Almighty and everlasting God, you have given to us your servants grace, by the confession of a true faith, to acknowledge the glory of the eternal Trinity, and in the power of your divine Majesty to worship the Unity: Keep us steadfast in this faith and worship, and bring us at last to see you in your one and eternal glory, O Father; who with the Son and the Holy Spirit live and reign, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
An article in today’s Wisconsin State Journal profiles the responses of two of my Madison colleagues to last week’s court decision striking down Wisconsin’s ban on same-sex marriage. Andy Jones, Rector of St. Andrew’s, had this to say:
The Rev. Andy Jones, pastor of St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church in Madison, would like to perform same-sex marriages but his denomination does not allow it. The Episcopal Diocese of Milwaukee, of which Madison Episcopal churches are a part, also prohibits same-sex blessing ceremonies, although other Episcopal dioceses allow them.
“Longtime members of St. Andrew’s — faithful, committed couples — long to have their church community affirm who they are and to have their church bless their relationship,” Jones said. “It pains me that I can’t do that.”
The article also quotes Miranda Hassett, who showed her support at the City-County building last Friday: “It was really important for me to be there as a priest and as a progressive Christian,” she said.
We’ve become accustomed to rapid change in our culture and in our lives but still, sometimes, the speed and amount of change can be breathtaking. Take gay marriage for example. Two or three decades ago, it was unimaginable. Less than a decade ago, voters in Wisconsin passed a constitutional amendment banning it. Still, in the months since the Supreme Court’s verdict on the Defense of Marriage Act, courts all over the country have struck such bans down, including the one in Wisconsin. And over the weekend, we’ve been treated to scenes of marriages taking place at the City-County building a few blocks away. Wherever one stands on the issue, the rapidity of the change is unsettling. In this, as in so many other aspects of our lives, we’re often not sure what it all means, where our culture and world is moving, and where we as individuals, and as the body of Christ, should take a stand. Continue reading
We knew it was coming. After last summer’s Supreme Court decision and the series of decisions throughout the country throwing out state bans on gay marriage, it was bound to happen in Wisconsin as well. And it did yesterday afternoon.
I’ve documented the conversations at Grace Church and in the Diocese of Milwaukee regarding same sex blessings on this blog. Grace’s public statement of full inclusion is available here: LGBTstatement_revised_01292014. But those conversations occurred with little reference to the larger legal context. We submitted our responses to the Standing Committee’s survey in December and are waiting to hear what other congregations and clergy throughout the diocese had to say.
More telling, perhaps, is the almost total silence around our collective response when gay marriage became a legal reality. In my recollection, I had only one conversation with fellow clergy in the last months about how Episcopalians might proclaim the good news of Jesus Christ’s love when marriage equality became a reality in the state of Wisconsin. My colleague Miranda Hassett and her family went down to the City-County Building last night to be present among the celebrations:
I’m grateful to her for that.
As Episcopal clergy and as a church, we have painted ourselves into a very small corner. It’s going to be increasingly difficult for our congregations to claim to be open and welcoming to LGBT Christians when we refuse to extend the sacrament of marriage to them. As clergy, we are no longer going to be able to use the excuse that same sex marriage is forbidden in the state constitution when couples approach us to solemnize their vows. In retrospect, it would have been helpful to have had frank conversations about this in the past months. Instead, we dithered and kept our mouths shut.
And don’t get me wrong. I’m not pointing the finger anywhere except myself. I dithered, kept my mouth shut, and didn’t raise questions when opportunities presented themselves.
Federal Judge Crabb has just announced Wisconsin’s ban is unconstitutional.
More here
But I know that God’s new world of justice and joy, of hope for the whole earth, was launched when Jesus came out of the tomb on Easter morning, and I know that he calls his followers to live in him and by the power of his Spirit and so to be new-creation people here and now, bringing signs and symbols of the kingdom to birth on earth as in heaven. The resurrection of Jesus and the gift of the Spirit mean that we are called to bring real and effective signs of God’s renewed creation to birth even in the midst of the present age.
N. T. Wright, Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church
I just finished Charles Marsh’s new biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. It’s entitled A Strange Glory: The Life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer
In short, it’s brilliant, spellbinding, and full of new information. Marsh gives us a portrait of Bonhoeffer in all of his complexity. He comes across as almost hedonistic at times and irresponsible. Marsh depicts his desire for companionship and his desire for community, but points out the irony that while he wrote a dissertation on the importance of Christian community, he rarely attended services while a theology student.
Marsh is especially strong on the importance of Bonhoeffer’s time in America in raising his consciousness about injustice (racism) and as the location where he first fully engages in Christian community (at Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem). In Marsh’s perspective, the quest for community would drive Bonhoeffer for the rest of his life.
It’s been thirty years since I’ve read Eberhard Bethge’s biography of Bonhoeffer so I don’t recall details, but Marsh is working with new archival finds and he has scholarly distance from his subject that Bethge could not have. What impressed me most about Marsh’s reading of Bonhoeffer was the central role of Bonhoeffer’s deepening spirituality, the spiritual disciplines that became central in his life, his desire for Christian community, and his shaping of the underground seminary at Finkenwalde by the monastic communities he encountered in England and elsewhere.
He’s also very strong on Bonhoeffer’s relationship with Bethge. We learn that two lived for a number of years as a couple, sharing a bank account, giving Christmas gifts with both names, traveling together (and Bonhoeffer’s annoyance when Bethge brought friends with them on their journeys). Marsh also makes clear that whatever the relationship was, it was not consummated sexually but that Bethge was the one who had to establish clear boundaries. Incidentally, within two weeks of Bethge becoming engaged to Bonhoeffer’s niece, Dietrich himself became engaged to Maria von Wedemeyer.
Bonhoeffer is widely regarded as a hero of the faith, a martyr and his legacy has been contested. Marsh stresses Bonhoeffer’s early opposition to Hitler and does a very good job of showing his theological and ethical development, especially on the issue of Bonhoeffer’s participation in the plot against Hitler.
I own well-worn copies of the Letters and Papers from Prison in both English and German and have always been fascinated by the rigorous and revolutionary theological insights he articulates there as well as by the deep Lutheran, even pietistic spirituality that he expresses.
As I was reading Marsh’s biography, I was intrigued by the continuing relevance of those theological insights in our very different cultural context and wonder what a theological voice steeped in Bonhoeffer might have to say in the post-Christian, neoliberal culture of the twenty-first century.
Today, the seventh Sunday of Easter, is one of the oddest of all of the Sundays in the liturgical calendar. We are in something like suspended animation, or stopped motion. On Thursday, the calendar, even if we at Grace Church didn’t, commemorated the feast of the Ascension, when Jesus Christ departed from earth and from his disciples forty days after the resurrection. Next Sunday is the Feast of Pentecost, when we celebrate the coming of the gift of the Holy Spirit on the assembled disciples, empowering them to spread the good news of Jesus Christ throughout the world. But today, today we’re waiting. Continue reading
Almighty God, whose blessed Son our Savior Jesus Christ ascended far above all heavens that he might fill all things: Mercifully give us faith to perceive that, according to his promise, he abides with his Church on earth, even to the end of the ages; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, in glory everlasting. Amen.
While preparing for Wednesday Eucharist, this collect caught my attention. I immediately assumed that it was modern, but no, according to Hatchett, it derives from the Leonine sacramentary. The first thing that caught my attention was the phrase “that he might fill all things.” My assumptions must have been in overdrive because I thought it had to be a typo–“fill” instead of “fulfill.” But no. Jesus Christ ascended into heaven [so that] he might fill all things. Ascension is not about explaining why Jesus is no longer present among us but about proclaiming Christ’s omnipresence in the universe; to use the words from the Epistle of the Day, he is “all in all.”
Even more interesting is the focus of the petition. The prayer is not asking help for us to believe in the ascension, but rather that we might have faith to “perceive that … he abides with his Church.” To put it another way, it’s harder to believe in Christ’s continuing presence in the Church than in the Ascension.
On second thought, that might not be so strange at all, given the realities of the church in the twenty-first century.
I’ve long been interested in how our built environments, our cities, for example, reflect our deepest values and passions. You can see that clearly in a city like Madison, which was laid out as Wisconsin’s capital, with capitol square in the middle and streets radiating out from it. If you’re familiar with cities on the east coast—Boston, for example—you know that such planning isn’t always the case. In Europe, it’s interesting to see how order and power were imposed and projected on capital cities—Paris or Vienna, for example.
What do the cities of today say about our values? On the one hand, there are cities like Detroit, that have collapsed economically, demographically, and politically and have become laboratories for experiments in creating new ways for people to come together. On the other hand, there are cities like San Francisco where gentrification is running amok, with housing prices again going through the roof, and forcing lower income and working class people to relocate. Madison is closer to the latter than the former as we are seeing a boom in the construction of upscale apartments across the city but especially downtown. We’ve been learning about the consequences of such economic growth—increasing inequality, growing gaps between rich and poor, white and black. Continue reading
Preaching Grace on the Square 