(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.
While in Wales we were taken to St. Fagan’s: the Welsh National History Museum. The centerpiece of our visit was to a restored medieval church that had been moved about fifty miles from its original location.
As part of the restoration the large portion of the whitewashed walls that had been covered by vivid iconographic paintings has been brought back to life.
In addition to the striking graphic elements, all over the walls, the very shape of the church interior is striking. Unlike the many churches with which I’m familiar, there is not a central visual point in the church; instead, the altar is fairly heavily sequestered inside the sanctuary, and there are articulated galleries, which, with their associated wall paintings created many focal points for the worshippers’ gazes.
A brilliant young woman docent, deeply informed about both art and medieval church life, gave us an introduction to the church. She speculated that as there were no pews, and given the interior configuration of space/gaphics that worship might have been akin to what one might experience in some Eastern Orthodox churches today – people coming in at various points in time throughout the span of time set aside for the Eucharist, talking with one another, and moving about the inside of the church, looking at the sacred images.
She pointed out that the images are very powerful, seeming to yield their meaning fully on the first viewing. Using the Mocking of Christ as an example, however, she went through several less obvious levels of meaning that also derive from a meditation on the Mocking of Christ. Then she said, “A generation of people could look at these pictures over and over and together grow in understanding throughout their lifetimes.”
In the Diocese of California we’ve been learning from creative people like Ian Mobsby of Moot Church in London about what the English are calling “Fresh Expressions” of the Church. This restored church from 1,000 years ago has given me some thoughts about worship in our post-modern world.
We might think about worship that is not focused on the preacher/celebrant. A world that is not ordered by patriarchy/hierarchy, where God is God-with-us, rather than simply above us could use some worship that reflects that reality, that gives people the tools for formation-in-community and aids them in using those tools. This, as opposed to dispensing wisdom and access to sacred power.
We might think about worship that sees theology not as a subject among subjects, where once you’ve “gotten it,” as with the Periodic Chart, or the quadratic equation, you’re done, and rather something that is full of endless mystery and surprise, where once the grammar of theology is gained, worlds of reflection, meditation, contemplation, relationship and transformation open up.
St. Fagan’s does not represent a paradigm for relatedness with God that I imagine can be brought forward unchanged into our context. What I’m suggesting is that by looking at an unfamiliar pattern of worship we may be prompted to find possibilities for new life that fit our own time. We live in a time where new cosmologies have been and are being dreamed, theorized, imagined, and where worship still largely references frameworks that reflect a prior paradigm.
One of the most fun times I’ve had in quite a long time was attending a village fete held at a medieval church in the parish served by the Leonards, my hosts in Wales. The gentle good humor, the mutual support given to one another, the sense of community are all things that people in the diocese I serve probably experience on a nearly weekly basis, but as much fun as visitations are for bishops, they are not this vibrant yet understated sense of life-sustaining community I experienced in Wales. ,
It is this treasure of community that is one of the great gifts the Church can give to an increasingly fragmented world. The question many of us in the Diocese of California are wrestling with is how to really offer some possibilities for unchurched people to be part of community such as I experienced it in Wales. It is painfully obvious that simply waiting for the opportunity of likely candidates for membership in the Episcopal Church is an insufficient formula.
We need to find ways to actively invite into our communities, and beyond that to find out what the needs of a community are really, and how we could partner with them in meeting those needs.
Following is a video I took of the fete, the village choir singing Abba’s “Waterloo!”
I have been in Wales, in the Diocese of Llandaf, for the last five days, enjoying what is called "pre-Lambeth Hospitality." The other non-UK bishops in Llandaf were from Mexico, Australia, and also from our own Diocese of Milwaukee. Those three bishops were hosted in Cardiff, while I was the guest of Peter and Teann Leonard, who serve a rural parish comprised of three medieval churches some fifteen miles out of Cardiff.
Wales is a province of the Anglican Communion, with its own Archbishop, The Most Rev. Barry Morgan. Archbishop Morgan spoke to the news while I was in Wales to say that if his Church agreed he would be willing to ordain a partnered gay or lesbian bishop, a strong statement in the United Kingdom at this time.
The four visiting bishops spoke at a forum hosted by a parish church in the diocese. We each spoke for about five minutes, describing the dioceses we serve, our sense of mission today, and our hopes for the Lambeth Conference. There was remarkable commonality among us, running beneath differences that have to do with both personality and the character of the dioceses we serve.
We all have a sense of urgency about the need for the Church, in both its local expressions and as a global body, to work with the poor and the oppressed. An important difference, I think, between my position and theirs as we head into the conference is that I believe the struggle for the recognition of LGBT people in the Church and in civil society is part of the overall struggle for justice and reconciliation, and not a separate choice. Nevertheless, I am encouraged by the common ground we shared, and by the great hospitality I received and the strong support I received from Archbishop Morgan and Bishop David.
I'm now in Oxford for a small retreat before the conference begins.
