Leaders are not always in the position to govern, and governors don't always lead.
— Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG, reflecting both on the phenomenon of bishops becoming prophetic in retirement, and the fact that the laity, the Holy People of God, sometimes (perhaps often) lead the church more effectively than the hierarchy
The Church Times reports on the scheduled Wednesday unveiling of the Anglican Church of North America as a new province. The question, of course is, province of what? As noted in the comments at Thinking Anglicans, until someone or other declares it a province, it is just a collection of individual bishops, clergy and laity, formed into whatever subdivisions they imagine helpful to the existence of a church. Contrary to the assertion, the portions of former Episcopal Dioceses in this mix have all left behind the still-functioning, though diminished and in some cases needing restructuring, dioceses of The Episcopal Church. Also included are a number of groups that left TEC in earlier generations, some more than a century ago (The Reformed Episcopal Church), now coalesced in the Common Cause Partners. (One can be forgiven, in the midst of all of these associations, for thinking of the scene in Life of Brian where distinctions have to be made between the various splintering factions attempting to subvert Roman rule.) The new "emergent" province is part of a larger constellation that calls itself the Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans — which includes a broad collection of entities and individuals around the world.
I have noted that it is unlikely the "Anglican Church in North America" will be recognized by Canterbury -- and they seem to have partaken of preemptive sour-grape-consumption in saying already, in the GAFCON Jerusalem Declaration, that they don't need Canterbury to be Anglican. But surely, as observed at TA, they need to be recognized by somebody if they are to be a Province, rather than a free-floating exercise in autonomous ecclesiarchitecture. For provinces are always provinces of; to use a Hebrew language analogy, a Province is always in the construct state, the state of being possessed by or related to some other entity.
So, at present it is best to describe it as part of a looser assemblage, a Fellowship. One assumes that word was chosen with care by the Fellowship of Confessing Anglican folks, and in the knowledge that that is how the Anglican Communion (centered on Canterbury) describes itself. So, it seems to me, preparations are already afoot, should a "Province" not be recognized by Canterbury, to form a new Acantuarian Anglican Communion altogether. And I think perhaps some, even of the most separatist-leaning of the present Anglican Communion provinces in the Global South, may wish to maintain a foothold in both Communions. Or am I misreading the tea-leaves.
Whatever the case, they had best be reminded of the danger of attempting to board a vessel while keeping one foot still firmly planted on land.
Tobias Haller BSG
Lay Presidency and the Cultural Revolution:
— compare and contrast.
Tobias Haller BSG
The Sydney Synod has approved in principle the ideas of diaconal and lay presidency at the Holy Communion, suggesting a delay in implementation for laity but a sooner licensing for deacons, including women deacons. This has created, as perhaps an unintentional consequence, some concern among the more catholic conservative allies with Sydney against the liberal-trending spectrum of the Anglican Communion.
I have no difficulty understanding the extreme protestant position on this score — it has been well spelled out in terms of the priesthood of all believers, the lack of scriptural clarity on the subject, the fact that deacons can baptize so why can’t they celebrate, and so on and so forth. I also have no difficulty understanding the practical implications, and the needs of isolated or small communities. On neither of these do I find the arguments persuasive, but I do find them comprehensible.
What I find hard to understand is how any who so pride themselves in the 1662 BCP and Ordinal and Articles of Religion can adopt a position so at odds with the limpid clarity of their requirements, and what they present as a model for what it means to “minister in the Church.” The Articles demand that no one minister without being called; and the calling of a deacon is well spelled out to be (at most) an assistant in the ministrations limited to priests — also clearly listed in the order for making them. To read, as the current move has it, assists in as presides at seems to be an example of eisegesis at its most wishful and contrary. And this doesn’t even get into the murkiness of what it means for a lay person to “minister” (in the fulsome sense in which the classical documents use the term) — since as Richard Norris once said, a lay person authorized by a bishop to preside at the eucharist is properly called “a priest.”
So the issue for me — quite apart from my opposition to the move on other grounds — is the logical inconsistency of taking steps so at odds with sources of authority that are brandished in other controversies as touchstones of stability for the emerging Anglican Communion 2.0.
Perhaps this is just the beta.
Tobias Haller BSG
Update: See further at More on Sydney
Convent of St Helena Vails Gate • October 3 2008
Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG
First Meditation for the Diocese of New York Deacons’ Retreat
A Bedtime Story before Compline
Once upon a time, and a very long time ago it was — something over 1400 years ago — there was a good deacon named Honoratus. Actually he was an archdeacon, but in those days only deacons could be archdeacons. He served the diocese of Salona in Dalmatia well and faithfully, but he ran into a bit of trouble with his bishop, whose name was Natalis. The bishop was a convivial man who enjoyed being bishop — in fact, he enjoyed it too much. He was fond of giving lavish parties and entertaining his relatives. He was even said to have given away some of the church’s sacred vessels and vestments to a few of his favorite relatives. As these goods were the concern of the dutiful archdeacon, he raised more than his eyebrows and complained to the bishop that such behavior might bring embarrassment and scandal to the church.
The bishop was not amused. But being a very clever bishop he thought of a way of addressing the problem that would silence the deacon without in any way giving him cause to complain. The bishop ordained him to the priesthood.
Now, as I said, this was a very long time ago, and in those days deacons were free to travel about on the business of the church. Indeed, this formed a very important part of their ministry. But priests of those days were forbidden to travel outside their own parish jurisdictions without the bishop’s permission. And so, the clever Bishop Natalis sought to curtail the deacon who had given him so much trouble by making him a priest. This may be one of the first instances of what the business world calls kicking someone upstairs. It has been a common fate of whistle-blowers ever since.
Unfortunately, Deacon Honoratus didn’t want to be a priest. He was perfectly happy in his ministry as archdeacon, with the exception of his disagreements with the bishop. The bishop, for his part, apparently didn’t know the old saying — old to us, for in the bishop’s day it hadn’t yet been said and wouldn’t be for another 1200 years — that the pen is mightier than the sword. And taking pen in hand the now-priest Honoratus wrote to the pope. He laid the situation out in black and white and the pope responded. He wrote to Natalis and said how strange it was to charge a person with poor performance and then promote him. The pope also instructed the bishop to restore Honoratus to the diaconate.
You see, the church was still young, and the fussy notion of indelible orders hadn’t yet fully developed. That’s the kind of thing that later ecclesiastics and systematic theologians with an interest in Aristotle would get worked up about in another six hundred years or so. But in those simpler days of the sixth century the three ministries of deacon, priest, and bishop were still understood rather differently than people came to think of them later. For one thing, the emphasis was on the ministry rather than the minister. More importantly, the pope was wise enough to see the game that Natalis was playing, not only replacing the deacon with someone more to his liking as archdeacon, but removing his capacity to travel about to check up on the diocesan property without permission.
Still, the pope was aging and unwell, and had more important things to think about than a fairly minor dispute between a bishop and one of his deacons, and the situation remained unresolved at his death. He was succeeded as pope by one of the seven deacons of Rome, whose name was Gregory — the first of that name. Gregory was of an abstemious bent and a spiritual heart — he had become a monk after retiring from the civil service — and never expected to be a deacon, much less pope. But he also had a practical side, and was a shrewd judge of character. He had served as his predecessor’s ambassador and had traveled quite a bit, more than most people of that era — remember, that was part of a deacon’s job back then, and Gregory was a very serious deacon indeed. As such, Gregory had been around the block a few times and had also heard reports concerning bishop Natalis. So Gregory wrote to the bishop, asking him to explain his actions, and why he hadn’t yet responded to his papal predecessor’s demand to restore Honoratus to the diaconate.
Natalis responded with some shock — real or pretended I cannot say, though I imagine it was rather like the shock that Captain Renault expressed on finding gambling at Rick’s. The bishop admitted that he was fond of playing the host and entertaining his guests well, but defended himself on biblical grounds that he, like Abraham, might be entertaining angels unawares. Gregory wrote back to him in an equally convivial style and said, “We would not blame your Blessedness for feasting, if we knew that you were entertaining angels.”
Meanwhile Honoratus the deacon was still in limbo — or the presbyterate, take your pick. And Gregory reminded him that if any vessels or vestments should go missing he would be in part accountable — as I said, one of the archdeacon’s tasks was caring for the fabric of diocesan property — or in the case of vestments, the property of diocesan fabrics. And as I also noted, in the meantime Natalis had appointed someone else more congenial to his way of seeing things as archdeacon. Dare I say this made it somewhat easier for chalices, vestments and the odd tapestry to go walking.
So Gregory, finding that Natalis had not changed his ways nor provided an accounting for the missing vessels and vestments, wrote a very stern letter to him and all the bishops of his province. In it, he not only threatened to remove the pallium — that fancy version of the stole that popes gave to certain bishops as a sign of their authority — but also to remove him from office and finally to excommunicate him if he didn’t mend his ways.
Well, unlike certain other bishops of more recent vintage threatened with deposition, Natalis took the hint, and said he would straighten things out — although he died before he could actually restore Honoratus to his position. In the ensuing episcopal election, Honoratus — favored by Gregory — contended with Maximus. Maximus had the backing of the soldiers and most of the laity, and in spite of papal support, Maximus became the bishop.
The moral of this story is, You can take the deacon out of the presbyterate, you can try to put the deacon into the episcopate; but in the long run the laity will have the last word.
+ + +
I tell this story because it highlights some of the concerns that you have as deacons, and that I have as a long-time supporter of this distinctive ministry. I say “long-time” with the full awareness that the contemporary revival of the diaconate has not been going on for a long time. We are still very much in the process of working out not only the details but even the broad sweep of things. And I know how that feels. As we see from the current political campaigns, the word “change” can have lots of different meanings, and realities. The problem in the case of the diaconate is that there are at least five historical eras or models for diaconal ministry — and each of them has its own peculiar take on what it means to be a deacon.
The deacons of the first two eras — the apostolic church and the church of the first few centuries — seem to have a good bit in common, if we are to judge from Gregory’s evidence. Deacons were a distinctive order of ministry, responsible for the nuts and bolts of the church, the physical property and the day-to-day operation of the institution, in particular the property, relief and outreach programs. Even as late as Thomas Becket, who was Archdeacon of Canterbury before he became Archbishop of Canterbury, deacons functioned as the main workforce of the diocese, with the archdeacon almost like a chief administrative officer.
In the third phase — that scholastical era when the hot topic of sacramental theology came to a boil — the diaconate seems to get lost in the shuffle, seen primarily as a stepping-stone towards the priesthood. This was when Aristotle came in, with the shift in focus to the “character” of the minister rather than the activities of the ministry, and the priestly office came to take up more and more responsibility — it developed a kind of Middle Ages spread. It was all about priests then: the diaconate came to be seen as preparation for priesthood, and the episcopate not as a separate order at all, but as a kind of senior class of priesthood. This was back when they all had subdeacons to kick around — and the three orders of ministry were subdeacon, deacon and priest (which included the bishop as a kind of “high priest”).
Then we come to the Anglican era, when things were restored a bit to the older model by teasing apart the order of priest and bishop, and the subdeacon faded into memory. To give a distinctive flavor to the diaconate, there emerged the perpetual deacon — a very Episcopalian office which in many places came to be a kind of permanent senior warden, unlike the ancient deacons very much attached to the parish, and in many cases the bane of any new rector. I can recall the rector of my own parish, Father Basil Law of blessed memory, saying to me in the mid-70s, when the diaconate began to be revived in this diocese: “Oh, Tobias, they’re bringing back the deacons. We had one once — you can’t get rid of them!” It is sad that a once noble ministry had come to be seen like some kind of recalcitrant mildew.
This was the early phase of our own time’s effort to revive a diaconal order and ministry that recovers some of the freedom and responsibility that the office entails — that graceful capacity for change to meet emerging needs that gives a title to this retreat. It has not always been an easy ride — I mean, we all know that most Episcopalians think the motto of the church is “Change is Bad.” So it has been a bumpy course in rather unchartered waters, from the early resistance of those who, like Father Basil, remembered the immovable perpetual deacons of yesteryear — to the practical difficulties we still see when parish priests don’t know enough about the diaconate to be of help in discernment or deployment.
Another part of our present difficulty lies in coming once again to see the diaconate as relating chiefly to the diocese rather than to the parish. This introduces tension, as with a call to the priesthood, when a person is discerned by a community of faith to be a valuable minister, only to be told, for all practical terms, to take their ministry elsewhere. This is, of course, a significant change from the nineteenth century model of perpetual deacons that is still soaked into the woodwork of many of our parishes, for, as I noted before, deacons were meant to be more mobile from the beginning. However, it is no good pretending that we still live in the nineteenth century any more than the second or the sixth — or even the twentieth! Even presbyters don’t stay put for as long as they used to, on average. The world has changed and very few people are born, live their whole lives, and die in the same village — or the same parish. Like it or not, we live in a time and a world in which transition and change are very much a part of all of our lives. Those who will minister for 30 or 40 years in the same place will be rare indeed — whether deacon, priest, or bishop.
+ + +
This presents us — all of us, whatever our order or ministry — with challenges and opportunities. Times of transition — liminal times, boundary times — can be painful and disorienting, but they can also open us up to new possibilities that we didn’t perceive before. And I would say that this is something for which the diaconate is particularly well suited. For the deacon stands at the pivot point, the fulcrum point, the point at which a small pressure here or wise word there can shape what follows.
As you know, in the eastern liturgy the deacon stands in the door to the inner sanctuary and communicates with the laity gathered outside the iconostasis as well as addressing prayers and exhortations to the inside — to the presbyters and bishop. The deacon communicates. As our own liturgy for the ordination of deacons says,“You are to interpret to the Church the needs, concerns, and hopes of the world.” In this the deacon is sensational — the deacon is the sense organ for the church, the one who perceives the needs of the world; and is also the voice of the church to the church — communicating those needs to the church: the whole church assembled. This is also one of the reasons that the rubrics assign first choice for leading the prayers of the people to the deacon, explicitly so in four out of the seven forms provided (including the form in Rite I).
This is why the deacon needs to be free to roam while at the same time being connected to the congregation that the deacon serves; and a major part of that service consists in bringing to that congregation’s attention not only its own needs but the needs of those outside. The deacon is like the fisherman who casts the net out into the sea beyond and draws it back — full of needs, concerns and hopes, into the vessel of the church. And this can, of course, leave you feeling like a stretched out rubber band, ready to snap.
The only enduring solution to this tension lies in a simple motto: It’s not about you. This is, ultimately, the motto of any really good servant, of any good minister — and let’s remember that both minister and servant are translations of the Greek word diakonos. A good servant or minister — a good deacon — by focusing on the task at hand and the needs of others can become forgetful of self — the prideful self, the judging self, the hungry and needy self sometimes (for we all have needs). This motto applies to all kinds ministries, of course — not just to deacons. So while I’m talking to you deacons I’m also listening to myself: and the advice applies to a busy priest and a busy bishop as well as to a busy deacon or busy layperson. Service means a posture geared towards others — to their needs. And it contains in itself the precious seed of self-forgetfulness, which, if we will allow it, will, by dying, bring forth fruit in abundance.
There is a story told of psychiatrist Karl Menninger, who was asked what people should do in a case of nervous anxiety. Menninger offered this prescription: “Go home, dress for work, leave your house and lock the door behind you; go to the poor part of town across the tracks, find someone who really needs help, and then help them!” Part of the wisdom of Saint Benedict was the awareness that work can be a wonderful way to take your focus off yourself. Service isn’t about you, but about those you serve — and the more focused you are on them, the ones you serve, the less you will find yourself an obstacle to your own ministry.
+ + +
The good news, when I say it’s not all about you, lies in another function of the deacon. I reminded you that the deacon is responsible for that sensational function — bringing the church’s attention to the needs, concerns, and hopes of the world. The deacon also gets to have the last word in our liturgy — go do it! The deacon gets to tell everybody else, “It’s not about you” — we are all in this together, and it isn’t that you the deacon has to solve all the problems of the world — what you do is tell the church about them and then say, Church: let’s get to work, in the power of the Spirit. For you are part of that church as much as the people whom you dismiss, as much as the priest of the parish, as much as the bishop of the diocese. The whole body of the church, equipped with all these various organs doing their own functions, working together, but not obsessed with themselves or each other, can get about the work of God, to help serve a suffering world. By setting our selves aside, losing ourselves, we not only gain the world, but serve it.
I’ll speak a bit more tomorrow about this ministry of service, and how by keeping our focus on those we serve we can help reduce the tension in our own lives, a tension misdirected to our own wants and needs. Such service is paradoxically liberating — but then, you know that too, for we all serve the one who came to serve us, and whose service is perfect freedom.
And they lived happily ever after.
As some may know, I had hoped to attend the Lambeth Conference, but other responsibilities, and a few kerfluffles, got in the way. Nonetheless, I am in virtual attendance today, via this short essay in the Lambeth Witness, which is also available on-line.
Jesus portrays the Word as seed scattered abroad, a striking image for the generosity and breadth of Christ’s mission to the world — but also the extent to which the Word requires soil as well as sowing in order to bear fruit.
This is in keeping with the truth that the Son, the living Word, does nothing on his own (John 5:19,30; 8:28). So, too, the Bible, the written Word, does not work alone, but takes root in the heart, and is interpreted under the stewardship of the church by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, becoming fruitful through the Church’s mission and its many members. Ultimately, the truth of the interpretation will be found in the fruit and harvest they bear. (Isaiah 55:10-11)
As the deacon and evangelist Philip showed the Ethiopian, true interpretation of Scripture will point us to Christ (Acts 8). Christ is the living Word to whom the written Word leads us in the Way to the Truth, and thence to Life; and Scripture is fruitful as it performs the task for which we are assured it is sufficient. God’s purpose is to bring people to the new Life of faith — as it did the Ethiopian, who, with the Spirit’s guidance and at Philip’s teaching saw the Truth, and immediately asked to be baptized into the new Life, into Christ’s Body, the Church.
That whole Church (laity, deacons, priests and bishops) is engaged in this process, each and all called to be ‘soil’ for the word to take root — to bear ‘fruit with its seed in it’ (Genesis 1:29), seed which they will further spread. Bishops, as the senior presbyters, have a specific role in teaching; but in coming to decisions at Lambeth, do well to recall Resolution 24 of Lambeth 1968: ‘That no major issue in the life of the Church should be decided without the full participation of the laity in discussion and in decision.’ The harvest is most plentiful when the seed is cast most widely, to many fertile fields, by many workers, all of them servants of the one Lord, whatever their order of ministry. §
Tobias Haller BSG
In a July 2008 Episcopal Life article, my colleague Ian Douglas quotes the Archbishop of Canterbury as saying, in reference to the upcoming Lambeth Conference:
The main focus I long to see at this conference is the better equipping of bishops to fulfill their task as agents and enablers of mission, as co-workers with God's mission in Jesus Christ.
Clearly it would be good thing for the bishops to improve the quality of their own collegial work. However, what is most important, when they leave Lambeth and return home to their dioceses, is that the work continues with a different set of co-workers: the rest of the church: laity, deacons and priests. Mission isn't just about God and the bishops. God does not appear to intend a model of trickle-down mission, but rather grass roots. Jesus, after all, came to fisherfolk, not the hierarchy, to choose his missionaries. So the bishops need to be prepared not only to work with their episcopal colleagues, domestic and foreign, but with all of the other missionary members of the church, not lording it over them, but as Christ did, working among them. To paraphrase John the Evangelist (1 John 4:20), If you cannot work with your brothers and sisters in Christ, whom you have seen, you cannot work with God, whom you have not seen.
I understand that the work of the Apostle John is to be part of the substance of the Lambeth Bible study. May the words of the Scripture enlighten the minds of the bishops, to strengthen them in the mission they share with the whole church.
Tobias Haller BSG
In 1968 (Resolution 24) Lambeth stated
The Conference recommends that no major issue in the life of the Church should be decided without the full participation of the laity in discussion and in decision.
In 1978 (Resolution 11) Lambeth said,
The Conference advises member Churches not to take action regarding issues which are of concern to the whole Anglican Communion without consultation with a Lambeth Conference or with the episcopate through the Primates Committee, and requests the primates to initiate a study of the nature of authority within the Anglican Communion.
Something appears to have happened to the laity between 1968 and 1978. Have they gone astray? Or have the shepherds, overly concerned with their own identity as bishops and primates, wandered off themselves? And are they continuing on that path?
Tobias Haller BSG
Bishop Cyrus Pitman of Eastern Newfoundland and Labrador is acting as a true shepherd in calling all his clergy together to determine their desire to remain loyal to the ordination vows they took, or to follow the self-styled prophets of the True Faith into schism. In a news story in the Toronto Star, an American schismatic opines that such "loyalty pressure" will begin to be felt everywhere. One would have thought, given the ecclesiastical nature of the vows (with explicit reference to obedience to real live leadership rather than the dictates of one's own private judgment) that no "pressure" would be necessary. But times have changed, and as in the days of the Judges, people often simply do what they think best.
Some will say, But isn't that what Canada and the US did in not following the dictates of Lambeth and the Primates? The difference, of course, is that no one has taken vows to follow the advice and counsel of either Lambeth or the Primates as a body. These bodies usurp and presume an authority they do not have.
Needless to say, it is also the duty of a bishop to gather, not to scatter, the flock; and certainly not to woo the clergy and laity into schism. This struck me in particular due to this from the first reading in the Daily Office this morning:
Jeremiah 23:1-4 Woe be unto the pastors that destroy and scatter the sheep of my pasture! saith the LORD. Therefore thus saith the LORD God of Israel against the pastors that feed my people; Ye have scattered my flock, and driven them away, and have not visited them: behold, I will visit upon you the evil of your doings, saith the LORD. And I will gather the remnant of my flock out of all countries whither I have driven them, and will bring them again to their folds; and they shall be fruitful and increase. And I will set up shepherds over them which shall feed them: and they shall fear no more, nor be dismayed, neither shall they be lacking, saith the LORD.
Thank God some bishops, such as Cyrus Pitman, know how to act like bishops: to preserve unity by calling people together.
Tobias Haller BSG
Well, it seems the leadership of the Diocese of San Joaquin have gone and done it. That is, the Bishop and a majority of the clergy and laity have voted to change the diocesan constitution and to realign themselves, their souls and bodies, with the Anglican Province of the Southern Cone. Souls and bodies they may have charge of; it remains to be seen what becomes of the real property and assets, and the loyal Episcopalians (clergy and lay) who remain.
Now, of course, this is a deception; a baseless fantasy movement. Dioceses cannot so realign themselves motu proprio, on their own, any more than a man can divorce his wife or a wife her husband by saying thrice, "I divorce thee!" The church is governed by laws, and this lack of a capacity to divorce is all the more clear, constitutionally speaking, in cases such as that of San Joaquin, which began its life as a missionary diocese and was only granted full status in the 1960s. Contrary to the imaginings of former Bishop of San Joaquin John-David Schofield, the canonical silence on the subject of how dioceses become independent does not signify consent, but inconceivability. Anyone familiar with the history of The Episcopal Church should know that, and numerous canons make it clear: the territorial limits of the United States play a definitive role in determining the relationship of a domestic diocese with the only legitimately constituted Anglican presence in our portion of North America, which is to say, The Episcopal Church.
John-David wishes however to continue in his illusions, and has nourished many of his clergy and lay leadership on this addictive brew. Regardless of these dreams, now that he and they have removed their allegiance to The Episcopal Church, and allied themselves with the distant Cone of the South, it is abundantly clear that they have abandoned the communion of The Episcopal Church, hold its laws and its leaders in contempt, and declare themselves the true believers and possible martyrs to the cause. And the end will come, no doubt about it. The inevitable canonical process of the real Episcopal Church will now begin to be engaged, and the see of San Joaquin declared vacant; a number of clergy will be adjudged to have abandoned this communion and they too will be deposed.
Tobias Haller BSG
They came from as far as the antipodes: primates and bishops, laity and clergy, theologians, journalists and politicians, gathering in Chicago at Seabury-Western Theological Seminary for three days of intense discussion, planning, and strategizing. Theologians and canonists read papers (which will be available on the web in relatively short order), the assembly divided into small groups and regathered into plenary, and much newsprint was marked. Why? A modest goal — To help the church recover its soul, as a community of neighbors, a fellowship of diverse members unified by the love which called them together, through the power of the Holy Spirit.
The Chicago Consultation, as it is being called for short, addressed the prevailing boundary issue that has beset our church and our Communion over the last decades, and most irritably over the last six years: the place of GLBT people in the church’s life and ministry.
In plenary sessions and small groups, we challenged ourselves to find a way forward that would be grounded in the powerful message of Jesus’ call and care. We focused on the the full inclusion of those whom some have determined to be inappropriate minsters of the Gospel, embracing the mandate and charge which comes with the highest authority, and in response to the question, “Who is my neighbor?”
Lambeth is coming, little more than half a year away; and it too will be a forum which will provide the bishops, albeit non-legislatively, an opportunity to consider and reconsider their own past actions, and to recognize that the so-called consensus of 1998 was far from complete even then, and has demonstrably revealed itself no longer to exist, having led to increasing conflict, dissent, and in some cases, division.
Further away on the time-line is the next session of the General Convention. This will provide us with the opportunity to reevaluate the usefulness of resolution B033, and address the underlying issue of the appropriateness of moving forward in our growing recognition that same-sex couples, particularly in those parts of our country where the civil authority already recognizes the value of their relationships, deserve the church’s full support in ordering their lives in consistency with the Gospel principle: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”
This is the only “agenda” guiding the Chicago Consultation: to call and help the church to live the Gospel it proclaims.
Tobias Haller BSG
For more information, see Inch at a Time, Preludium, and keep an eye on Episcopal Café.
The Episcopal Diocese of New York held its 231st Convention this past Saturday, some four hundred voting clergy and laity plus about an equal number of alternates and supporting folk, and visitors from Africa, India, and England -- pressed together and packed down a bit in the half-closed-off and under-renovation but still humongous Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine.
We heard some stirring addresses: in particular Bishop Sisk challenged the state of the state we are in, when leaders of state seem not to know what is or is not torture. A resolution strongly condemning such equivocation was overwhelmingly adopted.
On the white smoke front, I am pleased to report that I was elected to an additional term as a Clergy Deputy to General Convention (2009) and also as a clergy member of the diocesan Standing Committee. The former will allow me to continue to be a burr under a few prelatical saddles, and contribute what I may to the ongoing life and direction of The Episcopal Church at a national and international level. The latter will allow me to address the interesting paradox of having a seat on a standing committee. I imagine it saves a good deal of wear and tear on the chairs, and keeps meetings short and to the point.
Tobias Haller BSG
Archbishop Rowan has clarified the intent of his earlier note to Bishop Howe, and this clarification is to some extent helpful, as it corroborates my suspicion that the Howe communication was a nonce letter and not intended as a formal policy statement. Still, it is disturbing to note even in this communication a persistent subtle diminishment of the “national church.”
It isn’t really a matter of “units” as such. Talk of “basic units” gets a bit odd, as we could say the basic unit of a church is a brick, but no one worships in a brick! So while I acknowledge the Ignatian notion that the sacramental fullness of the church can be found in the liturgy with all orders of ministry present — a notion celebrated by Bishop Zizioulas — yet when it comes to polity the province is the smallest church entity that can exercise all of the functions of a church — including the creation of new bishops.
So the Archbishop has clarified that what he was getting at is that priests must relate to the wider church through their diocese. What he doesn’t mention is the similar fact that bishops (and dioceses) no less relate to the communion through their province. There is an organic unity here that works on up through the various levels, about which I will speak more below. For the nonce, though, let me note that in support of the Archbishop’s view concerning priests, the defining canonical point for the licensing of foreign clergy both in TEC and the CofE is not merely that they are validly ordained and related to some bishop or other, but that they are a “member of a church in communion” with the receiving church. Yes, their membership is through a diocese (hence the need for a letter dimissory), but it is the connection of that diocese with a church — which is to say, a national, provincial, or particular church — with which the receiving church is in communion that makes the ultimate difference in their being licensed or not. Dioceses simply do not stand alone, apart from the national or provincial church, and they derive much of their competence to function from participation in the larger body.
Of course, bishops as individuals may well relate directly to Canterbury when he invites them to Lambeth — but even this invitation hinges to a large extent upon their being bishops of a church that is a member of the Anglican Communion. This importance of the national church is what appears to be missing, or downplayed, in Archbishop Rowan’s thinking.
The Fractal Church
We are at a point where the integrity of Anglicanism as a specific form of polity is in danger. I put this in the framework of the equilibrium of systems: the “equilibrium point” of Anglicanism (as opposed to that in other systems of church government) has been, from the at least the time of recognized ecclesiastical independence of Scotland and the US, to reside at the provincial level. We have never had a higher governing body to oversee the relationships of the various provinces. Anglicanism’s global identity has been that of a communion, a fellowship of autonomous provincial churches — neither a “world church” like the Roman Catholic Church, nor a federation like the Reformed Churches.
At the levels of polity below the international, Anglicanism (at least in the US and England, as well as a number of other provinces) has a fractal quality. Fractal structures, for those not familiar with them, are structures that replicate certain features at various scales. This gives them a certain organic robustness and resiliency. The Episcopal Church has such a structure — from parish to diocese to province — which has not yet been effectively mirrored to the communion level. That is, at every level we Episcopalians have governance by clergy and laity together — but then the interprovincial level gives us things like Lambeth and the Primates. Now, this is in part because — while The Episcopal Church has preserved lay involvement, inherited from England, at all levels (in part via Bishop White’s familiarity with the US Congress), and the Church of England continued its lay involvement (originally through the Crown, then King-in-Parliament, and later in the Synod) — not all of the other provinces in the Anglican Communion share in this particular aspect at either local, diocesan, or provincial levels. Generally speaking, the churches of the Communion that related most directly to England or the US (as opposed to churches arising out of the ventures of missionary societies) tended to preserve this kind of involvement by the whole People of God.
And that is, I firmly believe, part of the problem for many of those provinces in understanding how either The Episcopal Church and the Church of England function. Churches in which bishops are elected only by other bishops, or in which the Archbishop has ultimate veto power, will not well fit into a larger entity at a level of scale resembling that in the provinces in which the laity and clergy are more intimately involved in provincial government.
Rather, these churches are accustomed to their own more clericalized fractal hierarchy: the parish priest who sits in the diocesan house of clergy; the diocesan bishop who sits in the house of bishops; the primate who sits in the Primates meeting — it all seems very logical, but it leaves out that intrinsic element so vital to Anglicanism in its founding expression: the involvement of the whole People of God in the government of the church.
I think we are in definite need of some form of an Anglican Congress, involving laity and clergy as well as bishops, at the level of the Communion. Though the ACC is a move in that direction, it has been subsumed by the pressure towards the episcopate in Lambeth and the Primates.
A fractal structure may help to restore some of our equilibrium: the balance we have enjoyed over the last two centuries or so is being pressured by various forces. This is, I think, the fundamental “tear in the fabric” that results when provinces have a different internal structure that is not replicated at the higher level: it is not just that some provinces have done things not all provinces approve of, but that we arrive at these decisions in very different ways, and yet have no overarching superstructure to govern the resulting tension — we are merely pulled back and forth in the quest either for more elasticity or more rigidity.
A properly fractal solution would be to work for an Anglican Congress — not more power to Lambeth or the Primates. The authority of such a Congress would have to be decided, of course, and agreed to by all — if, indeed we decide we need that level of governance. It might be good to begin by exploring the variations in polity in and between the member churches. A common agreed upon code of canon law might also be helpful, though it might equally be decided to take more of a live-and-let-live approach as far as internal affairs go.
Speaking practically, though, I would suggest that an Anglican Congress might be something a bit larger than the present ACC, with perhaps three persons in each order representing each province. My hope would be that this would be a body for discussion and implementation of broader global concerns, not primarily the place to hash out disagreements between the provinces — which I really do think are best handled ad hoc between the disagreeing parties, even to the extent of impaired communion. (I don’t think all problems have to be solved in the short run; some will take care of themselves in time.) So I see the primary utility of such a Congress as a more effective means at communication and mission organization. In fact, I think Anglican Mission Congress should be the proper name.
The dangers of final decisions
Ultimately, we may be dealing with a case of Schrodinger’s Church: we have been able to maintain our state of being neither congregational nor curial as a communion, but if we force the question, we may find that we will collapse into one form or the other — and Anglicanism’s experiment will be over. That, I think, would be a great loss to the Body of Christ.
Tobias Haller BSG
In the extended online interviews for “Religion and Ethics Newsweekly” this week, Bishop Duncan of The Common Cause Partners states:
The last time that Episcopal dioceses separated from the Episcopal Church was in the American Civil War. Nine dioceses actually separated for a period of years. When the war was over the Episcopal Church came back together. There was an important social issue, I mean the whole issue of slavery divided the nation. The North and the South were divided. When the issue was settled the church came back together. Where we are right now is seeing the church moving in two distinctly different directions on issues of Christian morality quite different than the slavery issue.
Bishop Duncan’s account is telling both for what he omits and what he includes. First of all, from The Episcopal Church’s perspective, those southern dioceses were not “separated” — their bishops were “absent” but the roll was still called down yonder wherever the General Convention met.
More importantly, the rationale given for the separation by the separationists was the importance of defending the integrity of the national church. Since the Confederacy was a new nation, it was necessary for a new national church to be constituted for this new nation — just exactly as it had been “necessary” for the The Episcopal Church to separate from the Church of England at the creation of the United States, as the preface to our first BCP notes. Civil War veteran chaplain, and historian of The Episcopal Church, Archdeacon Charles C. Tiffany recorded the actions of the first Confederate Conclave:
It was unanimously resolved that the secession of the Southern States from the United States, and the formation of the government of the Confederate States, rendered necessary an independent organization of the dioceses within the seceded States. (496*)
So the reason for the “division” in the church was not disagreement over slavery, but the concept of the integrity of a national church — the very thing Duncan’s movement contradicts. To our shame, slavery was not the issue that “divided” the church — the church had, on the contrary, refused to take a national position on slavery in the interests of keeping the peace. As Tiffany put it,
The Episcopal Church as an organization had, from the beginning, determined to keep aloof from party politics, and, more fully that other ecclesiastical bodies, had done so. Her membership was very varied among the influential classes of society. Many of the distinguished statesmen of all parties were of her communion. They acted in their several political spheres as citizens and as churchmen, neither gave nor withheld their countenance in political action. The triennial meetings of the General Convention had made the clergy and laity of the North and the South familiar and friendly with one another. The sectional institution of slavery, which occasioned the secession movement, had not been made the subject of general ecclesiastical legislation. It was left to the regulation of the dioceses in which it existed. (494)
Thus, by allowing for local option on the question of slavery, The Episcopal Church was enabled to remain united, until the matter boiled over in the secular arena.
Finally, it is fascinating to me to see that Bishop Duncan appears to think that our present divisions over sexuality are of quite a different moral significance — and obviously far more important — than the question of slavery. It seems to me that this sad past chapter of our national history offers little to support his present pressure for division.
Tobias Haller BSG
on the feast of S Irenaeus of Lyons
preached at the Finger Lakes Conference • June 28 1999
Tobias Haller BSG
Have nothing to do with stupid and senseless controversies... — 2 Timothy 2:23
The Apostle Paul warned his young protege Timothy, “Have nothing to do with stupid and senseless controversies; you know that they breed quarrels.” Like most advice, this bit of avuncular Pauline wisdom has largely been ignored. An agnostic viewer of the church’s history — or an honest Christian — might be tempted to say that the church’s history consists of little else besides stupid and senseless controversies.
Christ went to the cross to save the world, but the proximate cause of his predicament was violent controversy about the sabbath, the Temple, and various fine points of Jewish dietary law, and the precarious balance of power between Rome and the tetrarchs. Peter and Paul faced the problems of what we’d now call a pluralistic society, and the question of whether, and how far, Gentiles should be let in on the Christian thing — and whether, in the case of men at least, such an entry required parting with a nonvital portion of their anatomy. Later Irenaeus wrote a big, fat book about heresies, most of them now long forgotten. The Holy Fathers who hammered out the Nicene creed argued on and on about the difference between “same as” and “similar to” — and their successors in the Reformation argued about double predestination and allowing the chalice to the laity. The list goes on and on…
And please don’t mistake me: I do not say these matters were of no importance. Although the burning issues of one age are the cold ashes of the next, while they burn, they do give some light, and as the Gospel appointed for the feast of Saint Irenaeus has it, giving light is a large part of what we are to be about. (Luke 11:33-36) It is out of these conflicts — some of them now seeming so trivial and pointless — that the church took shape, defining itself in these tensions. As Saint Paul himself once observed, with a flash of Hegelian insight, it is through controversies and factions that the genuine truth is eventually discerned. (1 Cor. 11:19)
The downside of all of this is the hurt and harm that happens in the process. As parties form around various positions, mutual anathemas are issued, and where the power of the sword falls into its hand, orthodoxy can be a terrible thing indeed, mowing down those it considers heretics — which is just a fancy Greek word applied to members of the opposite party.
But if we look closely at our church, the church that survived the controversies, that was formed out of these tensions, the strange thing is that our surviving church quite often represents the forces of change and development, not the orthodox defenders of what they think of as the faith once given. Yesterday’s heresies become today’s orthodoxies, and presto chango: who is the heretic? If nothing else, none of us Gentiles would be here if the Circumcision Party had had their way. Even though they had scripture and tradition on their side, the church moved on.
As it has a way of doing. Because the church is not so much about taking up a position as in being a way. The Spirit moves where it wills, leading a pilgrim people. And to follow the Spirit, and to follow Christ, means pulling that cross from the ground and carrying it every day of your life, not knowing where it will be planted next. If the church is to be true to its own best self, it must always be on the move, and follow the One who is the Way.
+ + +
The other thing about heretics — the orthodox kind, the kind who get left behind when the church moves on, the kind who think they have God in their pocket next to their zipper-flap bibles — the thing about heretics is that they are always so sure of the truth. Their truth, that is. Now, as Professor Indiana Jones told his class in archeology, “I’m here to teach you about facts. If you want to talk about truth you’d better check the philosophy department.” But the orthodox heretics have forgotten that: they treat the truth like facts. They think it’s all clear and self-evident, printed in black and white, with words of Christ in red. In doing so, they neglect the living Truth who is not a fact but a Person; who is a Word that is always being spoken in our hearts, not set in stone or printed on india paper in red ink. Christ, the living Word is also the living Truth, the Truth that reveals itself not in static (and therefore dead) absolutes but in the relatedness that binds all things in one. The real Truth is about relationships, for it is out of relationships that reality itself is constituted, from the Holy Trinity on down.
+ + +
We are, like it or not, in the midst of another Reformation. The parties are formed up, taking their positions, marshaling their data. Out of this turmoil new life will arise, but many will suffer in the process. Is there a better way? Is there a nobler truth? You know there is. And you know who he is. Only Christ, whose mother hen wings stretch out and over the universe of human fallibility can gently rustle us together so none of us gets lost. Only Christ whose naked Truth was a scandal to Jews and a folly to Greeks can embarrass us into setting down our dog-eared Bibles with a blush of shame, as we realize who it is we have been arguing with, demeaning and demonizing. He is the Way, he is the Truth, and he is Life. And before him all our controversies, no matter how deeply convinced we are of their importance, become senseless and stupid. He is the Way, and the Truth, and Life. May we always walk in that Way, rejoice in that Truth, live in that Life.+
from the Deputies to the General Convention from the Episcopal Diocese of New York
the following was unanimously adopted by the deputation
General Response to the Report
1. Do you think an Anglican Covenant is necessary and/or will help to strengthen the interdependent life of the Anglican Communion? Why or why not?
It would be helpful at this point in time for the Anglican Communion to make up its mind whether the needs of the world and the mission of the church in response to those needs will be better served by a more strictly and centrally regulated structure, or by a more open model deployed for ministry. We favor the latter as more in keeping with Christ’s commission to the church, which is focused not on itself and its structures but on the proclamation of the saving message to a wounded world. It appears that the more we attempt to secure our inner agreements the more we focus on the things that divide us. The Anglican Communion has been known until recently as a body governed not by statute but by bonds of affection, and a Covenant, if needed, should, unlike the present proposal, focus on the affection rather than the bondage. Such a Covenant would be tolerant of diversity and encourage bilateral cooperation in meeting local and global needs through partnerships rather than promoting more complex and rigid structures, as the present proposal seems to advise.
The Introduction to the Draft
2. How closely does this view of communion accord with our understanding of the development and vocation of the Anglican Communion?
The introduction to the Draft Covenant accurately reflects the nature of our concerns as a communion, and flags some important truths; most particularly that communion is based in the person of Christ, and the work of the church in the mission of Christ.
However, the introduction (and the Draft itself) avoid or ignore these truths, and focus on the institutional or political aspect of the Communion as a global body, as if the mere existence of a unified ecclesiastical body were sufficient to recognize the reality of communion and to effect its goals. The Draft gives unity in Christ through Baptism lip-service, while emphasizing institutional unity. It pays little attention to the fact that institutional structures that bind the work of the church too closely can limit its effectiveness in meeting local needs; and it is good to remember that all ministry is, ultimately, local; this reflects the reality of the Incarnation which has global effect precisely because of the scandal of particularity by which God chose to act in a specific time and place. The global witness of a global church is only salvific when its work and witness advance God’s kingdom in particular places, meeting particular needs. There are many global movements in the world, and not all of them advance God’s kingdom; and there are many evangelical efforts that are very effective with no global involvement at all. There is, in short, no particular virtue in being part of a global community unless that global community is ordered towards making Christ known in every particular time and place, and actually effective in doing so.
It may well be the special gift of the Anglican Communion to remain as it has been in carrying out God’s mission: a fellowship of autonomous churches, rather than a “global church.” There are other “global churches” (such as the Roman Catholic Church) which function as an institutionally unified body, and the unspoken questions suggested in the approach taken by the Draft must be, “Why abandon one of the distinctive marks of Anglicanism in order to be more like other global churches?” Are we, in doing this, seeking to mimic a structure that has its own manifest flaws and faults, rather than accepting and working with and through the difficulties inherent in our own?
The Preamble
3. Is this a sufficient rationale for entering into a Covenant? Why or why not?
The Preamble would present a sufficient rationale for a Covenant if there were any evidence that the proposal actually could achieve the goal of helping the particular and national churches “to proclaim more effectively in our different contexts the Grace of God revealed in the Gospel.” This is by no means evident, and the recent disagreements and tensions experienced in the Communion appear to indicate the contrary. Teachings on some issues supported by a majority of the Communion may, at any given time, work contrary to the advance of the Gospel in particular parts of the world. An examination of the history of Lambeth statements on such matters as polygamy and birth control are exemplary of this unfortunate tendency for global decisions to impede rather than further local evangelism.
The church must be able to proclaim the eternal and unchanging Gospel in different social and cultural contexts, and in doing so recognize that the Gospel itself emerges from and was originally presented to particular cultures and societies. The testimony of the early church shows that while the core beliefs concerning Christ and his saving acts were not subject to cultural accommodation, there were other beliefs and customs on which a range of accepted positions was tolerable, and that it is dangerous to confuse the two.
The present tensions concern matters that are not core teachings of the Gospel and Creeds; and such differences of opinion on moral discipline have long been acknowledged in the larger Christian community. A monolithic position on a social or moral issue, without the capacity to adapt it or depart from it in order to meet local needs, will not serve the mission of the church. It may well lead to a church with a heart of stone, sure of its own rightness and perhaps deaf to the Spirit speaking through the people of God.
The church must also be prepared to recognize its own errors and missteps (Articles XIX and XXI), and be aware that a rigid or authoritarian structure may impede openness to the critique offered not only by the members of the body, but from those not yet part of it. The need for the church to repent from its past sins against indigenous peoples, from the easy equivalence the church made between native cultures and native religions, leading to the cultural equivalent of genocide, lies before us. To confuse the culture of first-century Palestine with the Gospel is as bad as confusing the culture of 16th- or 19th-century Europe with the Gospel. The church must be aware that while there is a danger of deformation by culture, there are times when the church is blind to its own accommodations to past or regional cultures, and more importantly that there are times when the culture can be a corrective to the church.
An example of this is how the church gradually realized its error in supporting slavery, which had been a cultural reality accepted as the norm in the first century world — indeed, to a large extent the single most important institution in first-century global society — and which to our shame remained acceptable into the modern era. The movement to end slavery came as much from the secular Enlightenment as from the leadership of the church; and the Christian influences against slavery were often more vocal in the nonconformist groups than in those with more “global” institutional or established structure.
The Life we Share
4. Do these six affirmations adequately describe The Episcopal Church’s understanding of “common catholicity, apostolicity, and confession of faith? Why or why not?
The affirmations are to a large extent unobjectionable, as they are for the most part slight expansions of the Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateral. However, as with any such general statements, it is in the particular application that problems will arise, as they have in recent times.
5. The Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion and the 1662 Book of Common Prayer (of the Church of England) are not currently authoritative documents for The Episcopal Church. Do you think they should be? Why or why not?
The greatest difficulty with the Draft Covenant’s citation of the Articles of Religion lies in the extent to which the Draft Covenant itself is in conflict with them. One of the characteristic marks of Anglicanism is the autonomy of national or particular churches, with a clear and absolute rejection of any and all episcopal authority from outside. (Article XXXVII, and ordination Oath of the 1662 BCP.) This is a formative element in the creation of the Church of England, and The Episcopal Church, whose ecclesiastical independence from its Mother Church was seen as “necessary” at the time of the American Revolution, as stated in the Preface to the First American Book of Common Prayer.
That first American prayerbook is markedly different from the 1662 version in many and important aspects. The Eucharistic liturgy derives not from the 1662 version, but from the older Edwardian forms preserved and expanded in the Scottish tradition. Many liturgical scholars would say that the Eucharistic rite of 1662 is seriously deficient on many grounds. To offer another example relevant to our present discussion, the marriage rite of the American book is almost completely rewritten from the English version, and significantly amends the theological rationale for marriage embodied in the English rite.
In short, this section of the Draft Covenant would be relatively unobjectionable if the reference to the 1662 Book of Common Prayer were excised, and the remainder of the Covenant brought into line with the Articles. However, there then might well be little of the Draft remaining, as so much of it, with its focus on authority, tends away from national autonomy and Scriptural sufficiency.
Our Commitment to Confession of Faith
6. Is each of these commitments clear and understandable with respect to what is being asked of the member churches and are they consistent with statements and actions made by The Episcopal Church in the General Convention? Why or why not?
A number of the commitments appear to be vague platitudes capable of a very wide degree of interpretation. For example, what are “biblically derived moral values”? As noted above, one can easily derive a biblical moral value for slavery, so long as slave-holders treat their slaves well. And what is the “vision of humanity received by and developed in the communion of member churches”? Human anthropology and its theological significance are highly variable from culture to culture, the variety perhaps nowhere so clearly evident as in the role of women in various parts of the world, and consequently the Communion. It is not abundantly clear that a common vision of humanity exists among the various members.
Point three also contains the seeds of cultural pride referred to above, that the Scripture, as interpreted and applied by the church (especially in its teaching office, which according to the Ordinal resides in the presbyterate, not the episcopate) be a source of illumination, challenge, and transformation to human cultures and systems. While this may be true, the church has often shown itself to be blind to the good inherent in human cultures, and the capacity of culture and its structures to illuminate our understanding of Scripture.
The Life we Share with Others
7. Is the mission vision offered here helpful in advancing a common life of the Anglican Communion and does this need to be a part of the Draft Covenant? Why or why not?
The mission vision laid out in the Draft is the most valuable part of the Covenant. It recognizes the call to transform unjust structures of society, and not all structures simply. This section, by focusing on what the church is for rather than on how it is structured might well constitute the whole of a Covenant. This section should be the touchstone by which the Communion functions; that is, if a given action or structure is not demonstrably enhancing the mission as described here, it had best not be undertaken or established. On that ground, it is not self-evident that the Draft Covenant as a whole will be of any benefit whatever in fulfilling the intent of this section; and will almost certainly lead to paralysis and loss of capacity to witness, as voices for creative dissent are stifled by the need to conform.
Our Unity and Common Life
8. Does this section adequately describe your understanding of the history and respective roles of the “Four Instruments of Communion”? Why or why not?
This section contains many inconsistencies and omissions. The undue focus on the episcopate is evident from the beginning, and not only overlooks the crucial role of the laity, but also of the other orders of ministry. While the ordinal confers the task of preserving unity on the bishop, the teaching office resides with the presbyter; in addition, the task of mission is primarily diaconal, and the whole people of God give their consent and their support. The Covenant ignores this balance.
Equally problematical is the affirmation that the four Instruments of Communion serve “to discern our common mind.” If there truly is a common mind, rather than merely a majority opinion, surely it need not be discerned, since it will be obvious. And while this passage verbally eschews the creation of a juridical central legislative or executive authority, the Covenant itself later goes on to recommend that the Primates Meeting essentially exercise that function. The Holy Spirit is not limited to or discerned by the Instruments of Communion, but is free to move where it wills.
Most importantly, the reduction of the Anglican Consultative Council — the only one of the four Instruments to have a clear constitutional basis and a representation from all orders of ministry — to a merely co-ordinating role (albeit in the most important aspect of our common life: mission) reveals the backwards-telescope reductionism that underlies the whole Covenant.
Finally, in discerning effectiveness, one is challenged to look to the fruits of the Spirit. These fruits are not at all evident in the past or recent work of Lambeth or the Primates, and the Archbishop of Canterbury has been tasked almost beyond his capacity in what appears to be a monastery full of novices with a reluctant abbot. One might observe that without Lambeth 1998 we might not be in the position in which we find ourselves, and reflect that had Lambeth never met at all the world would scarcely have been changed for the worse. Only the Anglican Consultative Council appears to be able to show a record of actual accomplishment for the good of the church and the world in the exercise of mission. It might be that the best course to take at present would be to rely on the already existing constitution of the ACC as the basis for any Covenant (if one is desired) rather than creating one as flawed as this present novel offering.
Unity of the Communion
9. Do you think there needs to be an executive or judicial body for resolving disagreements or disputes in the Anglican Communion? If so, do you think it should be the Primates Meeting as recommended by the Draft Covenant? Explain.
Disagreements can be settled by any number of means. The simplest remedy is to give those who are disagreeable no forum in which to air or enforce their disagreement, and merely to continue to disagree with each other until another generation arises, for whom the former dispute may be irrelevant. Seeking an authoritative solution, however, forces the issue to judgment, and judgment implies winners and losers. The Anglican Communion, from the foundation of Lambeth on, does not have a spectacular track record at settling disputes; yet most of them are forgotten over time.
Settling the authority for resolving disputes with the Primates is the worst possible solution to the dilemma faced by the Communion. Our unity is not based upon our agreement, but upon our Baptism into Christ. He is the head of the body, and the substitution of an oligarchy, whether constituted of Primates or bishops alone, or even of a more representative entity, is a form of submission to an authority which Christ forbade to his apostles, when he said, “The kings of the gentiles exercise authority over them... But with you it shall not be so; rather let the greatest among you become like the youngest.” (Luke 22:25-26) The image that comes to mind with the Draft’s proposal to commit judicial or executive authority (with the capacity to exercise discipline) to the Primates, is that of the servant who was rewarded with a position he then abused, by mistreating and lording his power over the other servants. (Luke 12:45-46) The punishment exacted upon this servant is precisely and literally division. Judgment (even — perhaps especially — when cloaked as “discernment”) will always divide; it will always create a unity of some over against others, at its worst giving in to the utilitarian notion that the peace of the many is to be achieved at the expense of the few.
Rather, if there is to be a Covenant, it should reflect the openness and freedom granted to the children of the God through the Gospel, which is not a spirit of bondage, but of charity and generosity towards those with whom one disagrees, recognizing them as members of the one Body not by virtue of their proclamation but through the blood of the Cross and the waters of Baptism. If Christ is the head, let not the members contend one with another. Christ will speak through his whole body in time, as matters of dissension cease to be divisive, in a natural and organic process. In the meantime, a comprehension of diversity within a willingly unified structure that will not allow itself to be divided, should be the goal of any covenant worthy of the name.
Moreover, this political solution with its focus on the Primates embodies a polity foreign to that of The Episcopal Church. In our church, at each level from parish to the highest synodical body, the laity are involved in leadership and custodianship of the work of the church, in concert with ordained leaders. We realize that this polity seems difficult to those who come from churches in which the episcopate is the font of all leadership. However, we note that the Anglican Consultative Council does replicate this structure at an international level, and commend this body as the primary working group for the communion.
10. What does the phrase “a common mind about matter of essential concern...” mean to you?
The use of essential brings up another conflict with the Articles of Religion, at least if essential is held to be synonymous with necessary. Article XX states that nothing can be deemed necessary for salvation if it cannot clearly be proved from Scripture. This does not mean that the church may not institute or even practice things not proved from Scripture, though it cannot require them, and it dare not require something that is not commendable to Scripture: examples from the Articles themselves are infant baptism (XXVII) and vernacular liturgy (XXIV). Anglicanism has generally held that all that is essential concerning the faith is addressed in the Creeds, and that the church is at liberty in matters of rites and ceremonies. The church’s authority in moral questions is balanced by its own tendencies to err or to fail to distinguish between that which is in Scripture from that which is truly of Scripture.
In our present divisions we are dealing with questions of pastoral theology. Decisions have been made in parts of the Communion that those parts believe to be in accord with Scripture. Those provinces that have made such decisions have done so locally, and with no suggestion that they must be required of all.
The church as a whole has taken advantage of a great deal of leeway concerning pastoral teaching. One of the most troubling phrases in this Covenant, noted above, is “biblically derived moral values” in section 3.1. The church has “derived” many and various moral values from Scripture throughout its long course, some of which few would defend as “moral” — perhaps the most egregious examples are slavery and its later cousin apartheid, which were defended by leaders of the church on biblical grounds. The “common mind” of the church can be in grave error concerning faith and morals, as the Articles attest. Ultimately, we are not saved by our morals or our works; however important they may be, they are not essential; we are saved by faith — and even this is not our fallible and imperfect faith in Christ, but the eternal and unshakeable faith of Christ: his blood, his sacrifice, his work — not ours — in which we participate vicariously, and imperfectly, as “unworthy servants.”
Our Declaration
11. Can you affirm the “fundamental shape” of the Draft Covenant? Why or why not?
The fundamental shape of the Draft does not represent the ideal of comprehension for the sake of truth, and not even compromise for the sake of peace, but rather a less than forthright institution of a substantially judicial procedure explicitly directed, not towards the discernment of agreement or the toleration of diversity, but to the exclusion of dissent based on the considerations of a conciliar entity. This “covenant” is in the form of a weak contract; not a marriage of commitment, but a pre-nuptial agreement containing the seeds of its own dissolution.
12. What do you think are the consequences of signing such a Covenant as proposed in this Draft?
The Covenant could be a benign tool for good or a means to the collapse of the Communion depending on how it is applied. On the whole, it seems to be framed to meet a need some appear to have for a degree of intolerance and rigidity. It represents such a departure from our traditions in polity, and is at such odds even in itself, that it would seem little good could come of it.
Concluding Questions
13. Having read the Draft Covenant as a whole do you agree with the CDG’s assertion that “nothing which is commended in the draft text of the Covenant can be said to be ‘new’”? Why or why not?
Contrary to the CDG’s assertion, this Covenant represents a significant departure in polity and governance for the Anglican Communion. Although language from the Anglican tradition is scattered throughout, the significance given to this language, and the emphasis on its employment has shifted from autonomous provincial government with joint cooperation and consultation, to a global body with central authority for leadership (and with an implied power of exclusion), placed in the hands of a body that had no formal existence as such prior to 1978, and has thus existed for a single generation. The elevation of “biblical morality” (as discerned by that authority) to the level of “essential,” is also a novel development.
The Draft Covenant thus seems to be a new patch put on the shabby and worn but still serviceable old cloak of the Anglican Communion; and the implied threat of schism (or exile) will create a worse tear than might happen if we were to exercise patience and charity instead of judgment.
14. In general, what is your response to the Draft Covenant taken as a whole? What is helpful in the draft? What is not-helpful? What is missing? Additional comments?
Our general response to the Draft Covenant is that it is unnecessary. The Anglican Consultative Council already has a workable Constitution for the governance of the international affairs of the Communion, and individual provinces have the right to restrict their interaction with other member provinces when and as they see fit, without undoing the whole structure. It is better to allow such temporary bilateral divisions on an ad hoc basis than to legislate division at a larger scale.
The section on Mission is a clear articulation of the purpose and direction of the church. That this is a product of the Anglican Consultative Council argues for the wisdom of emphasizing the scope of this body rather than the Primates or Lambeth.
The general tone of the Draft is unhelpful in that it appears to be less than honest in naming the real problems we face, and by seeking a solution based on bondage rather than freedom. It also fails to take adequate consideration of the importance of our baptismal unity, in spite of giving it lip-service. By focusing on implicit disunity at its conclusion, the Draft contains a poison pill.
The Draft fails to give adequate recognition to the ministries of laity, deacons and priests as distinctive participants in the governance of the church. The Draft appears willing to sacrifice those who dissent from a majority view on the altar of unity, thereby taking a view more akin to that of Caiaphas than Gamaliel; a view more punitive than paschal, willing to sacrifice others instead of exercising patience in the humble realization that the church’s process of reception demonstrably takes many generations. This document has grown out of impatience, haste, and a rush to judgment; from those ready to speak, but slow to listen.
The closing paragraph of section 7 refers to “the substance of the covenant” but places the interpretation of what that substance is in the hands of the Instruments of Communion. From our perspective, the substance appears to consist of an agreement never to disagree, but to excise the disagreeable. It is evident that this represents an essentially protestant approach, in which the church seeks to purify itself of minority views, and hence divides again and again. This is not how the church catholic has functioned at its best, when change has taken place locally, and these changes have been received (or not) throughout the larger church. Surely we have noticed that at least two major issues of division from the time of the Reformation have now been adopted by the very church that refused to allow them: the vernacular liturgy and the common cup. Change may take time, and patience is a virtue.
We referred to novices above, and the nature of the novitiate is that it requires practice and action in order properly to discern if a proposed way is right or not. It is no use simply studying patterns and taking measurements. Ultimately one must put on the clothing and see if it fits. These matters cannot be settled academically, but only by trial, and trial on a local level is the most effective (and safest) way to determine utility, rather than imposing change on the whole all at once. In this, experience is not a mere addition to the so-called Anglican way; it is an unavoidable teacher in that way. To a very real extent this Covenant stifles the possibilities for novelty through its own novel proposal for a central authority. It will quench the Spirit in order to serve the institution.
Members of the Deputation
The Rev. Gerald Keucher
Diane B. Pollard, Deputation Chair
The Rev Theodora Brooks
Michael J. McPherson
The Rev.Tobias Haller BSG
Nell B. Gibson
The Rev. James Burns
James A. Forde
Meditations delivered at Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, New York, with candidates for ordination to the transitional diaconate in the Diocese of New York, March 7, 2006.Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG
Pray for Andrew, Emily, Joel, John, Nora, and Sharon, that they may faithfully serve God’s church as deacons, and later this year, God and the Bishop willing, and the people assenting, be ordained to the priesthood and serve in that capacity all their days.
The day thou givest All of you have been to a greater or lesser extent involved in seminary life for the last couple of years, I take it — and that life has provided a matrix and a structure not entirely of your own devising. Upon graduation, you will find yourself liberated and free, but also, as one of my favorite playwrights once said, so free you might come loose! It is a bit like being born, graduating from seminary and taking on the life of an ordained minister of the gospel — and when the cord is cut you will find the need to breathe on your own. Ordination to the diaconate may come as a bit of the laying-on-of-hands slap needed to start you breathing independently — and it is nice to know that your first official diaconal utterance will be a charge to the congregation to “go forth into the world rejoicing in the power of the Spirit.”
It is of that world and of that Spirit that I want to speak to you this morning. I will reflect some of the structures that can help to ground you in your ministry — something to take the place of the seminary’s — since few parishes can provide the kind of hot and cold running liturgies that seminaries can provide. I want to offer you something of a portable chapel you can take with you wherever in the world you go — perhaps more like the tent of the Exodus than the Temple of Jerusalem, but where, nonetheless, you may be able to say, Truly God is in this place.
I want to begin with the opening verses of a Psalm, which I’d like us to read responsively. (Read Psalm 19:1-6)
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That 19th Psalm begins with a wonderful, cosmic image of the heavens declaring God’s glory as they slowly revolve, one day telling its tale to another, one night imparting knowledge to another, a kind of cosmic Algonquin Round Table of the stars, sun and moon, who tell and retell God’s glory even though they do not have words or language, and their voices are not heard — yet their message has gone out, as if in response to a divinely diaconal dismissal, to the ends of the world.
Modern science, of course, thanks to Copernicus and Galileo, reverses the image. It isn’t the heavens that spin about a stable earth, but a spinning earth whose rotation is but one of many complex movements in vast a celestial engine. As charming (or alarming) as the image may be, the sun is not actually let out of his bridegroom’s chamber to run from one end of the world to the other. No, the sun is relatively immobile; it is the earth that slowly and majestically turns to sun itself evenly on all sides, turning and turning as it rotates day by day.
From a vantage point far enough away in space, perpendicular to a line drawn from the sun to the earth, one could watch the shadow of night pass into the break of day from east to west, as a long band of dawn transects the earth from north to south. Scientists call it the terminator — but one might just as well call it the instigator. For as night ends, day begins, and vice versa — and though the sun goes down (or appears to go down) as the Preacher and Hemingway after him both observed, the sun also rises.
Speaking of scientists, the late physicist Richard Feynman, known for his quirky and off-beat genius, observed that wherever the terminator/instigator band of dawn passes over an area populated by human beings, there exists, simultaneously with it, a band of people stretching from north to south and moving as a wave from east to west — all brushing their teeth. And this great wave of tooth-brushing sweeps across and around the globe as surely and substantially as the band of dawn itself, leaving behind the faint odor of mint.
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But there is yet another diurnal and nocturnal cycle at work in the world. There is something else that happens as the dawn moves across the world, and as noonday, and evening, and night do the same. There is something else that sweeps around the globe besides sunlight and spearmint. Some of the residents of this house may well remember the days when not just four but eight successive bands of human activity moved around the world like this. Matins, lauds, prime, tierce, sext, nones, vespers, and compline skimmed across the surface of the earth by day and by night, coating it with prayer. So the bands move in their ordered rounds, and you can hear them singing, telling and retelling God’s glory in many languages, day and night imparting knowledge to each other, as their voice goes out unto all lands.
So the church’s life of prayer has a deep and intimate involvement with the cosmos. Even though we know that all times are in God’s hand, and that one day or one hour isn’t really more important than another in God’s eyes, still we echo the cosmic rotations and revolutions of the sun and moon and earth in our prayers and liturgy. It is no accident that the invention of timepieces in the Christian West owes its impetus to the need for the monks to keep their hours. And so they have kept them for over a millennium, mirroring the cosmos in miniature, like the precious illuminations in a book of hours, telling the hours, the days, the seasons, and the years of our Lord.
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And you too, as transitional deacons and then as priests will have a part to play in this cosmic dance, the church’s liturgical dance that mirrors the world God made. For apart from the grand cycles such as the scary and nervous-making millennium, or the festive Jubilee year, and other such generational anniversaries — at which few of us have the opportunity to officiate — our stateliest liturgical pace takes its rhythm from the yearly cycle of the seasons, from Advent through Christmas and on beyond that pivotal commemorationto Epiphany, the season that stretches out towards or shrinks away from Lent depending on the date of Easter. Of course, that Queen of Feast’s mobility is still determined by the moon, the inconstant moon, as its fullness lands on the far side of the spring’s equal balance of day and night — so linked are we still to the heavens’ movements. Then on we course again to bright red Pentecost and on through the greenery to Holy Cross (a hat tip to this house), and we find the year fully marked and quartered with its stational ember days — and will you miss writing ember letters? — and finally back to Advent once again, our year decked and draped with liturgically colored prayer all along the way. This is something you will engage in with altar guilds: — sorting through the parish store of frontals and stoles, burses and veils, and the more exotic accessories such as pulpit falls and bible bookmarks.
But you will also, as deacons first proclaim the gospels that recite the round of the year from expectation through birth and baptism, on to death and resurrection and the course of teaching and reflection. Then as priests, you will find yourself saying words even more closely bound up with those seasons — the collects of the Sundays and the feasts and fasts, and the prefaces that lead to the great hymn of praise the church raises Sunday by Sunday as it joins with the angels who look down upon our spinning globe: Holy, Holy, Holy Lord, God of power and might, heaven and earth are full of your glory.
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At a smaller scale there is the monthly cycle of the Psalter, perhaps Thomas Cranmer’s simplest and most thoughtful gift to those who follow that measured rule. As you know, Daily Office Lectionary of the BCP provides a seven-week cycle for the psalter, but Cranmer’s old thirty-day rotation is still widely used. My own community and the Order of Saint Julian, among others, use this monthly ordered reading of the psalms, rather than the 7-week cycle. We also retain all the bits of psalmody that version omits as distasteful, thereby able to fulfill John Cassian’s advice fully to internalize all of the emotions of the Psalter. He said, “When we sing the Psalms, we remember all that our carelessness has brought on us, or our effort has secured, or divine providence has granted to us, or slippery and subtle forgetfulness lost to us, or human weakness brought about in us.”[Dialogues IX 18]
I believe we gain something in this ordered and full reading of the Psalms — in addition to facing those hard nuggets of frail human reality that make the Psalms a challenge. And we equally enjoy the sometimes dissonant intersections of feasts with penitential psalms — much as one can enjoy the passing dissonances in a Bach chorale, or the sharp bite of a peppercorn on a mild serving of salmon. The hard bits and the dissonances we encounter in this orderly reading of the Psalter month by month, serve as reminders that at the heavenly scale we mirror in minature, the orderly laws of gravitation and of physics, as they work upon the substance of the cosmos, will sometimes have the effect of wiping out the dinosaurs.
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Then there is our weekly cycle, centered on Sunday, but inherited from a deeper and far older tradition that deliberately mirrored step-by-step the act of creation itself, and stubbornly stuck to it for all these years in spite of the fact that seven won’t go very easily into either thirty or twelve or 365. As deacons and as priests, as you settle into your ministries you will find this weekly cycle of the church’s life to be as regular as that of the world — one thing at least upon which sacred and secular are of a common mind — so powerful is that memory of God’s creative act that only the French were bold enough, during their Revolution, to attempt to metricize seven into ten.
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And finally, the smallest, fastest spinning wheel in this great cosmic mechanism: the day God gives us day by day, and which we bless and sanctify with prayer, with daily breaking of the daily bread, and most especially with the Daily Office, which has, since at least the time of Benedict himself, been called by that astounding and awe-inspiring name: the Work of God.
Now, in spite of its antiquity and universality, the Daily Office is one of those things that many people, some even in the church, just don’t get. I recall something that a priest (and I will use that somewhat paradoxical phrase “a secular priest” because that’s exactly what he was) said to me some years ago. His comment came at dinner after the life profession liturgy of one of my brothers. As required by our rule and customary, this profession ofvows took place in the context of a celebration of the Holy Eucharist, which was set on a Saturday afternoon to allow for friends and family to attend. After the liturgy (a lengthy one in comparison with most parish services), the assembly repaired to the refectory for dinner. When it was time for Vespers, the brothers began to excuse themselves to return to the chapel. I was sitting across from this secular priest, who asked where we were going. I told him that it was time for Evening Prayer. He looked at me with astonished disbelief and said, with a somewhat scornful tone, “You’re going to pray again!?” I looked at him, probably equally disbelieving, and simply said, “Why, yes; it’s what we do.”
I’m afraid he didn’t get it, as many, sadly even in the church, don’t. The irony is that the “secular” are not truly worldly in the sense of being as deeply in touch with the movements of the cosmos as the “religious” whose life supposedly separates them from “the world” but which, through the round of ordered prayer, actually reflects the intricate gears of that cosmos in miniature. The “secular” have followed the course that Puritan Richard Baxter described, so caught up with scholarship, didacticism, or activism that they have lost the simple gifts of contemplation. Prayer, especially formal prayer, has been minimized or postponed or deferred almost out of existence, evaporated in a cloud of unfulfilled “intentions” as these busy workers imagine themselves to be getting about the realwork of the church, the real work of God, as they see it.
I pray for you, brothers and sisters that you will not so seriously get hold of the wrong end of the stick. As Kenneth Leech wrote some years ago, far too many clergy spend too much time in the wrong kind of office! And believe me, it is tempting to do so, to defer the work of prayer because of the other work. But I can testify to you that about thirty years of saying the Daily Office has not seriously impaired my ability to get my other work done - perhaps because I see the Daily Office as part of my work, a part of my share in the whole work of God. The ordered prayer of the church is a large part of what the church is; it is the work of the church as much as it is the work of God, and I am enmeshed and geared into it as one cog in the great work of the church.
And I mean the whole church. For I do not embrace the idea that monks and friars, sisters and brothers, and clergy are simply the professionals who pray for those who don’t have the time — in spite of the fact that they sometimes end up doing so. And thank God someone does! We have it on good authority that ten righteous ones could once have saved a whole city from annihilation; and the rabbis still speak of God’s preservation of the whole world on account of the fifty whose prayers forfend its utter collapse into nothingness. So yes, the monks and nuns and friars and sisters and clergy do pray for others, but not so that they can be let off the hook of praying for themselves.
And let me note that clergy especially aren’t off the hook. The Church of England, at least, still expects its clergy to say the Daily Office. (How well this is observed is another matter, and I have no wish to make windows into clerical souls.) But I urge you to this, sisters and brothers. It is a part of our particular vocation as “parsons” — which is to say, “persons” of prayer who model the church — it is a part and parcel of our parsonal, our personal “work” of God, for God, and from God. Our work of prayer may indeed help to hold the prayer-free and carefree world together, as we lay down those daily fresh coats of prayer upon a spinning world.
However this vicarious benefit to the prayer-free may be one of the effects of our life of ordered prayer, I want to be quite clear that it is not its primary raison d’être. If I can use the analogy of the theology of marriage, this is a good of our daily prayer, but it is not its end. Its end is, in large part, your task as ordained persons: as priests to call together the community of the faithful, to make the church as its scattered members are recalled to unity in Christ — and as deacons to send them out into the world in the power of the Spirit: and you can feel the Spirit breathing as the church’s lungs inhale the congregation and then send it forth.
Some of our prayer is for others, passing sandbags down the line to stay the flood, but this is not the ideal for the church. But this is the minimum: for if the clergy do not pray, how can we expect it of our people? I can join with Moses and say, I wish that all of God’s peoplewere, committed to some form of daily prayer, even if it only takes the form of one office a day, a quickly uttered Lord’s Prayer on arising, or even a wordless pause to summon God to mind. But as for you about to be new-born clergy, I am afraid I espouse that rather old-fashioned idea that Kenneth Leech was defending: to follow the daily discipline of ordered prayer that goes by the name “the Work of God.” Thus joined with the laity the whole church can exercise responsibility and take up its share of the work of God, the whole church’s work of God.
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The ordered life of daily prayer is the heart and soul of the work of God, of our work, our liturgy that is both work for the people of God and the work of God, for without God inspiring the will and the deed, without God’s Holy Spirit filling and lifting our sails, our poor small boats would not be able to navigate the waters of creation.
God’s Spirit hovered over those waters at the beginning, setting up the ripples that would become time and space and all that is of matter and energy. Our ordered life of prayer reflects the movements of the cosmos, one voice taking up the song as another dies out, as those bands of dawn and dusk and midday and midnight sweep around the earth.
But the daily work of prayer does not only reflect the cycles of the cosmos. There is a greater mystery still: that the work of prayer reinforces those ripples of the Spirit to such an extent that prayer will one day fill the created universe. The vision of the Psalmist was of mountains skipping likerams, and hills like young sheep, of the sun and moon and stars telling of the glory of God, and of every creature with breath in its mouth raising its voice to praise the Lord. And we are, pace Galileo and Copernicus, at the middle of it all, we on this blue marble on which God chose to be incarnate, scandalously particular in our smallness, lowly handmaids graced by that visitation and exalted from our humble place on the outer arm of the Milky Way, and given an awesome task. This is the work of God, God’s work in us and our work for God with God’s people.
As poet John Ellerton wrote:
We thank thee that thy Church, unsleepingThis prayer, this daily prayer, ordered and repeating and mirroring the rhythms of God’s good world, of God’s great universe, is the work of God and our work, too. It’s what we do.
while earth rolls onward into light,
through all the world her watch is keeping
and rests not now by day or night.
As o’er each continent and island
the dawn leads on another day,
the voice of prayer is never silent,
nor dies the strain of praise away. (Hymn 24)
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Nearer than They Appear
I spoke this morning a bit about the Daily Office, and this afternoon I want to focus on the Eucharist. But first, I’d like to put my comments into the context of Scripture, and so we have two readings I’d like us to hear and reflect upon. (Read Ephesians 2:13-22, Mark 6:32-43).
I have to begin with a confession that I made to Canon Coles when she first asked me to join you for this time apart: that I have come to middle age — and a good bit past it — never having learned how to drive. Circumstances just never quite seemed to require it, and it has given me both a great love for long walks and a ready familiarity with the public transportation systems of many a great metropolis. A more down to earth consequence is that when I am in a car, I get to sit in the passenger seat fairly often, and so am quite familiar with the passenger side rear-view mirror. This mirror shows a wide-angle distorted view of what’s coming up behind. And printed right on the mirror is the warning: “Objects are nearer than they appear.”
Whether you hear this as good news or not will depend on what the objects are. If it’s a car pulling out of a parking place after you’ve circled the block for the twelfth time, you’re likely to rejoice. But what if what you see in the mirror is red and flashing? “Objects are nearer than they appear” — and what’s near is not always dear.
The words of Paul to the Ephesians look towards a joyful kind of nearness: the joy of the outcasts and foreigners, those far off, being brought in and let in — to discover the rules have changed, and the door that was shut for so long is now open and welcoming. What a joy and honor to be gathered thus into the covenant, to be built into a holy temple — can you imagine how it must have felt to the Gentiles to whom Paul wrote,
to hear those words, words of welcome and incorporation? The Gentiles were not allowed near the Temple in Jerusalem, only as far as the outer court, the court that in those days was still trammeled and crowded with the traders and money-changers Jesus was only for a few days able to cast out. Crowded in that space, those who wanted to draw nearer to the presence of God were stopped in their tracks by the big signs that said, “No Gentiles Need Apply” in Greek and Latin letters.
But Paul assures them that the rules have changed since Christ has come, and not only are they allowed in, but — wonder of wonders — they are to become the temple, God’s spiritual dwelling place.
It’s very easy to hear such a passage and imagine ourselves to be the ones restored or welcomed, the have-nots who finally make it, the ones who never got picked for the team being made captain, the ugly ducklings turning out to be swans. No doubt as you come to the end of the ordination “process” you are feeling no small amount of such relief yourself — as you come to embrace that to which you have felt so long called: diaconate is in sight, and then — God, the bishop and the people willing — the priesthood before the year is over. You will have come to where you hoped for so long to be. So yes, it’s easy to read these texts as happy-ending fairy tales about us.
But do we have the right to read them in this way? Or is this reading as distorted as the view in a rear-view mirror? Are we the exiles and the outcasts? Sometimes, you know, exile and exclusion are not so obvious as a sign in big letters saying, “You’re Kind Not Wanted Here.” Sometimes the ways for keeping the far away far away, or allowing them no nearer than a barge-pole, are so ingrained that they aren’t even noticed. They are just the way things are.
And I want to share these thoughts with you today because the parish can be — if we are not on our toes — a place not of welcome, but of paradoxical exclusion, a place for an in-crowd, if we as leaders cast ourselves too much as the benevolent host rather than as one of the guests. Remember how Jesus responded to the disciples who wanted places of special honor: “the kings of the Gentiles rule over them as benefactors — but with you it shall not be so. Rather, you shall be servants of one another.” You are about to become deacons — if only “only” deacons for a season. So I want to share with you something of what it means to be a “servant at the table” — for the servant’s lot is our lot throughout our ministry, and not just for the next six months!
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I do this in the context of the WLIW Friday night Britcoms. A few years back they ran a comedy series called “You Rang, M’Lord,” set in a well-to-do English household in the 1920s, with the household servants as the principle characters. It’s a kind of dystopian mirror-image of “Upstairs Downstairs” — and rather than the characters being charming and good-hearted, here they are all “pieces of work.”
The class system dominates and defines everyone in the house from the Lord of the manor to the boot-boy, in a hierarchy as rigid as a Byzantine court’s. The pivotal character is the butler — a hypocritical thief who bows and scrapes to the master — but when safely below stairs spouts the venom of his anger freely, the catchphrases of fine vintage Red activism seeming a bit incongruous as he promises: “We’ll see what it’s like come the Revolution, when the tables are turned and we’re on top and they’re down here!”
But class-consciousness works both ways: even in the supposed land of proletarian equality and comradeship below stairs. It is revealed in how the live-in servants treat the “day woman.” She’s the “low woman on the totem pole” — the one who does all the dirtiest and meanest jobs. When she heads out after a 16 hour day, on her weary way home, the live-in servants are gulping down their sumptuous dinner, (with bottles of wine from the master’s cellar that the butler has “opened by mistake — and we can’t let it go to waste, can we!”). The poor day-woman looks at the groaning board and the overfed staff stuffing themselves, licks her lips, and says with a pitiful sigh, “I can’t tell you ‘ow long it’s been since I had a nice bit of roast beef...”
The cook, who appears to be more than ordinarily well fed, says, offhandedly, “Oh, I’ve left you some week-old cheese in the pantry. It’ll be perfectly fine if you scrape off the green crust.” And the little woman mutters, “Oh, thanks” and scuttles off to retrieve the morsel of green cheese.
When the youngest maid-servant finally gets the pluck to say, “Oh, surely we could spare a bit of this beef,” the other servants look at her as if she has just pronounced the gravest heresy, and the cook solemnly pronounces the classic judgment— how many times in how many places and ways has this been said — “She needs to know her place.”
Yes, she needs to know her place. And her place is there, not here. We need to stake out our space, our turf, and not give in to the temptation to change the rules. Objects are nearer than they appear; you can’t be too careful. We want to keep them just as far away as we can — thank you very much.
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Them. There’s a lot of power in that word. Them. It’s the opposite of “us.” We are us; they are, well, them.
You know them. That sort. Those foreigners. They eat that strange food. I mean, it just smells up the whole building. And why can’t they learn our language if they want to come to our country? And those clothes. I don’t see how they can expect to find a job if they dress like that. Maybe that’s why so many of them are out of work.
And why should we be held responsible for them? It’s not our fault they’re here. We didn’t ask them to come here. In fact, we were trying to get away from them. They must have followed us. We’re not responsible. Look, here we are out in the middle of nowhere, out in the wilderness where we thought we could have some quality time with you and now you expect us to find them something to eat!?
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Oh my. Jesus has that look again. We’ve seen it before — that little tilt of the head with a furrow in the brow and a puckered smile — and that piercing look. And then he orders us to get all of them to sit down. And he takes what little we have — it isn’t much, is it? Hardly enough even for us, let alone for them. But he takes it, and he looks up to heaven and says a blessing of thanksgiving — I mean, thanks for what? A few loaves and fishes? — and then he hands it back to us, and all of a sudden it looks like there’s more of it than we thought there was.
He hands it over and tells us to serve them, to wait on them. Good deacons all of us, servants commissioned and commanded to wait on them. On them, you understand. Them.
The day-woman and the scullery-maid, — the migrant worker, — the latina with her noisy children, — the old man in the threadbare T-shirt with the frost of white on his elbows, — the widow who’s been living on cat-food in her cold drab room, — the hooker in spiked heels and a top so low that nothing is left to the imagination, — the toothless farmhand in overalls with a three-day scraggle of beard, — the soldier who lost his legs in someone else’s war, — the angry man who mutters as if haunted by himself, — the fifteen-year-old hustler with eyes three times his age, and the crowds and crowds of others, all the others, all of them who have been on the outside, out far away, suddenly and so uncomfortably near, neatly arranged in squares of fifty and a hundred, gathered on a hillside, having a picnic while we wait on them, doling out bread and fish we never knew there was so much of — so much embarrassing abundance where we thought there was so little, so much for so many when we thought there wasn’t even enough for us.
As we pass among them handing out the bread and fish, we find it hard to look into their eyes, and focus on their hands instead. Those hands are heavy with calluses, with dirt under the nails, or with impossibly long nails bright with polish and glitter, others are gnawed and broken.
And as we pass, their voices say, “Thank you… thank you…” voices soft and humble, even the man who mutters at his ghosts somehow calmed and comforted in this bread. It’s like running a gauntlet — passing out that bread — running a gauntlet of thanksgiving. We are washed again and again with waves and waves of gratitude tous for something we didn’t know we could do, something we never even thought of doing, were it not for his blessing and command. This wasn’t our idea, and we have no right to be thanked. And yet the thanks keep coming, as we pass among the lifted hands and bowed heads.
And when the meal is ended, when the crowds have eaten their fill, and been dismissed, Jesus finally lets us collect the leftovers strewn about the hillside for our own dinner — and there’s plenty left: a basketful for each of us. And we sit in silence and we eat in silence, eyes lowered to the baskets on our laps, not one of us looking up, — not at each other, certainly not at him.
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And slowly, it begins to dawn on us what has happened. We had always thought that we were the ones at the center, that we were the ones who were near, while they, them, all the others, were far off. But we had it backwards. All this while we’ve been living in a rear-view mirror world that made things appear further away and further apart than they really are. We lived in a rear-view mirror world until Jesus came and turned the tables on us, until Jesus turned us around and showed us just how close all our brothers and sisters are to us, and we to them — and what a family we find ourselves to be part of!
And he did it by feeding us the leftovers. We who were the ones who always ate first, who sat at table and were waited on, and who thought thereby that we were blessed — we have just eaten last, after serving and waiting on them. And all of us and all of them have eaten of the same food, the same bread. And because of that service and because of that bread, there isn’t any us or them anymore. We have become them, by serving them; they have become us by being served by us; and all who were far off have been brought near through the blood of the one who shed it for all, and all are made one in the flesh of the one who gave himself for the love of all, in the bread once scattered on the hillside now made one. We’ve passed through the looking glass, finally, into the real world, God’s world, the world God loved, the world God purchased. We were exiles and strangers all along, and didn’t even know it. But we finally have been brought home, and attained full citizenship in the country where there are no dividing walls, no signs that say who’s in, who’s out, who’s near, who’s far. And we slowly look up from the baskets on our laps, and we look at each other. And when we finally get up the courage, somewhat sheepishly to look at Jesus, where he sits to one side on the fresh green grass in patient silence, we see that he is smiling. And he is just as near as he appears to be.
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“a clear-sighted companion.... If you are passionate about the vitality of today’s church, I encourage you to accompany him on his mystagogical excursion into the liturgical landscape. You will rediscover a familiar place rife with fresh provisions planted by the God who longs to feed our deepest hungers and hopes.” —Jay Koyle, chair, Faith, Worship and Ministry of The Anglican Church of Canada
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