Pentecost 2, Proper 5
The Rev. Nigel Taber-Hamilton, Rector
Reflections on the Presiding Bishop’s Pastoral Letter
The Psalmist today describes a particular sort of God: one how brings “justice to those who are oppressed...food to those who hunger...[who] sets the prisoners free...opens the eyes of the blind.....lifts up those who are bowed down....cares for the stranger...sustains the orphan and widow”.
It’s entirely reasonable to assume that those who proclaim themselves followers of that sort of God would naturally reflect those values: that we would share similar concerns; that our identity would be shaped by our values.
And you would also expect that the Presiding Bishop’s Pastoral Letter would do the same thing: reflect not just her identity but the identity of our whole church, the Episcopal Church.
So today I want to try and “connect the dots” for you. First, as my friend Diana Butler Bass says, “Unless you've been sleeping in a cave, you are probably aware that the Episcopal Church [and other Anglicans in the Anglican Communion – of which we’re a part – have] been arguing about the role of Gay, Lesbian, Bi-sexual, and Trans-gender persons in the Church.”
The argument itself both is and isn’t about GLBT folk:
- It is, only in as far as our GLBT members are symbolic of all those minorities whom some would – oddly in the name of Jesus – seek to exclude;
- It isn’t because the real struggle is about what it means to be an Anglican – and hence what it means to be an Episcopalian: who are we, as Anglican Christians?
In either case “Identity” is what’s at stake.
We find our identity from at least two sources: one is Holy Scripture, and especially both in the Jesus we meet in the Gospels and the Letters and in the community birthed from them – the undivided Church; the other is from the Reformation. But, as another friend, Mike Russell, said to me yesterday, we’re really “ the battered child of the Reformation, buffeted between those who would return us to Rome and those who would carry us fully to [Augsburg and] Geneva”.
Ever since the Reformation there have been three threads within Anglicanism: on each end are the Anglo-Catholics and the Fundamentalist Evangelicals, and in the center are those who are called, for want of a better term, “Broad Church”. Sometimes it looks like this broad middle is populated with those who “go-along-to-get-along” – who seemingly acquiesce to the extremes for the sake of peace.
Sometimes it is populated with those folk. But often there’s something deeper going on, something that comes out of the fruit of what is called “The Elizabethan Settlement”: Elizabeth I’s solution to the internecine warfare within the English Church following the Reformation and split with Rome was to chart a middle way, a “via media” that attempted to be inclusive of all points of view, from Catholic to Reformed and everything in between. There’s real theological truth to Robin Williams best reason for being an Episcopalian: no matter what you believe you can always find someone who will agree with you.
At its best the Elizabethan Settlement created and encouraged a broadly tolerant heart that sought “the considered consent of the governed in the formation of [the] authorities which they would then allow to govern them” (Mike Russell). This is really important – you can draw a straight line from Jesus and St. Paul to Magna Carta, through the Elizabethan Settlement, to our Constitution and Bill of Rights, to the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
And, you can draw a straight line from Jesus and St. Paul to Thomas Aquinas, to Richard Hooker, to Henry VIII, Thomas Cranmer and the Book of Common Prayer, to Elizabeth I, to the first Presiding Bishop of our Church William White, to Archbishop of Canterbury William Temple, to our current Presiding Bishop Katherine Jefferts Schori.
This is a “bottom-up” vision of community, not a “top-down” vision. It is an institutional iteration of the Body of Christ. Our Baptismal Covenant, which we regularly repeat, is born of this “bottom-up” vision.
This is the Anglican vision enshrined in the “Broad Church” – “it stands apart from those who would take the church toward the despotic ends possible” (ibid) if those within Anglicanism who lean toward Rome, or toward biblical fundamentalism could have their way. Both of these visions, whether Roman or Fundamentalist, are “top-down” – only the claimed authority is different.
The great struggle happening within Anglicanism is about whether the two extremes will overcome the broad middle. We are that broad middle.
We face a choice, therefore: are we to walk away from this broad middle, this “via media”, or not? We certainly could choose to walk away, but if we did we would be abandoning that identity that lies at the very heart of what it means to be an Anglican” to some vestigial form of Roman Catholicism or Fundamentalism.” (Ibid).
It would also mean surrendering to those who wish to turn back the clock on tolerance, and human rights; on the full inclusion of every baptized person; it would be “to make Anglicanism look more like its historic fringes than its [solid] center”. (ibid)
The stakes are, therefore, very high: if we step aside we abandon the Anglican vision, which is – and always has been – one of .justice, inclusion, and broad tolerance, of “striving for justice and peace, and respecting the dignity of every human being”(BCP p 305); it is – and always has been – one of bottom-up democracy, not top-down dictatorship, about the full inclusion of all the baptized people of God – ALL OF US – in the governance and ministry of our Church.
It is in this context that you should read our Presiding Bishop’s letter.
And it is from this context that I would invite you to embrace this treasured Anglican vision, lovingly cared for and handed on to us by those who have gone before us – some of whom paid with their blood and their lives to do so. They are the ones who laid the Anglican foundation on which we now stand – they who have so clearly been part of the Trinity’s community of transcendent love, they who have so clearly been blessed with the Pentecost Spirit’s gifts. It is because of them that we are able to call ourselves Anglicans. May we not, now, fail them on this day and in this time. Amen.
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