"Pining for the Fjords": Trying to Resuscitate Lambeth Resolution 1:10

I regret to say that Ephraim Radner's article "CLEANING UP THE PLAYING FIELD: SIX RESOLUTIONS FOR LAMBETH" put me in mind of the above classic Monty Python sketch. Dr. Radner's "Resolutions" for the 2020 Lambeth Conference are an effort to revive the long-dead Lambeth Resolution 1.10 (1998), as a backdoor way to institute punishment on non-compliant churches.

Well, non-compliant progressive churches, that is. Because the fact that Dr. Radner does not acknowledge, is that the so-called Traditionalist provinces never themselves complied with the Resolution. The Episcopal Church did, but that didn't abate the Traditionalist disregard for the Resolution insofar as it would have affected their conduct.

Here are Dr. Radner's proposed Resolutions:

1. This Conference reaffirms the 1998 Resolution 1.10.

2. Those bishops and churches who contradict or contravene this affirmation (I.10), or who punish others on the basis of such an affirmation, stand outside the boundaries of Anglican teaching and witness as this Conference understands it.

3. We request that other Communion Instruments of Unity pursue their work on the basis of this teaching and witness.

4. We recognize the missionary and pastoral integrity of the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA) and its related member churches; and we urge serious deliberation, locally and at the international level, over how these churches can be integrated fully into the life of the Communion.

5. We commit ourselves as bishops to the work of formulating and pursuing extended, coordinated, and coherent formation and catechesis in the Christian faith within our churches and across the Communion.

6. We commit ourselves to gathering again in 10 years, and in the interim to developing ways by which, despite the real differences that divide us, we can fruitfully and honestly engage one another and our service of Christ according to the levels of communion we actually share.

But here's the problem; Dr. Radner only focuses on one part of the Resolution, missing the reciprocal obligations the 1998 Lambeth Conference attempted to create:

This Conference:

a. commends to the Church the subsection report on human sexuality [1];
b. in view of the teaching of Scripture, upholds faithfulness in marriage between a man and a woman in lifelong union, and believes that abstinence is right for those who are not called to marriage;
c. recognises that there are among us persons who experience themselves as having a homosexual orientation. Many of these are members of the Church and are seeking the pastoral care, moral direction of the Church, and God's transforming power for the living of their lives and the ordering of relationships. We commit ourselves to listen to the experience of homosexual persons and we wish to assure them that they are loved by God and that all baptised, believing and faithful persons, regardless of sexual orientation, are full members of the Body of Christ;
d. while rejecting homosexual practice as incompatible with Scripture, calls on all our people to minister pastorally and sensitively to all irrespective of sexual orientation and to condemn irrational fear of homosexuals, violence within marriage and any trivialisation and commercialisation of sex;
e. cannot advise the legitimising or blessing of same sex unions nor ordaining those involved in same gender unions;
f. requests the Primates and the ACC to establish a means of monitoring the work done on the subject of human sexuality in the Communion and to share statements and resources among us;
g. notes the significance of the Kuala Lumpur Statement on Human Sexuality and the concerns expressed in resolutions IV.26, V.1, V.10, V.23 and V.35 on the authority of Scripture in matters of marriage and sexuality and asks the Primates and the ACC to include them in their monitoring process.

In 2004, The Windsor Report added to these principles a request, implicit in the plea for unity in the Resolution, for a moratorium on the part of the Episcopal Church "to effect a moratorium on the election and consent to the consecration of any candidate to the episcopate who is living in a same gender union until some new consensus in the Anglican Communion emerges," and, reciprocally, for

those bishops who believe it is their conscientious duty to intervene in provinces, dioceses and parishes other than their own to
♦express regret for the consequences of their actions
♦ to affirm their desire to remain in the Communion, and
♦ to effect a moratorium on any further interventions.

(Windsor Report para 155).

Now, as I pointed out in 2010, when the Episcopal Church, after complying with the requested moratorium placed upon it for over 6 years, finally abandoned its adherence, it did so after the reciprocal obligations in the Resolution and in the Windsor Report had been systematically, comprehensively, and shamelessly flouted by the Traditionalists:

But I find I do have a word to say to the self-styled reasserter community, and to the communion conservatives joining them in deploring TEC's lack of "gracious restraint" in no longer honoring the Windsor Reports moratoria after six and a half years of compliance: Congratulations.

Seriously. In the years since the requests were made, TEC complied. In return, it was subjected to cross-boundary jurisdictional crossings, attempted property seizures, a farcical "listening process" and a never-ending wave of bile and venom. Additionally, our Presiding Bishop was insulted at the 2007 primates meeting, where seven Global South primates refused to take communion for fear of being polluted by her presence. And then of course there was the Lambeth Walk. And, finally, the ongoing effort to replace TEC as the North American Anglican entity. So, in view of all these, riddle me this, Batman:

What incentive did your side ever give the Episcopal Church to continue its adherence to the requested moratorium?

I mean, really. You go all out to tear her apart from within, demonize her and her leadership, replace her in the worldwide communion--and then you're surprised that she doesn't continue in a posture of "gracious restraint" which your "side" has been flouting for the same 6 1/2 years she's been complying. I mean, I know you have a low opinion of TEC, but what adverse consequence do you have in your arsenal that you haven't already launched at TEC? What benefit did TEC receive by holding off for 6 1/2 years? None, and none.

I wouldn't use the Batman reference nowadays, but, frankly, I stand by my point: The Resolution was never received by the Traditionalists of the Anglican Communion, only its condemnation of same-sex relationships. Sections (c), (d), and (f) (which gave rise to the so-called "Listening Process") of the Resolution were simply disregarded, or cavalierly "complied with" in form only. So, for example, The Church of Nigeria's Report on the Listening Process did not reflect the testimony or views of any person but the Archbishop of Nigeria, stating simply:

The Primate of all Nigeria has said “Our argument is that, if homosexuals see themselves as deviants who have gone astray, the Christian spirit would plead for patience and prayers to make room for their repentance. When scripture says something is wrong and some people say that it is right, such people make God a liar. We argue that it is a blatant lie against Almighty God that homosexuality is their God- given urge and inclination. For us, it is better seen as an acquired aberration.”

The rest of the report comprises arguments from Scripture to support this statement--not any evidence of any listening at all--and the "Report" as a whole can be accurately summarized by the old Ring Lardner line, "Shut up, he explained."

In sum, Radner seeks to elevate to canonical status a Resolution that has, for nearly a decade, been rejected by the Churches making up the Anglican Communion, on both sides of the divide. That the Resolution was frail at birth, and died nine years ago, after TEC alone had kept it on life support from 2004-2010, is the one thing the actions of the Churches establishes.

Why on earth would we pay lip service to a dead parrot? It's not pining, it's passed on.

"Father, Forgive": A Mediation on Luke 23:34

[Delivered today at St. Bartholomew's Church as part of the Seven Last Words Good Friday liturgy. I was honored to share the pulpit with some of my favorite clergy and lay people; you can hear all of our meditations here]

In the name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

When I graduated law school, my parents took my sister and me to England, the one place I had always wanted to visit. My mother worked for a travel agency, and we were on a bus tour of England and Scotland. We stopped at Oxford for a day, and Cambridge. We saw Stonehenge, and the moors where the Hound of the Baskervilles hunted.

One day, we visited Coventry, and pulled up in front of a very modern, frankly not all that impressive cathedral. As we piled off the bus, I wondered why we were even stopping there. As we went around, I saw why.

The outer walls of the old cathedral, a medieval masterpiece, had survived the bombing of the cathedral in November 1940, the height of the blitz. Nothing else had, mind you. The windows, gone, the roof, fallen in. Utter devastation. And not just the Cathedral.

That night, 568 people were killed; approximately 1200 people were injured, 863 of them seriously. Nearly 8,000 houses were either destroyed outright or required evacuation for repair.

The next day, Richard Howard, the Provost of the Cathedral, chalked on the wall of the ruined sanctuary the words “Father, Forgive.”

Later, when it was safe to inspect the still smoldering ruin, the cathedral stonemason, Jock Forbes, found two of the roofbeams, still linked, charred and twisted though they were, forming a cross. Forbes set the beams up behind an altar made from the rubble. Our tour guide told us that the first service said was for the souls of the German pilots, as well as for those killed in the air raid.

The altar read simply, “Father, Forgive.”

As I stood in the middle of that ruined cathedral, long after the others wandered into the shiny new one, I couldn’t take my eyes of that cross, off that inscription.

“Father, Forgive.”

I couldn’t take my eyes off it because I had only recently read that in late 1940, the threat of invasion still loomed over England. And that, if a beachhead were established by that invasion, “all would be lost, for it is a peculiarity of England’s island that its southern weald is indefensible against disciplined troops.”

With their cathedral and a large parts of the City destroyed, who could blame the people of Coventry if they wanted revenge? Or even if they just wanted safety, and the defeat of the invaders. But they forgave.

And this act of forgiveness was not done after the fact, from a position of safety. In fact, the people of Coventry forgave their attackers even when the forces of evil looked to be poised to triumph over them. The prayed for their attackers to be forgiven when it looked like the damage was not just incalculable, but irreparable. They forgave when it seemed that all was lost.

A few weeks later, on Christmas Day, Provost Howard of the Cathedral spoke over the radio from the ruins. He asked those who were listening “to banish all thoughts of revenge” and called on them to “make a kinder, simpler world—a more Christ-Child like world.”

We’re a long way from that kinder, simpler world Richard Howard prayed for on that Christmas Day here, this afternoon. Even though Lent started so early, this year, it feels further away from Christmas than I would have thought possible.

No, we’re here on Good Friday 2016. Just three days after a terror attack in Brussels on Tuesday claimed at least 30 lives.

And here we are, in the shadow of the Cross.

“Father, forgive them, for they know what they do.”

How hard it is to say those words with anything like conviction. It’s like that part of the Lord’s Prayer, when we ask God to forgive us for the hurts we inflict, just like we forgive the people who have hurt us. I don’t always say that part of the prayer with the intentionality it deserves.

But Jesus did. And Jesus does.

Maybe it’s because He knows us better than we know ourselves, and is able to understand how easy it is to fool ourselves into the worst betrayals, the worst crimes. After all, Peter has denied him out of fear, Judas has sold him for profit, the Temple authorities have betrayed him to the Romans, and the Romans—well, imagine the betrayal of finding in the occupier of your nation someone who gets it, knows that you’re not guilty, and then, as a matter of politics, sends you to death anyway.

And yet, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”

In my Catholic boyhood, I was taught to understand that line to mean that the whole cast of characters who betrayed Jesus that night and that day would have acted better if they knew he was the Messiah. And, yes, that’s one way to read it. But it's an easy way. One that lets us off the hook. One that doesn't require us to forgive.

So here’s another. Bernard Shaw’s play St. Joan has a character in it, an English chaplain, who is delighted when Joan is captured. He argues against the Church authorities’ efforts to get her to confess and recant, and wants to see her tried and executed as a heretic.

And, after he gets his wish, and she’s sentenced to death, he goes to watch.

He comes back, a broken man, and says:

You don't know: you haven’t seen: it is so easy to talk when you don’t know. You madden yourself with words: you damn yourself because it feels grand to throw oil on the flaming hell of your own temper. But when it is brought home to you; when you see the thing you have done; when it is blinding your eyes, stifling your nostrils, tearing your heart, then--then--

The chaplain can’t finish the sentence, the enormity of his own guilt is too much for him. He has realized what his own self-righteousness has helped bring about, and his heart is shattered at the pain he has caused.

He knows what he has done, all too late.

Like Peter, like Judas, perhaps even like Pilate. Like Paul in , when the scales fall from his eyes. Only afterwards do they understand the enormity of what they have done.

And not just because Jesus was the Messiah. Because they have, in betraying Jesus, betrayed what was best in them.

As we do, as I do, when we burn bright with self-righteousness at the terrible things that happen in our poor world, and give ourselves permission to hate whoever we think is responsible for them, to deny their humanity. As we do, as I do, when we feel that wonderful sense of justified anger, and give into it. As we do, as I do, when we accept an unjust status quo, and convince ourselves that there is nothing to be done. That so the world is, when in fact it is so we have made the world.

Father, forgive us, for we know not what we do.

Turn and Face the Strange: A Sermon for Transfiguration Sunday

[Delivered at St. Bartholomew's Church on February 7, 2016]

[This sermon is one where I went "off book" for a little bit, and so my notes don't perfectly reflect the text as delivered. I've amended it to reflect what I said, to the best of my recollection, while I'm pretty sure all the concepts are there, it's not verbatim.]

So, you heard it right. Jesus goes up the mountain to pray, and then—something happens.
Something that is hard even for Luke to describe—the best he can come up with is to say that “while [Jesus] was praying, the appearance of his face changed, and his clothes became dazzling white.” Matthew is a little more explicit—Jesus’s face “shone like the sun.” [1] Mark adds that Jesus’s clothes became “dazzling white, such as no one on earth could bleach them.” [2]
 
In reading these three tellings of the Transfiguration, it’s pretty clear that the Gospel writers are reaching for a way to capture the experience, and not quite succeeding. They don’t know how to put into words the sheer unearthliness of what happens to Peter, John, and James on the mountaintop with Jesus. It’s like trying to catch lightning in a bottle.
But they try to convey this experience for which there are no words—so Jesus’s face just alters, or it shines like the sun, his clothes are whiter than possible on earth. They’re grasping for metaphors to tell us that Jesus the teacher, the rabbi, the wise man, became suddenly very, very Other.

And if that’s not enough, Moses and Elijah appear, talking with Jesus. Not only are these two of the greatest figures in the Hebrew Bible—the lawgiver and the archetype of the prophet—but they’re both figures who were more than a little uncanny, a little unearthly themselves.
 
Moses, who after he received the tablets of the Law directly from God, came down from the Mountain unaware that his face was shining with an unearthly radiance [3], and that people could only speak to him if he wore a veil; Elijah, who was taken up to heaven in a chariot of fire.[4]

Peter, John, and James are exhilarated and terrified, and frankly who can blame them? Only Peter tries to do anything, and I have to admit, his effort to be helpful—“Master, it is good for us to be here; let us make three dwellings, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah"—sound like it’s right out of as Woody Allen movie. But at least he tries to be a part of what’s happening.
 
A mysterious cloud covers the mountain, and a voice is heard, saying “This is my Son, my Chosen; listen to him!”

And then it’s all over.

No Moses, no Elijah, Jesus back to normal, no booths for Peter to build.

So they go down the mountain, and rejoin the others.

***

I could take the easy way out of this story. “Oh, it’s a glimpse of heaven,” I could say, or “what a vivid metaphor. Let’s unpack it.”

But I can’t really do that here, not and be honest with you.
Because this story is so strange, that I think it has a kind of truth that the Gospel writers are struggling to articulate, and only imperfectly succeeding at, and if I use their struggle to domesticate the story, I’m smothering that truth.
 
So I’m going to do something different. I’m going to invite you to, in the words of the late David Bowie, “turn and face the strange.”

Something happened. What was it?

We’re handicapped by the fact that we live in a scientific, empirical age. We live by science and technology and it’s enriched our lives in many ways. But, it’s like Lawrence and Lee wrote in Inherit the Wind: progress has never been a bargain; you’ve got to pay for it. They say that it’s as if there’s a man behind a counter who says “all right, you can have a telephone, but you’ll have to give up privacy, the charm of distance. Mister, you may conquer the air, but the birds will lose their wonder, and the air will smell of gasoline!”[5]

And Lawrence and Lee are right.
 
As a culture, we have lost the sense that the ordinary can transcend itself, that in day-to-day life, there can be moments when the light gets brighter, the air is alive with currents and motes tumbling through sunbeams, and our hearts beat just a bit faster. They come out of nowhere, little moments that we can treasure, or dismiss as a fleeting feeling.
Back in 2011, I had one of those moments in this very church—next door, actually in the main sanctuary. I was sitting in the congregation as the choir sang a new piece of music, Evan Solot’s The Hawk, and suddenly—well, I was a little bit more alive. The music had set something free in me. I felt, in that moment, serene, centered, and at one with my Creator.
 
That’s not normal for me.
It’s not normal for most of us, I suspect, but many people have moments when they are pulled into alignment with the universe; some have experiences that are even more striking, harder to ignore.
These experiences are common enough to have been studied by the psychologist Abraham Maslow, who called them “peak experiences.” He believed that all people were capable of having them.

In the Church, we would call these mystical experiences, and the 19th Century scholar William Inge wrote that the mystical facility is one which everybody has but which few develop. But the lives of the mystics, from Julian of Norwich to Thomas Merton, have shown us that these experiences aren’t to be written off lightly. They’re not nothing.
 
In the ancient world people were far more open to these experiences than we moderns are. They write of them without embarrassment, without doubt. They have not called into question their own experiences.

But the Transfiguration isn’t a subtle little intimation of immortality, or an ordinary peak experience. It’s much more dramatic, much bigger, and shared—it’s not just Peter, or John, or James alone who experiences it, or even Jesus—it’s all of them. It has a reality to it that transcends any physical or psychological explanation for its cause.

And it’s not just a feel good moment. It’s terrifying as well as exhilarating, until the voice speaks and it all just ends. But the disciples remember. They remember well enough that slightly different accounts of the experience appear in 3 out of the 4 Gospels.
 
But the really important part is what happens next.

They come down from the mountain, and rejoin the day-to-day world.
In today’s reading from Second Corinthians, Paul references Moses’s transfiguration, and that veil he wore. Paul tells us that “when one turns to the Lord, the veil is removed,” and that “all of us, with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another.” Paul tells us that “since it is by God's mercy that we are engaged in this ministry, we do not lose heart.”

Well, that’s self-explanatory, right?

But wait—Paul is comparing us to Moses, as well as to his followers wandering in the desert.
Catch that thought for a second: we are both the viewer and the viewed, only without the need for any veil. By walking the Way—which is what the early Christians called their faith, because it is a way of life and not a set of doctrinal principles—we are like Moses, being with God on the mountaintop.
 
Like Moses, we are changed by our engagement with God, and not just once, but daily, even if we don’t realize it ourselves, just as Moses didn’t until the people hid from his altered face. It’s like C.S. Lewis wrote, that if we are really walking the Way, then, taking our lives as a whole, with all our innumerable choices, all our lives long we are slowly turning the central part of us, the part that chooses, into a creature in harmony with God, with others, and with ourselves. Or, like Dorian Gray, we can choose another path—but those choices will, one at a time, change us, too, even though we might not notice the changes until they accumulate.
 
Turn and face the strange. Because those choices? They do accumulate. We change, even though we don’t see it daily. So do others around us. We can see Transfiguration in those moments when we see the reality that underlies the workaday appearances of those we love, those who have blessed our lives. Maybe that’s when the beauty that isn’t evident is perceived, and we’re shocked by the glimpse of a level of reality we don’t often grasp. And that if we respond to that insight, we can respond to that beauty, respond to those changes.

Lent is coming in just a few days, and often we dread it. The solemnity, the penitential rites. We miss our alleluias. But Lent can be a mountaintop experience, too. You don’t have to put away something you love for Lent. You can pick something up instead. Try something new to change your perspective. Add a short daily prayer from the Book of Common Prayer’s Daily Office. If you do that already, try a different from of daily prayer. Me? This year I’m changing my usual Rite II daily prayer for an older from. Why? The unfamiliar language makes me think more about what I’m praying, and what it means. But that’s me. There are as many different ways of shaking up spiritual practices as there are people. The whole point is to give the kaleidoscope a twist, in the hope that all the shapes will reform, and give you a glimpse of a new perspective.

And heartened by the glimpse we come down from the mountain, like the disciples. We rejoin the swim of life, but participate in a new way. Restored, refreshed, encouraged.

In the name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

1. Matt 17: 2.
2. Mark 9: 2-3
3. Exodus 34: 29-30.
4. 2 Kings 2: 11.
5. Jerome Lawrence & Robert E. Lee, Inherit the Wind (1955), at 93.

The Call: From the Gallery

My friend and discernment companion Elise Hanley has announced on her blog (oi, I didn't even know she had one! Let alone that it's good! Share a little, Elise!) her upcoming ordination to the transitional diaconate on March 5, and invited me to attend?

Well, good heavens, as Archdeacon Grantly would expostulate, try to keep me away!

Elise and I started on our journeys to ordination near to each other, and she was always a source of encouragement and support on the journey. I hope that I kept up my end of that companionship, but I know that she enriched my own journey immeasurably.

How could I miss one of the culminating moments of hers?

I was unable to attend another friend's ordination thanks to our recent blizzard. But I will be honored to be seated among the clergy to welcome Elise to the diaconate. We'll be richer for her presence.

Deep Breath

(Photo: Anupam at English Wikipedia [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html), via Wikimedia Commons)

Right, I think we've had our excitement for the weekend; let's talk more positively for a bit.

I'll admit that Thursday's and yesterday's news provoked me greatly, with Abp. Welby's non-apology apology to the LGBT community only making matters worse. The grace and resolution of our Presiding Bishop Michael Curry and of Andrew Dietsche, my own diocesan bishop were something of a balm.

But, as I used to say in my days as a mentor for EFM, the last stage of a theological reflection is the "So what?"--that is, how do we use this in our day to day lives? Where do we go from here?

Yesterday, I found myself stepping up my prayer regimen. I've been praying the Daily Office for some years (generally, Morning Prayer, Evening Prayer, and Compline) for some years, since my friend and mentor the senior Deacon at St. Barts urged me to try it. It's been a longstanding practice that has enriched my life.

But this Christmas, when a friend of mine posted a picture of his new Anglican Breviary, I succumbed to a fit of book envy, and ordered a copy online. It's complicated, with 8 offices instead of the 4 in the Daily Office Book, and it's extremely Anglo-Catholic--higher in its churchmanship even than I am, in some ways. But there was a comfort to its familiarity, hearkening to prayers I remember from my Catholic boyhood, and even in its older, more robust language. Yesterday I added two more offices than normal. I found it calming, and centering.

I stand by every word I wrote Thursday. (Except for the typo!) But here's the thing: Life goes on. Anglicanism has given us a rich heritage of a broad church, uniting Catholics and Protestants, liberals and conservatives, around the altar. We're right strive to preserve that.

Ultimately, the Episcopal Church will be fine. Oh, I know we're shrinking like all the mainline denominations. But I have faith, you see, that God will lead us to where we need to be.

If my suspicions are right, and the Communion does not hold in its current form, whatever else befalls, the resources of Anglicanism are there for us. Liturgical prayer, the offices, the Eucharist. Richard Hooker, Charles Gore (hey, today's his feast day!), Hensley Henson, and all of the other theologians, activists, musicians, mystics and troublemakers who comprise the cast of characters who formed our tradition are going nowhere. The great choir music remains, as does our heritage.

More to the point, if we, to paraphrase Archdeacon Grantly, in a rare moment of spiritual depth, lack guile and love God, we will never go far astray.

Declaration of Independence

Today, the Primates of the Anglican Communion issued a statement, that, after some pious maundering, listed seven points of agreement:

1. We gathered as Anglican Primates to pray and consider how we may preserve our unity in Christ given the ongoing deep differences that exist among us concerning our understanding of marriage.

2. Recent developments in The Episcopal Church with respect to a change in their Canon on marriage represent a fundamental departure from the faith and teaching held by the majority of our Provinces on the doctrine of marriage. Possible developments in other Provinces could further exacerbate this situation.

3. All of us acknowledge that these developments have caused further deep pain throughout our Communion.

4. The traditional doctrine of the church in view of the teaching of Scripture, upholds marriage as between a man and a woman in faithful, lifelong union. The majority of those gathered reaffirm this teaching.

5. In keeping with the consistent position of previous Primates’ meetings such unilateral actions on a matter of doctrine without Catholic unity is considered by many of us as a departure from the mutual accountability and interdependence implied through being in relationship with each other in the Anglican Communion.

6. Such actions further impair our communion and create a deeper mistrust between us. This results in significant distance between us and places huge strains on the functioning of the Instruments of Communion and the ways in which we express our historic and ongoing relationships.

7. It is our unanimous desire to walk together. However given the seriousness of these matters we formally acknowledge this distance by requiring that for a period of three years The Episcopal Church no longer represent us on ecumenical and interfaith bodies, should not be appointed or elected to an internal standing committee and that while participating in the internal bodies of the Anglican Communion, they will not take part in decision making on any issues pertaining to doctrine or polity.

8. We have asked the Archbishop of Canterbury to appoint a Task Group to maintain conversation among ourselves with the intention of restoration of relationship, the rebuilding of mutual trust, healing the legacy of hurt, recognising the extent of our commonality and exploring our deep differences, ensuring they are held between us in the love and grace of Christ.

Never mind the facts that the Church of Uganda supported passage on a draconian anti-gay criminal law, as did the Church of Nigeria, even boasting about the fact in its response to the farcical "Listening Process"on homosexuality the Anglican Communion went through in 2007. Such patent victimization through secular law of a minority group with the Anglican church of the province cheering? A-OK with Canterbury and the other Primates. Likewise the never-addressed, let alone redressed, territorial incursions into the United States by the same churches, violating a moratorium that only TEC observed. Again, no problem.

But our treating gays and lesbians as people formed in the Imago Dei causes their oppressors pain, and we have torn the Communion?

The Archbishop of Uganda apparently wanted more swift and condign punishment than that which was delivered. He walked out of the meeting, declaring in a statement that "I have left the meeting in Canterbury, but I want to make it clear that we are not leaving the Anglican Communion. Together with our fellow GAFCON Provinces and others in the Global South, we are the Anglican Communion; the future is bright." (His italics, my emetics.) They're making a play to hijack the Anglican brand, which Welby is furthering.

So now we are supposed to play the repentant Magdalene?

No.

Just--no. No more of this Game of Mitres. No more of our money (we are the second largest contributor after England itself, and one of the two only givers in 6 figures, while Uganda and Nigeria give no money) fueling the great machinery that allows these ecclesiastical gangsters to cloak their embrace of human rights violators in the robes of the Church. No Dane Geld.

It's Independence Day again.

I for one am no longer interested in reconciliation at the expense of our brothers and sisters, but in freedom for the oppressed.

The Communion is dying.

Let it die.

Maybe--just maybe--it can then rise.

“You are my Son, the Beloved; with You I am Well Pleased." A Sermon for 1 Epiphany

(Delivered at St. Bartholomew's Church, NYC, Sunday, January 10, 2016)

The thing that people forget all too often is that John the Baptist was a very big deal. The ancient historian Flavius Josephus, who is one of the few non-Christian sources about Jesus or John had been led the resistance to Rome in Galilee until he was defeated, and then became a historian explaining the history and customs of Israel to Roman readers. Josephus spends more time on John than he does on Jesus. (In fact, Jesus is described first, 2 chapters ahead of John, which could lead the reader to assume that Jesus died before John the Baptist.)

John’s ministry is described, as is Herod’s fear that John’s influence had grown to the point that the people might follow John in a rebellion and sweep away Herod’s regime. Josephus tells us of John’s imprisonment at Machreus (which we know was used as a prison at the time), and his death at the Herod’s command are also described. No Salome and her dance—just a cold calculation by a wily monarch willing to kill the innocent John on the off chance that he posed a danger to Herod’s reign.

Which, come to think of it, sounds a lot like the King Herod in the Christmas story, seeking to lure the Magi into betraying the infant Jesus’s location so that Herod could kill him. According to Josephus, the people believed that Herod’s defeat by Aretus IV in 36 AD was God’s punishment for murdering John.

Jesus gets a passage that is shorter when you take out the sentences that were obviously added by later Christian copyists. Jospehus, a Hellenistic follower of Judaism, was not going to write of Jesus: “He was the Son of God!” In the authentic passage, Jesus is described as “a wise man who performed surprising deeds and was a teacher of such people as accept the truth gladly.” His trial under Pilate and crucifixion are noted, and the continued loyalty of his friends after his death. That’s it.

So, if we’re judging by a historian writing 60 years after they both died, John the Baptist is the slightly bigger name, the more important figure. His death is even avenged by God, unlike Jesus’s death. That’s how it looked at the time Josephus wrote—which incidentally is about the time that most scholars believe the last written gospel, the Gospel According to John was written.

But according to the Gospels, John knows better. Today, we hear Luke describe Jesus as “one who is more powerful than I” and even says that he is “not worthy to untie the thong of his sandals.” In the Fourth Gospel, John sees the Holy Spirit rest on Jesus at his baptism, and hails him as the Messiah. In all of the Gospels, , John knows that he is not the Messiah, but is here to awaken the world to his coming.

So John gets it. He’s the overture, not the main drama.

And unlike the historian Flavius Josephus, John gets it right. There is still a sect that claims John the Baptist as its chief prophet, the Mandaeans, but Christianity grew to be a truly world-wide religion.

Why? Why Jesus and not John the Baptist? It’s easy now to look at the question through the lens of Christian history and our own faith commitments, but what accounts for the spread of Christianity through the Roman Empire like wildfire over a John the Baptist inspired call to repentance and good works? They both taught the same basic ethical lessons—John is described as teaching those who come to him for baptism to take no more than their due, not extort others, to show mercy—they both used baptism to mark the redemption of the initiate, the forgiveness of sins, and called sinners to repent and accept forgiveness.

So why did people choose Jesus?

I think it’s the fact that Jesus met people where they were. John made it hard, didn’t he? You had to go out to the desert to find him, and his welcome wasn’t exactly very warm. I mean, the Pharisees and Saducees make the trip, and he greets them with “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? Bear fruit worthy of repentance.”[1]

What could be more cozy?

Jesus, on the other hand, sees Zacchaeus, a short tax-collector, who has climbed into a tree just to get a look at him as Jesus comes into town, and calls out to him, inviting himself to dinner. The crowd murmurs. After all, Zacchaeus is a notable sinner. But Zacchaeus is so overjoyed that Jesus wants to spend time with him, that he announces that he will give away half of what he owns, and give back 4 times any amount he has unfairly taken from anybody.

Jesus didn’t ask him to do that. He just came to dinner. He accepted Zacchaeus as a peer, a friend, and made Zacchaeus want to live up to Jesus’s estimate of him.

It’s the same way with the unnamed woman, described only as a “woman of the city” and a sinner, who anoints Jesus’s feet with expensive ointment and dries them with her hair. It’s a shocking moment of intimacy even now when we first read it in Luke’s Gospel, but even more so when we consider that it occurs between Jesus and a woman who would have been viewed as polluting him by her touch.

Nobody confronts Jesus about it, Simon, his host, assumes that Jesus would know better if he were a true prophet. Jesus defends the woman, pointing out that her welcome made up for the deficiencies in Simon’s own treatment of him, and praises her for the great love she has shown, in gratitude for the forgiveness she has received—which she understands has been given to her without her even asking!

Jesus even points out the difference in his approach from John’s, in criticizing the crowd that rejected them both: “For John came neither eating nor drinking, and they say, ‘He has a demon’; the Son of Man came eating and drinking, and they say, ‘Look, a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners!’”

I recently attended a two day workshop with the Lutheran pastor Nadia Bolz-Weber. In one of the sessions she described herself as a “Law and Grace preacher.” By that she meant that she saw a very great danger in our tendency to want to prove ourselves to be good people by our complying with the law. She explained that the idea that we’re good enough that all we need is a handbook to follow would mean that we wouldn’t have to bother God with all the stuff about ourselves we’d rather not face. We could just be good. The problem is, Jesus doesn’t buy that. Nobody can live up to the law—it would mean being perfect as our heavenly father is perfect. The law, Nadia said, is a lover who will never love us back.

That’s John the Baptist, in a way. John has been called the last prophet of the Old Testament, and there’s a lot of truth in that, because, although he offers a route to the forgiveness of sins, he carries the burden of the law. He expected Jesus to be like him, with his winnowing fork and with fire.

But Jesus set us free from that burden. Don’t believe me? That Pharisee of Pharisees, as St. Paul called himself, says just that in his letter to the Galatians: “we, too, have put our faith in Christ Jesus that we may be justified by faith in Christ and not by the works of the law, because by the works of the law no one will be justified.”

In my Roman Catholic boyhood, we used to keep a sort of moral score. Had we sinned badly enough that our venial (not all that serious) sins could add up to a mortal sin (uh-oh!)? Were our spiritual bank accounts overdrawn, or did we have a balance with God?

We don’t have a spiritual checkbook, of course. That’s not God’s way.

Jesus’s way is the way of Grace. Jesus met people where they were, and didn’t judge them—and by meeting them with love opened up new worlds of possibility for them. He changed how they saw themselves, and what they were capable of being. We don’t become perfect, but we meet love with love. And even our failures are transformed by the fact that we are free to love back, instead of trying to impress a strict legal guardian.

We can pass on that gift in our own way. “Judge not, that ye be not judged” isn’t just safer, it gives the people we interact with the chance to respond to us in a less defensive way, to see themselves through our eyes as people worth knowing and caring about as they are, not as we’d like them to be. That’s our part in grace. Pass it on. Love and forgive. And when we can’t, remember that God will do it for us until we can do it ourselves.

In the name of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

[1] Matt. 3: 7-8.

[2] Matt. 11: 18-19.

[3] Gal. 2:16.

"God is Here and Christ is Now": A Christmas Eve Sermon

(Delivered at St. Bartholomew's Church, New York City, December 24, 2015 at 12:00 pm)

In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Well, that happened quickly, didn’t it? 2015, I mean—another calendar year zipping by, a winter that feels more like early Fall, and here we are, once more, on the day that will give way to Christmas Eve.

Are you ready? Am I ready?

I suppose it all depends on what you mean. Am I ready for the glitz, the gifts, my nephew and niece swamping my parents’ living room with wrapping paper?

Not quite.

Oh, I finished my shopping—just. I’m ignoring all the emails from Department Stores, from Amazon and Best Buy and Costco, among various other sellers of things good and less good.

And I’m saying to myself. “It is enough. Let it be enough.”

I don’t come to Christmas the way I did as a child—breathless with excitement for a large pile of toys. One of the down sides of growing up, maybe. But maybe not. Because when the wrapping paper is torn through, and the favorite toys mine at last, the rest of the day could seem anticlimactic. And as adults, we can often buy ourselves the things we want as well as the things we need. So the child’s Christmas in New York approach didn’t work for me anymore.

A few years back, I was rereading a favorite novel of mine,
Robertson Davies' A Mixture of Frailties (1958), in which a young writer enjoys a Christmas in Wales. Davies has him tell a friend that:

If I were at home, I would have finished my Christmas shopping a full two weeks ago; I would have wrapped everything up in elaborate paper, and tied it with expensive twine.

[Yes, he said "expensive trwine. Just go with it.]

I would approach the great festal day prepared for everything but a good time.... [F]or the first time in my life, I have got Christmas into focus. Tomorrow, I shall worship, I shall feast, and--quite incidentally, I shall give and receive.

(P. 176-177 (first ed.))

I've tried to learn from that, to make the worship central, the good times with family and dear friends central too, and the giving and receiving a pleasant incidental. The joy is in the celebration, the music, and the day, not in the "stuff." The gifts are symbols, symbols of affection and celebration. Even the massive, rock-like Panettone that someone is absolutely going to dump on me.

But what are we celebrating, here, today, in the drab last days of 2015? Isaiah tells us that “unto us a child is born, unto us a child is given.” And in the King James version that sounds pretty impressive. And the shepherds were given the same news, from an angel no less. “To you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord.”
But Jesus’s birth took place just about two millennia ago. What are we still celebrating for?

Are we waiting for the Second Coming, when so many think we’ll get the conquering Messiah Jesus refused to be? I don’t get that feeling.

No, I think we’re celebrating something far better than that. I think we’re celebrating the fact that our scriptures and our holy tradition tell us the decisive intervention of God in human affairs was to come down from heaven and share in all our joys and all our sufferings.
To be one of us, and share all the good and all the bad. To roam from town to town, and to help those who would let Him. To choose to die rather than to choose violence, and to love unconditionally throughout his life. Our Christian story isn’t like Greek mythology, where all-powerful gods and goddesses use people up like the toys kids will unwrap tomorrow. It isn’t like Norse mythology, where battles are fought to a standstill, creation is destroyed—and then the whole bloody cycle starts again.

No, our story is one where we first glimpse God in a newborn infant. A little child born in a manger because there was no room at the inn. We first see Jesus as a homeless child, stabled among the animals.

And yet that child is special. He won’t write any books. He won’t be a conqueror. He’ll just serve people, forgive them, heal them, and feed them. And he’ll teach them and us that that’s the very nature of God.

In the wake of the First World War, an Anglican theologian tried to explain to a bruised and battered people what the Incarnation meant, what Christmas was all about. He did it very briefly. “God is love,” Charles Gore wrote, “and love is sympathy and self-sacrifice.” Sympathy doesn’t mean pity—it means to feel with others, to share in their experiences. And self-sacrifice isn’t an exercise in beating oneself up. It’s giving of ourselves to help others.

And so, Gore wrote, “[t]he Incarnation is the supreme act of self sacrificing sympathy, by which one whose nature is divine . . .” emptied himself of divinity in order to grow, feel, think, and suffer like we do.

Or, to put it more bluntly, the story that defines us is one in which love, forgiveness, and compassion are so important that we believe that they are the very best not just of humanity, but of God. And we also believe that that love, that compassion, that forgiveness are as true of God today as they were that first Christmas Eve.

The Christmas story isn’t just a sweet story, it’s our story. It’s the story of love in a violent, often cruel world not so very different from ours. Isis rages, people shoot kids in schools, congregants in a church, or coworkers at a holiday party, and the powers of the world look on, unable to stop the violence, or, worse, fanning the flames.

And that’s just this year.

But God is there, in the victims’ families when they forgave the murderer who opened fire at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina. God is there with the teachers who gave their lives to protect their students. And God is there in San Bernardino when Shannon Johnson made himself a human shield for a coworker, telling her “I got you.”

We celebrate the birth of Jesus, we celebrate the Incarnation, because it never ends. It’s not a historical event; it’s ongoing.


We celebrate it because God is here, and Christ is now.

In the name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

"The Readiness is All": A Sermon for Advent II, 2015

(Delivered at St. Bartholomew’s Church, NYC
December 6, 2015)


If it be now,
'tis not to come;
if it be not to come, it will be now;
if it be not now, yet it will come:
the readiness is all.

OK, That’s Hamlet, not Scripture, but I think it has something to tell us about Advent. Advent is one of those seasons of the Church year when the mood inside these walls is especially different from the mood outside. Outside, you can feel the buildup to Christmas intensifying. Get your shopping done! There are bargains to be had—better hurry! Buy for the kids, the parents, the spouse. And, hey—buy something for yourself, too. After all, who knows what you want better than you do?

Inside here though—the readings take us to a very different place. The unknown prophet named by tradition as Malachi starts off on a joyful note--the Lord whom we seek will suddenly come to his temple. The messenger of the covenant in whom we delight—he is coming. And then the prophet asks us, darkly, “But who can endure the day of his coming, and who can stand when he appears?”

He tells us that the Lord will refine us like silver—which involves a lot of fire—and the experience will be like cleansing garments with fuller’s soap. Now, fuller's soap is not Ivory Snow, or some nice gentle cleanser that softens your hands while you do the dishes. It’s made of alkali, urine and chalk. It’s like taking a bath in bleach, only it smells worse. A lot worse.

So, like many Episcopalians before us, we flee from the Old Testament to the New. Where Luke introduces us to the uncomfortable figure of John the Baptist, fiercely preaching a severe gospel of repentance.

Is this Advent or Lent we’re going through, anyway?

And is our beloved holiday season really a warning to be afraid, to be very afraid, of the judgment of the Lord?

No. I don’t believe that it is.

“Be not afraid” Jesus says over and over, in all of the Gospels, so I’m pretty sure we don’t have to dread his presence in our lives. Whatever Advent means, and these readings mean, it isn’t that. We don't follow the Calvinist preacher Jonathan Edwards, who famously warned his own parishioners, “God holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked.” That’s very dramatic, and I’m sure it increased the offering that week, but it’s bad theology. Even in a week when The New York Times that there have more mass shootings than days this year—it’s still bad theology.

The Fourth Gospel tells us that “God so loved the world that he gave his only son,” and did so that we could become children of God. All of us.

The proper response to that good news is joy, but joy with a tinge of awe. We don’t do awe well in our generation. We toss around the word “awesome” as a synonym for “excellent” or “good.” But that’s not awe.

Look around you, at this space we have the honor of worshipping in—the explosions of color and light in the Rose Window, the blending of wood and stone, brick and marble. We’re in a place of celebration, but it’s celebration that has a solemn quality to it. It’s joyful, but it’s a joy that carries deep meaning, and mystery. We’ll never completely understand it, but it’s real and can move our hearts, so that we come back week after week.

Awe can be frightening. And I’m not going to conjure up all the standard nature metaphors—beautiful but terrifying lightning storms, or incredible mountain vistas. Because good though they are, we’re talking about God, and I can’t have a relationship with Niagara Falls, or a mountain. It can’t know us, can’t love us the way we are taught, and the way I believe, that God loves us.

No, let’s stick closer to home for this. Think back to the first moment you realized were in love. Not infatuation. Not desire. The real thing. Now, I can’t speak for anybody but me, but mixed in with that unbelievable joy, that thrill that only the presence of that one special person can bring, is a kind of fear. The fear of being vulnerable. Will she love me back? What happens when he gets to know how insecure I am? Will I get hurt?

That’s awe.

And becoming aware, really taking on board, the love of God carries with it some awe. It’s hard to accept that we are loved by God. It’s especially hard to find room in our busy lives in an increasingly scary world that seems out of joint. With all that, how can we make space for a relationship with a God we can’t see, or touch, or whose voice we can’t hear.

It’s hard to remember the children we once were, and find that kind of spontaneity in ourselves again.

And that’s what Advent is for.

It’s a time for finding that moment when we feel at one with the world, where we can open ourselves to feelings we so often push to the side.

And how on earth do we do that?

Well, in AA, we have a saying—act as if. Be a part of what’s happening here these next few weeks before Christmas. Stay for coffee afterward, maybe take a tour. Maybe take an active part. There are all kinds of ways, you know—help decorate the church for Christmas, wrap toys to be given to children to fulfill Christmas wishes.

Here’s a secret—Community Ministry gives you the opportunity to meet incredible people, both our volunteers but especially our guests, who so often taught me what grace under pressure really is like. If that’s not for you, you can take a class—we have everything from Bible study to yoga classes throughout the week. Or just be here and soak it in, and clear some space for yourself to breathe. And listen. Don’t worry if you don’t hear anything. You will when the time is right for you.

Advent for me is a chance to make that space in life so that we can hear the inmost promptings of the heart, can open ourselves to discovering where our “deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.” Now, I stole those words. They’re from Frederick Buchner, and they’re the best translation I’ve come upon for what theologians mean when they talk about God calling each of us, clergy and lay, to a special ministry. It’s finding that place, he , “where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.”

Some find that place in ordained ministry, as priests, or, as I have, as a permanent deacon.

But our lay ministers and volunteers, our altar guild, the incredibly talented musicians who create beauty here every week, are responding to that call. And so are many people whose responses we don’t see, because they pursue that calling outside the church walls, and we’re here as a community and sustenance for them.

Advent is a bit like Lent, then.

It’s a chance to stop a bit, recognize that every day the world offers us all chances to find that place, and put our deep gladness to work. It’s a chance to step back from the rush, and get ready to hear. It’s a chance to oppose the cruelties and violence that are so common in our world, and by opposing end them. Not with more violence, but by acts of kindness and a refusal to accept that cruelty and violence establish the norm. They do not. So Advent is not a deadline; it’s a process. It’s about readiness.

If it be now,
'tis not to come;
if it be not to come, it will be now;
if it be not now, yet it will come:
the readiness is all.

In the name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Anglocat in the Pulpit Redux: Advent Sermonizing

So, as the new deacon at St Bartholomew's Church, I'm getting two chances to preach in Advent. First, on the Second Sunday of Advent, I'll be preaching at the 9:00 AM (Corrected, thanks to Claude Scales in comments) and the 5:00 pm services.

The readings for that day are a trifle dark, combining anticipation with a little dread: "the messenger of the covenant in whom you delight--indeed, he is coming, says the LORD of hosts. But who can endure the day of his coming, and who can stand when he appears?"

Who indeed?

I have to admit, the minute I was invited to preach and looked up the readings, my favorite passage from Shakespeare popped into my mind:

If it be now,
'tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be
now; if it be not now, yet it will come: the
readiness is all.

So that will be the leitmotif of my first sermon.

Second, on Christmas Eve, I'll be participating in all the services (!), but preaching at the 12:00 p.m., with my good friend Rev. Lynn Sanders presiding. It's a tremendous honor to preach at the first of St. Barts' Christmas Eve services (followed by the pageant at 4, the Choral Eucharist (the Christ-mass) at 7 and then again, but with incense and extra brio, at 11 pm).

Keep me in your prayers and/or c'mon by!

Richard Hooker's Day

Today the Episcopal Church celebrates Richard Hooker, who did so much to theologize the Elizabethan Settlement--proving that good policy can make good (canon) law. I think it safe to say that much Anglican theology is explicating the themes of Hooker's writing--the defense of variety in political and ecclesiastical structures as "things indifferent" to the Faith, but rather dependent on local need and culture, is the dawn of the local episcopate central to world-wide Anglicanism to this day. His classic Lawes of Ecclesiastical Polity were directed at refuting the Puritans who would disrupt the Elizabethan Settlement, and tried to point out to them the fact that the reason holds its place in assenting to the structure of the church, but that the issues that cause division are seldom those upon which the Faith depends:

The first mean whereby nature teacheth men to judge good from evil, as well in laws as in other things, is the force of their own discretion. Hereunto therefore St. Paul referreth oftentimes his own speech, to be considered of by them that heard him.By what means so many of the people are trained unto the liking of that discipline. “I speak as to them which have understanding, judge ye what I say1.” Again afterward, “Judge in yourselves, is it comely that a woman pray uncovered2?” The exercise of this kind of judgment our Saviour requireth in the Jews3. In them of Berea the Scripture commendeth it4. Finally, whatsoever we do, if our own secret judgment consent not unto it as fit and good to be done, the doing of it to us is sin, although the thing itself be allowable. St. Paul’s rule therefore generally is, “Let every man in his own mind be fully persuaded of that thing which he either alloweth or doth5.”
[2.]Some things are so familiar and plain, that truth from falsehood, and good from evil, is most easily discerned in them, even by men of no deep capacity. And of that nature, for the most part, are things absolutely unto all men’s salvation recessary, either to be held or denied, either to be done or avoided. For which cause St. Augustine6 acknowledgeth, that they are not only set down, but also plainly set down in Scripture; so that he which heareth or readeth may without any great difficulty understand. Other things also there are belonging (though in a lower degree of importance) unto the offices of Christian men: which, because they are more obscure, more intricate and hard to be judged of, therefore God hath appointed some to spend their whole time principally in the study of things divine, to the end that in these more doubtful cases their understanding might be a light to direct others. “If the understanding power or faculty of the soul be” (saith the [144] grand physician1) “like unto bodily sight, not of equal sharpness in all, what can be more convenient than that, even as the dark-sighted man is directed by the clear about things visible;Preface, Ch. iii. 3. so likewise in matters of deeper discourse the wise in heart do shew the simple where his way lieth?” In our doubtful cases of law, what man is there who seeth not how requisite it is that professors of skill in that faculty be our directors? So it is in all other kinds of knowledge. And even in this kind likewise the Lord hath himself appointed, that “the priest’s lips should preserve knowledge, and that other men should seek the truth at his mouth, because he is the messenger of the Lord of hosts2.” Gregory Nazianzen, offended at the people’s too great presumption in controlling the judgment of them to whom in such cases they should have rather submitted their own, seeketh by earnest entreaty to stay them within their bounds: “Presume not ye that are sheep to make yourselves guides of them that should guide you; neither seek ye to overskip the fold which they about you have pitched. It sufficeth for your part, if ye can well frame yourselves to be ordered. Take not upon you to judge your judges, nor to make them subject to your laws who should be a law to you; for God is not a God of sedition and confusion, but of order and of peace3.”

Now, note that this is not, taken in context, a counsel of blind obedience, but rather of humility--do we know enough to be the judge in a recondite or difficult matter? Or are we, with only fitful attention, setting up ourselves as higher authority than our knowledge can bear, and thereby rending the fabric of the Church on "things indifferent" to salvation?

Hooker's tone is gentle, for the most part but he has shafts of insight that are not just illuminating; they can be a trifle barbed. Here he is describing the certitude of the puritan that Scripture must bear the meaning for which they contend:

These are the paths wherein ye have walked that are of the ordinary sort of men; these are the very steps ye have trodden, and the manifest degrees whereby ye are of your guides and directors trained up in that school: a custom of inuring your ears with reproof of faults especially in your governors; an use to attribute those faults to the kind of spiritual regiment under which ye live; boldness in warranting the force of their discipline for the cure of all such evils; a slight of framing your conceits to imagine that Scripture every where favoureth that discipline; persuasion that the cause why ye find it in Scripture is the illumination of the Spirit, that the same Spirit is a seal unto you of your nearness unto God, that ye are by all means to nourish and witness it in yourselves, and to strengthen on every side your minds against whatsoever might be of force to withdraw you from it.

Hooker's work is important for both theology and jurisprudence, and, although a definitive modern edition has been been published, I still use my old 1875 copy of John Keble's edition--with a smattering of clippings about Hooker and other works pasted into the volume by a prior owner. I love the connection of Hooker and Keble, and honor them both. The Folger Books are expensive, but I have got a copy of the commentary volumes.

I hope to study Hooker in greater depth in 2016 (was 2015--I'd like to write something about his presence in the DNA of Anglicanism that won't be a cliche, if I can.

Time Mirror

When I was in the discernment process, before I had been recommended by my parish to the Diocese, I attended--thanks to the urging of my mentor and good friend, the Deacon (I guess I have to say the senior deacon now) at St. Bartholomew's Church--a retreat. A friend of mine, in the discernment process for the priesthood, described the Fraction as the "moment when the one who is whole becomes broken, so that we who are broken can become whole." I mulled the throughout for a long time afterward. It was true, beautiful, moving and spiritually alive and resonant for me. It was also a thought that would never have passed through my own mind, though in hearing it, I saw its profundity. I told her then that I believed with all my heart that her call to the priesthood was genuine. (She has since been ordained a priest.)

And it made me wonder if my call was not to the priesthood, but to something else.

Some months later, I was delivering a committee report about improving our church communications. It was in the wake of the financial crash, and I advocated for getting some computers donated, training some of our neighbors who had been unemployed as a result of the crash, and having them digitize our archives for use online. We could, I argued, help the unemployed learn new skills, give them a resume line to keep them viable in the job market, and at the same time improve our website.

When I finished, a short break was called. My friend who had spoken so eloquently of the Fraction sought me out, looked me squarely in the eyes, and said to me: "You're a deacon." And in that moment, I knew she was right, whether I was ever ordained or not.

***

Another friend of mine, professionally accomplished, with a busy life, had a few months back been in touch with me about wanting to undergo Clinical Pastoral Education. I told her what I knew about it, put her in touch with some people I knew, and offered to do more if she needed. She reached out to me again the other day, and we spoke on the phone. She told me that she was in a program, described what she'd been doing,and told me she felt that she might be being called to the diaconate. we discussed the discernment process, the formation and training, field placement--everything. She then started musing on how she'd been doing volunteer work since she was a girl, but always practical, always helping people not within the four corners of the church, but outside in the world, and now felt the need to integrate that with her spiritual practice--that she felt called to more, and that's why CPE was so important, even though it didn't encompass all that she wanted to do. Again and again, she used the word serve to describe her call.

I can't adequately describe the frisson I felt at that moment--the physical sensation running from the crown of my head to the base of my spine--the sensation that always accompanies for me those "peak moments," as my old teacher, Fr. R.F. Smith at Fordham, used to call them--those moments when the world aligns, and I recognize what's been staring me in the face all along. I felt as if I were in an echo in time, but with the roles changed.

"You're a deacon," I heard myself say.

Of course, the Church will ultimately decide that, not me, but that she has the heart of a deacon, that she is called to servant ministry, whether ordained or lay, I have no doubt.

Doubt that, Douthat

Really, this blog is not going to degenerate into one focused on a branch of the Church to which I no longer belong, but our friend Ross Douthat does keep making it hard to quit him:

It’s a very specific debate about whether conversion and repentance are necessary, not for community, but for communion: The reception of the eucharist, the body and blood of Christ, during the central act of Catholic worship, the sacrifice of the mass. And by claiming — or at least very strongly implying —that Jesus’s meals with sinners are the template for how the church should think about communion, Father Martin is effectively rejecting the entire sweep of our church’s tradition on this question.

This tradition is rooted in the gospels themselves, where the Last Supper is emphatically not a feeding of the five thousand moment or a meal with a tax collector: Those encounters are arguably prefigurations of the Last Supper, but the actual eucharist itself is instituted in an intimate encounter between Jesus and his closest followers, held in a private upstairs room far from the crowds and hangers-on.

The tradition is also rooted in the New Testament more broadly, and particularly in Saint Paul’s admonition that “a man must examine himself first, and then eat of that bread and drink of that cup; he is eating and drinking damnation to himself if he eats and drinks unworthily.” (Which doesn’t sound like a “community first, conversion second” admonition to me.)

And then it’s rooted in the ancient, millennia-spanning practice of the church itself, in which the idea that communion follows conversion is part of the chain of experience that binds the earliest Christians to their medieval and modern Catholic heirs.

So treating the eucharist as a form of outreach instead would represent a revolution, not a mere pastoral tweak, in the way the church thinks about that sacrament (and not only that one). That’s because there’s no clear way to confine Father Martin’s logic to the narrow cases at issue in this debate. If community precedes conversion in the reception of communion, why should only remarried Catholics (or gay Catholics, or polygamous Catholics) have the benefits of being welcomed at the altar? The same welcoming logic would surely apply to any unshriven sinner in need of conversion. And not just any sinner who happened to be baptized Catholic: If the template is Jesus’s meals with the unconverted, then it would apply to any human being, period, since who wouldn’t Jesus have dined with? Why should Protestants not be welcomed to communion? Why shouldn’t Jews? (We know Jesus liked to dine with Jews!) Why shouldn’t Muslims and Mormons, agnostics and atheists? If the eucharist is basically a form of food-based Christian fellowship, a means to outreach and welcome and hospitality rather than a sacred mystery for believers to approach with reverence and not a little fear, then forget the divorced and remarried; barring anyone from receiving makes no sense at all.

And indeed there are many Christian churches that take exactly this attitude toward communion. But they are also, not coincidentally, generally churches that don’t have Catholicism’s view of transsubstantiation, confession, or the sacramental economy writ large. They are always Protestant, frequently liberal, and emphatically not the Roman Catholic Church in which both myself and Father Martin were confirmed.

Long quote; sorry. But I don't want to be accused of taking him out of context.

A few points:

1. To Douthat's purity principle, pointing at the Last Supper, might I point out that one Judas Iscariot was present; indeed, he was singled out for special attention:

Now there was leaning on Jesus' bosom one of his disciples, whom Jesus loved.
Simon Peter therefore beckoned to him, that he should ask who it should be of whom he spake.
He then lying on Jesus' breast saith unto him, Lord, who is it? Jesus answered, He it is, to whom I shall give a sop, when I have dipped it. And when he had dipped the sop, he gave it to Judas Iscariot, the son of Simon.

So, clearly, only the pure in heart and converted should be allowed at our commemoration of the Last Supper. Don't get me wrong; I respect the right of the Roman Catholic Church to make whatever rules it holds to be required by God and the service of God. But this line of argumentation is distinctly poor--

2. But that's hardly surprising; Douthat argues like a high school debater. "[E]mphatically not the Roman Catholic Church in which both myself and Father Martin were confirmed," Ross? You were born in late 1979 and converted (and I'll assume confirmed) at 17. By my poor math, that means you've been a Catholic for about as long as South Park has been on the air. Your adherence to Roman Catholicism has just about tied the original run of Cats



See, sometimes change is better.

Kidding aside, My point is that this is a juvenile argument--you don't get to pull that O tempera, o mores routine based on an 18 year run.

3. He's also stone-cold ignorant about the liberal churches who do allow communion to all or to all the baptized: "there are many Christian churches that take exactly this attitude toward communion. But they are also, not coincidentally, generally churches that don’t have Catholicism’s view of transsubstantiation, confession, or the sacramental economy writ large. They are always Protestant, frequently liberal," and, as we covered earlier, not the Church he was confirmed in back in that distant era when Bill Clinton was serving his second term. Which doesn't explain his complete unfamiliarity with Anglo-Catholicism, in either its English or American forms. Short version: From its conservative, indeed reactionary, origins with John Henry Newman and the Tractarians, it had a second wave, the so-called "Second Oxford Movement", led by Charles Gore and the "Holy Party." Both variants flourish to this day, disagreeing quite often--though not always--on questions such as women's ordination and same sex marriage, while sharing a firm conviction to what Gore described as "sacramental religion." [A first rate book on the English context is N.P. Williams's Northern Catholicism (1933), and, for the American context, George DeMille's The Catholic Movement in the Episcopal Church (1941).] So, yes, many liberal protestants believe in Real Presence in the Eucharist, some in Transubstantiation, quite a few in confession, and plenty in the Atonement. (I mean, there's a whole chapter on the Atonement in Lux Mundi (1889), the founding text of liberal Anglo-Catholicism.It's by Arthur Lyttleton, and quite good.)

Oh--and that we share so precious a sacrament so widely is not because we do not value it, but because, in the words of a wise priest I know, it isn't ours to keep, but to give away. It's a vision captured in that most wonderful of hymns--which we sang at my ordination, "There's a Wideness in God's Mercy." We really believe these words:

More Catholic Than the Pope

Ah, Ross Douthat, you never disappoint:

THE Vatican always seems to have the secrets and intrigues of a Renaissance court — which, in a way, is what it still remains. The ostentatious humility of Pope Francis, his scoldings of high-ranking prelates, have changed this not at all; if anything, the pontiff’s ambitions have encouraged plotters and counterplotters to work with greater vigor.

And right now the chief plotter is the pope himself.

Francis’s purpose is simple: He favors the proposal, put forward by the church’s liberal cardinals, that would allow divorced and remarried Catholics to receive communion without having their first marriage declared null.

****

And yet his plan is not necessarily succeeding. There reportedly still isn’t anything like a majority for the proposal within the synod, which is probably why the organizers hedged their bets for a while about whether there would even be a final document. And the conservatives — African, Polish, American, Australian — have been less surprised than last fall, and quicker to draw public lines and try to box the pontiff in with private appeals.

The entire situation abounds with ironies. Aging progressives are seizing a moment they thought had slipped away, trying to outmaneuver younger conservatives who recently thought they owned the Catholic future. The African bishops are defending the faith of the European past against Germans and Italians weary of their own patrimony. A Jesuit pope is effectively at war with his own Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the erstwhile Inquisition — a situation that would make 16th century heads spin.

For a Catholic journalist, for any journalist, it’s a fascinating story, and speaking strictly as a journalist, I have no idea how it will end.

Speaking as a Catholic, I expect the plot to ultimately fail; where the pope and the historic faith seem to be in tension, my bet is on the faith.

Where do I begin?

Well, let's start here: Douthat, who was born in 1979, is not yet 36 (he will be in late November), converted to Catholicism at 17, i.e., in late 1996 or in 1997, and holds holds a BA from Harvard (admittedly magna cum laude). Now, I was a cradle Catholic, and was educated the Marianists at Chaminade High School and I hold a BA earned studying with the Jesuits at Fordham College, summa cum laude, in honoris causa. I was a Roman Catholic for nearly 30 years, so, with all respect to Douthat, I lived the life of an American Catholic far longer than he did, in a way he simply did not, and was educated in that tradition with a depth that he has not yet had a chance to be steeped in. I was a Roman Catholic, in other words, longer than he has lived since attaining the age of reason.

And I wouldn't have the arrogance to tell the Pope that I know what is "the faith" better than he did, let alone accuse him of "plotting" against it.

That was true when the pope was John Paul II, who, in closing many of the the windows opened by Vatican II (with the assistance of his successor, the future Benedict XVI), essentially made it impossible to remain a Roman Catholic without being substantially in dissent from the narrowed scope of freedom of conscience (as I saw and see it) under his Papacy. Unable to agree to the "musts" the Roman Catholic Church asked of me, I left, consistent with the future pope Benedict's depiction of those could not assent to the Church's requirements. Soon thereafterI discovered that I was better suited in the messier, but more small "c" catholic approach of Anglicanism--where self-perceived Protestants and catholics, liberals and conservatives, can gather around the Lord's Table together. It's not that I don't value my Roman Catholic upbringing and education--I do, very much, it made me who I am today. But the man that upbringing and education made is an Anglican, with a loving fondness for the Church that nurtured him--I am an Anglo-Cathoolic, because I keep the best of what I was given by the Church of my youth.

And I had and have too much respect to remain a member of that Church without accepting the discipline it demands as a precondition of membership.

We'll see what the Synod produces, and what Pope Francis does or does not do in the fulness of time. And maybe Francis will surprise us all and be a "bad" pope. I'd be surprised, frankly--I think, as I recently wrote, that political and theological liberals have to realize that Francis

was never our guy. And he's not the political conservative's guy, either. He's a good man, walking the Way by the light he has, one within the strictures and structures of the Roman Catholic Church. He's trying to do it in an irenic and community building way, one that damps down conflicts, and allows conversations to happen. And when that happens, the Holy Spirit has room to do wonderful things we can't predict

.

As to Douthat--he's a full of the convert's zeal, but, alas, without much humility to temper it.

MTD and the Theological Context of Prayer Book Revision: A Response

Derek Olsen has a post in which he uses a term, Moralistic Therapeutic Deism ("MTD") that has become quite a favorite in the "traditionalist" Christian blogosphere, and so has connotations that he may not intend. It's used in his setting of a context in which Prayer Book revision in the Episcopal Church will take place. To set the stage a little:

There are some these days (I think of Elaine Pagels and others) who underscore the diversity of early Christianity to remind us that the stream of apostolic Christianity that became orthodox Christianity and that grounded the Undivided Church was one among many in order to suggest that some of the others are perfectly valid ways of being Christian and that orthodoxy became orthodox because the mean patriarchal Fathers constructed it that way so they could oppress everybody else. I don’t agree with that perspective, and that’s not why I’m bringing up the diversities of Christianities in the past. My point is simply that claiming Christianity does not automatically ensure orthodoxy.

In fact, I’d argue that orthodox Christianity is once again a minority among Americans generally and even among Americans who claim Christianity. The majority faith is Moral Therapeutic Deism (MTD). Again, the major tenets of MTD are:

1. A god exists who created and ordered the world and watches over human life on earth.
2. God wants people to be good, nice, and fair to each other, as taught in the Bible and by most world religions.
3. he central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about oneself.
4. God does not need to be particularly involved in one’s life except when God is needed to resolve a problem.
5. Good people go to heaven when they die.

Furthermore, I think that some of the classic Christian heresies are currently functioning in such a way to blur the edges from Christian orthodoxy into MTD.

OK, let's stop there a moment. Leaving aside Olsen's views on Pagels and Ehrman, which I find unduly dismissive, I generally see MTD used by traditionalists as a way of characterizing (actually caricaturing) the Christianity of those they define as liberals. Including, sometimes, real liberals, like yours truly, who in fact does not hold such a belief. I'm a creedal Christian; that informs my liberal views, not contradicts them. So, generally, I've seen MTD come up as a pejorative for the view held by the (non-present) Other, to facilitate their dismissal. That said, it originated in empirical research into teenagers' beliefs, so there is a core reality behind the term.

Moving on with Olsen: "Again, we need to recall why heresy is an issue. I think sometimes there’s a sense that there’s a “patriarchal dogmtic thought police” who wants to make sure that you’re under their thumb and you’re only thinking what they want you to think. Throw that notion out—it’s ridiculous."

No. Witch hunts were real; so too was the patriarchal, anti-woman screed by John Knox, The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women (1558), and so too have been many claims of heresy used to deny women's right to political, social, legal, let alone religious equality. The ordination of women remains a bone of controversy to this day, as witness the disruption--by a priest no less--of the first female bishop of the Church of England, earlier this year. Alister McGrath, no liberal, has noted that ""the extension of the category of heresy was an important instrument of social control."

This isn't a major point in Olsen's analysis, so why am I harping on it? Because I think he underestimates the extent to which the abuse of the term "heresy" by religious authorities as a means of maintaining dominance has engendered distrust and skepticism of orthodoxy as a concept. I won't "fisk" the whole essay; I actually think that much of it is quite good, and explores some ways that modern attitudes toward religion can echo ancient heresies. But in doing so, I think that Olsen makes it all rather too easy on orthodoxy. Let me give you a particularly egregious example:

Neo-Marcionism: Marcion was a gnostic who taught that the Creator spoken of in the Old Testament as the God of Israel was a lesser being who imprisoned souls and soul-stuff within material reality. Jesus came to save us from creation and material reality, and taught us of his Father who was all love who was different from the lesser, evil, Creator active in the OT. The modern form is the general rather nebulous notion that the God of the Old Testament is the mean god who does mean things; the God of Jesus is the good god who loves you and thinks you’re great. Whereas the first two heresies are presently taught by thinkers who write books that are discussed in Adult Forums and such, this one tends to be more cultural than presented as an actual argument. This heresy helps bring Christianity into conformity with MTD by denying the continuity between God the Creator and the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob who was intimately related with human life in its particularity (pt 1, 4), and downplaying the notion that God has some very clear and specific commandments on the ordering of human life an[d] relationships (pt 2).

Oh, as usual, dear. Writing off the "general rather nebulous notion that the God of the Old Testament is the mean god who does mean things" as just a way of bringing Christianity into conformity with MTD, and brushing off God's "very clear and specific commandments on the ordering of human life an[d] relationships" enables us to elide some pretty tough stuff in the OT, doesn't it? Read C.S. Lewis on the "imprecatory psalms":

In some of the Psalms the spirit of hatred which strikes us in the face is like the heat from a furnace mouth. In others the same spirit ceases to be frightful only be becoming (to a modern mind) almost comic in its naivety... One way of dealing with these terrible or (dare we say?) contemptible Psalms is simply to leave them alone. But unfortunately the bad parts will not "come away clean"; they may, as we have noticed, be intertwined with the most exquisite things...At the outset I felt sure, and I feel sure still, that we must not either try to explain them away or to yield for one moment to the idea that, because it comes in the Bible, all this vindictive hatred must somehow be good and pious. We must face both facts squarely. The hatred is there - festering, gloating, undisguised-and also we should be wicked if we in any way condoned or approved it, or (worse still) used it to justify similar passions in ourselves.

Need an example?--Psalm 137:9 leaps to mind, or the genocidal passages theologians struggle with.

Look, I'm not advocating for Marcion. But let's not pretend that shying away from these passages as expressing the true essence of God is somehow not a moral reaction to some dubious texts. As that defender of orthodoxy Charles Gore pointed out, the Hebrew Scriptures are a melange of folklore, history, imaginative history, drama, and storytelling. Pretending that the more *ahem* sanguinary, or dubious passages are consonant with the teachings of Christ, and are as much of God, is asking the understandably skeptical reader to ignore her own reaction. Gore went so far as to argue that only with the prophets do we begin to see the lineaments of God's self-revelation. That's not Marcionism; it's acknowledging that there are many strands in the Bible, and not all of them are equally moral.

If you want to win people away from MTD, it seems to me critical to offer them a nuanced view of the Bible, one that acknowledges, as did Lewis and Gore, that not everything in it is of God; you have to get past the pain of a people oppressed, or, in earlier sections, the evolving understanding of a people only discovering monotheism, and defining themselves as against their neighbors. Christians haven't always gotten it right throughout history--why should we be surprised that the history in the Hebrew Scriptures records a tale that is not always edifying?

But to ignore the difficulty, and blame it on MTD, seems to be asking for a principled moral rejection from the uncommitted. We can do better. And we'd better.

Is the Pope Catholic? (Answer: Yes.)

Above, a melange of conservative pundits denouncing Pope Francis.

Meanwhile, this is harshing some liberals' mellow feelings toward Pope Francis:

Pope Francis met privately in Washington last week with Kim Davis, the county clerk in Kentucky who defied a court order to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples, adding a new element to an American tour that saw Francis attract huge crowds and articulate left-leaning positions on poverty, immigration, the environment and inequality.

Vatican officials initially would not confirm that the meeting occurred, finally doing so on Wednesday afternoon, while refusing to discuss any details.

Ms. Davis, the clerk in Rowan County, Ky., has been at the center of a nationwide controversy over whether government employees and private businesses have a legal right to refuse to serve same-sex couples. She spent five days in jail for disobeying a federal court order to issue the licenses.

Kim Davis, the clerk for Rowan County in Kentucky, on her first day back to work after being released from jail earlier this month.Kentucky Clerk in Gay Marriage Dispute, Kim Davis, Joining G.O.P.SEPT. 25, 2015
Kim Davis, center, with her son, Nathan Davis, by her side, spoke on Monday outside the courthouse in Morehead,

On Tuesday night, her lawyer, Mathew D. Staver, said that Ms. Davis and her husband, Joe, were sneaked into the Vatican Embassy by car on Thursday afternoon. Francis gave her rosaries and told her to “stay strong,” the lawyer said. The couple met for about 15 minutes with the pope, who was accompanied by security guards, aides and photographers.

“I put my hand out and he reached and he grabbed it, and I hugged him and he hugged me,” Ms. Davis said Wednesday in an interview with ABC News. ‘Thank you for your courage.’”

To each side of this debate, I can only ask: What did you expect? Francis is not an American politician; he is the leader of the Roman Catholic Church, an ecclesial body that has strong, long-held views on subjects that do not fit the orthodoxy of either American political party, or of American polity in general.

As I acknowledged in a 2011 article about Anglo-Catholic theologian Charles Gore, Roman Catholic social teaching has been strongly pro-worker, critical of unfettered capitalism, and advocating for the poor since the late 19th Century when Pope Leo XIII issued Rerum Novarum 1 Encyclical on Capital and Labor (1891). Pope Benedict and John Paul II don't get credit for it, but they hewed to this line, too, and I've written elsewhere of the late Edward Cardinal Egan's impatience with dismissal of Catholic Social teaching by conservatives, as well as his pronounced distaste for America's Mideast exploits. It's true that Robert P. George shamefully sought to limit the bishops to "“making utter nuisances of themselves” about poverty and injustice, like the Old Testament prophets, as long as they did not advocate specific remedies," but what success he had there reflects poorly on him and the individual bishops who followed his lead. Neither John Paul II, Benedict, nor Francis backed away from the Church's social teaching.

Likewise, liberals need to take onboard that Francis is not one of us. I don't say that with dislike--I think Francis has been a success in changing the tone so that ecumenical dialogue is possible again, and so that disagreement need not poison relationships. But he has upheld the Church's traditional teaching on marriage, and I strongly suspect he will continue to do so. If he can--and this has not happened yet--convince the clergy and laity of the Roman Catholic Church to abate the hostility some--far from all--display toward their gay and lesbian brother and sisters, he will have again achieved something worth doing. because the status quo, with traditionalists and liberals locked into unproductive hostility gets in the way of the work of the Spirit. And that's where Francis is working. He's trying to turn down the temperature while remaining faithful to the truth as he sees it. That is, in itself, worth doing.

Look, if you believe in a Christianity that recognizes the love and ministry of those in same sex relationships, as an Episcopal Deacon, let me just say "The Episcopal Church welcomes you." As do several other churches. Pope Francis's traditionalism here isn't a surprise, or a betrayal. He was never our guy. And he's not the political conservative's guy, either. He's a good man, walking the Way by the light he has, one within the strictures and structures of the Roman Catholic Church. He's trying to do it in an irenic and community building way, one that damps down conflicts, and allows conversations to happen. And when that happens, the Holy Spirit has room to do wonderful things we can't predict.