For Jeff

[My cousin Jeff died on March 20 after a battle with brain cancer. He was 44. In the picture I am on the left and he on the right with our great grandmother].

We were the oldest of our generation and because of that there are so many pictures of us together from days that both of us have long forgotten. In some of them we look almost frightened, no doubt unsure of what all this fuss was, and why Gram was trying to hold us so tightly together on her lap.

Our lives just zipped past one another on occasion as we grew older and we never got to know one another well, but I knew you to be a good man, devoted to your girls and a good and honest businessman. We were connected by this odd yet wonderful Johnson bond, at the same time loose and very, very tight.

So I am immensely sad that you are gone, sad most of all for your girls, and for your parents, who are experiencing that awfulness of having one’s child die before you. I suppose I am sad, too, for myself, and the reality of aging and increasing loss.

I am supposedly in the business of coping with loss, and also of proclaiming its ultimate defeat in that thing we call the resurrection, in which I fervently believe. And yet I cannot pretend to understand, much less accept, a death such as yours, a life not lived to its fullness. I wish God could have figured out another way, and I hope someday to be able to ask him why not.

But by then I will have seen you again, if my faith is right, and you will have told me, if I have not yet figured it out myself, that the question doesn’t really matter. You already know that, and probably wish that we could know it too.

I am reminded of a blessing that friends of mine use on occasion. Something like: Life is short, and we do not have much time to make glad the hearts of those who journey with us, so be swift to love and make haste to be kind… I have never used it myself, but perhaps I will begin, because your life and your death have helped me to come closer to its truth.

I know you struggled courageously over the past years and months, and that no one could have been a stronger advocate than your Jamie, and a more faithful companion than your father. You fought the good fight, and so did they, and we are all the better for it. In that very strange paradox of being human, we are all more fully alive because of the way you struggled with death. I trust that now you have seen God’s face and know the love and life that is outside of death. I long to se it with you some day, and perhaps then we will have the time to sit together and become the friends we should have been.

A Day for Humble Thanks

I slept well last night for ther first time in weeks, having stayed up long enough to be able to read the resolutions from the House of Bishops, who have been meeting this week in Texas. I am enormously grateful for their words: http://www.episcopalchurch.org/3577_84148_ENG_HTM.htm.

The words are remarkably clear and, in my estimation, are a healthy dose of self-differentiation in the midst of a climate of "shoulds" created by the Primates. A shorthand summary of what was said might be, "We desire to be in Communion, but as the body that we are. We know this has caused great anxiety, but the anxiety does not belong to us." This is all very grown up(especially for the church)!

As much as it is tempting, however, this is not a day for crowing, because it is a day of pain for some of our brothers and sisters. Let us still hope that we can stay together, and work for it in a way that sacrifices no one's dignity or their integrity.

I am especially grateful to my bishop, Jack McKelvey, for taking a leadership role. Thank you, Bishop, from the bottom of my heart.

This is the Message

Lent 4C: Joshua 5:9-12; 2 Corinthians 5:16-21; Luke 15:1-3, 11b-32

Sermon preached at the Church of St. Luke & St. Simon Cyrene, Rochester, NY
The Mayor of Rochester was present.


At the beginning of this Service we lamented the breach of what I would call incivility: the gap between the dignity with which we believe every human being is endowed, and the way we actually treat one another. This gap exists in all aspects of our society. None of us are immune to it.

It takes a fairly violent form, however, on our streets and among our young people. The senseless fights at recent basketball games at the Blue Cross Arena are just an example, and just the tip of the iceberg. They brought into the public eye for a moment what is a daily reality of life for many of our young people.

What to do? Many things, obviously. One thing, though, is that we in the church need to get clearer about our message and find new ways to proclaim it, and not just in our churches. All of us need to become evangelists of this message in our daily lives.

The message of Christianity, by the way, was made for these times. Christianity was born in a violent time, when upholding the dignity of every human being was not a cultural value, quite the opposite. The message of Christianity was profoundly counter-cultural. Why else did so many early Christians die for proclaiming it? Our time is increasingly not unlike that early time. If there ever was a time when the message of Christianity was culturally acceptable it was not at its beginning and it is not now.

I think this reality is something around which most of us have a difficult time wrapping our minds. We still think of going to church as a culturally acceptable thing to do. Some of us may live in circles where that may be true, but overall I do not think it is any longer. And this is especially true if we get clear about what the message of Christianity actually is. Our message is deeply culturally subversive.

So what is the message? Our readings this morning are perfect for answering this question.

Joshua says it, in a word from God,

Today I have rolled away the reproach of Egypt.[1]

Or, in another translation (NRSV), “Today I have rolled away from you the disgrace of Egypt.”

Paul puts it succinctly in a couple of phrases from him this morning:

We don’t evaluate people by what they have or how they look (the New Revised Standard says, “from a human point of view”); and

Anyone united with the Messiah gets a fresh start, is created new. (NRSV: “If anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!”).

Then Paul gives as close to a job description for Christians as you can get:

All this comes from the God who settled the relationship between us and him, and then called us to settle our relationships with each other (NRSV: “and has given us the ministry of reconciliation”).

And then Jesus tells us a story that illustrates just how this all works: “There once was a man who had two sons…”

The younger son stands for all of us in alienation from God and from one another, sometimes quite willfully chosen. “Give me my inheritance right now,” the son says, which is as good as saying, “I want no more part of you.”

Now let’s stop right there. What does the father do? He gives it to him. He gives it to him. How many of you would honor such a request by one of your children?

The story starts with God the giver of something he never by rights should have given us, our freedom. We are children of God, but we can do what we want to do. We have free will. It is our glory, and it is, of course, how we mess up.

This is how Christianity (and Judaism, for that matter) is culturally subversive right from the beginning. We have been given complete free will by God. God will not do anything to restrict our freedom. Again, this is our glory. But it also leads me to believe that the world is all about me, me and my glorious ability to make choices for myself.

That would be fine (and only glorious) if each of us lived on our own planet. We don’t. We are surrounded by other “me’s.” And the difficult task God has put before me is to make choices that benefit not just me, but us, because God does not just love me, but God loves us, and the “us,” by the way, is literally every created thing.

We are wired to be individuals. But God asks us to be a community. That’s really the dilemma of being human. And God’s answer to this dilemma is culturally subversive because the goal of our culture is for the individual to be all he or she can be, to be able to make every choice without consequence, for every individual to be able to act as if there was no one else in the universe.

The younger son in the story lives into this, his own, dream. It was a great ride for a while. There is something to be said for dissolute living! What a joy to be able to waste and not think about the consequences!

But, of course, there is that little thing which gets in the way of us all: reality. Pain. “He began to hurt.” And then he was thrust into his moment of disgrace: slopping pigs. The detail of the pigs is very important to the story. Pigs were unclean animals. Jews had nothing to do with them. The son has fallen into total disgrace; there is not a shred of dignity left.

That brought him to his senses.

Those few words are a statement of the entirety of what God expects from us. The one thing we have to do to heal our relationship with God. We have “to come to our senses.” We have to be honest about who we are and what we need, and that almost always means being able to say to ourselves—and here comes the cultural subversion again—“I cannot make it on my own.”

I submit to you that there is no reward in this world for making that statement. We define success in our culture by its very opposite: the self-made man or woman is our cultural hero. Someone who says, “I cannot make it on my own” has failed the rule of personal toughness, that is the rule of our streets, be they our city streets, or our suburban ones.

The son makes the choice. I cannot make it on my own. And he prepares a speech, hoping to be received back into his father’s household. Notice it is a speech about status. He assumes he can only get back in by taking on a lesser status. “Take me on as a hired hand.”

Then the story gets really good, and really subversive.

When he was still a long way off, his father saw him.

Now, either his father just happened to see him or, he was watching and waiting. I assume it’s the latter. God doesn’t give up on us, any of us. God sits on the porch and pines for our return like a lovesick puppy dog.

And then runs to greet him. Is that the way you got greeted when you had to come home with your tail between your legs? I’m betting not. And to try to imagine this elderly Middle Eastern-dressed patriarch running down the road is helpful. None of this makes sense.

And note the kiss and the embrace come before the apology. God doesn’t need our confession in order to forgive. He just needs our desire. And then the son doesn’t get the whole speech out, he only gets to “I don’t deserve to be called your son.”

Eugene Peterson captures it brilliantly in the Message. “But the father wasn’t listening.”

My son is here—given up for dead and now alive!

Nothing the son could do could change his status. “You are sealed by the Holy Spirit in baptism, and marked as Christ’s own for ever.” He was already a new creation, long before he was willing to think of himself as one.

This is the message. You are already loved beyond your wildest imagination. You are free, and God will not interfere with that, but if you use your freedom to take so much as one step toward God, you will find yourself dressed for a party, no questions asked.

And this is also how we are to treat one another. This is “the ministry of reconciliation” to which God calls us. To love as the father in this story loves, without condition, prodigally, that is, extravagantly. The dignity of each and every one of you, and your neighbors wherever you live, and your enemies wherever they live, and the thug wanna-bes, and the mentally ill, and those in prison, and everyone on this planet that is thought of as weak or a sinner, is never in question in the eyes of God who wants nothing but to dress us all in the best robe and throw a party just because we are alive.

Now just in case we thought this news was all good and no one could possibly stick up their nose at it, into the story strides the older son, representing the way we want the world to work. You get what you deserve.

“No, son,” the father seems to say, “even you don’t get what you deserve. It is not how I operate.”

That’s the message we are called to proclaim. It’s about love, pure and simple, and, mostly, unconditional. It is not the way the world works, but the world, including our children, will remain lost without it. It makes no sense at all, but the world will only be converted to anything like civility by love, and we in the church are called to dare to be the ones who act that way.

That’s why we ultimately have to say “no” to war as an answer to anything, and we cannot put our trust in more police and more rules to make our streets—or even the Blue Cross Arena—safe again. We must teach people how to love, and we must do that by taking the risk of loving them first. That is how God works and it is how we are called to work.

And we should have no illusions as to how counter cultural and sometimes even dangerous that work is. And how even we will resist it, because even we want the world to work like the older brother wants it to work.

But ultimately it doesn’t. The world works by love. That is what we are about to celebrate at Easter, and it is what the message is that we are called to get clear about and proclaim.

[1] Translation of Eugene Peterson, The Message.

And now for a break...

from the daily episode of "As the Anglican World Turns."

The kittens have just turned 9 months old and got caught in this pose a couple days ago. There biggest problem these days is the timing of the twice daily feeding. They've appealed to tsome mysterious "feline primates," for an earlier time, but we've made it clear they have no jurisdiction in this house.

Reflection on a Meeting with the Presiding Bishop

Last Thursday (March 1, 2007) the Rev Susan Russell and I had the privilege of sitting down for a little over an hour with Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori. I was grateful for the opportunity and I hope it signals a new openness on the part of her office regularly to engage acknowledged leaders in the Episcopal lgbt community.

Bishop Katharine is a remarkable listener and, even more strikingly, an amazingly non-anxious and non-defensive person. Those qualities alone go a long way to encourage me to trust her, even when I disagree with her. My impression is that she says what she means and does not speak in code, so we do not have to spend (and should not waste) a lot of time trying to figure out what is really going on or what she is really intending to do. This too is refreshing, and makes her election all the more remarkable.

This brings me to probably the most important thing I brought from my meeting with her. She told the Church Center staff after her return from Tanzania that she really did not know if the Episcopal Church could make a positive response to the “requests” of the Primates. I believe she sincerely means that, and is willing for us as a Church to disagree with her. I say disagree, because I do believe she thinks the current proposals are the best way forward, and I have no doubt she will continue to argue for them. On the other hand, she is not going to force us to do something we are not willing to do.

This means that we (lgbt Episcopalians and our supporters) must vigorously participate in the forming of consensus, whatever shape that is to take. It is time for us to make clear who we believe we are, and what the limits are to our participation in this ongoing process. I think we can do this in as non-anxious and non-defensive way as Bishop Katharine, so that our word is not a simple, “We have no need of you,” which would be a less than Christian response.

Susan and I presented Bishop Katharine with three bottom lines as we perceive them among lgbt Episcopalians:

The full inclusion of lgbt people in the life of this church (incomplete as it is, but also as far along as it is) is not up for negotiation, and this must include our being very clear that Lambeth 1.10 (1998) is not the standard of teaching in this province of the Communion (the most recent missive from the Archbishop of Canterbury makes it clear that his goal is our accession to this standard. If that is the case, then the Communion is indeed in trouble).
The days of pronouncements such as the Tanzania Communiqué that are about lgbt people without the body producing them having been in any substantive conversation with us must be over. It is absolutely intolerable for this non-listening to continue.
Integrity in particular, and lgbt Episcopalians and our supporters in general, will continue to insist that nothing short of the full inclusion of all the baptized at all levels of the church, including sacramental ones, is acceptable for the church to be a whole and holy body. We asked her not to perceive this as our being unsupportive of her.
She signaled her agreement to all of these points, although I have no doubt we remain in some disagreement about how best to carry them out.

I believe from various things she said that she has acted thus far as she has for three basic reasons:

She values the Communion and believes the Episcopal Church does as well, and faced in Tanzania with its break up, she offered what she thought she could in a good faith effort to hold it together. It is difficult for me, who has been a part of this conversation for twenty years now, to believe wholeheartedly that this is a good faith effort. I hear, for instance, her insistence that we see the graciousness in the Communiqué. I have looked hard and failed to find even an ounce of it.
She believes there has been progress on the issue of the inclusion of lgbt people in other provinces of the Communion and that we have a vocation to stay at the table and ensure that this progress continues.
She believes there will be an Anglican Covenant and that it is best, again, that we stay at the table and participate in its formation.

I find myself in relative agreement with her on these positions, but a serious “cost-promise” analysis needs to be done. We will do no good at the table if we are there without our integrity intact. My estimation of what is being asked of us is that we say we are something that we are not for the price of our continued admission to the table. This is highly problematic and smacks of institutional idolatry. It may very well be that many (even a majority) of our Communion partners need us to stand clearly against this process for the sake of Anglicanism and the Communion, and that our full capitulation to the Primates’ demands may do more damage than good to the Communion in the long run.

In addition, Susan and I were able to share a great deal of our personal stories and the contexts in which we live and minister. I was able to share some of my experience at the Lambeth Conference in 1998 (at which she was not present). I wanted her to know that I have stayed in this church not simply to fight a justice issue about which I feel passionate, but because it is in this church, and in particular in the two communities with which I have been privileged to share an Altar as priest, that I continue to find God and God continues to find me.

One puzzlement that I carry with me since the meeting is her mentioning several times that she thinks we should be looking for a “non-violent” response. “What would Gandhi or Martin Luther King, Jr. be doing in this situation?” she asked. I must confess I am not exactly sure what a “non-violent response” means here. I am not sure that simply saying, “No, we cannot do these things,” is a violent response, or especially, “Here are things we can do, but here are things we cannot do.”

I also fundamentally disagree with her that “impatience is an idol” in this situation. She is the presiding bishop because of past impatience, so this assessment rings hollow with me. Patience was not one of the virtues with which Jesus was invested, nor Paul as I read him. There is, rather, an urgency to the good news that they believed must be proclaimed in word and deed, and a radical impatience with those who would put up roadblocks to that proclamation. The Anglican Communion itself is what may have become an idol in this case, its preservation having become more important than the work of God. God is no respecter of persons was a fundamental part of the early proclamation of Christians. God is even less a respecter of institutions, even (perhaps especially) religious ones.