Dylan’s Neighborhood

A sermon for the eleventh Sunday after Pentecost -- Genesis 32:22-31

A first-grade Sunday School teacher seated her students in a circle, and asked them what they wanted to be when they grew up.  One by one, each child announced, "I want to be a doctor, like my father," or "I want to be a pilot, like my mother."

 
All the students in the circle had shared their dreams, when the time came for the most shy and timid boy in the class to speak.  He said, "When I grow up, I'm going to be a lion tamer in a circus.  I'm going to face those ferocious animals with my whip and chair and make them leap through hoops of fire.  They will obey all of my commands."

The stunned silence and looks of disbelief on the teacher and his classmates was followed quickly by his reassuring, "Well, of course, I'll have my mother with me."

 

God was with Jacob.  A few weeks ago we heard God promise to be with Jacob, do you remember?  Jacob dreamed of a stairway connecting Earth to Heaven, and in that dream,  God drew very near to him and promised to be with him.

 

Well, perhaps that promise and that encounter seemed like a distant memory to Jacob where we find him in the reading this morning.

 

Let’s look back over his life, just a bit.  Jacob was the younger twin brother of Esau, the sons of Isaac and Rebekah.  Jacob was a usurper, a trickster – and he had managed to trick his brother and his father into getting the birthright and the blessing that should have been Esau’s.

 

Jacob had fled from Esau’s wrath.  He had gone to live with his mother’s people, namely Laban, her brother.  Twenty years have passed.  Jacob had married Laban’s two daughters, Leah and Rachel, and now had eleven children by these two women and their maids.  But Jacob was not content with all that he had.  He had tricked his way into gaining much of what belonged to Laban, to the point that Laban’s sons complained that Jacob had more of their father’s possessions than they had.

 

Jacob had to go.  Suddenly, he was homeless again due in large part to his trickery.  But now he had wives and children and servants and huge flocks of animals with him.  He set out to return to his homeland, which was now the territory ruled by his brother, Esau.  Would 20 years be enough for Esau to cool off?

 

Do you think Jacob was rushing back for a tender reunion?  No, the account shows him hedging his bets, sending messengers ahead to find out what Esau’s reaction to his brother’s return would be.

 

Jacob receives word that Esau is coming to meet him, and not alone, but with 500 men!

 

At this point, Jacob decides to send peace offerings ahead.  He sends some of his best flocks on ahead with word that these are gifts to Esau.  Finally he is left with just his family as they cross into Esau’s territory.  As our reading recounts, he ultimately sends his family ahead of him, with “everything that he had.”

 

The text makes clear, “Jacob was left alone.”

 

Suddenly it was like it had been 20 years before, when Jacob encountered God in this same desert, homeless and fearful for his life.

 

In the beginning of this chapter, Jacob makes an impassioned plea to God to remember the promises that God had made to Jacob.

 

And what happens at this point?  Jacob finds himself in a wrestling match.

 

Now, remember that the origin of his name may imply a wrestling move, grabbing the heel, getting your opponents feet out from under him.

 

Well, here the heel-grabber is in the fight of his life.  He and this strange man wrestle until dawn.  Who is this mysterious stranger?  An angel, Jacob’s Freudian subconscious, is it God?  Regardless of who it is, the two wrestlers come to a draw.  And then this man pulls a dirty trick – he cripples Jacob.  But does Jacob let go?  No way!

 

Clearly Jacob senses that this is no ordinary man – he demands a blessing from him.  Where any of us might be relieved when the man asked to be let go, Jacob refuses.  Perhaps he sensed that this man could provide him with something for his impending reunion with Esau.

 

The man asks Jacob his name.  This may seem odd to us, but names were very significant in that ancient middle-eastern culture.  Your name provided not only a family link, but it often referred to a trait unique to you.  Abram’s name is changed to Abraham.  Sarai to Sarah.  And we shall soon hear how God’s own name is important.  Some scholars have suggested that to know someone’s name was to have some measure of control over them.  They were no longer anonymous, their identity was revealed.  So here, Jacob, the usurper, the heel-grabber, gets a new name.

 

Will this mark the beginning of a new era for Jacob?  Is his life as a usurper over?

 

The name he is given is “Israel,” literally “a man who has contended with God.”  And the stranger adds, “a man who has contended with God and has prevailed.”  Jacob has proven his tenacity and his will to survive.  Rather than tricking his opponent for a blessing as he did in the past, here he has won it fair and square.  Remember he asks for the blessing after this man has crippled Jacob.

 

Then Jacob demands to know the name of the man he had been wrestling with.  We don’t hear the man’s answer, but we do hear Jacob’s response.  Like he had at Bethel, he consecrates this place.  Jacob knew that in some way he had encountered God and yet had lived to tell about it.

 

But Jacob, now Israel, does not leave that encounter the same as when he began to wrestle with this man.

 

He sets off to meet Esau the next morning, limping.    

 

This encounter with God not only changes Jacob’s name but it more importantly changes his way of getting around in the world.  This clever usurper had met his match.  He came away with the blessing of his opponent, but he came away with what we might call in today’s parlance, a “career ending injury.”

 

Why would God do this?  This God who had promised to be with Jacob, had promised that his descendants would be as numerous as the sands on the seashore, has just wounded Jacob!  Now he is vulnerable, and visibly so – Esau would be able to see from a distance that his crafty younger brother was in no shape to wrestle him.

 

Yes, God had promised to be with Jacob, but had it ever occurred to Jacob that God’s presence might also mean affliction and opposition?

 

Jacob had had it pretty easy so far in this story.  But suddenly he is humbled, crippled, slowed down.

 

What does Jacob have left as he turns his steps toward this reunion with Esau and possible death?  He doesn’t have his possessions anymore.  He has sent his family on ahead.  And now he doesn’t even have his physical prowess.  Jacob is left with no option but to place his absolute trust in God and the promises God had made to him.  His schemes can no longer be his first recourse.  He won’t be able to grab at Esau’s heel.  Not this time!  He is humbled – forced to plead for mercy.

 

In the end, this encounter with God just before his encounter with Esau should have told Jacob, now Israel, that he needed to be reconciled with his brother.  Rather than pull a trick, he must ask for mercy.  The pain he suddenly finds himself in has transformed not only Jacob, but it has transformed his relationships – with Esau and with God as well.

 

God had Jacob’s undivided attention wrestling on that desert floor all night, the night before he was to meet his ultimate fate.

 

Would he approach Esau, whom he had so ruthlessly tricked, with his wits and his cleverness, or with humility and a limp?

 

Remember that this man, Jacob, now Israel, would become the father of the twelve tribes of Israel.  An entire nation was waiting to be born in this man.  What then might this say to us about how we engage with others, whether it is on an individual and personal basis or in the realms of international diplomacy?  Some approach confrontation with a swagger, itching for a fight.  Others limp.  Should we confront the opponents in our life ready to get the upper hand, to grab for their heel, or should we allow our vulnerability to show?  Should we not try to hide our limp?  These are remarkably different approaches to human interaction, and will no doubt bring about remarkably different outcomes.

 

In this encounter with God, Jacob was given yet another glimpse of the character of the God he, once Jacob, now Israel, was serving.  As he approached Esau in the distance, if Jacob led with his cleverness and strength, he would have been living out of his old name and identity.  But instead, thanks to God’s intervention, Israel was now forced to rely solely on God’s promise as his defense.  He began to live into his new name, his new identity and his new purpose, one closer to God’s intentions and closer to God’s own heart. 

 

In the end, the reunion is a peaceful one.  Esau, who had every right to be furious with Jacob, greets him with respect.  Was it because of the limp?  Who knows?  Jacob, now Israel, has many more miles to go in the adventure of his life, an adventure that will take him all the way to Egypt.  But that story is for another Sunday.  Amen.

A sermon for the ninth Sunday after Pentecost -- Genesis 28:10-19a; Psalm 139

Over the past few weeks we have been hearing some of the great stories of our faith, and not just our faith, but that of Jews and Muslims as well.  Often called the stories of the Patriarchs, we certainly haven’t neglected the Matriarchs involved either.  This morning we have heard another quite familiar story from the Hebrew Scriptures, one immortalized in song and imagination – the story of Jacob’s ladder.  Now, the lectionary, or the schedule of scripture lessons we read from week to week, keeps moving quickly through the narratives of the lives of the patriarchs and matriarchs, so, in the summer months of vacations and lazy Sunday mornings, it is all too easy to miss one of the pivotal plot developments along the way.  So bear with me if I recap a little.

 

Our story so far…

 

In the days after Noah, God called a man named Abram and his wife Sarai to leave their home and move to a new land.  In faith and obedience Abram and Sarai moved as God had told them.  God changed their names to Abraham and Sarah and promised Abraham that his descendants would be as numerous as the stars of the sky.  One problem – they had no children.  In the first of many miracles, Sarah became pregnant in her advanced age and gave birth to Isaac.

 

One day God told Abraham to sacrifice his only son, Isaac, this miraculous gift from God.  In faith and obedience, Abraham prepared to sacrifice Isaac, with God staying his hand at the last second, providing a substitute sacrifice instead.  Isaac matured and took a wife, Rebekah.  Rebekah gave birth to twin boys whom she said had wrestled in her womb.  The first one who managed to be born first was red and hairy, named Esau.  The other who emerged holding his brother’s heel was smooth and fair, named Jacob.  The name Jacob actually derives from a wrestling move, you guessed it – grabbing the heel of the opponent, and had the characteristics of a usurper, an over-thrower.

 

Esau, the rugged outdoorsman and hunter, was Isaac’s favorite.  Jacob, more domestic and subdued, was his mother’s favorite, but he was not the first born son – therefore he did not have his father’s ultimate blessing, nor did he have the birthright that entitled him to all of his father’s wealth and lands.

 

You may recall the story of how Jacob, egged on by Rebekah, had masqueraded as Esau, wearing animal skins on his arms so his blind father would think he was his brother.  Jacob, this usurper, successfully tricked Isaac into giving him the blessing that was due to his elder brother Esau, from whom Jacob had already secured the birthright, leaving Esau with nothing.  Esau, perhaps true to his nature, saw this trickery as a declaration of hostility.  His anger burned, and he was intent upon killing Jacob.  A family feud had begun.

 

Now their mother, Rebekah, told Jacob to flee to Haran, her ancestral home, to live with the family of Laban, her brother.  In fear, Jacob leaves his home in search of another, and it is on the way to Haran that Jacob has the encounter with God we heard in the reading from Genesis.

 

Jacob, who had seemed to be the winner so much of late, tricking his way into both blessing and birthright, was suddenly a fugitive.  He was without a home, forced to leave his family.  He may have the birthright and blessing, but he had to flee the family’s land.  What good are a birthright and a blessing if you have no land?

 

One could imagine Jacob filled with fear, regret and probably feeling utterly alone.

 

You see, we know what happens to Jacob later in the story, but he doesn’t.  It’s the not-knowing that can be the most discouraging and frightening.  This is so early in the story.  If we didn’t know the rest of the story, we might not be so sure that things were going to work out for Jacob.

 

It is in this place of doubt, fear and uncertainty that God meets Jacob.  In his dream, Jacob sees what we have come to call a ladder, but the Hebrew would be better translated as a ramp or even a stairway.  On it, angels are ascending to heaven and descending again to the earth.

 

And then suddenly the LORD is standing beside him.  And what does God promise to this fugitive, this usurper?  God reiterates the now familiar promise that God had made with Abraham and Isaac before him.  God promises this childless, homeless man that his descendants would be like the dust covering the ground.

 

By appearing to him, God has endorsing Jacob as the rightful heir of the promises made to Abraham, and then God promises something new – I will be with you.

 

God has promised to abide with Jacob – not forsaking him but guiding him.  And God further promised to bring Jacob back to this very place.  God has heard the prayer of this fugitive man, a man with only a promise and no land.  God would give him land, and children, and most of all God’s presence.  In the classical language of the Hebrew Scriptures, God has made a covenant with Jacob.

 

The symbol of this covenant is this stairway connecting heaven and earth.  God used other symbols when previous covenants were made – with Noah God has hung up his war bow in the sky promising never to make war again on the human race, with Abraham God provided an alternative sacrifice so that Abraham would not have to kill Isaac his son.  So now God is making a statement about this new relationship with Jacob, symbolized in this stairway.

 

So what about this ladder, or stairway?  Scholars have debated its meaning about as long as any other biblical symbol.  What I think is important to take away from this encounter is a vision of Heaven and Earth in relationship.  Angels are ascending and descending, drawing closer to God and then drawing closer to humankind.  There is a give and take.  One scholar even suggested the beings on the stairway represent both our prayers and our actions.  We draw closer to God through our prayers, and God communicates to us through prayer as well.  Our choices affect God as well, and God interacts with us in return.  Again, a divine give and take, drawing near and returning.

 

Jacob doesn’t seem to do much theological reflection when he awakes from his dream.  Indeed his first reaction seems to be fear.

 

He says he did not know that God was in this place.  God’s point may have been to remind Jacob that God indeed was with him and would be with him wherever he went.  This omnipresence of God is beautifully recounted in today’s Psalm – “Where can I go then from your Spirit?  Where can I flee from your presence?”

 

It seems God is present with the fugitive in the wilderness just as much as God seems to be with a king in his palace.

 

God interacts with Jacob at this precise moment, a moment full of fear and isolation and doubt.  And God reminds Jacob of his promises – he makes sure Jacob knows what he needs to know.

 

Now God doesn’t tell Jacob everything.  Probably Jacob could not bear to know all the details of his immediate future, how he would have to marry TWO wives, and how his 12 sons would quarrel, plunging the family into strife and grief. And they’d all wind up in Egypt!

 

Instead God told Jacob what he needed to know at that moment, to get him through to the next stop on his journey, and this is a turning point for Jacob.

 

Remember, these characters don’t know the rest of the story.  This is an example of what is known as God’s progressive revelation.  Throughout the stories of the Hebrew Scriptures, we witness this constantly growing self-revelation of God as God’s relationship with the people of Israel deepens and grows more complex.

 

Things they couldn’t imagine lay before them – the Egyptian captivity, the Red Sea, Mt. Sinai, the conquest of Canaan, David, Solomon, exile – all of that is in their future.  God reveals more and more to Israel about their relationship as the story unfolds.  God tells them what they need to know now…

 

In the ladder or stairway, God encountered Jacob in an unexpected and very intimate way.  It was in his fear and loneliness and isolation that God broke through to Jacob.  It was as if to say to him, "This very sense of alienation and disconnection you feel may yet lead you to find me in entirely new ways."  This is a private, intimate meeting between God and a man.  No sacrifice.  No audience.  Just Jacob and God.

 

When he awakes, Jacob’s exclaims, “Surely the Lord is in this place and I did not know it!”  After the shock and fear wear off Jacob turns to praise and blessing and what does he do?  He builds a shrine.

 

We may think, how odd!  How culturally quaint!  He erects a stone and pours oil on it.  He even calls it, Beth-el, which literally means, “The House of God.”

 

We may think it odd, but we are no different.   Jacob set up a stone for remembrance of God’s goodness and promise toward him, to memorialize that space, that encounter and that promise.  Over the centuries since God has continued to meet with people, and in response, we have established places to remember this fact about God.  We are in one right now, one made of stone. 

 

We are in the midst of remembering and commemorating the founding of this parish, some 150 years ago, when planting a parish was sometimes a very risky venture, especially on the frontier in the wilderness, so far from Richmond.

 

Of course, when we call buildings like Christ Church the “House of God,” we know that God cannot be contained in a box, and yet what does a house represent?  Something that God promised to Jacob, something Jacob did not have – a place where a family dwells.  This is “God’s house” in that this is where God’s family gathers, here and in thousands of other places of worship across the planet.  This is not to say that we cannot be with God in our homes or that God is not with us wherever we are, but this building this “house of God” represents a marker, in our case a marker made of stone, where we can remember how God has visited us.  The great archaic term is an Ebenezer, a stone raised for remembrance.  We in this community know all too well what it means to raise stones in remembrance.  And yet this church building is a similar monument, but what we recall when we gather here, is the goodness of God over the years, in trials and sorrow and in joy and celebration. 

 

For those on the outside of this or any house of worship may miss the point entirely – until someone has personally experienced God’s presence, this may just seem like a building.  But once we have had an encounter with God, whether it be in the quiet of our own hearts or in the love of God’s people that gather here, we know that this place is “special.”  It is “set apart” in some intangible but deliberate way.  The church was here before us, built by the faithful people of God, and it will go on after we have departed this life.  Generations after us will encounter God in this place, hearing God’s promises and teaching them to their children.

 

God is with us.  God has drawn near.  We remember this fact in an ultimate sense when we approach the Lord’s Table this morning.  God has not forsaken us.  We may not know the rest of the story.  We may feel like homeless fugitives at times.  We do not know what the next chapter holds, but we can trust God – the God who has been with us in the past will be with us in the future.  We as the family of God have gathered in God’s house to celebrate that fact and to thank God for his goodness.  With Jacob we say, “How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.”  Amen

 

 

A sermon for the second Sunday after Pentecost; Matthew 6:24-34

It was one of those images, something about it caught my eye.  While surfing the web I saw an image of a young newly married couple standing in front of a magnificent cathedral.  The caption read, “Wedding Photo Shoot Witnesses Earthquake’s Destruction.”  I clicked on the story and found a series of images documenting the aftermath of the massive earthquake in China’s Cheng Du province.

It seems the cathedral was part of an abandoned Roman Catholic monastery, and it had since become a very popular location among local residents for taking wedding photos.  The wedding photographer captured some pretty harrowing images, among them an unforgettable picture of the cathedral’s tower collapsing.

When the shaking stopped, the cathedral was in ruins, but the photographer continued to snap pictures.  One of the most moving, for me, was a picture of the bridal party, clearly shaken, standing amidst debris, the bride’s dress and hair disheveled with a look on her face that defies easy description.

We have become quite good at documenting disaster these days.  With cell phone cameras that also shoot video and with the ability to send these images around the world in a matter of seconds on the internet, we find footage of destruction on our television and computer screens nearly every morning these days.  Storm chasers drive along side dangerous tornados, hoping to get a really good shot.  The news programs rerun this footage in endless loops.

We have become all too good at documenting disaster these days.  But I have to stop and ask myself, “What is the story here?”  Is the story the devastation and destruction or is it the people left standing in the rubble.  Sure we are attracted to dramatic images of tornados and collapsing buildings, but when the dust settles, the real story begins.

There were an estimated 80,000 killed in that earthquake in Cheung Du.  Cyclone Nargis has left 200,000 dead or missing in Burma.  And dozens have been killed in this country in this tornado outbreak over the past few weeks.  But the earthquake also left 1.5 million homeless in China.  There are 2.5 million homeless in Burma.  In a scenario that seems all too familiar these days, many of these victims have never heard of a thing such as insurance.  No claims adjusters are on their way to Burma.  They are simply wiped out.  All that they once had is gone, leaving nothing.

“Consider the lilies of the field,” Jesus says in today’s gospel.  “How they grow; they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these.”  How might these words sound in the ears of congregations whose buildings were destroyed in the recent tornados?  How would people still living in the devastation in the aftermath of Katrina hear these words?

“Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them.”

Where’s the story here, Jesus?  We need some good footage!

“Do not worry, saying, ‘What will we eat?’ or ‘What will we drink?’ or ‘What will we wear?’  Indeed your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things.”

To those gathered to hear the Sermon on the Mount, these words may not have meant at that moment what they would come to mean in the lives of those listening.  We often hear the words of Jesus but lack the immediate context for using them in our own lives.

Jesus tells us, “God provides,” and we understand that concept.  But can we understand it as intimately as someone who has seen everything they ever owned taken away by a cyclone or an earthquake or a hurricane?

Jesus words probably wouldn’t make headlines today, as perhaps they didn’t when he first spoke them.  But to those left with the clothes on their backs, these are not words easy to ignore.

Jesus is describing a God who is not remote, removed from the world, but rather a God who is intimately involved in life.  Like a Father, he said to them.  We might just as easily add mother here.  This passage begins with language that seems to set this father/mother God up against material power and wealth.  You can’t serve both, Jesus says.

When all your possessions are taken from you, which one of these masters will not forsake you?

Money and wealth are ephemeral, but God’s provision starts at the level of the soil, from the dirt up. This immanent God provides for plants and birds, and they aren’t just surviving, Jesus reminds his listeners – they are more beautiful than even Solomon in all his glory.

The writer of Matthew’s gospel paints a portrait of this caring God throughout the gospel – this God who suffers with the least of these, who identifies with the sick, the homeless, the persecuted.

“Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing?”  Often we hear these words of Jesus used to scold us for being too materialistic in the west.  Rightly so – we do build great barns to house all our stuff.  But Jesus wasn’t speaking directly to us, nor did the gospel writer have us in mind.

The early Christians who heard these words in the gospel were themselves a homeless people.  In the year 70, the temple in Jerusalem had been destroyed by the Romans.  Not just Christians but the entire Jewish nation was essentially homeless, Diaspora.  How would these words have sounded to their ears.  Solomon’s glory was no more.

But this language Jesus used must have calls their minds and their hearts back to their sacred stories – it is the Gentiles who strive for all these things.  We aren’t like them, remember?  The Jewish people had seen God’s provision in the past.  They intimately knew the character of this immanent, suffering God.

Through times of famine and war and exile, God had always provided.  This was not news to them, this was part of their sacred story.  If God has cared for us in the past, this same God, like a father, like a mother, will care for us in the future.  Nothing has changed that.

I wonder if we rehearse our sacred stories enough.  Do we have stories to share about how God has provided for us in the past?  Surely in a parish founded in the frontier has stories of lean times but also times of abundance.  God has not forsaken us in the past.  This same God will not forsake us in the future.

But we have other stories to tell as well.  These are stories Jesus alludes to at the end of the lesson today.  “Strive first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.”

We have a story to tell about how we, both as individuals and as a parish, have worked for that very goal – seeing God’s kingdom, God’s commonwealth here on earth.  We have participated in the bringing about of God’s righteousness, bringing about justice, making things right, and we have stories to tell.

When earthquakes and tornados and disasters take life away and leave so many in desperate need, many evangelists and prophets will affix blame for why it happened.  God must be punishing someone for something.  But where I find God in disasters is in their aftermath.

“Will God not clothe you?”  Jesus asks.  So often, God does clothe the naked by using our hands.  God provides for the homeless, using our hands.  God feeds the hungry, using our hands.  This is what it means, in part, to seek God’s kingdom.  This is how we can bring righteousness and justice and peace to the world.  That’s the news story if you ask me.

Yes our future is uncertain.  The recent disasters that have shaken this globe should remind us of that, if we needed reminding.  But even in our lives there is anxiety.  If Jesus were speaking these words to us today in our context, he might say, “Do not worry about the price of gas, or airline tickets.”  He might then point to animals that walk as a means of God’s provision.   Despite the context of our anxiety or our need, Jesus words remind us that God provides.

Make your choice between the masters, wealth and power that can be taken away in a whirlwind or flood, or the God who has provided and will provide.  In God’s commonwealth, with us serving as God’s hands, anxiety can be exchanged for hope.  Amen.

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"When was the last time you were at a wedding that had a death defying hike, rogue waves, a luau, ultimate fighting, a presidential candidate and a budding bromance?" asks Papi Chulo. For most of us, the answer is never, but luckily, Papi Chulo and Secret Agent Scotch took the time to Vox all the amazing moments during their unforgettable Hawaiian wedding on 08.08.08 so we could all take part in the festivities.

The story began last February, when Papi Chulo popped the question and  Secret Agent Scotch said yes! Since then, they've kept us in the loop about all the details, from the bride's veil to the wedding song to the final To-Do List. And throughout it all, they inspired us with their love for each other. (I'm pretty sure it doesn't get any better than knowing your future husband thinks you are The Perfect Girl.)

It's an amazing love story and we are thrilled they shared it with us. Watch the video of the ceremony and please join us in wishing Papi Chulo and Secret Agent Scotch the fairytale ending they deserve.

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Spice up your Vox blog with one of our latest themes (found in the design area under "New") or any of our hundreds of themes. From shopping to sushi, comics to cycling, there's something for everyone.

Can't get enough of the wedding? A few lucky Voxers - Krissy, djchall, and Beau Smith - made the trip to Hawaii to take part in the celebration. Check out their Vox blogs for more pictures and stories.

Congratulations again to Secret Agent Scotch and Papi Chulo! Enjoy the Honeymoon!

~daisy 

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.

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