About the Episcopal Church

I wrote this essay for the website of St Andrew’s Parish. It may need some ghastly re-writes after this summer, but I think it’s very honest as of this posting. It is also biased, I think: it is my own inclusive views of ECUSA and Anglicanism. It is also why I choose to be Anglican.

The Episcopal Church is an American manifestation of the Anglican tradition and the local branch of the Anglican Communion. We were founded in the thirteen original American colonies as the local Church of England parishes by clergy and lay people who came to these shores, along with other immigrants, seeking various lives and ministries in “the New World”. The first uses of the prayer book on this continent were in 1578 (in Canada), 1579 on the California Coast and in 1607 in Jamestown, Virginia. After the beginning of the United States, American members of the English Church sought to establish their own church governance and so began The Episcopal Church.

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Turning away from Jesus (Pt 2)

I’ve had the day to cogitate on the article from Harper’s referenced in the previous post. And it has been quite a day: my office, filled with mentally healthy folks, puts work down in some quite logical piles on Friday and picks them up again on Monday. Taking the reactor off line and bringing it back online make for some insane times. It’s taken me a couple of weeks to recognise the pattern.

Now, Cam preached a sermon, yesterday, that involved us Christians remembering who we are and whose we are, for a time today, I had to remember who pays my salaryl and so there really wasn’t much time to worry about the whinging of Episcopalians today, as the thing that butters my bread was more important today.

But now I can come back to the article, having relaxed a bit, taken care of some important personal business (my BF, my former-housemate, a wonderful Fraternity brother, some grocery shopping and cooking supper). Now I can attend to blogging and picking up the rant where I left off this AM.

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Turning away from Jesus

If you’ve missed the rumble in the blogoshere, go out and buy the current edition of Harper’s Magazine and read Turning away from Jesus: Gay rights and the war for the Episcopal Church by Garret Keizer. It’s not another left-good/right-bad piece. Nor is it another right-good/left-bad piece. It’s a Jesus-good/rest of us-messed up piece.

A church that was as “inclusive” as the progressives want it tome, and as “biblically based” as the self-appointed guardians of orthodoxy want it to be, would instantly rectify the situation described by Bishop Stacy Sauls of Lexington, Kentucky… “The problem is that the most isolated places need the priest with the greatest skills. But the system works so that the priest with the greatest skills go almost always to the places that are well-resourced [ie Wealthy - DHR] already… The deployment system is basically a free-market system.

I just finished reading it - and I’m on my way to work - but I’ll blog some quotes later. It’s a sound condemnation of how we’ve let a debate about sex derail the entire denomination: American, African, “Global South” - whatever.

Are we sick?

Bishop Alan writes of hopelessness as sickness in the Body of Christ.

Some kind of internal distraction process seems to be pulling the wagons off the trail, dragging them into a defensive, inward looking circle. To change the metaphor, perhaps the body of Christ is subject to the kind of illness in which the body’s immune system turns on the body itself, producing illness, despair and frustration.

He notes a series of dichotomies, saying “If these both/ands become either/ors, they are symptoms of sickness…”

He wonders about the wagon: are we moving forward or are we circling them. And he draws this into a discussion of cliques.

Human groups have a way of degenerating into self-serving cliques. One of God’s mechanisms for preventing this is to send along a healthy crop of alternative people to leaven and enliven them. Really strong cliques, however, have a way of making it pretty obvious up with what they will put in others. They can pray as hard as they want for growth. No responsible deity, however, would put more people into their sausage machine, until they grow up and become joinable.

I see Bp Alan’s words as a critique of strong parties on many sides of the current Anglican Canyon: anyone who seems to press an agenda at the cost of the Church’s being herself. I’m with James: I’m no longer threatened by those who believe differently than I, only by those who insist I must believe as they do - and who seek through trickery to change my beliefs to suit them.

But I see the post as a critique of many others as well: emergent to staunchly institutional, traditionalist and revisionist, liturgist and evangelist, Anglican, Catholic, Orthodox… whomever seems to be drawing the wagons into a circle rather than opening out into the world.

St Alban and St Sergius Fellowship Conference

This conference At St Vladimir’s looks very interesting. I notice that while there are a lot of mainstream Orthodox, there is only two Episcopalians - and not very mainstream at that - both semi-Schismatic, I think.

It seems a curious melange of Orthodox, however: liberals and conservative.

Oddly for an OCA Seminary, clearly the institutional Orthodox are taking sides in the Anglican debate: even if individual Orthodox (as well as certain monks) are hanging out with different Episcopalians. I wonder to whom this conference is to be seen as pandering.

Programmes! Get Yer Programmes, here!

Cuz you can’t tell the players without a Programme! The Pluralist has this prediction:

The Anglican Communion is as near as dividing as it can be. It will be surprising if it does not. Northern/ Western Churches by and large will not accept a restrictive Covenant or one that goes beyond present Anglican formularies. Against this GAFCON, supposedly renamed, e.g. Instrument of Global Anglicanism, will become a kind of activist agent for the theological right. The Global South will, however, not only feel alienated from the Northern/ Western Churches, but will split with the Global South elements in GAFCON. Also split will be the Open Evangelicals either towards openness or evangelicalness about whether to go with GAFCON types or the Northern/ Western Churches - the Covenant for Northern and Western Churches either being dead or no more than a summary document. GAFCON will also split within, between Catholic and Reform.

Now, part of me is neither concerned nor worried: I’ve predicted the death of Anglicanism and ECUSA at nearly every convention and every Lambeth since the mid80s. And professional, Cradle-palians have been saying it a lot longer than I.

But part of me is amused/saddened: watching people whose drive for “purity” and “orthodoxy” drives them out of fellowship with everyone. We had it in the Eastern Orthodox churches - many converts are running for the same reasons. Every choice is a political one: who you think is “canonical”, which calendar is “right”. Which horrendously modern Litugy is the least heretical or who has the authority to call a council, meet with the Pope or decide to Ordain women. Which saints are really saints and which heresiarch slept with the Commies (or the Turks or the Jews). If you tell me one side is right over another, I’ll know which side your on. But you needn’t tell me at all: I’ll know by when you celebrate Christmas, if you fast on Fridays after Easter, if your Church commemorates the Tzar-Martyr; I’ll know if you let non-Orthodox have antidoron or if your priest has the doors open during most-all of liturgy. And I’ll have to choose if I want to stand there with you - or not.

It’s what humans do. Anglicans are more up front about it right now. So, yes, I think we’ll have a fight over this and we may even break up: we’ll be quite Orthodox when it’s all over.

One day, Christians will learn the Lesson of the Corpus Christi Miracle.

About the Episcopal Church

I drafted this essay on ECUSA last night, with some edits this AM. Feedback is welcomed (on this blog post - not on the parish website, thanks). Naturally, the history is biased, as is all history: I left out the part about the Anglican inquisition.

Brava!

A hearty “Brava” to the Women Clergy of the Church of England who have written one of the saddest and most-Christian of letters I’ve seen in a while.

We believe that it should be possible for women to be consecrated as bishops, but not at any price. The price of legal “safeguards” for those opposed is simply too high, diminishing not just the women concerned, but the catholicity, integrity and mission of the episcopate and of the Church as a whole. We cannot countenance any proposal that would, once again, enshrine and formalise discrimination against women in legislation. With great regret, we would be prepared to wait longer, rather than see further damage done to the Church of England by passing discriminatory laws. In this, we support the recent principled stand taken by the Archbishop and Bishops of the Church in Wales.

The Catholicity (wholeness) of the Church is about building relations, building trust, building communion. It can, as my friend Ana used to say, “Shatter the resonances” if we push too hard, too fast. The women clergy write, After 21 years of ordained ministry and 14 years of priesthood, many of us have much experience of building trustful relationships with those unable to accept the priestly ministry of women. If you’ve watched The Vicar of Dibley, you’ve seen this process in action. Gay presbyters, too, have seen this. But a Bishop is something different. To bring in “other bishops” for those who question “the bishop’s” presence and Authority is not an accommodation, per se, but rather a denial of the catholicity of the Bishops. It is the creation of a deonomination within the denomination. What is a denomination difference, at root, but a denial of one understanding episokope by a group of people? If I can not accept the ministry of my local bishop, I am in a different denomination of Church.

Again, as the women say, Strong relationships have been forged on the anvil of profound disagreement and there is ample testimony to the richness of these encounters, to set alongside those situations which have proved painful. As the broken body of Christ on earth, the Church’s internal relationships should rest on trust, forgiveness, repentance and reconciliation, rather than on protection and an over-anxious reliance on the letter of the law. It is the process of working out this thing that is important: it is the process, the work, that makes us Church. Running rough-shod over someone is not the action of a Christian.

We long to see the consecration of women bishops in the Church of England, and believe it is right both in principle and in timing. But because we love the Church, we are not willing to assent to a further fracture in our communion and threat to our unity. If it is to be episcopacy for women qualified by legal arrangements to “protect” others from our oversight, then our answer, respectfully, is thank you, but no.

I would that gay clergy would take the same stance…

O, Canada!

The Courts of Canada have ordered Anglicans to act like Christians to each other!

A Superior Court judgment released yesterday has ordered three parishes in the diocese of Niagara that voted earlier this year to affiliate themselves with the Province of the Southern Cone to share the use of their property with the diocese.

Bravo! Bravo!

The Invitation: Taste and See…

So, lets take all the essays in this series:

Intro

Can a hand say to a foot

Fear

Faith 1
Faith 2
Faith 3
Faith 4 (a summation of the three)

Love

I spent the most time on “Faith” because that’s what seems to be making the big stumbling block: some people, Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholic (and some Anglicans, too) seem to think that they have a right, a divine duty and a responsibility to limit who can come forward - based on the assumed faith (or lack thereof) of the seeker.

The Orthodox Invitation is,

Proper, OT, Biblical fear, the Hebrew word Yirah, as I tired to show in my first essay is paralleled not with terror (as in the Greek word, “Phobos” (whence, “phobia”) but rather with the near erotic imagery of Da’at.

Faith, as I tried to show in all four essays, is not the simple belief in Santa Claus that makes Christmas Morning awesome for a three year old and boring for a 13 year old. Faith is trust. God is a consuming fire and when we come, like fire walkers, we have to love the fire. If we disrespect the fire, run away from the fire, or douse the fire, it will simply swallow us up, whole. But if we come in trust… not checking off points on a creed nor, like the Cowardly Lion, chanting over and over, “I do believe in spooks! I do believe in spooks! I do believe in spooks!” (while quaking in our boots) then we have nothing to fear. As a child or an atheist can come, feeling the love - and having no second thoughts - but never knowing why… so should we come.

And love, finally, is not something for God, but for our neighbour. It’s hospitality: we come with two hands outstretched, one to Jesus and one bringing a friend along behind us. In fact, we can not come to God at all, alone.

To really partake of communion, there is no call to hide it, in fact, I’d go so far as to say if you *were* hiding it from others, you might not be really partaking of communion anyway.

I’ve shared this story before, but one Sunday after giving out Communion, I asked Donald: “When I hold up the bread and say ‘Lizzie, The Body of Christ’, am I saying something about the Bread or about Lizzie?” and Donald said, “Yes”. We fail to discern the Body of Christ (in the fullest Pauline Implication) not when we forget there’s something magical about the bread: but when we forget to love the person standing next to us at Church or on the street.