In the Diocese of Central Florida: The Rev. Canon Gregory Brewer.
In the Diocese of New York (as Coadjutor): The Rev. Canon Andrew Dietsche.
2 New Bishops in the Episcopal Church today
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Rethinking and Restructuring the Anglican Communion
Various dioceses (Eastern Oregon, California, and the executive council of the Episcopal Church have weighed in, urging rejection of the Anglican Covenant at General Convention next summer.
In New Zealand, the Maori have rejected it as well. Because of the complicated structure of the Anglican Church in New Zealand and Polynesia, that decision means that the province as a whole rejects it as well.
In the Church of England, dioceses are also rejecting it (St. Edmondsbury and Ipswich, Birmingham).
In fact, there is considerable discussion about the Covenant both here and abroad.
Michael Poon, in Rebooting the Anglican Communication, asks three important questions:
1. To Church leaders in sub-Saharan Africa: Do strong protests against Western decadence in fact reveal a deep anxiety about ecclesial identity?
2. Is GAFCON the only valid expression of Anglican evangelicalism?
3. Are North American Christians in fact using the churches worldwide as theaters for their domestic religious wars?
For Poon, the heart of the problem is communication: “Sound bites mask private ambitions and secular undercurrents that in fact shape our disputes.” His analysis of the situation among Anglicans suggests that we mirror the political discourse in secular culture. Of course, he is correct that “communion” points to a deeper relationship, a deeper reality, and whatever Anglican Communion ought to be, it ought to embrace and incarnate the mystery of God’s love.
Tobias Haller spoke at a meeting of the Diocese of Albany on Anglican Disunion: The Issues behind “the Issue.” He outlines there what he calls the “Anglican Triad:” humility, provinciality, and variety, distinguishing these three characteristics from the “Instruments of Communion” stressed in the Anglican Covenant and elsewhere as providing the unity of the Communion.
Savi Hensman points to an earlier attempt to define what unites us as Anglican. The 2005 Anglican Consultative Council said this:
Nourished by Scripture and Sacrament, we pledge ourselves to:
1. Recognise Jesus in each other’s contexts and lives
2. Support one another in our participation in God’s mission
3. Encourage expressions of our new life in Christ
4. Meet to share common purpose and explore differences and disagreements.
5. Be willing to change in response to critique and challenge from others
6. Celebrate our strengths and mourn over our failures.
7. Share equitably our God-given resources.
8. Work together for the sustainability of God’s creation.
9. Live into the promise of God’s reconciliation for ourselves and for the world.We make this covenant in the promise of our mutual responsibility and interdependence in the Body of Christ.
All of this discussion has to do with our relationships with Anglicans world-wide. Meanwhile, here at home, there are lively and creative conversations taking place around restructuring the church. Most of the latter have to do with de-emphasizing the centralizing structures in order to focus on ministry and mission at the local level, and create ways of communicating and relating horizontally. The impetus for this discussion is partly financial, partly in response to changing demographics, and partly a function of a rapidly changing culture.
It seems to me that what is taking place locally and horizontally is also, in some ways, occurring globally. The Anglican Covenant was an attempt to respond to one set of elements in our rapidly changing world–globalization and the communications revolution–but did so without reference to some of the other elements in the changing context even though those elements were also driving much of the conflict (non-official relationships among like-minded people throughout the world, for example).
I would be curious to see how all of those folk currently ruminating on re-structuring in the Episcopal Church would imagine re-structuring of the Anglican Communion.
The ABC on the KJV
There was a celebration of the 400th anniversary of the Authorized Version in Westminster Abbey this past week. Queen Elizabeth was in attendance. Rowan Williams preached a sermon that is worth reading.
He alludes to the problems inherent in translation and the importance of interpretation but he is much more interested in the role of the text in the life of the community:
But what the 1611 translators grasped was that hearing the Word of God was a lifelong calling that had to be undertaken in the company of other readers and was never something that left us where we started.
it was meant to be read aloud. And that means that it was meant to be part of an event, a shared experience. Gathered as a Christian community, the parish would listen, in the context of praise, reflection and instruction, to scripture being read: it provided the picture of a whole renewed universe within which all the other activities made sense. It would not be immediately intelligible by any means, but it marked out the territory of God’s work of grace.
The Guardian’s report on the celebration is here.
Williams reminds us of the open and unfinished nature of translation, to use other language, that translation always involves interpretation. That means scripture always eludes our efforts to capture and contain it, to define and fix its meaning. More importantly, he also urges us to take seriously our obligation to devote our lives to engaging the text, wrestling with its meanings. As Williams puts it, scripture invites us “to a pilgrimage further and further into the mysteries of [God’s] mind and love.”
An outsider’s perspective on Occupy Wall Street and Religion
From Michael Greenberg on The New York Review of Books (oddly the post on the website has gone missing):
organizers had been in talks with some of New York’s religious leaders for at least two weeks, negotiating support for the movement around the city. On Tuesday, coincidentally, they had been planning “a move” as one organizer put it to me. “The clergy would give us [an alternative] space to de-concentrate Zuccotti, to lessen the need for Zuccotti, to diminish its importance.”
According to Ellick, 1,400 “faith-based leaders in and around New York” were throwing their support behind Occupy Wall Street. When I asked him what defined a “leader,” he answered, “anyone with a constituency.” But what did support mean? For Ellick and John Merz, an Episcopal priest at Ascension Church in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, it meant opening church kitchens and giving protesters a place to shower and sleep “even though we’re not a shelter.” It would involve public support as well, talking to the press and urging parishioners to join the protesters in their various anti-corporate actions.
And his take on Trinity Church, Wall Street:
Trinity Church, the historic Episcopal church located a block south of Zuccotti Park, had been cautious in its support of the occupation, allowing protesters to hold meetings on its steps and, on occasion, use its bathrooms. Trinity is one of the largest landowners in the city, and its main business is the management of its properties, among which is a large open space on Canal Street and Sixth Avenue. The space abuts Duarte Square, a half-acre city park. Organizers had been in negotiation with the church to expand their encampment to the Canal Street space. Despite pressure from more radical Episcopal priests from other parishes in New York, Trinity ultimately decided to forbid access to its land. One priest I spoke with who preferred not to be identified, was indignant at Trinity’s decision—“Its meekness,” he called it, “its fear of antagonizing authorities who are responsible for upholding so many of its privileges. Let’s face it,” he added, “they’re more a corporation than a place of faith. They have fewer parishioners than I do.” He said that meetings at Trinity had been heated. “This is a basic challenge to our values. If we don’t support Occupy Wall Street, what do we stand for?”
Trinity has made its views clear in a letter and in its acquiescence in the clearing of Duarte Square, property owned by Trinity, but leased to another group.
Meanwhile in London, the St. Paul’s controversy continues.
Sexual Abuse, abuse of power, and institutional self-preservation
As we learn more about what happened at Penn State, and people reflect more on the events and what they might mean, there have been a number of essays that examine some of the underlying issues that may have led to the apparent cover-up by Penn State officials.
Matt Feeney blames big-time college sports in general:
What happened at Penn State was the scheme of big-money college sports working as it was designed to work. The act of looking away, repeated by so many in State College, is the perfect emblem for the cognitive politics of the NCAA. It should be on their flag.
Katha Pollitt also blames college athletics, not only for the Penn State crimes, but for its effects on academia in general. She goes further, attacking the masculine privilege inherent in athletics today:
There really is a message here about masculine privilege: the deification of a powerful old man who can do no wrong, an all-male hierarchy protecting itself (hello, pedophile priests), a culture of entitlement and a truly astonishing lack of concern about sexual violence. This last is old news, unfortunately: sexual assaults by athletes are regularly covered up or lightly punished by administrations, even in high school, and society really doesn’t care all that much. A federal appeals court declared that a Texas cheerleader could be kicked off the squad (and made to contribute to the school’s legal costs) for refusing to cheer her rapist when he took the field—and he’d pleaded guilty to misdemeanor assault too, so why was he even still playing?
Jane Leavy, whose earlier essay may be found here, writes an open letter to Mike McQueary. Commenting on all those who have vilified him for not taking stronger action, she points out that
When you were called to testify by the grand jury, you didn’t just expose a predator, Kohn pointed out. You exposed the morally lax administrators, directly contradicting the testimony of the now-fired university president, the vice president, and the athletic director. “But for McQueary, the coach [Sandusky] may still be there,” Kohn said. “The athletic department would be unchanged. That he didn’t throw himself under the bus doesn’t surprise me in the least. Look at the janitors. They didn’t tell anybody.”
I can’t help reading the Presiding Bishop’s statement about Bede Parry without thinking of Penn State. Bede Parry was a Roman Catholic priest and monk, accused of sexual misconduct and eventually released from the monastery (He has confessed to committing sexual abuse during the late 1970s). He found his way to the Episcopal Church and was received as a priest by Presiding Bishop Jefforts Schori when she was Bishop of Nevada. News about this broke several months ago when one of his victims filed a lawsuit. There’s background here.
What I find surprising is the absence of a psychiatric evaluation in Parry’s process. The PB states that he was required to undergo medical and psychological evaluations and a background check. The canons for reception of a priest (as for ordination) also provide for “psychiatric referral if desired or necessary.” When I was in the ordination process, a psychiatric evaluation was required. Mine was somewhat perfunctory, but all of the necessary questions were asked, and one would think that a bishop would want to have as much information as possible, especially if someone had undergone treatment.
If true and there’s no reason to doubt her, the PB has done no wrong here. But waiting since the allegations were first made public in July, till now to make an official statement sends the wrong message. The impulse for institutional self-preservation should not silence the truth.
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Numerical Decline and the local congregation
The dramatic numbers reported last week continue to reverberate across the Episcopal Church.
From Jim Naughton’s lede on Mariann Bude:
I’d ask you to read Michelle Boorstein’s story about the situation that confronts the bishop and the church, and then look at the Q and As in The Post and the Examiner. Several things struck me as I listened to her give these interviews. She is unabashed about the need to rebuild the church. Unlike some of our leaders, she does not theologize our decline. She is also clear in her opinion that the church does not lack a heart for mission. Rather, it lacks capacity because so many of its congregations are weak and struggling simply to keep their doors open. It makes no sense (this is my opinion, not hers) to tell these people that if they look inward they will flounder, but if they look outward they will thrive, because they may be in no position to look effectively in either direction.
It’s hard to focus on mission and outreach when all of a congregation’s energy is going into survival. Or to put it another way, given how thinly stretched resources are in a typical congregation, resources in terms of staff, clergy, and volunteers, it’s almost impossible to do things well, let alone innovate, when so much effort is expended on making sure the doors are open.
Donald Romanik says much the same thing, challenging us to focus on the local, not the national or international:
for the overwhelming majority of members of our congregations, the Episcopal Church is equivalent to their local faith community and the mission and ministry of that local congregation is measured by the impact it makes on the people it touches both on Sunday, and, more importantly, throughout the week.
As leaders of our local faith communities, our primary responsibility is to bring the message of Jesus and his healing presence to our immediate surroundings and engage our neighbors and friends in the work of God’s reconciliation in the world. And we do this through a constant cycle of prayer, worship, education, fellowship, outreach, and evangelism – that awful “e-word.” The Episcopal Church has a powerful message of hope to a broken world. Likewise, our local faith communities also share this important message.
I suppose I began my annual report to the parish with those same statistics because I wanted to provide some larger context for our struggles at Grace, but also, at least implicitly, to remind people of the great resources we have at Grace to reach out into the world, and that we are already doing many of those very things, including evangelism.
Pastors need to be challenged and disrupted
Patheos is running an online symposium on the future of seminary education. Like higher education in general, graduate education for clergy is in a crisis–rising tuition, rising debt for students, shrinking enrollments.
Reading the various entries brought home to me how inadequate my education at Harvard Divinity School was. We knew it was at the time; HDS offered very little in the way of courses in the practice of ministry. But it finally dawned on me that there was an even larger disconnect. I remember thinking at the time I was doing my field ed in a struggling mainline parish in Boston’s Back Bay that it seemed that the only people attending church were elderly or so disfunctional because of mental illness, substance abuse, or other forms of abuse, that what we were learning at HDS had no relevance in the pews or on the streets.
Fifteen years in the south were somewhat deceptive. Attending church was still culturally acceptable, even expected. It was easy to imagine that the Church could survive, perhaps even thrive in the American landscape. I remember how surprised I was when I began teaching at Sewanee to find seminarians who had come from suburban churches and were expecting to return to similar congregations where they would face no greater challenge than making sure acolytes were wearing black shoes. It seemed like we were still in the 1950s. Sometimes I wonder how many of those students I taught are still in the priesthood and whether their education has prepared them well for the challenges facing the church in the second decade of the twenty-first century.
I wonder whether seminaries, by their very nature blind students and faculty to the reality of the outside world. For denominational seminaries, even those in the throes of survival struggle, there still may be a sense that if we can just get it right, the institution will survive. I know that for many who enter the ordination process in the Episcopal Church, think of it not as an ongoing challenge, but only as a series of hoops through which to jump on one’s way to the promised land of a a settled cure somewhere. The ordination is designed to create clergy invested in the denomination as it stands, because the promise of an well-paying job and a secure pension are the pot at the end of the rainbow.
The most recent entry in the symposium comes from Kurt Fredrickson of Fuller Theological Seminary, who advocates for those institutions “to serve and resource the whole church.” But the most compelling thing he said is the phrase that appears as the title of this blog post: “Pastors need to be challenged and disrupted.”
I think that’s exactly right, and more true for denominational seminaries than for non-denominational ones or for divinity schools. In the latter, students will be challenged and disrupted by the encounter with students from other religious traditions. In the former, the tendency is to do little more than indoctrinate students in the denominational culture, which by any measure, is in radical decline.
The new bishop of the Diocese of Washington
Mariann Edgar Budde was consecrated Episcopal Bishop of the Diocese of Washington on Saturday. Here’s the report from The Washington Post.
The Post also printed her first sermon as Bishop, preached yesterday.
Here are two key excerpts:
We of the Episcopal Church have been entrusted with a particular expression of Christ’s gospel that is priceless. Think of what it means to you to have a spiritual home with such an appreciation of mystery and all that is beyond our knowing and curiosity about the world as we can know it through the rigorous inquiry of science. Think of what it means to you to have a spiritual home that lives the Via Media, the middle way among all expressions of Christianity, affirming the wholeness of faith that can only be fully experienced in the creative tension of polarities — heart and mind, Catholic and Protestant, word and sacrament, mysticism and service, contemplation and social engagement. Think of what it means to you to be part of a Church that does not ask its members to agree on matters of politics or theology or biblical interpretation, but rather to allow the grace of God to unite us at the altar of Christ in full appreciation of our differences and the God-given right of everyone to be welcome at God’s table.
And:
You have called me as your bishop at the time when the first priority for the Episcopal Church is the spiritual renewal and revitalization of our congregations and core ministries, not as a retreat from social and prophetic witness, but in order to be more faithful to that witness, with greater capacity not only to speak but to act in God’s name. This is a time when the cultural and societal context in which our churches find themselves is constantly changing, and we must learn how to sing our Lord’s song in a new land. It’s a time when we aren’t sure yet what we need to let go and what to keep, what is essential to our identity and what is secondary. It’s a time of deep spiritual longing yet superficial spiritual grounding, and that’s as true within our congregations as outside them.
Lectionary Reflections for Christ the King Sunday
This week’s lectionary readings.
Next Sunday is the last Sunday of the liturgical year, known as Christ the King. Next Sunday, the first Sunday in Advent, begins a new lectionary cycle. Advent will begin with a focus on the coming of Jesus Christ—both his first coming and his second. Today’s lessons also focus on Christ’s second coming and our lessons emphasize Christ reigning in majesty and his reigning as a judge. This gospel reading is not only our last for this year. It is also the last substantive teaching that Jesus gives his disciples before his crucifixion. So, for Matthew, apart from a few commandments Jesus gives his disciples—the institution of the Eucharist and the Great Commission—this story is Jesus’ last words to his disciples.
So it’s an important story, not simply because it’s a favorite of those who see the Gospel message as primarily one of outreach to the needy. It’s important for Matthew, too. It’s an apocalyptic vision. Jesus is describing what the Parousia—the coming of the Son of Man will be like. First, he uses royal imagery. He will come in glory and sit on his heavenly throne. But immediately, that imagery is combined with another image, that of the shepherd. He will separate the people like a shepherd separates his flocks, the sheep from the goats.
This image may draw us back to the reading from Ezekiel, where another visionary sees God coming like a shepherd, judging between the fat sheep and the lean sheep, rescuing them from wherever they have been scattered, feeding them, binding up the injured. We might find it odd that these two images—the shepherd and the king—are linked together in the biblical tradition. As the reading from Ezekiel makes clear, one reason for that linkage is the tradition that the founder of the Davidic monarchy—King David, was a shepherd. But for Christians, when shepherd imagery is used of Jesus, it is almost always used to emphasize Jesus’ care for us and his intimate love for us.
Yet here in Ezekiel, the shepherd is a judge who culls his flocks, separating the fat from the lean sheep. So too in the gospel, the Shepherd King is a Judge who divides the sheep from the goats. In the Ezekiel passage the contrast between the care and tender concern the shepherd shows for the lean sheep and the harsh words with which he judges the fat.
The same is true in the gospel. The king judges harshly, unequivocally between the sheep and the goats. Christ appears to us here as a shepherd-king, but there are two other important images of Christ in the gospel. One is the obvious one. When the king says, inasmuch as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers and sisters, you did it to me, identifies the presence of Christ in the naked, the prisoner, the hungry, the sick. The third image is less obvious. The text begins with a reference to the Son of Man. In Matthew, when Jesus uses that title of himself, it almost always is in reference to his crucifixion. Christ the King is also the Crucified One and the least of these.
We are called to hold these three images together, we might think of them as three facets of a prism that together refract the light. If we ignore one of them, the other two become less brilliant. Emphasizing one over the other is a common temptation for Christians, but the gospel itself warns against it. We might prefer one image over the other. Some might want to encounter Christ only in the face of the poor and hungry; others only in an image of the Crucifixion. There are even those who can conceive of Christ only as the judge who comes on a cloud of thunder and reigns in majesty.
Each image taken by itself will lead to a distortion of our faith. Those who focus only on the crucifixion will see Jesus only as the one who offers forgiveness for our sins. Those who focus on Christ in Majesty will think only about the second coming and making sure that they are on his right side. Those who focus only on outreach to others turn the Christian message into a social service agency.
The judge separates sheep from goats, those who reached out to the needy and those who didn’t. The surprising thing here is that all are surprised. Neither group knew that Christ was present in the naked, the stranger or the prisoner. So for those whom the King welcomed into the kingdom, their actions in reaching out to the needy were not a conscious response to Jesus’ teachings or the result of acting out of duty or in order to gain their salvation. Their actions were an unconscious, unknowing part of who they were as Jesus’ disciples.
Each year as Christ the King Sunday approaches my mind turns to the marvelous mosaics in the churches of Ravenna, Italy, created in the sixth century on behalf of Byzantine emperors. There are two that are especially appropriate on this occasion. The first is from the Mausoleum of Galla Placidia, depicting Christ as the Good Shepherd:
The second is in S. Apollonare Nuovo, showing Christ separating the sheep from the goats:
Preaching Grace on the Square 