Filed under: Uncategorized
As predicted I was reticent to jump into the fray on the phone call. It was just too intimidating. I did appreciate the professional facilitation of The Rev. Eric H. F. Law of the Kaleidoscope Institute. Another member of the group and I were assigned to come up with something useful to say to the Archbishop about basic human dignity. My initial thoughts:
I think I have to ruminate for a moment why basic human dignity is germane to the discussion. In my mind “dignity” evokes the words of the baptismal covenant. I cannot get away from the imperative in those vows. The promises my godparents made for me (I was baptized in 1976) and which I reaffirm at several opportunities annually are not optional observances. Any question as to why I do ministry in Christ’s name is answered by those promises. I would like to convey to the Archbishop that it is not out of any political agenda, or elitism, or economic opportunity, or any other related motivation that I feel compelled to call the church to full inclusion. Rather it is out of the bonds of covenant and conviction of the gospel that I can do nothing else. My “story” would discuss the way in which the church’s hypocrisy in its treatment of LGBT people has translated into silent complicity in the abuse and neglect of young people. The teachings of the church are consisently held up in my community as a defense each time a young person is thrown out of his or her home when his or her sexuality is discovered. These are not radical agitators attempting to overthrow the quiet order of our rural community. They’re just young people trying to come to grips with their God-given selves. If the church could “come out” on their side, so much pain and loss would be healed, and further losses prevented.
Filed under: Uncategorized
Am currently discussing resolutions with my deputation. Some concerns came up around 815’s decision to change the publishing schedule of Episcopal Life, the Episcopal Church’s monthly newspaper. A problem for my diocese is that we are one of the 30 or 35 dioceses that publish our own newspaper as a “wrap around” with Episcopal Life. This change represents a significant cost increase for us.
Filed under: Uncategorized
In a few minutes I’ll be on a conference call with 5 other LGBT deputies and a consultant to discuss our July 8 meeting with Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams. We’ve been granted an audience with the Abp. during GC09. I don’t know yet what we’re going to talk about, hence the conference call. I’m mostly worried that my cell phone is not up to the task, but it’s all I have.
And I’m sort of intimidated by this call. Included in this group are some giants in the world of Episcopal advocacy for LGBT rights and inclusion, such as Dr. Louie Crew and The Rev. Tobias Haller, BSG. I’m just a deputy from a small, not very well-off diocese. I have no record of advocacy or work on these issues. I’m not a theologian or a member of the clergy. What I bring to the table I’ve yet to discover.
Filed under: Uncategorized
I originally started this blog as a place to post musings and such on General Convention 2009. Shortly thereafter I lost interest as there wasn’t much of substance going on at the time.
That has certainly changed. I pledge to start posting regularly about GC09 and all the craziness it creates.
Let’s start by posting this.
This is a fantastic interpretation of the current version of the Anglican Covenant as presented by Deputy Gracey of the Diocese of Ohio. Now, as I understand it, GC09 will not be asked to vote on consenting to this document. The reasons why not are not clear to me; I think has to do with a timing issue. Some taskforce created by some body has to do more work on it? I don’t know. But the linked document does so much work for the reader; I highly recommend it if you want to understand what it all means. Article four is the contentious bit. Grateful acknowledgment to the Lead at Episcopal Cafe for linking this.
I guess I think this Covenant is unnecessary if you don’t think that Article four is a good thing. Article four is the punishment piece, thus: if one province of the Anglican Communion (say, The Episcopal Church) does something that another province doesn’t like (say, consecrate bishop someone openly partnered with a member of the same sex), then this (new?) body called the Joint Standing Committee can sort of, well, kick out the province, officially or non-officially. You know, sort of but not really, maybe? Very Anglican.
What I don’t know is how popular this thing is outside of the global South. Provinces like Nigeria and the Southern Cone are all for it, but what about others?
Meh.
Filed under: Uncategorized
The last time I checked, there were 238 pieces of legislation to read. Some of the them are procedural and quite brief. Some are contentious and deserve reflection and prayer. This is going to be a trip.
Filed under: Sermons
Matthew 20:1-16
Dividing things up fairly among the children can be troublesome for parents at times. Children demand your time, your patience, your money, your energy, your love, and it can be hard to keep all that in balance. Most parents I know will readily admit that fairness isn’t possible all the time, maybe even most of the time. The children in a single household are not created with equal portions of wants and desires, needs and challenges.
When I was a kid, I had a blended family. My step-brother and I split our time between our mothers’ and our fathers’ homes. Add to the mix a younger half-brother, and we were a real life “Yours, Mine, & Ours.” And we definitely had sore spots when it came to fairness. For example, my step-brother and I, at the ages of 18 and 16 and both measuring at least six feet tall, were still sharing a bedroom with twin bunk beds – our feet hanging over the end – while our five year old brother had a double bed in a room all to himself. Clearly, this was not fair.
My step-brother, Jeremy, thought that he should get a room to himself since he was the oldest. He believed in the time-honored tradition of seniority. I thought I should be able to have my own room, too, since Jeremy was a pain in my neck and I didn’t think he should get anything I didn’t get.. As it was, Drew, our little brother, got his own room because he lived there full-time, and Jeremy and I were part-timers. We had rooms of our own at our other homes. Of course this was not our fault, we didn’t ask for this amalgamated family, but we were stuck with it and we were stuck with our parents’ decision. And because we loved each other and our baby brother, it was okay. Annoying, but okay.
In the parable we just heard, Jesus is speaking to the disciples. They are preparing to accompany Jesus into Jerusalem, thus beginning the dramatic events leading up to his death and resurrection. When Jesus says, “the kingdom of heaven is like”, Jesus is teaching the disciples about the redemption of Israel. The disciples, recognizing Jesus as the Messiah, the one who will restore the people of God, are learning what that redemption will look like. As the story comes to a close, Jesus presents a startling turn of events. The laborers who worked all day are paid the going wage, as is the custom. The laborers who worked half the day, and the laborers who worked just one hour, are also paid the same wage. This is not customary, and it doesn’t sit well with those who worked longest; those covered in sweat from a full day’s labor under the scorching heat of the sun.
The sequence of events when payment is made is key to understanding today’s Good News. Those who started working last, received their pay first. Those who started working first, were paid last. After seeing the latecomers paid for a full day, the full-day workers assumed they would be paid more – even though they knew what they were promised when they started working that morning. Therefore, they were not paid unfairly; they just were not paid proportionately. While this is vexing to the laborers, and it is instructive to the disciples and to us about the nature of God’s grace.
In my working life at MSU, I spend quite a bit of my time determining issues of compensation. Deciding what to pay someone for the work they do is a complicated process, highly subjective, and occasionally liable to anger someone to the point of shouting. Many factors come into consideration, and proportionate pay for proportionate work is the underlying principle. After weighing all the factors, including years of loyal service to the University, I have to make a decision, and grace is not an element that I can employ in my process. If I tried it at MSU, I’d probably be run out of East Lansing in front of the business end of a pitchfork.
Today Christ Church is facing hard questions about the future of our community. What are we doing here? How is God calling Christ Church to bring about God’s kingdom? How are we going to pay for it? Our finances have forced us take a hard look at who we are, and why we are here. Whether we’ve been here for fifty years or fifty days, we’re facing the same challenges and the same uncertainty. For those who have worked hard all their lives to earn their rewards, this lesson may be hard to hear. Why shouldn’t we be blessed proportionately? Why shouldn’t God bless those who have earned it, who deserve it more, because of their hard work and dedication?
It’s tempting at this point to turn the whole thing around and look for some comfort in the unpredictability of God’s grace. It would be easy to focus on the laborers who worked only briefly. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could look to this parable as proof that even if we don’t earn it, God will bless us anyway? After all, all the laborers received their pay; they received their daily bread. If there’s no such thing as a proportionate blessing in God’s reckoning, then what have we to fear?
Today’s parable shows us that God does not run the world according to human concepts of meritocracy and work ethic. God distributes grace according to God’s plan; we can do nothing to earn it. If anything, there is little comfort here. Rather, this parable is a warning to us not to become too self-assured. There is no guaranteed formula for grace that humans can detect. Fifty years or fifty days – we don’t know God’s compensation plan. The parable reminds us that God is Lord and that we do not know when or where or why God will bless us. Friends I don’t have a warm and comforting thought to leave you with this week; this Gospel lesson doesn’t have one. And I hardly think it’s fair that I don’t get to do warm and fuzzy in my first sermon – but as we’ve seen, God isn’t about “fair”. God is about grace, and love – but on God’s terms.
Filed under: Uncategorized
My desk is covered with bible commentaries, textbooks, syllabi, bibles, and notebooks. Yes friends, I’m taking a preaching class. Preaching is the one part of a priest’s job I never thought I’d want. I still don’t want it. But when asked if I’d be willing to participate in a preaching class for lay people, instead of “no”, my mouth said “yes”. So every other week or so, six of us gather for a couple of hours to learn about the art and science of constructing and delivering sermons.
Turns out, it’s quite a bit harder than you might think, and I can’t imagine how priests and pastors do it every week for years. I like to think I can write a little bit, but I don’t know if I have the stamina to keep it up like the pros. Now I’m not a priest, so the question you might be asking is, why is this happening? Why am I being trained to preach? I don’t think I know the complete answer, but I can say that when our priest is away on a Sunday we don’t get a sermon. Sometime in the future, I’ll be filling in when she’s on vacation or whatnot. I suspect that other parts of the answer have to do with the changing role of clergy and the coming clergy shortage in The Episcopal Church, but my place on that tableau is not yet clear to me.
I’m currently working on a draft of my first sermon. The gospel lesson appointed for that Sunday is pretty tough; it’s not a feel good story. In it, we’re confronted with the reality that God’s grace cannot be earned. We cannot do a thing to ensure God will bless us; God will do as God will do. That’s hard to bear, and it raises questions of fairness and favor. I think one of the shocking things we learned about God’s grace in recent years was the revelation after Mother Theresa’s death that she suffered for something like fifty years in “spiritual darkness”. One would imagine that someone living as selflessly as she, an icon of Christ’s love for the world’s most pitiful creatures, would be sustained and rewarded with a rich inner life and relationship with the divine. Yet that wasn’t the case, and we’re left wondering what it was all for, if not for God’s presence in her life.
I have some answers to all that, but I can’t seem to make them sound very satisfying. In the end, we cannot assume that our human ideals of fairness, of work ethic and of proportional reward apply to our God, who is in heaven. The gospel text appointed for the day ends, “So the first will be last, and the last will be first”. Unsettling, indeed.
Filed under: Church-y
It seems everyone’s up in arms about the two men whose union was blessed in a London church this week. This thought from the BBC is the most accessible defense of gay marriage I have seen yet to date.
Filed under: Church-y
Heather’s been after me to write something about General Convention ever since I was elected to be a deputy from Eastern Michigan. I’ve been trying to figure out a way to describe General Convention in a way that isn’t insufferably boring. I’m not sure it can be done. I thought about trying to write a haiku to capture the zen of it, but it turns out the classic poetry formula of 5-7-5 syllables is just too orderly for a messy thing like church government.
Now, don’t get me wrong. General Convention, by all accounts, is far from boring. It’s just that describing a legislative body that’s too big, too polarized, and older than the Library of Congress in any succinct way is just too difficult for me. But I’m going to give it a shot anyway: imagine if the Daughters of the Confederacy, the ACLU, the 700 Club, and PFLAG all got together and threw a party in the same convention center. That’s kind of what General Convention is like, because it’s a representative body of The Episcopal Church. Southern aristocrats, Northeastern liberals, Heartland conservatives, and California gays all trying to discern the will of God for the church while keeping an eye on their respective agendas. Oh yes, politics is involved. Whenever human beings try to agree on something in a group, politics is involved. “Politics; the art of the possible” (Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber, Evita)
If that’s not descriptive enough, here are some facts. General Convention is the highest decision-making body in The Episcopal Church. It meets once every three years for about two weeks. General Convention has the authority to do things like authorize new prayer books, permit ordination of women to the priesthood, and confirm the election of openly non-celibate gay bishops, to name just a few of the more fun items you might not have heard of. There are two divisions of the Convention: the House of Bishops, and the House of Deputies. Does this bicameral organization remind you of anything else excessively large, expensive, and self-important? I thought so. Many of the founders of our nation were Episcopalians, and it is believed that while they were creating Congress during the day, they created General Convention in the evening. And there was evening, and there was morning, the eighth day.
The House of Bishops is made of up, well, bishops. You have to be a bishop with jurisdiction to be in this one. So don’t get your hopes up too high. They all get in (well, except if they’ve been deposed, inhibited, or otherwise snubbed by everyone else). The House of Deputies is made up of four lay people and four ordained people from each diocese (110 or so, depending on if you’re bff with Greg Venables – more on that in another post). Altogether that’s about 1100 people trying to do the business of the church. So yeah, it’s a riot!
Meetings of the Convention have been described as a professional basketball game, requiring skilled players who can keep up with the fast pace. The days begin with committee work at 7:30am and many days do not end until 10:00pm with special events or legislative sessions. Hundreds of resolutions, elections, and decisions will be voted on during Convention; few will make sense to anyone but the associated committees. The two houses meet separately, but the final legislation must be passed in identical form by both houses. Interesting point: deputies are not “delegates”. They are not elected to serve the interests of or represent the members of their home dioceses. They are elected to serve the whole church. They must do their very best to prayerfully vote as they believe the Holy Spirit leads them. Bishops are also elected and ordained to do the same, but the context of their ministry is in the whole church, rather than just meetings of the General Convention. The next General Convention will be held in 2009 in Anaheim, California.
Resolute, we vote,
Someone’s bound to demonstrate;
Disney, here we come!
I did it!
Filed under: Church-y
I was compelled to respond to this post at Episcopal Cafe.
I am a cradle Episcopalian. Four generations ago my great-grandfather, an ordained Methodist pastor, chose to join Christ Episcopal Church in Owosso, Michigan. He and my great-grandmother raised their children as Episcopalians, as did my grandmother and grandfather, as did my mother. As a while male who grew up in the Midwest with no particular ethnic heritage, I often refer to the Episcopal Church as my ethnicity. I shan’t try to define ethnicity in any useful way, but for me, many of the ethnological characteristics of my personality and identity are quite clearly the result of four generations of Episcopal upbringing.
Much the same way that third and fourth-generation children of immigrants will grow up entirely American absent the intentional preservation of homeland culture, I too have grown up with no real sense of spiritual history in any other tradition. Luckily, I have some very close friends and cousins who have other tradition histories, so throughout my childhood and adolescence I was exposed to different churches and ecclesiastical cultures. As a young adult I learned from personal experience and from classroom training about the richness and diversity of Christian denominational history in America and about the vast systems of belief that have existed throughout the world from pre-history until today.
My rector recently commented that I am the epitome of an Episcopalian. I didn’t agree with her at first, and now I think there are morsels of truth in that comment. My initial reaction is related to the first sentence of this piece. Cradle Episcopalians are not in the majority of our churches any more. The realization of that truth sometimes gives us “cradles” over to feelings of invasion and a sense of erosion of cherished traditions. We see it over and over again: “newbies” show up, fall in love with our liturgy, our pageantry, our connection to ages of Christians through the apostolic succession, and they want to change it – some of them even get ordained. They have ideas and experiences from their previous spiritual homes (or secular homes) and they want to make things better. The cradles’ response is to affirm that our tradition is wonderful and of course others would be drawn to it, but if that’s what they’re drawn to, why do they want to change it? We sometimes forget that by allowing others to have agency in a system, they take ownership and are more likely stay invested. But we have an emotional reaction to the rearrangement of furniture, to the reorganization of a prayer book, to the different faces wearing collars on Sunday morning and we say “no”. These changes represent “them” messing with the fundamentals of our identity. So we fight back, create barriers, run them off, and lament the empty pews. Even with a progressive theological, social, and political outlook, I am as guilty as anyone in this. Don’t move my pew!
I mentioned morsels of truth, and they do exist. Many examples abound. I am the epitome of propriety and correct church behavior. I know how to conduct myself at worship and during fellowship and service. I can recite all the creeds without looking. I know that the service of Holy Eucharist, Rite II, begins on page 355 of the Book of Common Prayer; the spine of my BCP is permanently creased at that page. I know the difference between a tabernacle and an aumbry, and I think you should, too.
Those things are somewhat inconsequential and potentially divisive, but they were bred into me; I cannot cast them aside. I call upon others to recognize that if I’m not always as accommodating of innovation as I could be. Some of those pieces point to the unique richness of substance and depth of spiritual wealth that the Episcopal Church offers. I don’t want to ever deny them. However, I try to mitigate the divisive pieces by being as friendly and welcoming as I can be. I recognize feelings of grief and loss when things are changed, and I try to work through them if the changes bring about goodness and peace. I think that I have been successful at supporting and championing those things that are good, and at providing some comfort when the changes are just too hard for my fellow cradles to bear. If the Episcopal Church is about reconciliation in the world, then I hope I’m playing my small part.
