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.

A Pastoral Paradox

What kind of a watchman am I?
Far from the heights to which I aspire,
I am constrained by my weakness.

And yet — the one who created me
and redeemed me and all humanity
can give me, even in my unworthiness,
some grace to glimpse the whole of life,
and the skill and ability to speak of what I see.

So it is for the love of God
that I do not spare myself in preaching.

- Gregory the Great
(remembered in the Episcopal Church on March 12)

icon written by Br. Tobias Haller, BSG

An Unsacramental Priest's Bellyache

Many in the Anglican blogosphere seem to be taking offense these days.

So I will join the crowd and indulge a brief bellyache and issue my own little bullish response to the most recent papal statement, which has caused quite a stir.

Regardless of what the Pope says, I still believe in the sacramental priesthood and that I remain, however imperfectly, a member of that Order. I also believe I serve the Church, despite the reminder by His Holiness that we are not a church. As I pronounced last rites for a remarkable Christian of the community I serve this past week and then shared communion with his loving family, I find the Pope's statement pastorally callous, however rooted it might be in Roman Catholic ecclesiology.

It is the Spirit and God in Christ at work in the "ecclesiastical community" that defines the Church and makes the sacraments valid, not the magisterium declaring proper apostolic succession, nor my personal virtue or lack of same.

I still love my Roman Catholic brothers and sisters. The path to ecumenical relationship and the persistent dream of reunification, however wistful, is through our incarnate, shared ministries in the community -- not through the doors of the Vatican. But the Pope continues to have my prayers, and unconditional ones at that.

As Tobias Haller writes, he has said nothing new, and that should suffice as an antacid.

There, that's succinct and straightforward as far as bellyaches go. Off to unload the dishwasher.

Update before lunch: The widely circulated AP Report notes speculation but little substance about the motivation behind the Vatican's statement making such a statement at this time.

So we are left with Daniel's incessant question these days: Dooshite? Why?

Maybe the Pope needs a few more questioning three-year-olds around him!

So says this Papa, at least.

Update during lunch: Tobias has risen to the occasion and offered a more in-depth analysis.

Daniel would likely continue to press the question. So do I!

A Personal Manifesto

The Diocese of California is a place within the Church -- not alone, but prominently -- where gay and lesbian people have been freer to offer their gifts: Both professional gifts and those of lay and ordained ministry. As a result, the Diocese of California has been immeasurably enriched.

- from the Shrove Tuesday, 2007, response to the Primates' Communique
by The Rt. Rev. Marc Handley Andrus

Flinging all decorum to the winds, I want to put flesh on Bishop Marc's most excellent words, which salvaged what only can be most charitably described as a disappointing day in my life as an Anglican and as a priest in the Episcopal Church.

My journey in these matters began in the Midwest 32 years ago, growing up in small, rural, conservative towns where the only place sexualities other than heterosexual were discussed were in boy's locker rooms and where the word "fag" was a plain put-down and suggested some thing thoroughly disgusting and unholy.

I grew up, like most Christian kids, with a lot of worry about my sexuality. I was straight. I knew that from at least the 2nd grade, because I liked girls. But I was being infused with a hearty dose of American puritanism, so I was taught in the cultural waters to be suspicious of sex-in-general, even if the 1980's were more enlightened than previous decades in teaching the basic anatomy, etc., when we started to approach puberty.

I went to college sure that straight was the only way to be. My first conscious meetings with gay and bisexual people happened quite by accident, when friendships developed and I learned about their struggles on a relatively conservative University campus with flirting with the threshold of the closet. Knowing nothing about the "ex-gay" movement, I nevertheless encouraged them to seek help, believing their sexuality to be a disorder that was rooted in other emotional problems. I thought it was the right thing to do for God.

Then, at a summer music camp, I met Andrew, a wonderful pianist and teacher. After a piano lesson, I realized I wanted to study with him and was willing to pull up stakes and transfer to the school where he taught. Only after this (and even well after meeting his partner!) did I discover he was gay. My desire to study piano with him won the day, except now I'd call it God's grace that overcame my environmentally cultivated heterosexism.

In three years of study, I learned from Andrew much about what it means to be human. He was unassuming, full of humor, a great artist, and absolutely committed to his students and my development as a pianist. He was not a Christian. But he was a profoundly spiritual man whose devotion to compassionate life taught me a great deal about what was best about my own faith tradition. We never really discussed his sexuality at any length. But through his witness in our teacher-student relationship, I went from believing homosexuality was a perversion; to seeing it as a disorder; to believing it was a choice that I didn't need to support, but I needed to respect; to seeing it as a fully human and God-given characteristic that could be lived into through love and covenant.

Meantime, I had joined a small, loving Anglican community on the University's edge. A gay couple there, whose partnership had been blessed there, befriended me. We had dinner together every several weeks, enjoyed great conversation on everything from science fiction to theology. Mark & Wayne showed me what a healthy, covenanted, and committed relationship looks like from the inside. Meanwhile, I began coughing up every puritanical belief I had ingested, and found warm and loving Christians ready to help me see the Gospel with fresh eyes. And it came to life for me.

My friend and roommate at the Aspen Music Festival one summer, a committed Episcopalian and partnered gay man, was an enormous help to me through our friendship as I went through personal and professional upheaval over nine weeks. I found myself wishing one day for a spouse (I knew it would be a woman, of course) who would be like Randy was for me that summer. And this is to say strong, abiding friendship marked by truth-telling and heartfelt honesty. Both strike me as hallmarks of any healthy covenanted relationship.

When I came to the Bay Area for seminary, I was nurtured, buoyed, supported, mentored, and be-friended by countless gay, lesbian, and bisexual Christians -- many of them in committed relationships. They loved the heterosexism out of me even while knowing that I, a young, straight, white dreamboat of most parishes in the Episcopal Church could, simply by virtue of the cosmic accidents of biology, cultural, and theological bias, go much further in the Church than they could.

An openly gay priest living in a beautiful, committed relationship and raising two daughters, counseled Hiroko and me for marriage. It was his generous listening and warm-hearted humor that taught me to let go of the last remaining puritanical notions about my own sexuality, freeing me to live more fully into my marriage. Hiroko and I have been happily married now for nearly seven years. We've had our ups and downs. But I owe the health of our relationship and the friendship in which it is rooted in great part to all the LGBT Christians and non-Christians who supported me and us in our shared journey. And now we have a three-year-old son. It all works. I'm still straight as they come. And yet I have wonderful LGBT friends and colleagues. Go figure.

I have seen ministries wrecked by homophobia. I have seen the scars born by LGBT clergy who have made pilgrimages into the unknown as they escape hostile dioceses. I have sat with them as they listened to subtle, patronizing bigotry couched in gentle, "pastoral" voices. I have watched them get sliced and diced online and in person, told to return to the closet, and seen in print how they are regarded by some merely as abominations. I have watched them react with heartfelt sympathy to those who conscientiously cannot find their way out of the theology that prevents them from accepting sexuality other than that between a man and a woman. I have seen them persevere through elections, searches, and discernment processes where they knew, at the end of the day, they were being rejected simply because of their sexual orientation.

They have taught me healing ministry. They have taught me how to cry and be honest about who I am. They have loved me while even knowing that I could walk away from them because of their sexuality. . .that I could walk away at any moment with impunity as far as the greater society and Church is concerned, because I have that privilege. I have betrayed them in word and deed as an ordained priest. I have sold them out to chummy up with people I fear. I have dismissed and abstracted them away in my writing and preaching. And, yet, they continue to love me and call me back again and again to my full humanity in community and communion. And what is more Christ-like than that? Does not Christ love us most visibly and without reserve when we betray him? Is that not what the gospels and our greatest theologies about salvation teach us?

I have seen the face of Christ most in the wounded, loving, caring, and compassionate gay, lesbian, bi-sexual, and transgendered Christians of this Church, lay and ordained. I am who I am because of who they are, and who God in Christ has been through them. They have become a part of me, and an integral part of my spiritual journey into the heart of God in Jesus Christ.

So, to the Primates I now say, as a priest at the growing edge of the Anglican Communion, and with no intended reproach towards those who strongly disagree with my position on human sexuality:

Wherever my brothers and sisters are damned, I am damned as well.

Lambeth Resolution I.10, lectures and grand, bellicose, and eloquent statements by bishops and archbishops, and even the Windsor Report and the Primates' Communique all put together, and even the weight of 5,000 years of theologizing on why LGBT are "bad" people have taught me next to nothing about marriage or true relationship. . .nor do they hold a candle to what God and the Gospel of Jesus Christ have given me and my family through my LGBT sisters and brothers by way of many friendships, generous mentoring, companionship, solidarity, and definitive Christian love.

I stand with them now. And I will fall with them if I must.

May God only give me courage where it is needed.

This is my Lenten discipline of fasting and self-denial.

Why my heart's in this. . .

Being a raised a Kansan, I'm about as Midwestern as they come. As the old saying goes, you can take me out of the Midwest, but you can't take the Midwest out of me.

Which is why I was absolutely floored by this video I caught on PBS tonight:

The first part, "I am Emily" is a profound witness to what our children continue to have to face.

Emily is a faithful Christian. Emily prayed for five years for God to make her no longer gay. Emily is 15.

This is a powerful piece on what happened when she came out to her family, friends, school, community, and church in a rural town in Iowa.

As a Christian priest and pastor, I ask you to watch the conversation she has with her minister. It's a study worthy of a thousand posts and a million comments.

This is it, folks. This is why my heart is in this.

I pray for Emily and every youth who struggles as she does with exile, even in her church that she wants to call home.

An antidote: Christopher over at Bending the Rule has a truly marvelous essay that offers an inspired, Spirit-filled alternative to the theology expressed in this video.

The Wages of Fear

It has been a day of ironies for me.

This morning, I battled for parking so I could attend the ordination of twenty clergy, many of them younger than I, to the priesthood and diaconate at Grace Cathedral. As I joined the throngs, praying with so many close friends and colleagues, I thought of the Diocese of San Joaquin as they considered the next fateful step in a determined march out of the Episcopal Church. I prayed for the friends I have there, for those who oppose the schismatic resolutions, and for those who face broken churches and an uncertain future for their faith communities.

I gazed into the stained glass as we sang "I am the bread of life," the Christ window becoming an icon of our Savior speaking to me of promise and the generous upwelling of love breathing through Grace Cathedral. I wondered if this is what Bishop Schofield meant when he talked of "deepest, darkest San Francisco." Is one person's hell another's heaven?

I thought of the irony that he once prayed within these hallowed walls with the colors of diverse opinion and theological perspective bouncing off the high pillars, the laying on of hands as people gave themselves in love to God's people for leadership. . .and yes, vowing to uphold the "doctrine, discipline, and worship" as this church has received it. . .however mistaken and marred it is by process, argument, and the inscrutable vagaries of history and culture.

I wondered at the peace a dear friend wished me as she recognized my frustration at my own fatigue, despite a two-week vacation -- that fatigue that only parents of three-year-olds can really understand. For peace when, as I knelt with trepidation on "I AM" lovingly woven into the altar cushion. . .knelt to receive a small portion of the grace of God in the bread and wine. . .I knew others were gathering with just as much fervor and a claim on God as I have. . .and they were gathering to angrily detest some of those newly ordained who were bringing me the sacrament.

I wondered, as I tootled up to Mill Valley to finish preparing for the first Sunday of Advent at Church of Our Saviour, and walked into a room filled with Christmas items to be sold so that the proceeds might benefit someone in need. . .I wondered about what was more sinful: risking heresy for the disenfranchised, that they might receive the full sacramental blessing of the Church; or threatening to further divide the Body of Christ for the sake of protecting an historic understanding of faith.

As I gazed across the table at my lovely wife and the dinner she had so graciously prepared -- and wondered that I could marry her, the daughter of traditions and customs of a far-off land -- without fear in one century -- but would well have been barred from joining hands with her in another -- what room is there in this world, this church, this place, and the current conflict in Anglicanism, for a bit more than simple vitriol, hateful words, and spiteful actions?

I pray for God's grace in San Joaquin, but not that my will be done. But that whatever fear is there, whatever hatred, whatever righteous anger -- and the narrow tunnel and myopia that brings (I know it too well myself); that there be a measure of peace this Advent, even as we look ahead to a troubled year for our branch of Christ's Church.

I wrestle with a God who loves all of us on both sides of this chasm. I wonder at a grace that promises to see us through this, even the nastiness that is yet to come. Of what abuse we may yet have to endure with our gay, lesbian, bi-sexual, and transgendered sisters and brothers -- abuse hurled in the name of Christ. And what abuse we may be tempted to hurl back as the blame circles another round, presentments and lawsuits are filed, and the blood boils yet another day.

And the grace our leadership will need to seek a way forward as we try to move ahead with less than imperfect steps in what Christ calls us to: justice, hope, and peace for a world groaning with her warfare, disease, hunger, and environmental degradation.

In sadness, I write that we are all deeply gorged with the wages of fear, arrogance, and sin.

But it is Advent, and hope is not gone. I light a candle and pray. May our hope burn in the darkness. Our hope for grace that we cannot yet see. Our hope for an end to the "fever in our blood," and a path to our true home, perhaps even a path together.