared to tread. But many of us feel called by God to go there, too, while a few portions of the Anglican Communion and an even smaller portion of The Episcopal Church have decided that they will make this as difficult and painful a choice as possible, hanging all other mission if necessary. . .that so cosmic is gender and sex in marriage that even our common life in Christ must apparently be eclipsed and, indeed shattered.

Not so long ago Bishop Marc taught me that diabolos carries in its Greek parts dia (by means of) and bolos (boulder) the implication of shattering something beautiful, like throwing a stone through a stained glass window. It could be said therefore that we in this Diocese, like many across the Anglican Communion, are still confronted with a choice that smacks of the diabolical:

Of working to honor the faithful covenants of those most closely entrusted to our care -- those whom we know as real, fallible human beings made in the image of God -- and our unique witness to the spiritual fruits of their most hallowed relationships. . .

And therefore annoying those who know little to nothing of these couples, their everyday lives, where they come from, how they met, how they love one another, except perhaps in the cold imaginings of the most clinical variety. Of risking that this annoyance will provoke another stone to be cast at the fragile panes of something we hold with strangers and intimates alike around the world: communion with God in Christ.

As painful as this reality is, it strikes me as far preferable to continuing to abandon or ignore those we are called to love and nurture in every way, of turning our face away from the face of Christ in a good many of our sisters and brothers. . .only to please or appease those who know them least, whether bishop, archbishop, or priest. Or should we prefer perpetuating injustice to our own and the violation of a prayerful conscience so that we may, for a time, take an unholy peace by mollifying a frequently disinterested ecclesiastical power -- disinterested until threats suit its ends?

While our violation of canons by what we are doing in this case is quite arguable (I believe we have pushed their limits, but not transgressed them), amid the half-veiled or fully naked calls that we are anarchists and rejecters of the rule of law, I am reminded of the legacy of civil disobedience. Is there such a thing in an ecclesiastical setting? It was St. Augustine who argued that an unjust law is no law at all. Perhaps we are starting to point towards this ancient truth in our actions at this time.

We are called to minister to people, not powers. If truth be told, we are called to attend to Christ in each other first, not the limits of canons and carefully worded structures. This is a hard truth, for we rely on our canons and constitution to hold for us some sense of unity and community in a fractious world. But, in truth, the canons and constitutions are imperfect reflections of our faith in a perfect God. We must be forever cautious, at least this side of God's promised Reign, not to confuse one for the other. That surely is one reason Christ quoted the ancient Jewish teaching that the law is only properly understood and anchored upon love of God and love of neighbor.

But we have endeavored to honor the canons as best we can, while knowing that law and our ability to abide by them has limits that are mysteriously and constantly tested by a capricious Spirit -- a Spirit who sometimes might even rattle around state supreme courts and be found in controversial judicial decisions. We have endeavored to honor the canons in an effort to show we honor Communion.

We should expect heat just the same. . .umbrage, curses, annoyance. That is our cross to bear.

In my most doubting moments, I remember the counsel of Gamaliel. In my brightest, most jubilant moments, I remember Christ victorious on the cross. We walk with some humility in either case, or at least we should.

After all, loving our neighbors as ourselves is a risky business, even in a country as free as ours.

Preaching While Gay

The Lead reports that Archbishop Rowan Williams has barred Bishop Gene Robinson of New Hampshire from preaching or presiding while in England. Bishop Robinson has agreed to comply, although he submits to a moral travesty that should be an embarrassment to every Anglican.

Meanwhile, no similar measure has been taken against Archbishop Akinola or Presiding Bishop Venables, both of whom (amongst others) continue to actively violate provincial boundaries, snapping up clergy, parishes, and dioceses outside of their jurisdiction. All this continues despite protest from their peers. All this continues even though it flouts the Windsor Report, which was reportedly cited as another reason to bar Bishop Robinson from simply preaching and presiding. Yet, by all accounts, Akinola and Venables and their cohorts are still invited to Lambeth while Bishop Robinson is not.

The justification used to bar Bishop Robinson appears to me to be the moral ecclesiastical equivalent of "driving while black" -- preaching or presiding while gay. Truly, it smacks of Donatism. How can the greater world not draw the conclusion that his preaching or presiding is somehow perceived as diminished or less Spirit-filled -- less fruitful for the Church, in England at least -- simply because he is gay?

The primary reason Archbishop Williams appears to have given for this decision is to forestall further controversy in the Communion. I submit that this is a futile effort, exhibits no substantive leadership, and only further victimizes our gay and lesbian sisters and brothers. In the end, it constitutes only a demonstration of raw heterosexism: a prejudice against gays combined with an exercise in clerical power.

This marks another sad day in Anglican history and will do nothing to resolve the ongoing crisis.

Update: Tobias Haller has some graceful perspective on this day, and on Bishop Robinson's response, which is more graceful than many of our own.

Eves Dropping

Late yesterday evening, I received an e-mail from Christopher, a deep-thinking theologian and friend, asking for reflections from those of us in the church who have children. He was interested in our response to a curious post, "on what is and what is possible" over at Thomas's Journal, suggesting that children ought to be better disciplined to attend late Christmas Eve services in the name of teaching them that Christianity "costs" something. Christopher's response is here.

Christopher generously urged me to post my thoughts, so I posted them to the thread under the original post, and here they are, in a more edited and expanded form:

Who is to pay the "cost" of attending late-night masses: the children who get bored and difficult, or the parents who force them to sit still through the midnight service?

While I tend to agree with Brother Tom's general idea (Christianity costs something) I disagree about where he directs this concern, particularly at children.

My son this year gave up two Sunday early afternoons to practice being a shepherd for our 4 p.m. Christmas Eve pageant. He learned more about the Christmas story and the joy and preparation that comes with it, I am sure, with other children, re-telling the story, and then sharing in Eucharist, than in only sitting. . . fatigued. . through a much later and less frenetic (for a four-year-old) Christmas Eve service.

This past Sunday, the "Low Sunday" after Christmas no less, a neighbor who recently began coming with her two children was smiling with delight following our 10 a.m. worship. She had e-mailed me about halfway through Advent asking if she might bring her children to join in the pageant rehearsals, already under way. I said, "Of course!" "

They've been back every regular worship since.

This morning, her 8-year-old showed me a drawing of people in worship with, "yay church!" written all over it. He was beaming ear to ear. I was stunned, as this was particularly surprising in a town, county, and region of the country that is known for its militant secularism.

He said he insists on coming every week now. His mother nodded and admitted her children are the driving reason she makes provision each Sunday for church.

I don't think it's always true that adults need to teach children about sacrificing to attend church. Quite the reverse may well also be true - perhaps more so!

More broadly, I am not entirely sure "cost" is appropriate as a theological premise or a spiritual discipline, particularly when it comes to joining actively in the worship and mission of the Body of Christ. I think it might be more compelling to argue that God's desire is that we give up mammon for grace, "bread and circuses" for the true bread which came down from heaven -- not because the "sacrifice" builds "character" -- but because the latter truly nourishes us and our neighbors as people made in the image of the Divine. Mammon, constructed as it can be upon violence and greed more often will leave us empty and alone, especially if it is central in our lives.

While I eschew church consumerism, if our people are bored or feel truly unfed or malnourished by "church," that is partly our responsibility as leaders. Grace is not being served. Uninspired, irrelevant, insipid, or age-inappropriate liturgy can be deadly to the spirit of the People of God. We do well to take this seriously; we do worse to wag our fingers when people, most of all our children, express boredom at it. I've written more on this in a slightly different context.

At Church of Our Saviour, we mix it up with Godly Play, a new fourth- and fifth- grade program called "Cloud of Witnesses," designed in large part by our Associate Rector, Este Gardner Cantor, a dynamic Middle School program, a Youth Group, and Adult forums, as well as our regular Rite I, Rite II, and Rite Something liturgies.

If people (from infants to adults) attend regularly, they get exposure to just about everything. Regardless of where they most feel at home worshipping and encountering God in our community, they hear proclaimed the transformative Gospel of Christ with an authentic passion. I believe that is what is key here, far and away from forcing tired children to sit still on one of the most exciting nights of the year.