I am sometimes amazed by God’s grace. Consensus was reached on our statement to the wider Church. There was one negative vote — a liberal.
No one will be happy with all of it, but it is an accurate statement of where we are as a House of Bishops today.
Check it out on http://www.episcopalchurch.org
Now…over to the Archbishop of Canterberry and the Primates!
A very long day Monday working on our statement to the wider Communion. There was a glitch in communications somehow and, even though our agenda had always said that we would not finish our work until the formal business session on Tuesday, the Joint Standing Committee of the Primates and ACC who are continuing to meet here separately for their regular meeting wanted something yesterday. I argued against changing our process because we do not do our best work under pressure, but the Presiding Bishop was able to give them a sense of where we are heading and I think they appreciated that.
We are now working on two statements — a short, pithy one to answer the specific questions we have been asked to address by the Primates and Joint Standing Committee, and a longer one to contextualize that response and speak to the rest of our experience here in New Orleans. Time is short to get all that done and the writing team has been working night and day with our input and suggested revisions/refinements to the text.
We have most of today (Tuesday) to get this done and I have hope that we will indeed complete our work. It’s a very difficult task, given the diversity of this House, but that very diversity is part of the richness of the Episcopal Church and, at least historically, Anglicanism.
Wish I had time to respond to the many responses (and challenges!) to my posting on Sunday. But, my primary responsibility is to be an active member of this House and not a full-time blogger so I’ll have to demure on that! I invite my readers and corresponders to continue their prayers for me, my colleagues, and our work.
I presided at the Eucharist and preached at a small mission congregation in the Diocese of Louisiana this morning. Before the liturgy, I led an adult forum with about 15 folks around a table in the parish hall. After an overview of the House of Bishops meeting and a little bit on our ecumenical relations, I opened the floor for their questions.
Lots of concern about the “September 30 deadline” (which, of course, is not a deadline but as the Archbishop of Canterbury has reminded us “perception is reality” in real life). I spoke of my hopes that we will find a way forward, and then said something like:
“Two things I hope you’ll hold in tension: I want you to be concerned about these larger issues, about the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Communion, and all the rest of it. But, bottom line, no matter what happens at this House of Bishops meeting, it doesn’t have to derail your local efforts. The cutting edge of our mission and ministry is the local congregation and you need to build a healthy and vital congregation!”
A 40-something big guy, with a red face and tears in his eyes said, “I disagree with you. What happens does affect our local congregation! I invite people but nobody in this part of the world wants to come to a church where, when you open the paper, is all about gay bishops and being thrown out of the world wide communion!”
I conceded that there are local consequences, but reminded him that I was only arguing for some balance in all this…that we shouldn’t be consumed by “the issues” but dedicate ourselves to mission. Then we went on to the predictable argument about “do we believe the Bible or not…why won’t the bishops defend the plain Scriptural truth…why is the Episcopal Church going against worldwide Christian opinion on these matters, etc., etc., etc.”
So, I did what bishops do every Sunday in the 50 minutes we are given in adult forums like this…trying to summarize decades of biblical scholarship, cultural differences, Anglican polity — things which parish clergy should have been doing for years in little places like this! In the end, I think I did OK. They trusted me enough to come to the liturgy, listen carefully to the sermon, receive the sacrament. All in all, it was a good day.
But, over a glass of wine at lunch with the rector and his wife, I had to confess that I do not know if we can hold this fractious Church together. Where I live, in New York, we bishops will be pilloried if we make any concessions in a conservative direction. An 815 staff person walked out on Katharine Jefferts Schori after she reported on General Convention Resolution B033. It was too conservative.
Finally what we will have to do, over these next two days, is say our prayers…listen deeply to each other…come to a consensus decision which is faithful to what this church is and what this church desires to become…and offer it to the larger Church.
As we said in an earlier communication from this House: all we can offer you is who we are. Not who you might wish we were.
A wonderful, tiring day in New Orleans.
Busses to a former Walgreen’s Drug Store which will become All Souls’ Episcopal Church in a new church start, post Katrina.
Vans to various worksites.
A FEMA trailor in the front yard. An elderly woman, living there alone. Waiting for her house to be rebuilt.
Four young adults (volunteers) as crew bosses, teaching twelve of us about hanging sheet rock.
Five hours of hot, sweaty, humid work. Masks because of the dust…and mold still remaining in this house.
Measure the space…measure the sheet rock…cut the panel…carry and mount it…secure it with screw guns.
Four and a half hours later…with the young “regulars” and us old one-day volunteers…two rooms completed…clean up.
Others of us in mobile medical units…intaking patients…taking blood pressures…doing diabetes testing…listening…
Vans back to the new church start…a block party, complete with fried chicken, red beans and rice, and a jazz band.
Speech from an African American city council woman, praising the Episcopal Church, the Diocese of Louisiana and (even) the Archbishop of Canterbury.
Bus ride to the hotel…and a blessed shower…
Mission…however truncated and symbolic…
Unity…if only for a day…
Another difficult day. We listened to passionate testimonies from members of the Anglican Consultative Council and several Primates of the Anglican Communion. Clearly, they want more from us than General Convention has said. We will certainly not — and cannot — usurp the prerogatives of our synodical form of government including bishops, priests, deacons, and the laity making decisions together.
On the other hand, there are — in our checks and balances system — specific responsibilities given to bishops, as well as to the other orders of ministry. We can give or withhold consent to episcopal ordinations. We can authorize, or refuse to authorize, specific liturgies in our dioceses. We can cooperate, or refuse to cooperate, with “delegated episcopal oversight” in our dioceses. These are among the decisions we will have to make.
After thanking the Archbishop of Canterbury and our other visitors on the floor of the House this morning, I also thanked the House of Bishops Planning Committee for the schedule. Today was not a day to craft a “Mind of the House Resolution” on these matters. Many of us were too angry.
But now we have the weekend to “take a deep breath.” We hang dry wall and paint houses tomorrow. We worship with the people of Louisiana and Mississippi on Sunday.
Monday, the harder work starts…
Quite a roller coaster of a day yesterday. Our first time, as Episcopal bishops, to meet with the Archbishop of Canterbury to talk face-to-face about our ongoing issues in the Anglican Communion.
We began with a festive Eucharist in the hotel with a great sermon by our Presiding Bishop, Katharine Jefferts Schori and the lusty singing of hymns from “Holy, holy, holy” through “There’s a sweet, sweet Spirit in this place” (and, perhaps surprisingly, there is!) to “O Praise Ye the Lord!”
Then, we entered into table discussions and open plenaries sharing our Hopes and Concerns for this meeting. My hope was that we could find a way to assure the Communion that we will do what General Convention has asked us to do by exercising restraint in consenting to the election of bishops whose manner of life will produce additional strains on the Communion. My concern is, that nothing we do will be enough for some — in our own House and in the Communion.
The afternoon continued with a brief address by Archbishop Rowan Williams and two questions to wrestle with: how far can we go in accommodating the request of the Primates’ Communique and what kind of “shared episcopal leadership” (within our own House) would we find possible and helpful. Lots of pain and anguish from all sides in the open discussion which followed. But it was good for Rowan and the other Primates and visitors from across the Communion to see the kind of respectful and thoughtful conversation we can have together.
I learned nothing really new. No conversations we have not had before. But it was good for our overseas colleagues to engage with us. It would have been helpful for the Archbishop to have done this three years ago.
Last night he preached a brilliant sermon at an ecumenical service at a Convention Center focusing on the plight of New Orleans and the role of Christians in bringing healing, reconciliation, and rebuilding to this city and to the Mississippi Gulf Coast. Each diocesan bishop filed up with an offering (some as large as $10,000) collected by the Bishops of Louisiana and Mississippi to assist. Tomorrow we will get our hands dirty in some work projects in both dioceses.
It was moving to see the Bishop of Los Angeles and the Bishop of Quincy coming back down the aisle after each making their offering. Mission does indeed unite.
Today, we continue with Bible study led by the Archbishop. And more conversation. May the Word speak in and through the many words…
In Chicago for (yet another) meeting, I slipped out of the hotel on Sunday morning and took the L train into the city to get to the Eucharist. The church is a famously “anglo catholic” parish known for its good music and full liturgy and I was not disappointed. The simple offertory anthem by Felix Mendelson sung by a solo tenor voice was almost worth the trip!
But, aside from a decent sermon and receiving the sacrament, I was most moved by an unselfconscious gesture by the rector while distributing communion. There was a sizable group of young people, from toddlers to teenagers, who were ushed down the aisle by their Sunday School teachers to receive communion first. Baptized children are allowed to receive communion in our church, but some parents still prefer that they wait until confirmation, or at least until first communion classes, so the children receive a blessing at the altar rail rather than the sacrament.
This is done by a simply laying on of a hand and/or marking their foreheads with the sign of the cross while pronouncing a prayer of blessing. What I liked in this case was that the priest lowered himself to one knee in front of each small child he was blessing to that they could see his face and be greeted “on their level.” A simple thing, but it spoke volumes to me about honoring everyone.
It was almost as though, in addition to the logistics of height and access, the priest was genuflecting before “the least of these” which the church values highly. “Suffer the little children to come unto me…”
“Unless you come as a child…”
Conversations with a visiting bishop from Pakistan yesterday highlighted for me once again the great difficulty of interfaith dialogue. While we in the United States, and so many in the West, seek to put the best face on Islam, consider it one of the three great “Abrahamic faiths,” and seek mutual understanding, tolerance, and even cooperation where possible, there are Christians in other parts of the world with a very different perspective.
It reminds me of a moment at the Lambeth Conference in 1998 when there was a session on “interfaith dialogue.” A bishop from one part of the world spoke of the richness of interfaith dialogue and the deepening of relationships and mutual understanding, an African bishop from the same podium exclaimed, “If they would just stop killing us, we would be glad to initiate a dialogue!”
This is not so much due to the fact that there are different “Islams” — there is a certain unity in Islam (even with the Sunni, Shiah, Sufi divisions) that Christianity, and perhaps even Judaism, lacks. It seems to me more a factor of culture and context. Muslims — like the rest of us — are products of their nationalities and upbringing and cultural contexts.
Political frustrations — and the resultant violence too often — are brought about by marginalization, arrested economic development, poverty, demographics and the environment among many other factors. If we are to engage productively in interfaith dialogue, we must first of all understand the essence of the religions themselves. But we must also take very seriously the cultural context in which each of our religions is lived out.
This can be very tricky indeed. But it is absolutely essential in our day. For, as Hans Kung has said,
“No peace among the nations without peace among the religions.
No peace among the religions without dialogue between the religions.
No dialogue among the religions without investigation of the foundations of the religions.”
And those foundations include the cultural as well as the theological ones.
The preacher today shared some memories of September 11, 2001 and suggested we might want to do the same, during this week, not to cling to them but to acknowledge and remember the past, live fully into the present, and embrace the future. Not a bad idea. You might want to do the same thing. I remember…
*Watching the whole event unfold, with my staff, frozen to the TV in our midtown Manhattan office…
*Worrying about my fiancee who was at a meeting closer to Ground Zero than I was…
*The sound of silence in the city streets, even with so many streaming past our building…
*Volunteering to take some shifts as a chaplain, whatever that might mean…
*Days later, putting my fiancee on a train in Grand Central, crowds like a train station in a WW II movie…
*Serving food at the Seamens’ Institute, talking with construction workers in St. Paul’s Chapel…
*Presiding and preaching at a requiem for a clergy couples’ son in our Chapel of Christ the Lord…
*Wondering, as I still do, why this nation chose misguided vengeance rather than reconciliation and healing…
We left church this morning with these words, sung to the tune of “Melita,” the great Navy hymn, still ringing in our ears:
“So brief, the joy since each was born/ So long the years in which to mourn/ Give us compassion to sustain/ Each other in this time of pain.
Guard us from bitterness and hate/ And share with us grief’s crushing weight/ Help us to live from day to day/ Until, once more, we find our way.”
Indeed. Help us, O God, as a individuals…and as a nation…”find our way.”
I had a very interesting conversation yesterday with Jim Wallis (of Sojourners), Brian McClaren (Emergent Village), and several young people about a possible “American Green Belt Festival” planned now for the summer of 2009. “Green Belt” has been around in England for decades and is a combination music festival, art show, conference, and revival! It is ecumenical and celebrates renewal in its broadest sense.
The dream here is to find an American expression of that event, bringing together large numbers of young people — musicians, artists, pastors, teachers, seekers — who are involved in the “emergent” church, movement, conversation (whatever) with some of us “mainliners” who are interested in tracking and learning from this movement. The hope is also to cast a wide net by being “catholic friendly,” diverse in race, class, age, and ethnicity.
The emergent conversation often describes itself as being post-evangelical and post-liberal, seeking to find ways to bring the gospel message of the kingdom of God to the “post modern” world by linking faith and social justice. I’d be interested to hear from some of you who check in with this blog from time to time what you know or think about “emergent.”
Is this a new wave of renewal or a “passing fad?”
That We All May Be One 