Today came word that the Church in Mexico has approved the Anglican Covenant. The Bishops of the Church of England have commended it to the General Synod for approval.
Provocative comment in The Guardian today that describes the proposed covenant as a “power-play.”
Meanwhile, Presiding Bishop Jefforts Schori is visiting Australia, where she has received a hearty welcome from the Primate of [All] Australia.
A few nights ago, Corrie and I watched a movie called “Cold Souls.” It’s not a great movie by any means, not even a particularly good one, but it has a great premise. Paul Giamatti, who has made a career out of playing middle-aged men stuck in lives they don’t like, plays an actor who is struggling with his current role—Uncle Vanya in the Chekhov play. He can’t get into the part. He tells his director that he feels sick, like there’s intense pressure on his heart. After another sleepless night, he comes across an article about a company that can remove his soul and put it in cold storage. The technique promises that it will rid him of all his existential angst and he will feel light and carefree again. Of course he does it, and most of the movie concerns his struggle to get his soul back. Continue reading
Proper 7_YrC
June 20, 2010
Elijah should have been on top of the world. He had just been declared the victor in the “Israel’s Top Prophet: Celebrity Edition.” The finale was a doozy. Elijah on one side; on the other 450 prophets of Baal. Their task was to bring fire from heaven down on an altar on which a bull had been killed. The prophets of Baal had tried to work their magic all day, and failed. And then Elijah came up. To make an even more dramatic impression, he instructed the stage crew to drench the altar with water as well as all of the ground around the altar. And then, in contrast to the dramatic efforts of the prophets of Baal, who danced, and shouted and sang, and even cut themselves, Elijah uttered a simple prayer to God. And the fire came. He proved that Yahweh, the God of Israel, was more powerful than Baal.
But Elijah didn’t get the big payoff. He didn’t get his own show on the Prophecy network; he didn’t win $1,000,000. No, he had to flee for his life. He had aroused the wrath of Jezebel, who was the chief promoter of Baal in Israel and she put a contract out on him. So he flees. He flees all the way across Israel, across Judah, and down into the Negev desert where he finally came to the Mountain of God. Mt. Horeb, it’s called here, but we know it better as Mt. Sinai.
What happens next is one of the richest and most dramatic stories in all of scripture. Elijah, to use our language, is burned out. He has done everything God has asked, but in spite of all of his successes, all of his miracles, he seems to be a failure. To buck him up, God promises to appear to him. “Now there was a great wind, so strong that it was splitting mountains and breaking rocks in pieces before the LORD, but the LORD was not in the wind; and after the wind an earthquake, but the LORD was not in the earthquake; and after the earthquake a fire, but the LORD was not in the fire; and after the fire a sound of sheer silence.” Probably not a very good translation here—the KJV reads: “a still, small voice.”
Just like at Mt. Carmel with the prophets of Baal, God pulls out all of the special effects. In fact, the special effects are the same as when God appeared to the Israelites when he gave the 10 commandments at Mt. Sinai. But for Elijah, God was not present in earthquake, wind and fire. The point of the story seems to be that all of the spectacular events, the natural phenomena that might have been associated with the presence of God, may be nothing compared to the direct, quiet voice of Yahweh.
Both the gospel and the epistle readings involve similar confrontations with the divine. In Galatians, Paul is working with one of the central conflicts in the earliest decades of the new Christian movement, indeed, it was really before Christianity and Judaism had established clear boundaries between each other. The community to whom Paul was writing consisted of Jews who had accepted Jesus as the Messiah, and Gentiles, non-Jews, who also had come to regard Jesus Christ as the Savior of the World. The question for them, and for Paul, was whether Gentiles who joined the community were required to practice the laws of Judaism. To that question, Paul answered a resounding no; but in Galatians he is also attempting to explain why the law was valid for the Jewish community.
In today’s lesson, Paul probably is quoting a baptismal formula, something that was said when early Christians came out of the waters of baptism: “In Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave or free, male and female.” The point of the statement is that traditional barriers, social, religious, ethnic, and gender, no longer exist. The new community called into being by Christ is a community in which such distinctions do not matter. It was a revolutionary claim, and we see in other Pauline letters some attempt on his part to move away from the radicality of that claim. But for now, let’s stay with the idea that this experience of the Risen Christ was so powerful that it changed everything. It changed the way people related to one another. It broke down barriers that were ensconced in religion, society, and the state. It made everyone equal.
The gospel lesson makes something of the same point. Jesus and his disciples have left Jewish territory, they are now on the other side of the Sea of Galilee, in Gentile country. The first person they encounter is doubly, or triply, unclean. He is a demoniac, possessed by evil spirits, and he lives among the tombs. Jesus casts out the demons, and when they complain, he casts them into a herd of swine, again, an unclean animal, and they drown themselves in the sea.
This is one of those stories that may be most puzzling to the contemporary mind. Few of us, outside of the Cineplex, encounter people possessed by demons. We might be tempted to interpret such behavior in the gospels as signs of mental illness; and that may be legitimate. But there is another level to the story. The demons are named “legion” and they ask Jesus to allow them to possess the herd of swine. Now a legion was the standard military unit of the Roman army—6000 men, not including support personnel. And the image of a pig, or a boar was a potent symbol of Rome. Indeed, the legion that was stationed in Syria, and took part in suppressing the Jewish revolt in the 60s, had depicted on its standard, the image of a boar.
Here, Jesus is doing battle not only with the forces of evil. He is also doing battle, at least symbolically, with the forces of Rome. But more than that, the demons, the possessed man living in the tombs, the swine, even the Roman legion, are all profoundly outside the people of God. In the gospel of Luke, this is the only time that Jesus clearly ministers outside the Jewish community and outside Jewish territory.
And what does Jesus do? He restores him to his life, to his community, to the world. He had been living alone, naked, among the tombs, but now he is back in the middle of things, even if the middle of things is a Gentile community, not among Jesus’ closest companions. Still, the message is one of inclusivity. To put this event outside of Jewish territory is to underscore, for the gospel writer, that Jesus came for everyone, Jew and Gentile.
And of course, that’s the message of Paul in Galatians. In Christ there is no Jew or Greek, male and female, slave or free. But such a community, for Luke and for Paul, is not created only by our efforts and hard work. It is created in our encounter with God in Christ.
The gospel story continues by relating that the residents of the territory to which Jesus had come were seized with great fear and asked him to leave. Having encountered the mighty power of God, having witnessed Jesus power to transform lives, they were having none of it. They didn’t want their world or their lives transformed, they wanted to get on with their old, humdrum lives.
Even Elijah shows something of that same tendency. He expected God to act in certain ways. When he defeated the prophets of Baal, he expected God to make things work out so he could have a successful career in Israel. When he came to Mt. Horeb, when Yahweh said he would appear to him, he expected Yahweh to come to him in earthquake, wind, or fire. Instead, God came to him in a still small voice.
But no matter. The message came with the same power, and the same capacity to transform. What didn’t happen was that Elijah turned his back on God. He didn’t ask God to leave.
That still small voice is around us, calling us. It may often be drowned out by the noise of our world, by our busy lives, by the work we have to do, by our family’s demands, or by TV, music, movies, video games, the cell phone—indeed everything that our culture has created to keep us from being alone with ourselves.
But the still, small voice is around us, calling us, in the emptiness of our hearts at the end of a day, in the needs of the poor and the destitute. It is calling us to be transformed by the power of the Spirit, to live into the community called by Christ.
If it weren’t so pathetic, it would be amusing. Clearly the Archbishop of Canterbury (or someone in his office) stepped way over the line. They’re back-pedalling now, promising an “investigation” of the Presiding Bishop’s treatment, although they aren’t moving as fast as the GOP did after Representative Barton’s “apology” to BP yesterday. Still both are public relations disasters.
Various sites are keeping track of those women bishops who have preached and celebrated in England while wearing their mitres. Among them:
The Rt. Rev’d Mary Tottenham, Area Bishop of the Credit Valley Diocese of Toronto (Canada), who preached and celebrated at Southwark Cathedral on November 9, 2002. More on that here.
Presiding Bishop Jefforts Schori did the same in 2008 at Sudbury Cathedral. More on the issue at the Episcopal Cafe and Preludium. Plus, Diana Butler Bass has comment on Beliefnet.
Now we learn that the Bishop of El Camino Real, the Rt. Rev’d Mary Gray-Reeves, is currently visiting the Bishop of Gloucester and is reported to have worn a mitre.
It was clear at Clergy Day yesterday in our diocese that many of those in attendance were outraged by the treatment of the Presiding Bishop and that whatever sentimental attachment that many of us had to Anglicanism, and the respect we had for the Archbishop of Canterbury is quickly dissipating. If the goal was to get the Episcopal Church to leave the Anglican Communion on its own, it may be in sight.
No this isn’t another post about our current troubles. Rather, today we are talking about diversity within the historical tradition of Anglicanism.
An interesting pairing of commemorations on June 15 and June 16. Yesterday was Evelyn Underhill (1875-1941), the great English spiritual writer. Today is Joseph Butler (1692-1752), theologian and Bishop of Durham. They express two very different strands in Anglicanism. Butler was one of the most important theologians of his day. An apologist, he sought to explain Christian doctrines in ways that would make sense to contemporary thinkers, especially to skeptics. The eighteenth century was dominated by Deism, which sought to develop a religion consistent with reason and with natural law. Butler saw his task as explicating the ways in which Christianity met that standard.
Evelyn Underhill was a writer and a mystic. Apparently as a child or youth she had profound experiences that she sought to understand. Eventually through the help of Baron Friedrich von Huegel, she began learning about mysticism. In 1911, she wrote Mysticism, which is one of the most important English-language works on the topic. Full of scholarly erudition, it also expresses her reflections on her own spiritual experience. Indeed, she criticizes William James’ Varieties of Religious Experience because James denies any personal leanings toward such experience.
Underhill describes the various mystical stages that culminate in “unitive life.” As she describes it: “The Mystic Way has been a progress, a growth, in love: a deliberate fostering of the inward tendency of the soul towards its source, an eradication of its disorderly tendencies to “temporal goods.” But the only proper end of love is union.”
Quoting Walter Hilton, she explains: “it is a perfect uniting and coupling together of the lover and the loved into one.”
But it is not just about the fusion of I and God: “We find as a matter of fact, when we come to study the history of the mystics, that the permanent Unitive State, or spiritual marriage, does mean for those who attain to it, above all else such an acess of creative vitality. It means man’s small derivative life invaded and enhanced by the Absolute Life: the appearance in human history of personalities and careers which seem superhuman when judged by the surface mind.” (Mysticism, pp. 428-9)
Her work still bears reading, both by the individual seeking a deeper spiritual life and by the scholar attempting to understand mysticism.
Together Butler and Underhill point to two very different approaches in Anglicanism: one the intellectual, the rational, the other the experiential. Though Underhill is probably closer to contemporary Anglican sensibilities with her careful theological and historical analysis of the spiritual life.
In the interest of full disclosure, I should add that Underhill was powerfully attracted to Catholicism and considered conversion. It may be that her husband prevented her from going over to Rome.
There’s a report making the rounds that during her visit to England, Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefforts Schori was asked by the ABC not to wear her mitre while preaching and celebrating the Eucharist at Southwark Cathedral. Apparently there were hisses from the reactionaries while she preached. Apparently, too, she carried her mitre with her. The Bishop of Southwark, who extended the invitation comments here.
No doubt the ABC is concerned about what will transpire when the Church of England’s General Synod meets soon to discuss (again) the ordination of women to the Episcopate. It is a very sensitive issue with both Anglo-Catholics and Evangelicals resistant to change. But it seems quite an affront to our Presiding Bishop, and to the American Church, that our chief representative not be allowed to wear the symbols of her office.
And if he’s willing to do that, it’s likely he’s willing to sacrifice all of us to appease opponents of women’s ordination.
Thinking Anglicans links to a couple of posts about the ongoing debate over the consecration of women as bishops in the Church of England. Although ordination of women as priests has been possible since the early 90s, there are no women bishops in the Church of England, and in order to make that possible, legislation has to be passed by General Synod. There continues to be controversy as Anglicans from the Evangelical wing and from the Anglo-Catholic wing resist the move. Most commentators think the Pope’s overtures to Anglo-Catholics last fall had more to do with the debate over women bishops in the CoE than with the larger debate in Anglicanism over sexuality.
Thinking Anglicans also points to an essay decrying women’s ordination in the Church of Australia.
While all this is going on, the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church, Katharine Jefforts Schori, has been visiting the United Kingdom, speaking to the gathering of the Scottish Episcopal Church, and preaching at Southwark Cathedral.
Mark Harris argues that the Archbishop of Canterbury’s sanctions of the Episcopal Church have more to do with the fact that we have a female Presiding Bishop than with our actions concerning sexuality. He also hints that the ABC began his current campaign by asking ++Katharine to step down from her position on the Standing Committee of the Anglican Communion.
All of this is especially interesting in light of today’s gospel reading in which Luke makes clear that there were women disciples, following Jesus, and ministering to him.
Our lessons today bring us up squarely against one of those ways in which the language and world of the Bible confronts our world most profoundly. The Biblical world uses the term “sin” to express the chasm that separates human beings from their creator, and in our texts today, we see “sin” in all of its complexity and all of the suffering it causes. From the Hebrew Bible, there’s the story of King Ahab coveting and seizing a commoner’s vineyard. From Paul’s letter to the Galatians, our reading begins with words that shock us: “we ourselves are Jews by birth and not Gentile sinners.” And the gospel presents the story of a sinful woman who receives forgiveness from Jesus.
There continue to be interesting responses to the Archbishop of Canterbury’s letter and the disinvitation of Episcopal participants in ecumenical dialogues. Inclusive Church, a movement within the Church of England has spoken sharply against the ABC’s actions. They did it in an earlier letter, but now have responded forcefully to this week’s developments. Most criticism has focused on the unequal treatment of the different moratoria breakers–the Episcopal Church is sanctioned, but those who “crossed borders” have not been punished.
But there’s another important issue raised in the Inclusive Church letter and in the blogosphere as well. That is the matter of inculturation. In other words, in our contexts, it seems to many to be a gospel mandate to be inclusive, to open our churches fully to our gay and lesbian brothers and sisters.
There is also growing resentment of the Church of England’s hypocrisy, which I’ve mentioned before. With animosity growing toward British Petroleum in the States, there seems to be something of a snowball effect among progressives.
Coincidentally, both the Anglican Church of Canada and the Scottish Episcopal Church were meeting this week. Presiding Bishop Jefforts Schori attended and spoke at both, and ironically, Kenneth Kearon, General Secretary of the Anglican Communion spoke to the Canadian Church on the very day that his letter was made public.
The Canadian church debated the Anglican Covenant as well as issues of sexuality. The primus of the Scottish Episcopal Church offered a thoughtful discussion of the covenant.
Meanwhile, the Supreme Court of the State of Virginia decided in favor of the Diocese in a long-running property case with dissident parishes.
It’s early in the game yet (strange to say, since we’ve been arguing over this stuff for over a decade), but I think we are beginning to see real fracture in the communion. My sense is the Episcopal Church is beginning to make its peace with the future, and seek alliances with like-minded folk across the communion, whatever the ABC may say.
In his Pentecost letter, the Archbishop of Canterbury asked that the Episcopal Church’s representatives to interfaith and ecumenical conversations be lowered to “consultant” status. This week, the Secretary General of the Anglican Communion, Kenneth Kearon, did his master’s bidding, effectively disinviting Episcopal involvement in dialogues with the Orthodox, Lutherans, and Methodists.
The internet is abuzz with stories concerning the “sanctions” imposed on the Episcopal Church. There’s a wonderful irony here, because the Lutherans and the Methodists have each seen controversy in the US over sexuality, although apparently the Lutherans’ decision last year to permit the ordination of gays and lesbians went relatively smoothly. Even more amusing is the fact that last year there was great concern when the Church of Sweden voted to allow gay marriages. Not only that, the Bishop of Stockholm, Eva Brunne, is a lesbian in a registered partnership, with a three-year old son. Because of the Porvoo Agreement, the Church of England is in full communion with the Church of Sweden. As a punishment, it seems rather silly to prevent Episcopal representatives from meeting with Lutherans whose policies on sexuality are more clear and more open than ours.
Of course there are other matters at stake. One of the key issues in the reception of the Anglican Covenant is section four which deals with disciplinary action. There has been some resistance from various sectors of the Anglican Communion to these proposals for a more tightly-run ship. I suspect the ABC would have liked to do something a little more ruthless to the American Church but lacked the nerve. Where’s Ratzinger when you need him?
There’s a local connection to this controversy. Tom Ferguson, who is Chaplain at St. Francis House and who also works for the national church on ecumenical matters, is one of those who has been disinvited. He was a participant in the Anglican-Orthodox dialogue.
The Presiding Bishop has also commented on recent developments.
As always, you can follow developments at Thinking Anglicans and The Episcopal Café.
Preaching Grace on the Square 