Citizenship

September 11, 2008

From time to time I am asked why I am not an American citizen and the answer is that I cannot take ‘the oath’. Whenever there is an election I am reminded that I am disenfranchised. As an alien, I have the privilege of paying taxes, (if I was an appropriate age I could be drafted for the military,) but I do not have a vote. I do not begrudge my host country this reality. At the same time I have been gone from England too long to be afforded an absentee (actually proxy ballot) there, a law that I do begrudge as having no logic except that it is presumably administratively tricky in some way.

I also do not begrudge America asking that those who are afforded citizenship become true Americans. That is understood as requiring a renunciation of all other allegiance. I wish that was not such a blunt instrument. I know a number of English people who have taken citizenship who point out that telling the American government that you are renouncing all other allegiance does not mean that the English think you have renounced your citizenship there does not help me. I wish there was some ‘dual’ option, but there is not and the oath does not allow wiggle room. Here it is:

I hereby declare, on oath, that I absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate,

state, or sovereignty, of whom or which I have heretofore been a subject or citizen;

that I will support and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States of America against all enemies, foreign and domestic;

that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same;

that I will bear arms on behalf of the United States when required by the law;

that I will perform noncombatant service in the Armed Forces of the United States when required by the law;

that I will perform work of national importance under civilian direction when required by the law; and

that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; so help me God.

The Election and The War

September 11, 2008

It has seven years ago today that we saw people pouring out of the tall office buildings that surround the church after the bombing of the twin towers in New York and the Pentagon in Washington. Life has gone on. We invaded Afghanistan with wide public support and to initial effect in our pursuit of Al Qaida and Osama bin Laden. We then (perhaps without learning the lesson of Hitler’s opening of the Russian front in WWII) turned our energy and attention to Iraq and the rather sickening sight (at least in retrospect) of Colon Powell seeking to have his Adlai Stevenson moment at the United Nations showing the world the perilous threat of Saddam’s Weapons of mass Destruction. I presume that there were many in the administration in those days who believed, on balance, that such weapons either existed or were close to coming into existence. We now know, of course that they didn’t exist and that there were clearly a number of intelligence reports over a period of time that made that case but which were (willfully?) ignored by senior politicians in England and America. Even before that came to light it was hard to get a sense as to why we were really in Iraq. There were plenty of (shifting) rationales but I never heard a compelling reason for taking the extraordinary step of America and its allies (notably England) being the aggressors in a massive war. We knew than and know more now about the young policy types from the Nixon administration (Wolfowitz et al) who were now senior enough to try and put their theories to the test. I remember asking journalists Judy Woodruff and Ray Suarez in a meeting with some Episcopal clergy in 2003 why they thought we were really in Iraq and their answers added up to saying that no one really know but that our political leaders were clear ‘believers’ that the invasion was the best thing we could be doing. I wanted then, and I want now, leaders who will do better than that in the matters of life and death with which they deal.

I opposed this war (in contrast to the first Iraq war and our invasion of Afghanistan) on moral grounds. But we lost some parishioners from All Saints’ in those days allegedly because I did not speak out forcefully enough against it. My own view at the time was that railing against a war that was underway was tilting at windmills and that the best we could do was pray that something good could be brought out of this terrible thing. Maybe Iraq post-Saddam could be a better and more free place for those who live there. I was skeptical of the talk of ‘nation building’ and skeptical about how self serving were our motives where oil was concerned, but maybe something good could be brought out of this war. Later I learned that we could join the great spiritual tradition of lament and we put together a service of prayer for peace, (basically music and silence with some written meditations) which I still use in my own prayer. (Our recent performance of Karl Jenkins’ The Armed Man was a direct result of that desire to find ways to lament the war.

That is the same view I have taken with every subsequent morally questionable decision (including, most recently, ‘the surge’ of troops being sent to Iraq even as our allies continued to bail.) it appears that this last one has brought about a measure of quiet or at least been a catalyst for some Iraqi Sunni people to find the backbone to resist the radicals in their midst who would keep going the cycle of violence and bloodshed. I remember the criticism that the then Archbishop of Canterbury took from Margaret Thatcher and others for reminding the British nation of their need to repent during a service of thanksgiving at the end of the Falklands war in the 80s. He did not buy into the jingoism and political capital that was being claimed as a result of ‘victory’. I give all credit to General Petraeus and our troops under his command for their part in bringing about a reduction in violence, but Iraq is still a long way from ‘peace’; and claims of ‘victory’ (such as we have heard from the G.O.P.’s V.P. nominee in recent days) in the face of all the bloodshed of the long years past, is not something that makes sense to me.

I’m delighted that eight thousand or so of our troops will be coming home and not replaced before Christmas. I’m happy that there is some chance of our escaping a long term entanglement of large numbers of troops with some possibility of being able to leave a relative degree of stability even if it does not last very long. And I hope that we will have a President committed to getting the rest of our troops out of Iraq in short order. I hope that General Petraeus or someone with his kind of tactical vision can take command in Iraq where it seems we will need to be for quite a while longer if there is really a meaningful way to deal with Al Qaida if that idea has any meaning.

More on Rio

September 8, 2008

In the early 80s the Diocese of North Carolina entered into a companion relationship with the Diocese of Belize. Much was made of the Central American refugees that were flooding the country and the needs of the Church. I was greatly amused by the irony that the shop in the lobby of the hotel where we were meeting had a full window display of a magazine (now defunct) called Connoisseur. On the cover was an article about the beautiful beaches of Belize and the wonders of snorkeling in that country.

In the divine comedy or economy of God, my laughter has come back to haunt me. Yesterday’s travel section of the New York Times had an article on the restaurants in an up and coming area of Rio called St. Teresa. http://travel.nytimes.com/2008/09/07/travel/07surfacing.html?ref=travel

Of course, this is the area in which the Cathedral is found.

Hatred, Fear and Homosexuality

September 4, 2008

There is something about Richard Norris’s Notes on the Current Debate regarding Homosexuality and the Place of Homosexuals in the
Church that seems a little unreal to me, helpful though I believe the piece to be. This unfinished work (Published in the Anglican Theological Review) is an extended essay on the moral question of homosexuality (If it is wrong, what exactly is wrong with it and how would we know?) He draws on Scripture, Aristotle, Aquinas and Kant as he makes his way through a complex argument that appears to allow for some measure of choice (at least in the sense that we cannot know for sure that a homosexual orientation is entirely due to some genetic or other predetermined factor) and at the same time seems to be moving toward finding that being homosexual is a morally viable option. One of his respondents, Thomas Breidenthal believes that he allows some measure of choice (rather than fate) in order to allow a genuinely moral conversation and the possibility that making choices as a homosexual can be a moral ‘good’.

What is unreal or at least unaddressed is the fear and hatred that homosexuality engenders in some people. On Sunday August 24, 2008 someone left a placard tacked onto the main door of St. John’s in College Park for everyone to find as they arrived for worship saying ”homosexual priest in the pulpit of this church are an abomination! 666” (grammar as reported in the press). A blogger responding to a news report that Jeffrey John, Dean of St. Albans and a man forced to resign a nomination to be a suffragan bishop in England by the Archbishop of Canterbury and his advisors is a candidate for election in a diocese of the Welsh Church opined that he and his ilk were all “going straight to hell.” The existence, let alone affirmation of GLBT people, is profoundly upsetting to the world view of many and all the logical debate in the world does not seem to touch that part of humanity, however useful the debate may be.

Norris deals with the interpretation of Scripture right off the bat dismissing, among other things any notion that we can understand and evaluate scripture based on its ‘plain meaning’. We know that some (perhaps especially in the Global South?) either have not grasped or are unpersuaded and choose not to respond to such critiques (See entry for May 26, 2008.) Victoria Matthews opines in response to Norris that his conclusions are unlikely to be embraced by evangelicals until a door is opened to them in Scripture. The argument that many moral questions are neither addressed directly, nor answered definitively in Scripture she believes will fall on deaf ears. I’m not clear why the whole sweep of the story of scripture as the story of God’s love and our ever expanding understanding of it (with the Council of Jerusalem by which gentiles were included in the new dispensation offered as ‘exhibit A) is not that window.

Ellen Davis of Duke and the incomparable Margaret Farley of Yale (see her Just Love: a Framework for Christian Sexual Ethics (Continuum, 2006) both have helpful and accessible responses on the larger questions of scripture and ethics in this regard. Others also seek a broader context such as the reality of the church or the status of men in black communities. It is really an interesting read (available in our parish library) and useful contribution, but unlikely to satisfy those who have staked their careers on becoming Ugandan and Nigerian Bishops and the like in the USA. If only they would publish something thoughtful in response that takes seriously the challenges of scripture and the social sciences, treating them worthy of response rather than straightforward condemnation.

The Blessing of Same Gender Unions

September 3, 2008

At our last General Convention deputies passed a resolution that promised that they would exercise ‘caution’ or some such thing in the election of a partnered gay or lesbian to the Episcopate. One of our deputies voted against it as he was not willing ‘to achieve unity at the expense of gay people’; another told me that he voted for it because it bought time without really committing us to anything.’ This is the basis for the Episcopal Church agreeing to a ‘moratorium’ on the consecration of any GLBT people as bishops. The basis for our moratorium on the blessing of same gender unions is that there has been no official move in convention to develop or allow such liturgies. What is happening now, we say, is that some bishops are allowing a ‘pastoral response’ to some of our members. Neither of these measures or moves will ever satisfy those who insist that the church must provide no affirmation of any kind to homosexual people unless they realize that intimate relationships are not open to them if they wish to be faithful and fulfilled Christians. That being the case, and given that people of such a belief (or at least willing to go along with leaders who hold to such a belief with passion) are moving ahead with their quest for ‘parallel jurisdictions’ and the like, then what is stopping us having a conversation about whether or not we should be developing liturgies for same gender unions and changing our constitution to allow the possibility that marriage, expressed legally, can be entered by two people of the same gender?

At the moment, our ‘muddling through’ appears not to be working very well for us. We have a bishop in a relationship that is only sanctioned by virtue of his consecration as bishop. We have bishops and clergy in at least two states where parishioners are getting married by the State and the church says ‘we cannot bless tht union’ getting us into all kinds of logical problems. (It is arguably worse in England where as I understand it, clergy may enter into official partnerships as long as they promise to be celibate.) We are in a situation where our gay and lesbian members cannot celebrate their commitments to one another in the church building (on the basis that we are attempting to honor where the rest of the church and of our diocese find themselves and not do anything that could be construed as ‘illegal’ or against the spirit of where we are as Anglicans and so on.) But if none of this ‘charitable restraint’ is to make any difference then I think we should move full steam ahead to doing what is right and seek to persuade the church as a whole to move forward decently and in order on this matter. For that reason I am making a personal contribution to an organization called ‘Claiming the Blessing’. You can find out more about it here: http://www.claimingtheblessing.org/

An Anglican Future?

September 3, 2008


News reports suggest that the Gafcon Boys, (I’m sure there are more respectful ways of describing these men, but this captures the source of their authority –a conference they called to set up an alternative structure within Anglicanism in order to cleanse it of those who believe that homosexuals are people who can partake of the transforming love of God without that being defined by them; and that they are all men) still using words like ‘desperate’,’ dire’, ‘critical’ and so on to describe the need of faithful e Episcopalians for their intervention over against ‘liberal bishops’ (most of whom are in fact simply trying to be Episcopalians) are apparently planning to take their cause to the Anglican Consultative Council and seek permission to establish a parallel province of Anglicans in North America. This of course is what they have wanted for along time and has been condemned as a course of action for those claiming catholic principles from at least the fifth century until the Windsor report and its aftershocks. If the ACC approves such a move (and I can only presume that the GBs are counting votes) then the only way they can in conscience approve such a move is to declare that the Episcopal Church does not exist as part of the world wide Anglican Communion (also, of course, what they have wanted for along time.)

The Virginia judge who is making preliminary rulings on a number of matters of law regarding eleven Virginia parishes has made another ruling that the statute designed for churches splitting over slavery is applicable there and that what is happening is not, in effect, individuals leaving the Episcopal Church, but actually a ‘church split’. As I understand it, other states do not have that strange statute or its equivalent on their books. I wonder if Canterbury recognizes this movement as a church split and if not, why it wouldn’t say so; and if so, who is splitting from whom? Canterbury clearly believes that he has no role in sorting this out so the mess will continue for a while.

I’m, OK ‘living with tension’, ‘lack of resolution’ and so on but am wondering if it would not be altogether more Christian to resist my urges to fight and instead to let any parish that wants to secede to leave with the property that it currently holds in trust for the mission and ministry of the diocese in which it sits. I realize that is only half the issue. The other half wants to be part of the Anglican Communion. Maybe we should recognize that the Communion has no coherence at this point, an eirenic Lambeth notwithstanding, and that we should form our own ‘Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans’ preferably by a less grandiose and pretentious name, with a less unfortunate acronym, in which we know that many parishes throughout the world, if given genuine freedom, would choose to join. We could predict that for the most part the split would be along the fault line of those cultures that recognize such a thing as a homosexual orientation and who read scripture accordingly and those who don’t. My hope that we could continue together under one ‘tent’ is apparently intolerable for those fomenting schism. What is the alternative?

Preaching

A friend put me on to a book that is part reflection on preaching and part a commentary on 2 Corinthians. It is We Preach not Ourselves: Paul on Proclamation by Michael Knowles (Brazos, 2008), a professor of preaching at McMaster Divinity College in Hamilton, Ontario. He writes:

…to preach after the manner of Paul requires, first, that we be so convinced of Christ’s love and so uncertain of human –even religious—endeavor that we yield to the priority of interior over exterior, unseen over seen, and eternal over transient that Christ’s death and especially his resurrection exemplify. It requires that we enter into the dynamic of divinely imposed death and resurrection to such an extent that we begin to yield up our prerogatives of self-determination, social dignity, and cultural identity, and thereby become conformed to the reality of Christ, with the new life that this entails. (p.226)

In a way what Knowles thinks is the task of the preacher who would proclaim the gospel with the force and balance of Paul is also the task of any Christian. I find my self left unclear as to how to achieve the kind of balance that Knowles articulates as he finds his way through the various dimensions of Christian life discussed or implied in the Corinthian correspondence. But he has left me asking again what makes a good sermon. I have long believed in preaching rather than sermons, by which I mean that I value the conversation in a community over time more than the occasional (although most enjoyable) tour de force. I am not a very good ‘visiting preacher’ as a result. Over time we can preach “ a little law and a little grace” (as I once told a parish search committee.)

Everyone has heard sermons we think are good and others that we judge to be dreadful. In that sense we all place ourselves in the position of being experts and critics. It is rare that we find the high doctrine of preaching articulated by Bonheoffer at his most Germanic when he opined that the duty of one who hears a sermon is to “listen and obey.” He apparently believed that a sermon should never be discussed.

I know that I look for something that qualifies as a ‘so what?’ in a sermon and I look for something that takes me beyond the obvious meaning or straightforward reading of a text which I assume is available to me by hearing it and thinking about it for a minute of two. I don’t enjoy hearing the story re-told unless the re-telling offers me some new insight of consequence. I am suspicious of stories that are designed to move me but which bear no obvious relation to a point. I am suspicious of sermons that offer ‘four steps to a better life’ or ‘three ways to forgive those who have hurt you’ or other such staples of self help literature. It is not that I don’t appreciate the wisdom; it is rather that I’m not sure that such sermons capture or proclaim God’s liberating grace in the gospel.

I’d love to hear your thoughts and some conversation about what makes a good sermon in your view. If you have heard “something that sustains you through the week”, can you offer an example? If you have been challenged in a way that altered the direction of your life, what was that like? If you have heard consolation in a time of trouble, what was the content of the preaching that gave you that sense?