The Hunger for True Communion

Further thoughts on the Primates Commnique from Tanzania
The Rev. Michael W. Hopkins
Rector, the Church of St. Luke & St. Simon Cyrene, Rochester, New York
Past President, Integrity

A week from the issuance of the Communiqué from the Primates of the Anglican Communion, a careful read and re-read of it, significant prayer and conversation, and listening to the audio of Presiding Bishop Jefferts Schori’s presentation to the staff at the church center in New York, leads me to the following places:

• It is very painful to be in a place of considering whether it is right to remain in the Anglican Communion or not. Being a part of the worldwide fellowship—in all of its diversity—remains important to me. I care enough about Anglicanism as a way of being Christian that I do not want to leave the conversation on its continuing development. I too, like the Presiding Bishop, “hunger for a vision of a world where people of vastly different opinions can sit at the same table and worship at the same table.” This is a true hunger for true communion.
  
• Having said that, a state of some separation may be necessary for a time. It may be that only in that state of separation can the real conversation happen. It too much feels like we keep trying to get the other to say things about themselves that are not true in order for us to stay together. The one thing we might be able to agree on is that in any counseling situation that is a very bad place to be in, and no way forward. Separation is risky. Ironically enough, lesbian and gay folk know much about this dynamic. Many of us either are separated from our families of origin or spent a significant amount of time separated from them. In my case it was the latter, and it was only in that period of separation that both the rest of my family and I were able to grasp our deep need of one another and able to clarify how we felt and thought (including being able to let go of constantly being in a reactive state). If we do have to let go of one another I hope it is in this sense and not in any kind of “I have no need of you.”
  
• In any statements that the House of Bishops or the Executive Council or the General Convention makes in an attempt to state our desire to remain in Communion, I ask that the following three things be included as an honest statement of who we are (the inability to do this would signal that it was not actually a healing process that the primates had in mind, but an exercise in domination):
  
• A significant portion of our Church clearly does not receive the teaching of Lambeth 1.10 that “homosexual practice is incompatible with Scripture” and we are unable to accept that it is “the standard of teaching” in the Anglican Communion even as we recognize that perhaps a majority of persons in the Communion hold it to be true.
  
• Baptized persons, including clergy, who are gay or lesbian, many of them living in same-sex relationships openly in our faith communities, are valued members of the Episcopal Church. That is a simple statement of who we are, even though we understand that a significant number of Anglicans worldwide do not understand how this can be so.
  
• The pastoral life of many of our parishes includes these persons and the fullness of their lives, something that we committed ourselves to in 1976 (a commitment that, in part, prompted the first call for dialogue on this issue by the Lambeth Conference of 1978). Conversation with this pastoral practice must be part of any Communion-wide listening process for it to have integrity for us. At the same time, we expect to have to be in dialogue with fellow Anglicans who absolutely disagree with us on this matter.
  

Right now I do not want to comment further on the structures being proposed for alternative oversight, although I remain deeply troubled by them. I have needed to focus on where the Communiqué most directly impacts my life and that of my local faith community.

Lastly, I continue to hear something that I first heard at our General Convention last summer, that there has to be some sacrifice on “this issue” if we are going to be able to continue to do mission with the truly suffering of the world. I would hope that this rhetoric would be taken off the table. It is degrading all around. All of us want to do mission with the truly suffering of this world and all of us are doing it in varied ways. I trust that all of us will continue to do them even if for some reason we are cut off from official Anglican channels of doing so. My own suspicion (partly coming out of my own experiences in Africa) is that channels will remain open with Anglican partners even if official channels are closed.

The Anglican Communion & the Episcopal Church: The Way of Vulnerability

Sermon for Lent 1C The Rev. Michael W. Hopkins
Deuteronomy 26:1-11 The Church of St. Luke & St. Simon Cyrene
Romans 10:8b-13 February 25, 2007
Luke 4:1-13



Let me say first of all that I did not want to preach about the Anglican Communion and homosexuality this Sunday. As you will see in the newsletter that arrives this week, my intention this Lent is that we do some serious naming of the realities in the streets around us, lamenting those realities, and further prepare ourselves spiritually for participating in God’s work of reconciliation and transformation.

I still intend for us to do that the rest of this season. But today I have to say something about what is going on in our church.

Not all of you are aware of what I am talking about, so let me try to bring you up to speed quickly.

The archbishops and presiding bishops of the 38 member provinces (who are referred to as “primates”) had their annual meeting, concluding this past Monday. Our new presiding bishop, Katharine Jefferts Schori, was present for the first time. There had been some uncertainty about how she would be received. The good news was that she was seated, the first woman ever in that body. She was even elected to their Standing Committee by the other primates from North and South America.

Trouble did surface mid-way through the meeting when seven of the primates absented themselves from Holy Communion, issuing a statement that they could not in good conscience receive Communion with her.

Then came the final communication from the meeting. It stated explicitly that the Episcopal Church has departed from “the standard of teaching on human sexuality” as stated by the Lambeth Conference in 1998 and that “the episcopal ministry of a person living in a same-sex relationship is not acceptable to the majority of the Communion.” It then declared that the Episcopal Church is in a “broken relationship” with the rest of the Communion, and sets out several things that must be done “for there to be healing in the life of the Communion.”

As I read the document, these are the three things that are required of us:

Accept a Pastoral Council to act on behalf of the Primates in their relationship with the Episcopal Church. Our presiding bishop would appoint two of five members. This Council would choose a “primatial vicar,” who would provide alternative leadership to those in the Episcopal Church who disagree with the actions of our General Convention and do not wish the oversight of their own bishop or our presiding bishop. This “primatial vicar” must come from among those Episcopal Church bishops who are compliant with the supposed standard of teaching on human sexuality.
Our bishops are required to “make an unequivocal common covenant” that they will not “authorize any rite of blessing for same-sex unions” nor vote in favor of such a rite at General Convention.
Our bishops are also required to declare that they will not consent to the election as a bishop of a person living in a same-sex relationship. The bishops are given a deadline of September 30 to meet these two requirements.
If we do not satisfy these requirements than “the relationship between the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Communion remains damaged at best, and this has consequences for the full participation of the [Episcopal] Church in the life of the Communion.” Presumably this means that our bishops will not be invited to the next Lambeth Conference (in 2008) and we will be suspended from participation in all other international Anglican bodies.

All of you know that it is impossible for me to be objective or dispassionate about all of this. I am personally affected by it, as is Mary Ann, and, if for no other reason than the nature of our relationship, so are we, together, as a parish.

Our life together, however, is not directly, immediately threatened. The Primates are not going after openly gay or lesbian priests (yet), and there is no “authorization” of same-sex blessings in this diocese even though many parishes like ours offer that pastoral response with our bishop’s knowledge. Our bishop has assured me that situation is not going to change. Our bishop, in fact, remains strongly supportive. For those of you who have not seen it, copies of his public response to all this are in the back of the church.

In a letter to the clergy of the diocese who are gay or lesbian, he spoke even more strongly.

Please know that I will not abandon you nor will I sit silently while some try to wrest our openness away from us. I can tell you, “This is a ditch I am willing to die in.” You all are doing such excellent ministry, and thankfully, those who choose to look can see it. I am grateful to you, and I can only imagine God is too.

So there is no direct, immediate threat, except on an emotional, and therefore spiritual, level and, of course, that should not be discounted.

I do want you to know, however, that I am not able to be objective about these requests as much because of my commitment to Anglicanism as I understand it as because I am a gay man. I believe these proposals and the way at which they have been arrived are a betrayal of our heritage and signal a massive shift in our way of being church together. What I hope our bishops, in particular, understand, is that it is precisely our way of being church together that has made us a haven for so many. We are a kind of “church of last resort” because of our increasing openness. At least for us in this country, I believe we will be committing evangelical suicide if we completely capitulate to these demands.

As for our presiding bishop, I can tell you I am terribly disappointed in her, but I do not blame her for this and I still believe her leadership bears much promise. I would not have wanted to have been in her shoes in Tanzania, and I believe she was able to keep things from being even worse. In my response to her actions, I must both find a way to let her know that Irespect and support her, but I must also speak truth to power.

It is the prospect of doing just that—speaking truth to power—that causes me to reflect on today’s Gospel and perhaps salvage this sermon time for some spiritual benefit for us.

That is what Jesus is doing in the Gospel this morning, he is speaking truth to power (and, please, do not hear that I am comparing the presiding bishop to the devil!). In doing so, he is laying out a personal agenda which says no to the power of wealth and domination—both political and spiritual domination—itself. He is saying “no” to the achievement of his vision by means of control.

This pleases God. If this desert experience was a test for Jesus than he passes with flying colors, and then when he emerges from it and joins the masses of ordinary folk attracted to the river Jordan by the message of his cousin John, God’s response is, “You are my beloved Son. With you I am well pleased.”

I wrestle with Jesus’ embrace of vulnerability as a way of life, the way, as we call it, of the cross. In the current circumstances I wrestle with whether or not I (and we) are being called to be vulnerable and whether that might mean submitting to what is being asked of us. On the other hand, I do not see Jesus in this story submitting to power, but calling it out, naming it for what it is and refusing to participate in it, though not in a way in which he seeks his own domination of it.

The way of the cross, the way of vulnerability, at this point in the life of the Episcopal Church may very well be to say “no” to participation in a scheme of domination masquerading as healing. It may be to live in the wilderness of separation from our brothers and sisters for a time, although, I assume still doing everything we can to do ministry with them for the sake of the most vulnerable of the world.

If there is a separation I trust it will be in no sense a “thumbing our superior noses” at the rest of the world, nor certainly saying “we have no need of you.” If there is a separation, I pray that it is temporary, and for the sake of all of us being in a place where we can actually better speak out truth and listen to one another’s truth. This is the way of vulnerability.

It is this way of vulnerability, this way of the cross, that Lent confronts us with each year. It is the way to our freedom, although we have a great deal of trouble believing it. Truth to tell we really do prefer the god that the devil offers Jesus, the God of domination and control, the God who saves by manipulation and miracle. We get, instead, the God of the cross, who saves by dying and teaches us the way of disarming love and costly truth telling.

This is not the way being offered to us by the Primates of the Anglican Communion. It is not the way we will heal our Church. It is not the way we will transform our streets or our own lives. The only way for all those things to happen is to tell the truth, cost what it may, and trust in the God who leads his beloved children through the desert back to the water of life.

The Emergence of Reality and the Facing Down of Group Belonging

This reflection is a “part two” of my reflection from yesterday (“Honesty Needs to be the Game We Play…”). It happened that this morning I began my personal Lenten reading, Roman Catholic theologian James Alison’s new book, Undergoing God: Dispatchesfrom the Scene of a Break-in. The following passage in his introduction leapt out at me. “The mess” he refers to is the “double-bind produced by a sacred definition which has not been able to withstand the gradual emergence of truth which sets free, and yet has trapped so much of our [Roman Catholic] clerical structure into a series of contortions.” He goes on:

The only way out of this mess is when people dare to ask what is really true…and stick with their question, however inopportune it seems. But this requires a sense of being undergoers of “Another” other* who is leading us to courage in gently facing down immediate group belonging. Such a sense has been very little in evidence amongst our church leaders so far. I hope …to show both that the emergence of reality need not be as frightening as it seems, and that learning to deal with it is something intrinsic to the very shape of Christianity, and cannot be put off for ever.

* Alison’s name for God as wholly other, not able to be assumed on anyone’s “side,” no matter how obvious it may seem, yet for all.

I believe what the Primates are trying to force on us is not “communion” in any kind of biblical or theological sense. It is “group belonging,’ which must seek to exclude in order to define and defend itself. This is actually, I believe anti-communion in the biblical and theological sense.

There is, of course, no such thing as a purely inclusive community. Anglicanism has striven for it, however, in its principal of “unity in essentials, liberty in non-essentials, and charity in all things,” which has included the deliberate non-defining of essentials (the closest we have come to such a definition is the Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateral, which is itself full of non-definition). The Primates are saying that “homosexual practice being incompatible with Scripture” (from Lambeth 1.10) must be accepted as an essential (and therefore a defining point of unity). It is the Episcopal Church’s vocation to resist this with all its might for the sake of Anglicanism itself.

Canon Kendall Harmon let slip what is really going on here on the Newshour yesterday (2-20):

Well, the crucial difference here is, there are allowances for differences ... but the heart of Anglicanism is: In essentials, unity; in non-essentials, liberty; and in all things, charity.
And the problem is … in Anglicanism, there's always been this historic weakness, which is, what's the difference between non-essentials and essentials? And who gets to decide.

Clearly this is about who gets to decide. And less we had any doubt about some broader agenda in that regard, earlier in the interview he said, quite boldly:

And they're[the Primates] also doing it with a significant amount of challenge to the structure of the Episcopal Church in the process, which one could argue is unprecedented in Anglican history. They're making a lot of structural suggestions as to how things here should be different while this final seven-month process is going on.

In other words, the bishops, a singular group, more naturally prone to “group belonging” should decide. That is the very thing from which our Episcopal polity has protected us from the beginning. Not only should we be resisting any change to our own polity, but also the centralizing of authority in the Primates, which seems to be the agenda of the proposed Anglican Covenant. At the very least, the Anglican Consultative Council, with membership from the laity as well as non-episcopal clergy, is a better venue for decision making.
I think we have witnessed the dynamic of “group belonging” this week in the actions of our own Presiding Bishop. I think it is very difficult indeed to get put into that kind of relatively small group, and not have the dynamics change one’s priorities. What will keep this group together becomes the trump card, no matter the exclusive consequence.

Honesty Needs to be the Only Game We Play Now

A Response to the Primates Communique from Tanzania

For more than thirty years, gay and lesbian folk have been on a trajectory of honesty in the Episcopal Church. An often forgotten event is the ordination of the first openly gay/lesbian person in the Episcopal Church, the Rev. Ellen Barrett, in 1977 by Bishop Paul Moore. This act stirred up the first discussion of “homosexuality” at the Lambeth Conference in 1978 (everybody agreed to study it). The “a” in Anglican also frequently stands for amnesia. The way the current Primates’ Communiqué reads, you would swear that the Episcopal Church came up with this newfangled idea to ordain faithful, otherwise qualified gay and lesbian in 2003. The truth is that the Rt. Rev. Gene Robinson is a second generation openly gay Episcopalian!

As I read the Communiqué, one thing is clear to me. It is time for the Episcopal Church to catch up with gay and lesbian folk, to follow our lead even, in the honesty department. For years conservatives have been driven crazy by bishops (especially) who say things are not happening in their dioceses with their authority when they clearly are. Our bishops, and the rest of us, need to come to grips with the fact that a wink and a nod constitute authorization, even if you don’t use the word. You can parse the definitions of “authorize” and “allow,” but I do not believe that game will play anymore. We gay and lesbian folk are getting sick of it too, by the way. It is fundamentally denigrating. If nothing else, it is a flagrant a violation of the last promise of the baptismal covenant.

So let’s try honesty. And a big part of that honesty needs to be telling the truth about where we are as a Communion, and even as the Episcopal Church. We are impaired. We are broken. The Communiqué “invites” the bishops of our church to make certain statements or “the relationship between The Episcopal Church and the Anglican Communion as a whole remains damaged at best, and this has consequences for the full participation of the Church in the life of the Communion.”

Frankly, that’s the truth. It is damaged at best and all of us understand that decisions have consequences. Maybe if we stopped pretending that we can make things better in the short term we could be honest enough about the brokenness to begin the long journey of repair. What the Primates have offered is a short term solution, a quick fix that cannot be made without throwing a whole class of people overboard.

Whatever we do, the game playing must stop for the sake of everyone. The winkin’ and noddin’ days are over. Instead of semantics, let’s try honesty as the way forward.

True Freedom; A Sermon for Absalom Jones Day

Absalom Jones The Rev. Michael W. Hopkins
Isaiah 61:1-4 Grace Church, Syracuse, NY
John 15:12-15 February 10, 2007


True Freedom

Set us free, O God, from every bond of prejudice and fear; that…we may show forth in our lives the reconciling love and true freedom of the children of God…
from the Collect of the Day

We are now encouraged…to arise out of the dust and shake ourselves, and throw off that servile fear, that the habit of oppression and bondage trained us up in. In meekness and fear we would desire to walk in the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.
from the Charter of St. Thomas’ African Episcopal Church of Philadelphia

No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. You are my friends, if you [love one another as I have loved you].
from the Gospel of the Day

The collect of the day uses the term “true freedom,” which says to me that the writer or writers imagined that there is such a thing as “untrue freedom,” and I want to explore with you tonight just what the difference between “true freedom” and “untrue freedom” might be, particularly in our quest for reconciliation across the racial divides.

I think the first thing to know about the difference between true freedom and untrue freedom is that it is possible to be in a state of both at the same time, which should not be surprising given that in the biblical worldview true freedom is always a gift of God and untrue freedom a deceptive human-made bondage.

It is a mark of true freedom—indeed a gift from God—that I, a man of thoroughly European descent, with a long family lineage first in New England and then in West Central New York might be asked to preach at a celebration of Absalom Jones that is also an event in a longer series on race and reconciliation. It is a mark of true freedom, and, as such, I am grateful to God for its gift.

It would be a mark of untrue freedom, however, if I took this freedom, this gift, as an absolution of my own continued complicity in racism, including ownership of the part of that proud family lineage that was undoubtedly built on racism, for no white person in this country can claim that we are not the inheritors of an historical, sustained, privileged place in society built on the backs of our sisters and brothers of African descent.

The most significant mark of untrue freedom in this beloved country of ours, indeed, is our continued suppression and denial of its racist past, and, in particular, white people’s refusal to believe anything other than “the past is past.” That’s long ago, over now, I wasn’t a part of that, we white folk like to say. But the past cannot be past if the truth about it has never been told, and if the truth about it has never been told, than its effects cannot be laid to rest, in fact, they are allowed to continue their deceptive, pernicious influence on our lives.

I have been graced with glimpses of that true freedom. One of whom most recently has been two occasions on which I was able to view a still unfinished movie called Traces of the Trade, in which descendants of a prominent New England family, the DeWolf’s, come to terms with their family history of slave trading.

The first time I saw the film I was simply impressed by its powerful message: the truth that white members of colonial and early independent America almost universally benefited from the slave trade, north and south, and that the benefit lives on in the continued place of privilege that early social and economic advantage began.

The second time I saw the film, which was just this past week, it suddenly dawned on me that this was a film about me, about my family and the culture and social place in which I was raised and continue to live. The message of the film hit home on a personal level. If nothing else, my western New York family migrated to this part of the country from colonial Massachusetts through Rhode Island and Connecticut in the days of the slave trade.

I was raised to believe that my northern white hands were clean, and even as I have come over the years to understand the racism with which I was raised, I have continued to feel a certain superiority to those raised in the south. Traces of the Trade has completely shattered that illusion, which was an untrue freedom. Our own part of this country, too, was built on the sale of human beings. The place I hold in society as a white man was built on the sale of human beings. That is a painful, painful truth, but to acknowledge it is to begin the road to true freedom, the truth that sets one free.

I am an in-between person, however. As a gay man I experience being on the short end of another great mark of social privilege in this country and world—heterosexual privilege. I would not pretend that it is the same experience of my sisters and brothers of African descent. It is not. But it does make me a bit more sensitive to the presence of privilege, which most white people have little or no sensitivity to at all.

It also gives me the experience of being thought of as “a problem,” as persons in the minority are often thought of and treated as. You know you’re “a problem” when you’re mere presence in a room makes people nervous. What are you going to say or do? How uncomfortable are you going to make people feel? It would clearly be preferable if you were not there. It causes the kind of internal self-hatred that causes gay people, for instance, to try “to pass,” although I know that phenomenon is not unknown among African-Americans as well.

As a white person, I am increasingly aware that I have to take my own ownership, however, of being the real problem, just as I wish straight people would take responsibility for the problem they, not I, cause. As a white man I have to take responsibility that it is my unexamined assumption of privilege that is “the problem.” It is my refusal to share the burden of “un-privilege,” of disenfranchisement, that is the real problem.

My increasing realization that this is true causes me to be extraordinarily moved by the passage from the Charter of St. Thomas’ African Episcopal Church that Absalom Jones helped found that I read at the beginning of this sermon.

Jones and his colleagues speak of their desire to trade fear of the master for fear of God—really the same thing as trading untrue freedom for true freedom. “With meekness and fear,” they say, “we would desire to walk in the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.” It was not privilege they sought, but freedom. They sought to live in the true freedom they knew had already been given to them by God, not the untrue freedom of a place of power and privilege in society. That is perhaps the greatest challenge for people who have lived under oppression, not to desire the power of their oppressors.

The Christian vision is not one in which power and privilege are the dominant forces in society, no matter who holds them. Jones and his colleagues knew that and it is to their eternal credit that they set about to order themselves not in the privilege of societal, untrue freedom, but what they called the meekness of the true freedom of the Gospel.

Meekness is not rewarded in this world and it is not desirable, it is not a value we hold dear. We do not train our children or encourage one another to be meek. We equate it with weakness, not only of a physical kind, but also of an emotional and social and even spiritual kind.

But it was meekness of the kind that Absalom Jones sought to practice that Jesus spoke of in this evening’s Gospel reading. It is meekness that gives one the strength to lay down one’s life for one’s friends, to give up one’s privilege for the sake of another, to simply make room in one’s life for the other, the true other, the stranger who is known only by virtue of our oneness in Christ.

White people, in particular, need to develop the value of meekness if there is to be anything that can truly be called “racial reconciliation.” We must be willing to lay down our privilege, including the privilege of our sanitized histories and the untrue freedom that continues to guarantee our social power. We must deliberately seek ways to tell the stories of the past and to not be afraid of what they reveal.

As I learn more about my New England ancestors I will undoubtedly learn more about the ugly side of their lives, particularly if I am willing to find it. That does not mean that they are also not folks of whom I can be proud. It does mean that my pride can only be in their humanness and not in their superiority. To look back on the past of my ancestors only with the lens of their goodness is one of the privileges I must relinquish as a white person.

I dream of a day not when the world has become “colorblind.” That would be an affront to the diversity that God has created. It is not a goal worthy of God’s creation. I dream of a world, as Jesus did, where we are all friends, the kind who lay down their lives for one another, knowing and embracing their differences, celebrating their goodness, acknowledging their fallen-ness in a common seeking of the truth that will set us all free. We will then truly have become the meek whom Jesus promises will one day inherit the earth.

Set us free, O God, from every bond of prejudice and fear; that…we may show forth in our lives the reconciling love and true freedom of the children of God…

Let us in meekness and holy fear, together, with our privilege lain down, walk in the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.