That We All May Be One

We were reminded last week by the Vice President of our Episcopal Church’s House of Deputies, Byron Rushing (longtime African American state legislator in Massachusetts) to be careful in appropriating Christian symbols and values uncritically to our Fourth of July celebrations. For example, this prayer, often used on Independence Day, is offensive to many and not completely true anyway:

“Lord God Almighty, in whose Name the founders of this country won liberty for themselves and for us, and lit the torch of freedom for nations then unborn: Grant that we and the people of this land may have grace to maintain our liberties in righteousness and peace…”

Leaving aside the question of whether the “Founding Fathers” did what they did in God’s name, it is clear that they won liberty primarily for themselves and certainly not for the enslaved people they continued to “own,” Native Americans they continued to slaughter, and women who did not have the right to vote for their leaders for over a century.

Byron Rushing suggests the substitution of another prayer we often use For the Nation: “Lord God Almighty, you have made all people of the earth for your glory, to serve you in freedom and in peace: Give to the people of our country a zeal for justice and the strength of forbearance, that we may use our liberty in accordance with your gracious will…”  This, at least, sets us into the context of all the “people of the earth” and recognizes that we have a long way in establishing “liberty and justice for all.”

I also chafe at the ease with which we often appropriate texts about the “Promised Land” in the Old Testament, clearly referring to Israel, as now somehow applying to this new “promised land” of these United States. This is clearly “eisegesis” (reading something into the text) rather than “exegesis” (extracting meaning from the text). Therefore, I was happy that our morning Reading from the Wisdom literature of the Apocrypha avoids this tendency and really gives us something to think about:

“A wise magistrate educates his people, and the rule of an intelligent person is well ordered. As the people’s judge is, so are his officials; as the ruler of the city is, so are all its inhabitants. An undisciplined king ruins his people, but a city becomes fit to live in through the understanding of its rulers. The government of the earth is in the hand of the Lord, and over it he will raise up the right leader for the right time.”

“Human success is in the hand of the Lord, and it is he who confers honor upon the lawgiver. Do not get angry with your neighbor for every injury, and do not resort to acts of insolence. Arrogance is hateful to the Lord and to mortals, and injustice is outrageous to both. Sovereignty passes from nation to nation on account of injustice and insolence and wealth.” (Ecclesiasticus 10:1-8, 12-18)

Well, God may well “raise up the right leader for the right time.” But, in this country at least, that depends upon getting a majority of the people’s votes. And we have some pretty important choices to make this time around.

So, I will spend a few hours of this Independence Day registering new voters at the Bettendorf, Iowa July 4th Festival! Happy Fourth!

We lost another colleague from the House of Bishops yesterday. I guess at my age, I should expect that to happen with increasing regularity as the years roll on. Ed Salmon was the 13th Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of South Carolina. We served together for over 25 years as bishops, he was elected two years after me and at an older age, having served as a parish priest longer than I ever did.

In fact, the first time I met Ed we were visiting his large parish — the Church of St. Michael’s and St. George’s in St. Louis (I used to wonder why they didn’t just call it All Saints’ and be done with it!). I was serving, as a new bishop, on the Episcopal Church’s Standing Commission on Evangelism and we were visiting ‘happening’ places to see how evangelism was best being done around the church in preparation for what we were calling “A Decade of Evangelism” planned for the 1990s.

I arrived at the church early one weekday morning and found Ed Salmon in a powder blue jump suit, happily preparing scrambled eggs and sausage singe-handedly for a group of about twenty-five youngish businessmen who would shortly arrive for an early morning Bible study before heading off to work.

I remember Ed preparing the breakfast which others would then help him serve before he moved into conducting a lively Bible study and discussion with this men’s group. It was only one of many successful programs in this large parish which continues today to be a leading light in Episcopal evangelical circles in the Midwest and beyond.

Bishop Salmon was a more conservative bishop than I and we often disagreed on trends and directions of the Episcopal Church in the 1990s and early 2000s. Episcopal bishops sit at round tables of eight or so when we meet so that we can get to know one another better in a small group rather than (as used to happen) sitting in legislative rows where it is easier to make speeches than it is to listen to one another.

On more than one occasion, Ed and I shared such a small group experience and I always found him to be a gentle soul and a man of integrity. He was a bridge builder who fought hard to keep his conservative Diocese of South Carolina in the Episcopal Church even when he himself disagreed with some of the decision we made in General Convention.

He was grieved when his successor Mark Lawrence successfully led the diocese out of the Episcopal Church and yet, throughout his remaining ministry as a bishop and while serving in retirement as a seminary dean, sought to build bridges and relationships with the breakaway Episcopalians (who persist in calling themselves “Anglicans” of one stripe or another even though they are not members of the worldwide Anglican Communion and the Episcopal Church is).

While I served as ecumenical officer for the Episcopal Church, Ed and I worked together to find ways for clergy ordained in the breakaway bodies who wished to return to the Episcopal Church (of which there were quite a number) find their way back with a minimum of difficulty and red tape. He also attempted to work with the Reformed Episcopal Church, an previous breakaway from an earlier era over, actually, more substantive issues.

In a day of vitriol, harsh rhetoric, and demonizing those with whom one disagrees, I always found Ed Salmon someone with whom I could “disagree agreeably” and I never heard him demean or denigrate an opponent, even though he had a droll sense of humor and could more than hold his own in the debates in which we were often engaged in those days. Today’s morning psalm, to my mind, describes my friend and colleague about as well as could be done:

“O LORD, I am not proud; I have no haughty looks.

I do not occupy myself with great matters, or with things that are too hard for me.

But I still my soul and make it quiet, like a child upon its mother’s breast; my soul is quieted within me.

O Israel, wait upon the LORD, from this time forth, for evermore.” (Psalm 131)

Rest in peace, Ed. And rise in glory!

One year while I was still working as Assisting Bishop in the Diocese of Chicago, Bishop Jeff Lee, invited congregations who felt they could to invite some “unchurched” folks to meet and have coffee with one of us bishops during our Sunday visitations. The idea was to hear from the actual people we are not reaching some of the reasons why? It’s easy for us church goers to “guess” at why our congregations are declining. It’s quite another to hear it straight from those who have either left our ranks or who have never been attracted to church in the first place.

Not every congregation took him up on the challenge, but quite a number did and we learned something interesting things. First of all, often non-church-goers have been hurt by the church in some way in their past. Maybe they grew up in a very judgmental, hellfire and brimstone kind of church and felt rejected.  Some are Roman Catholics who were refused communion after they re-married after divorce contrary to their church’s teaching.

Some have just drifted away because of the busy-ness and stressed out nature of their lives. They just don’t find the time for church, and some have been away so long they feel awkward now coming back. A number of folks just can’t get their heads around what they perceive to be the beliefs and doctrines of the church, and they say they’d feel like hypocrites standing in the midst of folks who seem to believe, say, the Nicene Creed when these people quite obviously don’t! And, again, they’re afraid they would be judged by us if their true beliefs, or lack of beliefs, were found out.

Of this number, some are just out and out atheists. They really don’t believe in God and wonder why some of the rest of us do. Well, we took great pains not to judge any of these good folks. They had honored us by even agreeing to come and have a conversation with us. And we weren’t there to convert them. We were there to learn from them. Privately though, I always wonder – of this last group, the self-professed “atheists” – just what kind of God they “don’t believe in!” In other contexts, I’ve often said to such people, “Tell me about the God you don’t believe in…because I probably don’t believe in that God either.”

I say this because, I think often people have rejected their childhood image of “an old man with a white beard who lives above sky” or the angry, judgmental God who delights in nothing more than casting unbelievers into the fires of hell for all eternity.   Some of these folks have never allowed their understanding of God to “grow up” right alongside the other areas of their knowledge which keep expanding with every year. No wonder they can’t square their Sunday school image of God with the post-modern world of the 21^st century!

I ran across a beautiful quote from a friend of mine named Steven Charleston. Steven is a Native American of the Choctaw Tribe and lives in Oklahoma. But he is also a bishop of The Episcopal Church, has been a seminary professor and dean.. This is what he wrote:

The same power that set the sun aflame as though it were a candle, the same power that spun the Milky Way like a pinwheel, the same power that sprinkled the confetti stars across the distant heavens, that very power holds you safe under the shelter of its eternal care. The universe is not unconscious, creation is not unaware, all that was and is and ever will be resides in the mind and purpose of a presence beyond our comprehension or control. That presence is the source of life, of love, of intricate beauty and serenity sublime. That presence is with you today and will be with you forever. (June 17, 2015)

That’s the kind of expansive view of God I would just love the opportunity to introduce some of our unchurched friends to. Because I think our God is bigger than whatever truncated image they have felt it necessary to reject.  It’s the same God. But we must find ways to talk about the Holy One in language different from what our grandparents, our parents, and even many of us grew up with. I hope we can find ways to do that.

I hope we can find ways to do it before it’s too late, too late for the church…or at least the church as we experience it today.  At the very least, I hope you will listen to people you may know – people at work, in your neighborhood, people in your own family – who may be struggling to square the image of God they think we believe in with the world as they actually experience it.

Don’t judge them. Listen to them. And then, after you have listened long and deeply, maybe you can find a way to share with them – ever so gently that we welcome seekers in this church. Try to help them see that you don’t have to “have it all together” to be an Episcopalian. If you did, probably none of us would be here! The church, at its best, is a school of love; not a museum of saints. Hear again words describing the kind of God at least I hope you would be inviting them to encounter:

The same power that set the sun aflame as though it were a candle, the same power that spun the Milky Way like a pinwheel, the same power that sprinkled the confetti stars across the distant heavens, that very power holds you safe under the shelter of its eternal care. The universe is not unconscious, creation is not unaware, all that was and is and ever will be resides in the mind and purpose of a presence beyond our comprehension or control. That presence is the source of life, of love, of intricate beauty and serenity sublime. That presence is with you today and will be with you forever. (June 17, 2015)

I felt the sting of tears springing up in my eyes suddenly when I heard him say it, “Sometimes you have to do something out of the ordinary. Sometimes you have to make a way out of no way. We’ve been quiet too long. Now is the time to get in the way. We will be silent no more. The time for silence is over.”

The speaker was Democratic Congressman John Lewis of Georgia, a civil rights icon, as he led a “sit in” on the floor of the United States House of Representatives, asking only for an up and down vote on some fairly modest gun control legislation. The tears came because this is hardly the first time that John Lewis has had to “sit down to stand up.”

He was chairman of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee in the 1960s. He organized sit-ins at segregated lunch counters in Nashville. He became one of the thirteen original Freedom Riders. He was arrested twenty four times in the non-violent struggle for equal justice. He was beaten many times, once having his skull fractured when state troopers charged demonstrators with night sticks.

Yesterday, he said that he could never imagine, in those days, that he would one day have to lead similar sit-ins in the well of the United States House of Representatives out of frustration that the Republican leadership of that House would not even allow a vote on a bill which would simply render those persons on a No Fly List ineligible to buy firearms. “No fly, no buy.” Can you believe that anyone would oppose such a measure?

Well, they did. And Paul Ryan called this protest action a publicity stunt. The irony was no doubt lost on him that this was exactly what the racist politicians of my youth called the civil rights demonstrations which John Lewis and his colleagues so courageously led. After hours of speeches and singing by the protesters, Ryan convened the House, called for a vote on an unrelated bill and adjourned the House of Representatives until after the July 4 holiday. July 4 — Independence Day. Independence for what? Apparently Independence to carry assault weapons of mass destruction and slaughter children at will.

“Sometimes you have to sit down to stand up,” Congressman Lewis said.

“What will happen eventually,” broadcaster Luke Russert asked him yesterday. “Will you not be moved?”

Lewis looked at him through narrowed eyes, “Like a tree…planted by the waterside…We shall not be moved!”

And the tears came again.

Susanne and I just returned from a delightful trip to Canada to visit some very dear college friends. First of all, we love Canada and — even if Donald Trump were not running for President — we have thought about how great it would be to live there. Great people, beautiful country.

But this post is about friends. I have known these two couples for well over forty years. The guys were fraternity brothers (Beta Theta Pi, Gamma Xi Chapter at the University of Florida) and they were in love with their wonderful wives even then. I was dating my first wife, Pam, in those days as well and we were pretty much constant companions with the other two couples.

When Pam died unexpectedly in 2000, one of these dear friends made a special trip to check up on me and see how I was doing. Then, he and his wife came to our wedding when Susanne and I married later. They have always accepted her and the friendship has continued fun and easy and I think she enjoys these reunions almost as much as Pam would have.

The second couple I literally have not seen for most of those forty years! We visited once early on and recently have been in touch by email. But I had no idea how things would go after so many intervening years. The answer? It was pretty much like we had just seen each other! Isn’t that the way it is with real friendship? The bonds are so deep, the shared experiences so lasting that it’s really easy to pick up where you left off.

We had a beer on Centre Island overlooking the beautiful Toronto skyline, visited some Ontario wineries, laughed our way through an evening at Second City, ridiculed Donald Trump, and even broke out the guitar to harmonize on “The Sound of Silence” as we did years ago. All great fun.

Of course, Fraternities, and the entire Greek system, have certainly come under a lot of criticism in recent years and, in fact, have always had their share of detractors. Like most institutions, it is far from a perfect system but much work has gone on (some of which my friend was involved in as a national chapter executive for a number of years). Most fraternities have “cleaned up their act” (including my own at Florida) although I’m sure there is still much that can be done.

Nonetheless, I will always be grateful for the friendships I made through Beta Theta Pi and how the experience allowed me to grow up a bit and test some leadership skills which would come into use later in life.  It was an experience of “community” that I had yet to find in the church, but later would.

Whether discovered and nurtured in something like a fraternity or not, friendship is one of life’s richest blessings. The Greeks (the real ones, not frat boys!) had a word for it — “Phileo,” fondness, friendship. Along with three others (Eros – romantic love, Storge – family loyalty, and Agape – unconditional love, like God’s) it defines a quality I hope everyone experiences at some point in their lives.

Proverbs says it best: “There are friends who pretend to be friends, but there is a friend who sticks closer than a brother.” (18:24)