Bishops' Blog

The Road Ahead

One often hears that truism that we are at an historical crossroads, or are in a moment of cultural upheaval.  People used mistakenly to refer to the Chinese ideogram for crisis that also meant opportunity!  That it often seems so does not mean that of some times this is particularly true.  So I will begin with the harder news, first for our denomination as a whole, and then for us as a diocese devoted to what the late theologian Hans Frei called ‘generous orthodoxy.’  The Episcopal Church dropped sharply in the past decade, especially in the number of baptisms and marriages.  In addition, we have learned recently that, in the period of COVID, it has shrunk by a third in average Sunday attendance. While we have not experienced such a drop, we are not immune to the effects of the larger Church climate.  Some weaker dioceses may struggle to survive. (It is in this context that the importance of Dallas paying its full assessment, as an expression of fellowship, can be seen).

In such an environment, and in the face of a good deal of resistance from the bishops, the Church has embarked on a process of Prayer Book revision which is confused at best.  It will probably in continue through the next two Conventions, and it will probably result in the new marriage rite, amenable to same sex couples, having an equal status.  Meanwhile, and on a more positive note, there are efforts to assure that parishes that wish to do so can continue to use the 1979 Book (for the older of us the idea of the 1979 book as the venerable one is slightly comical).  At the same time, we watch with interest the consent process for new bishops in dioceses of the Communion Partners, the fellowship of those who are full members of TEC but maintain a traditional teaching on marriage. The Church as a whole needs to continue to affirm that our voice is ‘indispensable’(General Convention, 2015). All these facts taken together constitute an inflection point.

At a recent Commission on Ministry meeting I played ‘To be a Pilgrim,’ a hymn with words by John Bunyan.  I believe that intrepid and persevering spirit is what we are, first of all, called to in this season. Parishes, clergy, dioceses of more traditional mind, will have to make their way, learning along the way. We do not know exactly how things will work out. But we do know the things that need to be in the spiritual knapsack of the intrepid pilgrim.  I will offer these as I use three Greek words from the New Testament- I would apologize for the obfuscation, but in fact you know the words! For anamnesis, think ‘amnesiac’- it means ‘remembering.’ For oikoumene, think ‘ecumenical’- it means ‘global.’ For kyriakon, think of hearing the ‘Kyrie’ in Church, ‘Lord (have mercy)- it means ‘the Lord’s thing’ (day, people, place).’ All three are clear (but hard), humbling, challenging, life-giving.

Anamnesis

The context in both the New Testament and the liturgical tradition is eucharistic, but we can broaden this out to the whole of the Christian life. We strain to hear the message of the Gospel anew, and are given by grace to recall it. The word conveys a remembering which is powerful and brings the thing remembered into powerful presence in us.  As the Church struggles, we are driven back to the basics anew, not with a spirit of superiority, but in humility, as beginners, as ‘babes in the faith,’ anew converted.  A traditional witness has to be a vocation on behalf of all of recalling, and with the confidence that the Word itself and alone suffices in power to sustain the Church. We all as sinners are justified by grace, by virtue of Jesus’ saving death. We can learn many things from the world; the ‘sufficiency of Scripture’ doesn’t mean a retreat from thought and engagement.  But the authoritative voice in what matters most remains the Word of God. The sacraments likewise are ‘visible words’ (Augustine) calling forth what they say. By contrast, no stratagem or amalgam aimed at Church survival will suffice.  In uncertainty (which we in our weakness share) we repair to what is certain, the saving Word of God conveyed in Scripture.

Oikoumene

This word is actually related to another word you know: ‘economics, literally the ‘law of the home.’ Likewise the oikoumene is ‘the inhabited place,’ the world as it is given to humans to live together (in contrast in the New Testament to the kosmos, ‘the world’ (in its fallenness).  Christians, though a part of a distinct, and often oppressed, group, understood themselves to be members of the one oikoumene (indeed in the Letter to Diognetus imagined themselves its soul). 

The more pressed life may be for the Church in post-modernity, and in an era of denominational decline, the more we reach out as fellow-branches-of-the-tree, friends, neighbors, in the oikoumene. The more distanced we may have been, the more we define our very selves in relation to the oikoumene.  As I write this reflection, we begin to hear on Sundays the Sermon on the Mount, where Jesus deconstructs the very idea of an ‘enemy,’ in utter contrast to our cultural moment, and in direct connection to the saving death toward which He moves. 

Think here in terms of concentric circles. The parish is a spiritual place inhabited together, not a collection of individuals consuming a religious product. A diocese likewise is a koinonia, a thing in common. We have to work toward grasping this!  The Episcopal Church is likewise our family, to which we are bound, especially when we disagree or feel disregarded.  We inhabit the same oikoumene with other denominations of Christians, whom we may rediscover in the time ahead. We have a special vocation here of brother- and sisterhood with largely African American churches, and will need to continue to learn from them.  Of the greatest importance is expanding our sense of koinonia with the worldwide family of Anglican Churches. This is a providential gift, a sign to us of the ‘one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church,’ and the Gospel content for a more abstract notion of diversity.  (And we have new resources in the diocese to make this easier to do). Finally we inhabit the same oikoumene with those who suffer around us, those who misunderstand us, etc,

Kyriakon

If the oikoumene is as wide as can be, the kyriakon is a narrow. It is day of the Resurrection, on Christians pray together in the same place, The day, place, bodies all belong to the kyrios, the Lord.  (The premier ethicist in Anglicanism in our time, Oliver O’Donovan, has mentioned that Sunday itself was spoken of as a sacrament by some in the early Church).  Our practice is the same, a primitive simplicity, an utter throwback.  The places of the kyriakon thickly dot the landscape of the whole oikoumene, as we remember ‘until He returns.’  Of course I have in mind the stark contrast this has with that other reality, looming everywhere in our world, technology, the disembodied world system, itself resembling what the New Testament called ‘powers and principalities,’ the latter called in Greek kyriotes, ‘things pretending to be kyrios,’ or ‘hegemons.’ Political acrimony, adolescent distress, moral corruption: these are all bitter fruits of the ‘worldwide web,’ which said it would as one ‘bind us all.’ The idea that it would somehow deliver the Church was doomed, though I grant that it can have a (carefully) limited use.  In the future, it is the opposite, the embodied, diverse, ancient reality of meeting to pray on the Lord’s Day, to sing, to hear, to be absolved, to pray, to commune- which will be our greatest spiritual armor.

Peace,

+GRS

Christians are Pirates

Last Saturday I was here at St. Matthew’s for an ordination service, a great day with five new deacons. I am grateful for that, and as always for the hospitality of this congregation. But I am in fact grateful for one other thing. When we were lining up to go into church, Father Joe Dewey’s four year old, saw me at the head of the line, and shouted out, ‘Mom, Dad, look, it’s a pirate!’ Not sure why, the hat maybe, or the cape, or the grey beard….or maybe the swashbuckling demeanor! A highlight of liturgical 2022 for me! I’m a pirate!  So in appreciation of this great honor, I have named this sermon, for our confirmands- three reasons you all too are pirates, as far as Jesus is concerned! 

My verse from the Gospel is this- there is no one born of woman who was greater than John, but the least in the Kingdom of heaven is greater than he.  John was obviously an intensely holy man, and the pinnacle of the prophets, but from the kingdom point of view nothing.  We’ll get to that…but first, three ways that you are pirates!

First, buccaneers are rascals.  They are scoff-laws, rule breakers.   That’s you.  I am not saying that you don’t have good qualities. I am not saying you are not of unimaginable worth to God. But I am saying that you are not worthy in yourself to stand before God. In the prayer book tradition, before receiving communion,  you would say that you are not worthy so much to gather up the crumbs under the table.  This is not adding an un-necessary load of guilt and shame…it is simply honesty.  Now you might respond that we were made by God and pronounced to be ‘good,’- so we were, but since then we have acquired a crack running through us.  We have not loved God and our neighbor as we should, and even when we seem to do so, it has an alloy.   When I was a youth minister, the priest I worked for was killed. I appreciated him, and it was a grievous loss, but upon hearing of his death, another question ran through my head- ‘what will this mean for me?” that self-referentiality runs deep. Living for God is something, as we were meant to, is something we approach at times, but cannot hold onto.  And there is a side of us that just resists at times, our of orneriness- for reasons we don’t understand. Why?  To that great question of the early church, are we a gathering of saints, or a school for sinners, the answer is, like it or not, the latter.  And as for the idea of sin adding to our shame, on the contrary, honesty about ourselves is the beginning of the road out of shame.    

Which leads me to ‘why we are pirates’ part 2.  While we were yet sinners, at the right moment, Christ died for us.  That’s the Gospel. We are here as the gratefully undeserving.  But we have to see the right moment is here, and we have to be open to that moment.   In fact, according to the Gospel we have to be decisive, bold, full of chutzpah, nervy. Pirates aren’t big on extended deliberations.  Pirates seize the day.  This is an important theme in the parables of Jesus. For example, he praises the corrupt administrator, stealing money, who gets caught, and, before sentencing, goes and makes side deal with his clients so that they will help him down the road.  What? It is meant to be shocking, of course you aren’t to do any such thing. But this one thing you are to do, says Jesus, know how short the time is, and act decisively. Grab hold of grace like a buccaneer.

That is related to our Gospel verse. John has achievements of holiness and spirituality, but all that counts for nothing in the kingdom of grace, where pride of place goes to the dying thief who says ‘Jesus remember me when you come into your kingdom”. A different calculus, his.  The kingdom is worth everything, the treasure buried in a field for which you would sell everything to have it- we are focusing on the decisiveness to see, sell, and claim. What in your life impedes your way to the one for whom you were made?

The sinner as pirate, the bold and forgiven as pirate- got it, but what is number three?  Well, this one has to do with being a disciple, a missionary, for Jesus. And it requires that some recall from your reading of the Book of Exodus. Remember how, leaving Egypt, the Israelites were allowed to take gold, silver, and jewels from their captors. It is called ‘despoiling the Egyptians,’ and it was an important idea for St. Augustine, four hundred years after Jesus. It described how Christians were to borrow, as to the metaphor, we would say plunder ideas from their neighbors, pagan, secular, whatever, so as to use those ideas on behalf of the sharing of the Gospel.  What would that look like? Maybe a scholar using the idea of black holes to describe what happened in the resurrection. Or maybe something as simple as borrowing tunes learned in the pub in order now to extoll the Gospel.  Or maybe using the discipline of family systems to understand how churches succeed and fail!  Another way to say the same thing has been the idea of taking captivity captive- found in the Psalms and Paul’s letter to the Ephesians. How can you take captive for Christ parts of the world around you, or parts of your own life, repurposing, since everything is ultimately meant to subserve him and his kingdom. 

Those outside might think that the Christian faith is a compromise, a retreat from life, as if the boldness were in self-adventure and rebellion.  But the opposite is true, since the world around us would have us settle for the its own predictable obsessions, and too often we indeed settle for the wider menu back in Egypt. But to live toward God, since it means first hard honesty about ourselves, and then taking the risk of faith, and then wading into the godless world for a different kind of plunder, well, those indeed are really piratical, the living so is truly to steer the vessel into the open sea.  Bon voyage.

Let the last word belong to one of the greatest of our tradition, the poet John Donne. He passed through romantic and artistic and political love, and the life of a buccaneer, literally!, on the way to that which he was seeking all along, the love of God.

    ‘hear us, o hear us Lord, to thee

A sinner is more music, when he prays,

Than spheres’ or angels’ praises be,

In panegyric alleluias,

Hear us for till thou hear us Lord

We know not what to say

Thine ear to our sighs tears thoughts, give voice and word

O thou who satan heard in Job’s sick day,

Hear thyself now for thou in us dost pray. Amen.

 Bon voyage. Amen.