Convention Address
Good morning, mis hermanos y hermanas, compañeros todos. Before I begin my address, and in the spirit of ‘eucharist,’ I want to offer varias gracias. We are grateful to Parish School for their hospitality. The Demlers have done a great deal behind the scenes to make today possible. The diocesan staff has again done yeoman’s work. The officers of the diocese are gifted and indispensable- Cory, Rebecca . A hearty thank you to the Finance Committee, the Commission on Ministry lead so ably by Sandy, Real Estate and Church Planting. I speak of all in expressing our appreciation for all our parish clergy, for our remarkable deacons, for the grey eagles our retired clergy, wardens and vestries. I have depended on the wise counsel of Father Clayton and the Standing Committee. We appreciate those on Executive Council giving of themselves. A special thank you this year to those involved in the disciplinary process- Tim, Rebecca, Oliver, Andrew, Nancy, and George. Bienvenidos to Bishop and Mrs. Amoo. Our heartfelt thanks to our guests this weekend- Gar, Bishop Justin, y el obispo de todo Honduras, Lloyd. This year, I want to thank in advance our Search Committee. Finally, gracias to all of. You delegates on this beautiful November Day.
This morning, we sang one of the great hymn melodies of our tradition, Brother James’ Air, ‘How lovely is thy dwelling place,’ with the words of the 84th Psalm, a song of pilgrims on their way to one of the great festivals in the Temple in Jerusalem. The pilgrimage- it is the shape of the spiritual life, in miniature as each of us, on the Lord’s Day, headed to Church, and up to the altar of God. The same pattern is played out yearly, in the journey through Lent to Easter, our accompaniment of the Lord on his way to Jerusalem, the cross, and the empty tomb. And of course, it reminds us of our own journey through all our own days, toward our own passing through the grim portal on the way to the bright kingdom of God.
We humans are journeyers, peregrinos, and so we, like the journeys themselves, are defined by our destination. Nosotros seres humanos somos peregrinos, definidos de nuestro fin, The beauty of the dwelling place fills the mind of the pilgrim in the dry places described in the psalm. Our life together is defined and encouraged by the feast with the Lord toward which we walk, and by His presence with us, though, walking, we are at times doubtful and discourage. So, it was in Luke’s story of the disciples on the first Easter evening on the way to Emmaus. I once heard a preacher describe the great cathedral at Chartres.
On the floor is the labyrinth winding its way to the rose-colored heart at its center, intimacy and rest with Christ, though at the same time the Rose Window above suffused the winding walk itself with the same color, Christ beside me as well as Christ before me. The tincture of his presence on the journey is, as the Emmaus story reminds us pilgrims, by means of his Word and Sacrament.
Along the way of this address, I want to cite the themes and emphases that have been important in our time together in these past nine years. As we all know, it is easy to be lost in the details of our own Church, its local struggles and challenges. But our eyes are, in the psalm, on the prize. The Eucharist lies at the heart of our Anglican piety, the enjoyment of the risen Christ’s real presence with us,as well as ahead of us.
This pilgrimage of ours had a terrible and remarkable season with the pandemic. [pic of cars waiting for food in pandemic] In a strange way, when everything else was for a short time taken from us,so that the sheer and stark mystery of His real presence in the sacrament and the real miracle of His absolution, could be seen more clearly, as in a silhouette.
Another anecdote- the great Southern Roman Catholic writer Flannery O’Connor [pic of Flannery o’connor] was invited to a dinner party with the famous lapsed Catholic writer Mary McCarthy, who called the Eucharist a ‘pretty good symbol,’ Church for McCarthy was a quaint evocation of things we have a sense of on our own. But O’Connor memorably replied ‘if it’s just a symbol I say to heck with it.’ We too would defend His real presence at table as at Emmaus. In the same way we share the need to recall, and defend, the realities of the Scripture as God’s Word, of his atoning death, of His bodily resurrection, of the primacy of His saving grace, and the urgency to evangelize. These are yet more real. The things of our everyday lives are, to the Christian eye, suggestive of these verities, not the other way around! It is incumbent on the Church as a whole to reclaim these, especially in our relentlessly secular and pragmatic age. This advocacy is not the activity of a faction, but a humble vocation on behalf of the whole Church.
This sustenance O’Connor spoke of is Viaticum [slide of the word viatico] in Latin ‘a little sustenance for the journey,’ a snack. That is what you need if you are a pilgrim out on the road. In that morsel at table in the Emmaus story was taste of the real presence of the risen Christ walking alongside His disciples... El viatico es suficiente para sustenernos viajando en el camino del Senor
This image of the pilgrim suffuses the Scriptures. In this talk I want to circle back to it four times, to reiterate both what has been of special importance to us as a diocese, and into what terrain do we now commence to travel. We journey, as I say, with our eye fixed on our destination, Jerusalem. Its outlines are defined for us Christians by the Creeds, summing up as they do the Holy Scriptures. The fixing of our sight toward our true goal is what the Church means by ‘doctrine.’ These creedal affirmations are the common inheritance of all our co-religionists, whatever various theological opinions we may hold. It is not hard to list these: that we all are made in God’s image and yet originally sinful, that Jesus is God incarnate, the Way, the Truth, and the Life, whose death dealt with our guilt, and whose resurrection has opened the door of the Kingdom to all peoples and nations.
The Church, in our age as all others, becomes waylaid by the ‘winds of doctrine.’ In the face of all this, I continue to believe that there is a ministry of recalling, hearing and articulating once more, the great doctrines which make up what C.S.Lewis called ‘mere Christianity.’ This is a ministry for the whole Church, not against it. It is more urgent in a culture of growing forgetfulness and social media driven illusion. The Communion Partners is but one example of a group committed to this remembering, and I remain convinced that this ministry of teaching is of great importance. We in this diocese have endeavored to pursue this essentially catechetical, that is, teaching, ministry in a spirit of friendship and charity. The Episcopal Church needs those with a vocation of theology, needs help to remind tied to the Cross against the sirens of unqualified experientialism, consumerism, and pluralism, challenges for all of us no matter our positions on the controverted issues of our time.
We live in a particular moment in our Church’s life. A generation has struggled over the teaching on marriage. Our Prayer Book remains unchanged. But now we are headed in 2027 toward a new agreement, to live with two teaching, which is in itself a confusing thing. But it also means to live in peace. We will probably have a diversity of practice at the parish level. The best way to understand this will be to see it as a time of what the Church calls ‘reception,’ when it decides what it makes of a new teaching, and this period may continue for a long time. What we believe to be true on this question, and others also contested in our culture, still matters. Theological implications remain. We will disagree. But we have as a Church resolved to live together peaceably with this ‘Communion Across Difference,’ brought to fruition, I might add, by creative minds in our own diocese. We are a Church walking with difference, though not discarding theology, walking in patience, the Peace of Louisville. We offer our witness on the doctrine of marriage, bearing in mind as we do the received witness and the ancient inheritance. To be sure, on the larger credal questions, we pilgrims walk together with a wider band of companions, witnessing on behalf of the whole of the common body. Estamos caminandos y testigandos sobre la doctrina de nuestro centro y nuestro fin, por el bien mas general del cuerpo de los fieles.
Peregrinos en el camino. Two generations ago, a professor named Robert Webber of Wheaton College, observed that a number of young evangelicals were drawn to the tradition, to the longer history, to the liturgy, the theologians of the early Church, to a more ancient spirituality, and in particular Anglicanism, with its dual streams, evangelical and catholic. Many came to be ordained, Webber wrote an influential book entitled Evangelicals on the Canterbury Trail. El libro de Robert Webber llama ‘Los Evangelicos en el camino de Canterbury.,’ expresando un movimiento importante por nosotros tambien. A later book called ‘Ancient Future Worship’ filled out what he envisioned. How exactly this convergence is understood and lived out has varied, but the important point for us is a simple and obvious one: the Canterbury Trail has been wide open here in the Diocese in recent years, and is vital to us moving into the future. This trail of ancient-future ordinands has a great deal to do with our distinctive and what I would call a ‘retrievalist’ profile, even as we are full participants in the common life of our Church. I like to remind those coming into our Church not to leave the distinctives of their evangelical heritage behind- attention to Scripture, evangelism, an emphasis on conversion. We need these! (And these are not actually alien to us, since our own Prayer Book has Reformation roots, and the Wesleyan revival was begun, after all, by an Anglican priest, as I pointed out at length last year!)
These would seem to be exactly the gifts most critical for leadership in the era in which we live. But to say this is to read the situation in which we find ourselves in a particular way. This leads to my third Camino image, after Camino1, journeying to Jerusalem, and Camino2, Ancient Future emergence. Third might be called Camino proper, wayfarers, including searchers, vacationers, outdoor types, walking across Spain on their way to the shrine of St. James Compostela. I am tempted to call Father Victor Austin forward, slide of victor on the camino since he has written compellingly of the walk as a metaphor for the Christian life. Stephanie and I were planning to try the walk just when COVID hit, and the plan, like so much else, went by the boards. We hope to do it yet, though a bit less ambitiously, in retirement. But for our purposes here, I want to focus on the hospitality that the peregrino receives along the way. He or she can duck into albergue, a hostel, a casita, along the route. There is found welcome, a meal, as well as some feel for the locale, the pueblo through which you journey. It is not only the goal that matters, but the passage, el pasaje, the neighborhood though which God gives the pilgrim to travel. The image here is the Camino proper, the religious pilgrimage which sees also a cross section of the people and towns and cultures that surround the traveler... Igualmente los pueblos los que los peregrinos se atravesan son importante. Su alrededor tambien influye nuestra mision.
This image of the medieval pilgrim on the way to the religious shrine is of course also an Anglican one, Webber was alluding to... We all probably read some of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales in high school, and learned of the motley band on their way to the place where Archbishop Thomas a Becket was murdered in the cathedral near the altar in the 12th century (the Sumner happening to be one of the most motely of the gang!). Canterbury as Camino reminds us in Dallas that we are global Christians, Communion Christians. At the same time that the globe is here, in a remarkable diversity, in our region, not to mention the global diversity of our diocese itself, as we pray weekly in Urdu, Farsi, Igbo, Dinka, and Spanish, with energetic new curates who hail originally from Kenya and Nigeria, also the home of our bishop in residence, Israel Amoo, not to mention our own Father Jeff and Jenn Boldt ministering in Cairo, along with a raft of other connections.
We can follow this line of thought a step further: who are the neighbors along the way who also influence our mission in 2024 in the diocese of Dallas? We are setting back out on the road of church planting, in the growing suburbs around Dallas. We need to seize this moment and its opportunity as new communities sprout like mushrooms around us. I am most grateful to Real Estate, Church Planting, the Corporation, to Father Crowson our planter, and his launch pad at St. Paul’s. Prosper [tom and drew] but his eyes on Celina… It is its own mission field, with the one key difference that is not yet chock a block with churches.
What are the other albergues, what are the pueblos along the way, among which we must understand? One answer is underscored by this convention with our celebration of our Latino congregations. We live in a culture of two languages, with a long and complex history. The demographers tell us that by mid-century the people of this state will be more than 50% of Spanish background, but we don’t need a demographer to understand the missional opportunity and imperative. In the past year, due to our remarkable Latino clergy we have started a new parish-based model of study with the Stanton Institute, renewed the campus and ministry at Holy Family/ Santa Natividad, approached parish status, soon, at San Francisco, welcomed a Latina priest at San Bernabe, seen new aspirants at Santa Maria, and seen social outreach to the community out of San Marcos. Generalmente hemos visto vida nueva en nuestras congregaciones Latinas, entonces necesitamos planear proximos pasos en el camino del desarroyo del ministerio.
It is so easy in Church work to be overwhelmed by the needs, and the possibilities, of our own shop, as if we were our own franchise of Christian. But of course, we know, by virtue of the ecumenical movement, that we as Church are wider than one denomination. We depend on our Roman Catholic brothers and sisters not least for their social witness in advocating for refugees and migrants (a ministry we too have a hand in by supporting Gateway of Grace). We value of friendships with other denominations. We are growing together with predominantly African American Churches in our diocese, with the help of our diocesan evangelist Carrie Headington, through links like the Greater Dallas Coalition and the Lilly Foundation leadership grant that our Dean Rob Price was instrumental in obtaining. This begins as an ecumenical vocation- we are Christians together, and need to be reminded on the one hand that there can be no black or white Church of Jesus Christ, and yet, as Dr. King famously said, Sunday morning is the most segregated time in America. We are called to unlearn our own sociology. But then we are called yet further- we need to learn our own blind spots, as well as the inbuilt inequities of our society, through the eyes and the witness of our brothers and sisters. To this end our Racial Reconciliation Taskforce has asked the Rev. Markus Lloyd to help us again with a diocesan process of reflection in the new year.
In addition to these neighbors, we also live in a time of polarization, secularization, and alienation. In the past year our mission day had an opportunity to think about ‘the Great dechurching,’ the decline of Church attendance and awareness of things Christian. Vamos a entrar la temporada llamada ‘la gran salida de la iglesia’ en la historia de Estados Unidos. There is no little anxiety in our denomination, and we have a new presiding bishop who has thought a great deal about how we can respond structurally. We feel the effect here quite tangibly when smaller churches try to find a past-time priest. But we need to face this challenge theologically and evangelistically, not to mention turning for help to our impressive younger generation of leaders. Ultimately it is, as always, a matter of articulating the saving Gospel of Jesus Christ. the Risen One moved through walls, and so he can move through whatever technological and psychological obstacles our time presents.
An event from the recent past can help us here. The Roman Catholic Church held its Second Vatican Council, around 60 years ago, whose effects and counter-effects we are still feeling. [Pope John 23] Then and always, the mystery of the Church needed to be understood with the help of several models, but the dominant picture came to be the ‘People of God.’ En el Concilio Vaticano Secundo, llamado de Papa Yohan 23, la imagen primera de la iglesia era el Pueblo de Dios. [El Pueblo de Dios] Part of the biblical basis for this model was the people wandering, through the wilderness on the way to the promised land. Especialmente el Pueblo de Dios atravesando el desierto. The implications of a people sojourning is that they must travel light, they must live humbly, they give and take hospitality in inauspicious surroundings, and they take sustenance from their Biblical promise that they are indeed El Pueblo de Dios.
Wait a minute, the listener might say. What of the idea of a parish, with a building, planted in a location, physically gathered, all of which now is doubly crucial to witness against the new Gnosticism of our technological age? How can we be a peripatetic people, on the move, and at the same time, a people with the stability of our Benedictine forebears? To which I answer- good question! Struggle on with it. You will find help in the Epistle to the Hebrews, where the pilgrim people carry their rest, their Sabbath, their foretaste of eternity along with them with them on the way. Such will be the spirituality our rising generation, working this out with fear and trembling.
The people of God of course went into exile, a state that has proved evocative of our own predicament. There the prophet Isaiah borrowed the image of crossing the Red Sea to imagine a new exodus, wherein they would cross the desert anew, back toward home. As pilgrims, forgiven, healed, restored, the images of sailor and trekker, converged. There is another convergence here too, between going home and setting out into the unknown. We as Christian missionaries are always doing both. At the end of the Gospel of John, Peter, betrayer of our Lord, is confronted, forgiven, fed, and then sent on his mission. It will feel like being bound and taken captive, says Jesus, but the end of that road will be defined by glory They were to be apostles to the ends of the earth, crossing strange seas, [Otro Mar]. There were at once setting out and going home. So too us, who in our own lives, but also as the Pueblo de Dios, setting out into the future as into an unknown sea. Junto a ti buscare (y buscaremos) otro mar. [Junto a ti buscare otro mar]. But for us too, toward Jerusalem above, the same as our forebears, where the Tribes surround the wounded lamb, our lovely dwelling place.
In the words of John Bunyan let us close in prayer…
3 Since, Lord, Thou dost defend
us with Thy Spirit,
we know we at the end
shall life inherit.
Then, fancies, flee away!
I'll fear not what men say,
I'll labor night and day
to be a pilgrim.
