I’m just back from the Spring meeting of the House of Bishops, held at the Kanuga Camp and Conference Center, near Asheville, North Carolina. I was part of the writing team that produced the bishops’ pastoral letter on the economy, which I commend to you.
The process of putting a pastoral letter together to represent 100+ bishops, and the diversity of the writing team itself was a fun challenge. It meant, of course, that some things each of us wrote couldn’t be in the final draft. What follows is an edited version of something I wrote, which I felt was quite important, and that responded to the request of one bishop who said, “We must let people know that our response to the economic crisis cannot be an attempt to get back to where we used to be - that is futile and counter-productive - but must be reaching a new level of being and doing.” I agree.
A central theme of Lent is repentance. The commonest way to view repentance is to talk about reflection, rethinking, finding a new understanding of the past. But equally powerful, and sometimes a missing yet life-giving perspective, is to see repentance as seeking the mind we need beyond the mind we have now. You might say it is the Mind of Christ, who waits for us in the future.
Understanding repentance as seeking the mind we need for the future is helpful as we not only see the mistakes we have made in the past, relating to the economy, but as we seek the future mind we need for health and wholeness in the present and in the world to come.
In one instance, our old mind has been self-interested, not only at the level of the individual, but with respect to our culture as opposed to the larger world, with its ocean of suffering. We have had a narrow focus, and failed to speak a compelling word of commitment and economic justice as a whole culture.
The new mind we seek is pointed to in our historic commitment to the relief of global suffering, through meeting core human survival needs. We have done this by committing to eight interconnected goals that address the deepest human needs, called in total the Millennium Development Goals. There is a great trajectory in our commitment to the Millennium Development Goals that leads us towards the Mind of Christ, the compassionate one who is our Goal.
We seek a new mind that knows that while there are some of us for whom this crisis is a way of being invited into more simplicityfor the most vulnerable this “downturn” represents an emergency. As Christ looked on the hungry people gathered to hear him teach, and had compassion on them because “they were like sheep without a shepherd,” we must bear in our renewed minds not only our own privations, but the great danger into which this crisis puts the nearly three billion people on the earth who live on less than $2 a day.
Be assured that while we have a roll in striving towards this new mind, it is the grace of God in Jesus Christ that is drawing all creation to Christ. Our theology envisions a moment of completeness, of fulfillment, with Christ as both the center and the encompassing presence in this longed-for future. At the deepest level, our “work” is to be open to this grace that moves us to the Mind of Christ.
My Ash Wednesday sermon delivered at Grace Cathedral on February 25, 2009.
Holiness was all around us
Better, it was a walk of miracles
(I’ve been taught that the truth is that holiness is always around, so perhaps it was my rapturous companion who helped me see it that one Sunday)
(Every Sunday is a holy day, but whether miracles happen then, that’s another question with ardent proponents and detractors)
First, we finally met the family
going into the gated house
that flys the French flag.
I gave the woman carrying
the groceries, herding the children,
an English “Bonjour,” hoping.
And she gave me a Parisian one in return.
The license plate on the mini-van
said “Consul.”
Then, in the park a sturdy child
was having an accordion lesson
from a beaming woman
who had a guitar case, closed
beside her.
And in another park (they punctuate our walks)
a woman was encouraging a black Labrador
whose back legs were hanging in a wheeled metal
frame. (I recognized the dog, I’m sure. It was the one we saw, so still, brought in on a stretcher board to the emergency clinic in the middle of the night while we waited with Blaise – I wanted to let you know he survived.)
All this in a San Francisco fall day.
Bright, warm, but crisp
and dry.
That last element came to mind as I saw
brown California hills in the distance.
And that discordant note (the map marks the area as “severe drought”)
reminded me of how I began that day,
Hearing a story about Jesus
performing a miracle, on a Sabbath.
Going to a woman, not waiting to be asked
who had been bent over for
eighteen years.
He touched her, she was healed
But the Church people were
unhappy with Jesus
for straightening her up on a holy day.
Looking at them he asked (and I wondered yet again if we was not aiming his healing power, like a banked pool shot, at the Church leaders all along)
“Who among you, having an ox or ass,
will not untether it from the manger
on the Sabbath
and lead it to quench its thirst?”
And standing in the California sunlight, I wondered,
“Who will untether these trees, this earth
and where will we lead them to drink?”
Today is the day that people from around the world come together to restate their commitment to the Millennium Development Goals. People gather today at the United Nations in New York, and at churches, schools, NGOs, in parks and where ever they can to add their voices to the growing call to eradicate extreme poverty. Today, Anglicans from around the world will be in solidarity with those recommitting themselves to this noble task. In the video clip on the left are some of the voices that have come together.
The Episcopal Church of the Philippines has posted two videos (below) on YouTube as well, and others will continue to tell their stories through videos, blogs, articles and sermons. We invite you to join the video project. Send your video clips on the MDGs to MDGvideos@diocal.org.
Provinces and dioceses of the Anglican Communion are together making witness to their commitment to the relief of global suffering through the Millennium Development Goals on September 25, as the United Nations is meeting in New York.
Watch a video from the Diocese of California about our support for the Millennium Development Goals.
Listening Process
The Lambeth Conference came to its conclusion today, Sunday. I would like to thank the courageous –“acting from the heart” – people who came to Canterbury from many places to tell their stories as lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgendered people, as part of the Listening Process called for by Lambeth ’98, the Windsor Document, the Primates, and the Archbishop of Canterbury. As I pointed out in several settings at the conference, the strength and courage of LGBT people coming to a place where it was commonly heard that there were significant negative places of negative energy aimed at them is something to honor.
Tom Jackson, the president of Oasis California was an on-the-ground, tireless, manager and encourager for all present. Those telling their stories included: the Rev. Vicki Gray, deacon in the Diocese of California, Tom Poynor, chaplain at the UC Berkeley, Rowan Smith, Dean of St. George’s Cathedral, Cape Town, South Arica. Cynthia Black, Louise Brooks, and Katie Sherrod produced a powerful documentary of LGBT people telling their stories in Africa that had two showings at Lambeth. Mimi Walters journey from Baltimore, and lesbian and gay clergy came from the Diocese of North Carolina. The Rev. Fr. Michael Lapsley, of Institute for Healing of Memories spoke on reconciliation.
While there were barriers to hearing these grace-filled, transformative stories, still the connections were made. The contributions the above people made to the Lambeth Conference are akin to the dynamism Jesus talked about in his parable about a mustard seed – small, seemingly insignficant, but in the end generous and unmistakable.
Relations
The document that came out of the Lambeth Conference, the final draft of which we saw at the last plenary session yesterday, is a distillation of the Indaba Group conversations that have gone on over the length of the conference. All of us were assigned to Bible study groups that met each morning. Five Bible study groups constituted an Indaba Group, which met after the individual study groups.
What has emerged from the extended time in the Bible study and Indaba Groups is relationship. Bishops spoke honestly and deeply. We found places of profound commonality, and we named honestly pain in division that was not erased.
One Sudanese bishop said this, “After 22 years of suffering (civil war) we have learned not to run away based on what we hear, but to come and see, and then decide rather we need to run away. We are not leaving these friendships.”
There was much talk about “What I need to take back to my diocese.” People asked me that quite a lot. Was it moratoria on blessings, on incursions? Was it commitment to the relief of global suffering through the Millennium Development Goals process? An Anglican Covenant?
For me it is the relationships. Unlike most of the other products, the usefulness of the relationships formed at the Lambeth Conference will lie in the extension of the relationships into our diocese, and beyond. As I wrote in an earlier posting, part of the way bishops must now fulfill their ministry of unity is by actively extending the relationships they have to others, and even understanding that these relationships need to develop apart from the bishops themselves. I am coming home to the beautiful Diocese of California knowing that there are great opportunities for becoming a global body that contributes to the healing of the world, and that people in the Bay Area are eager to be part of this. The same Sudanese bishop who spoke so movingly of his province’s brave journey to Lambeth (when significant neighbor provinces stayed away based on what they had “heard”) has asked me whether people in California could help his people with the HIV/AIDS pandemic in Sudan. Who better than we?
Products
As to the other ‘products’ I mentioned above: the document we produced has real significance as it reflects the searching, prayerful conversations over a two week period of over 600 Anglican bishops. The points of substantial agreement are thus worth our attention. In California we will be seeking ways to utilize the indaba process to consider the contents of the document, absorb and extend its learnings, and contribute back to the whole.
At the same time, the document is not legislation. We will pay close attention to it, but we must not reify the agreement points in it into laws, and we should resist interpretations that seek to employ those agreements as laws.
Some of those places of broad agreement are:
Moratoria. There was widespread agreement that moratoria are needed in the areas of: same-sex blessings, consecrations to the episcopate of partnered gays or lesbians, and incursions by one province or diocese into the ecclesial life of another province or diocese.
Archbishop Rowan in his final presidential address, given just after we received the reflections document noted that, “There will be some who cannot abide by these moratoria, and in this they signal that there are steps to deeper unity they cannot take; or it may be that they conceive of deeper unity in other ways.” I take this to be a profound and generous idea. In not abiding by the moratorium on same-sex blessings I take it as incumbent on me and on us in the Diocese to actively labor to both understand the position of those to whom that moratorium is important, and to convey the reality of our life together to the world. I must redouble my efforts at inhabiting a deeper unity.
Millennium Development Goals. Following up on the Walk of Witness in London, there will be a Communion-wide day of vigil, prayer, and fasting on September 25, while the United Nations is meeting in New York. The Episcopal Church will have a presence there, along with representatives of provinces and dioceses throughout the Communion. All of this is to highlight the need to recommit to the MDGs in order to halve extreme poverty by 2015.
This Communion-wide act of witness and advocacy is something towards which I have been working and praying for six years. I believe it is also the fruit of much of Archbishop Rowan’s ministry, the result of his ministry as Archbishop of Canterbury – combining faith and action at a global level. The global church, he said, is not just existent to manage internal conflict, but to aid in the healing of the world’s wounds. Interdependent churches, globally connected, praying and worshipping as the base of their work of healing in the world, in this consists the catholic faith.
We must see September 25 as a starting point, not as an end point. The Diocese of California has been laboring to understand and implement the Millennium Development Goals in our common life. We may view this Lambeth agreement as an opening for greater partnerships and possibilities, an answer to prayer.
Environment. Environmental sustainability is Goal 7 of the MDGs. The environmental crisis, however, was of such deep concern to the bishops gathered at Lambeth 2008 that it was given attention as a separate but related subject area in the final document. In our Indaba Group I heard bishops speak with passion and intimate knowledge of sustained droughts in Australia, degradation from wide-scale and unchecked mining in India, damn building, the pollution of the oceans, and environmental effects of globalization and “affluenza.” The window of opportunity to reverse the negative effects of climate change is closing far more rapidly than even our scientific community thought twenty years ago. One bishop quoted projections he read just before the conference began that said we have about 100 months to do the emergency work we must do.
In the Diocese of California I am heartened by the revitalized work of the Environmental Commission, and the network of liaisons to the Commission that has been formed, but am aware that at the present we exist more as potential energy than as an active network. We must and will respond to this crisis with intelligence, commitment, and will. It is essential that we not only move into greater action, but that we also see that action as prayer, that we root our action in prayer and theology. It is also essential that we link our diocesan efforts with others in Province Eight of The Episcopal Church.
An Anglican Covenant. In an address he gave during the Lambeth Conference, Archbishop Rowan said that a covenant for the Communion, “should help us grow together.” While there is widespread will for an Anglican Covenant expressed in the final document of Lambeth 2008, there was equally widespread opposition to the sections (3 and the Appendix) of the St. Andrew’s Draft Covenant that make the proposed covenant an instrument of dis-union rather than its hoped for opposite. I think we will have a covenant at some time in the future, and I think it will be a much different thing than what we have seen yet, all of which has been born out of fear and anxiety.
Bishop Steven and I have been encouraging a group of non-Episcopal Church, non- Church of England bishops, clergy and laity to form to present some lively alternative ideas for the design group, contributions that may influence what goes to the Anglican Consultative Council in late Spring of next year. There are interesting ways of creating community, and healing community that have little to do with Western legal and legislative systems, and it might be good to hear about such processes.
Partners. Finally, I want to say what a pleasure it was to work with and spend time with Bishop Steven Charleston during the Conference. We met every day over breakfast, a touchstone of real use to me as the intense days were beginning. I am so hopeful about all of our work together in the future of the Diocese of California, and Bishop Steven is joining a great ministering community at Diocesan House, and bringing his own great heart and intelligence to that lovely partnership that serves the diocese.
Bishop Steven and I also hosted an evening with the Province of Brazil, including Bishop Naudal and Carmen from the Diocese of Curitiba, our Companion Diocese. After the fun dinner, I excused myself to go to another room in the same building to host the second screening of Voices of Witness from Africa. I looked up to see all the bishops and spouses of the Province of Brazil joining us there. I think this says a great deal about our brothers and sisters in Brazil, and about the good work and life we are going to share.
We are almost at the end of the Lambeth Conference 2008. I have been both sustained and challenged by the graceful expressions of bishops and spouses who have repeated over and over to each other, in hearings, in Bible studies, in indaba groups two things: we will not leave one another, and I believe and think certain things at odds with some others in the Communion, and these beliefs have not changed.
I know that when we leave this Conference, then, that we will not bear news that some people want to hear. We will not have a ratified Covenant for the Communion (there was never an expectation in the process that we would). It is also unlikely that we will have definitively turned back the St. Andrew’s Draft of the Covenant, either.
We will I believe make important statements that reflect a newly discovered, common commitment to the relief of global suffering, including the urgency to address the environmental crisis. This is what we should do from my point of view, and I have heard the same from bishops representing every part of the Communion.
This will not be enough for those who wish to have either a strong rebuke of The Episcopal Church and Canada over human sexuality on one side, and I also doubt that something I think incredibly important, a Communion-wide commitment to safeguarding the civil rights and safety of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered people will be affirmed.
But we will remain committed to one another. So my hope is genuine hope, in the theological sense – I do not know how it will finally look to live in the Communion, nor what the Communion itself will look like, but I believe in a good outcome for this.
We may have the will and vision to help in a substantial way to halve extreme poverty by 2015, and we may partner with civil society and other faith communities to avert the impending environmental crisis (one estimate quoted here is that there are only about 100 months before the climate change process will be irreversible).
I mentioned in an earlier posting that the awareness of the great web of prayers supporting us in our work has been foundational for my hope. Let me add that I went to the Night Prayer service, held each night at 9:45, early last week. It is conducted by a team of religious from around the Communion, including the Franciscans and the Melanesian Brothers and Sisters.
The service was beautiful in its sincerity and in the purity of the Melanesian polyphony singing. At the end, in the enuring silence, I sat quietly, preparing to go out of the building. Suddenly, one of the Melanesian brothers began singing a wordless tune. Then all joined in, singing, “Father make us one. Father make us one. That the world may see that you sent your son, Father make us one.” I believe God will answer this prayer. I’ve included a video clip of the Melanesian brother and sisters singing and dancing before the photograph of all the bishops was taken, to give you a sense of the joy and beauty in their music and their faces.
Becoming one will not be easy, however. Besides the clearly stated differences of those who are attending the conference, it is also true that over 200 bishops are not here in protest over the presence of The Epsicopal Church bishops (among others). I believe that these absences were enabled by the disinviting of Gene Robinson to the conference. Once a scapegoating exile has taken place, others may be actively added to the list of the unaccepted, and others may self- select out of the groups.
The recommendation to not invited Gene to the Lambeth Conference was in the Windsor Report. As we seek to be open to all it could mean to be part of the Body of Christ, we must be aware that becoming one will necessitate overcoming this severe negative dynamism set in motion by not inviting Gene.
Hearing the Melanesian Brothers and Sisters sing, leading us all in “Father Make Us One,” helps me know that this barrier to Communion can also dissolve as we move towards it, together.
(Note: Video (left) updated Monday (a.m.), July 28, 2008.)
The great banners running vertically down the façade of Lambeth Palace read: “Love Mercy, Do Justice.” The third piece of the touchstone verse from Micah, walk humbly with your God, provided the third part of Archbishop Rowan Williams’ meditation on why we bishops and spouses were marching in support of the Millennium Development Goals, MDGs, on London Day, last Thursday.
It was the day we were given tea by the Queen at Buckingham Palace, a day filled with beauty and hospitality. This march in support of the fulfillment of the Millennium Development Goal promise: the halving of extreme poverty around the globe by the year 2015, however, was what gave the day meaning.
Since the General Convention of The Episcopal Church in 2003, support for the MDGs has been growing within the church. The Episcopal Church as a whole has embraced the 0.7% giving to Millennium Goals, as have over 80 dioceses. Giving at the 0.7% level for the relief of global suffering, to meet the core needs of the poorest of the earth has become a spiritual discipline for our church, for the majority of our dioceses, for parishes, evidenced in Lenten programs, Christian formation programs for children and adults, and for thousands of individual Episcopalians.
The major horizon that has not been reached, the one without which we will most certainly not meet these goals by 2015, is advocacy directed at our government. The United States does not give to the United Nations MDG program at the 0.7% level. Most Americans, generous and good-hearted as I find us to be, believe that we give for the relief of global suffering at much higher rates than we in fact do – most think we give somewhere around 20% to these causes. In reality, even giving at the 0.7% level has not been endorsed by the government.
The need is for people of faith to use their influence to call our government to do justice and love mercy. Given our separation of church and state, the government can leave the walking humbly with God up to the church, a joyful yoke for us.
In 2005, “MDG+5” as we called it, I was part of an interfaith vigil on Dag Hammarskjöld Plaza outside the offices of the United Nations in New York. We were there while the United Nations were meeting to continue to call attention to the Goals. The goals are interrelated, and staged for achievement year-by-year leading up to their fulfillment in 2015. One of the goals, maternal health, had been targeted for achievement by 2005. We knew then that the goal had not been met. This is because very few of the member nations had given at the 0.7% level that makes the total goal achievement possible.
In September of this year, when the UN meets again, only seven years from the target date of 2015, there will be many of your bishops making the journey to New York to make public witness of our support for the Goals. We will be inviting clergy and laity from all our dioceses to come and support the effort, to make a big presence at the Plaza.
You will be joined around the world by Anglican bishops (see video below) and the people of God whom they serve, each keeping vigil and making public witness in their own countries. I am part of a group here at the Lambeth Conference working to coordinate this effort.
The MDG March in London on July 24 was a sign of hope at the Lambeth Conference. We will tend the flames of this hope so that it catches fire everywhere, as Jesus hoped, (“I have come to bring fire to the earth and how I wish it were blazing already”) and we help our Brother Jesus “make poverty history.”
During the Lambeth Conference we are studying the Gospel of John in small groups. Particular attention is being paid to the “I Am” statements. Enormous attention has been paid to seven of these statements, each of which uses a metaphor to speak of Jesus, his ministry and his relationship to God and us. These are:
I am the vine
I am the living water
I am the gate
I am the bread of life
I am the good shepherd
I am the light of the world
A lifetime can be spent meditating on the I Am statements. The are each related to the appearance of God to Moses in the burning bush, a story itself filled with holy mystery. And each metaphor is theologically mysterious, capable of infinite meaning. Finally, they can be thought of in relation to each other, having been woven into one gospel, and relating all to the ministry of the Son.
But here in this Lambeth Conference I am drawn to other I Am statements of Jesus in the Gospel of John, lying outside and containing the metaphoric I Ams. In each of these less well known statements, Jesus puts no metaphor before you in order to help you understand him, but refers directly to himself.
One of these is in the conversation with the Samaratan woman at the well. Another is when Jesus meets his disciples in the midst of a storm on a lake at night, as he comes to them walking on water. At the end of John’s gospel, at night again, Jesus says to the ones who are inquiring where Jesus of Nazareth is in order to arrest him, “I Am he.”
The Lambeth Conference brings questions of identity forward in our lives. We are with people of many different ethnicities, cultures, and languages. In the presence of great diversity our easy assumptions of identity are unsettled, and deeper ways to ground our identity can emerge. We can begin to see our life in Christ as the ground of our being, our identity.
As we are drawn deeper and deeper into relationship with one another we find that the descriptors that may catch our attention at first, those associated with ethnicity and culture, rich and capable of being explored in depth as they are, do not begin to sum up human life. Gender, sexual orientation, economic status, all these are important too. And then we begin to learn the personal histories of people, certainly conditioned and connected to all the above, but articulated in unique ways having to do with the inner life of people, their gifts and aspirations.
At some point we may come to understand, as we perceive the deepest aspirations of another person, their courage and hopefulness in the face of their own life challenges, that we are seeing Christ in that person. Christ speaks I AM from within all life, if we have ears to hear and eyes to see.
What Jesus, when he speaks of himself without metaphoric mediation is about is affirming the goodness of creation and the apprehension of the depth of human beings within that creation. He reminds us that we are all “offspring of the divine,” and have the divine image planted within us.
The Lambeth Conference is reminding me of the life Baptism has drawn me into and prepares me for each day. I am trying to look for Christ in each person here.
We have been on retreat with the Archbishop of Canterbury for the last three days. He spoke to the bishops in a series of five meditations on the meaning of the episcopacy. Some interesting things happened in my little life-world while I was moving through this retreat, walking back and forth from the University of Kent, where we are staying, and the cathedral where the retreat was held.
The receptionist at the college of the university where I’m staying gave me a large express mail package, and several letters. When I opened them in my room that evening I found dozens of cards with words of prayerful encouragement from cursillistas in the Diocese of California, and individual notes from clergy and lay people as well. Over these days I’ve been receiving numbers of email notes from people in the Diocese and elsewhere letting me know they are praying for me and all the bishops.
On one walk back from the cathedral I struck up a conversation with a man who was doing yardwork. He is a person who, in his profession, is doing work I think is highly valuable in helping us meet the environmental crisis, and who has a son who is in perhaps the most popular band in the world (hint in the audio link on the left). Several times in the conversation he stressed that he hoped the conference would go well, and said he would be thinking about us throughout.
As I got to the top of the hill where the university is I came on a landscape crew building a beautiful stone and turf labyrinth, oriented towards the cathedral, which could be seen in the distance. The head of the work crew and I talked about how Lauren Artress had begun the labyrinth movement, which has spread over the world, at Grace Cathedral in the Diocese of California. I thought, as I looked at the labyrinth in the making, and the cathedral beyond it how ministries in so many parts of the world have effects not only in the community where they are born, but far beyond.
All of these events helped me think about the great network of Christians, Anglicans and others, who are connected to the bishops gathered here. It is hard for me to comprehend this kind of spiritual connectivity, encompassing some 70 million Anglicans, and many others beyond our Communion (our Communion bishops, like the Lutherans, and representatives of many other Christian bodies arrived at the conference yesterday).
As we bishops direct our prayerful energies to building relationships between us, the people we represent are being drawn into greater communion. Work in companion dioceses preceded this conference, and I imagine it will continue in new, surprising, enhanced ways afterwards. New friendships are being made, and new ways of relating, new structures to bear the relationships are being made as well.
I think that a new phase for the exercise of episcopé will be for bishops to seek to connect the people of God more directly with one another, rather than through us. This is analogous to what happens in a parish when it moves from being a pastoral to a program style congregation.
In the pastoral congregation, most lines of activity center on the rector. In the program church, committees, ad hoc work groups, groups of both being and doing form without direct involvement of the rector – the lines become multi-focal rather than mono-focal. I think we are at the point of looking to see how the same could be true in a global body like the Anglican Communion. This would be a new role for bishops, and evolution of the meaning of episcopé.
