THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH IN RECENT YEARS indeed for decades has received a lot of heat for taking stands at the leading edges of social advocacy and prophetic ministries – race relations, civil rights, prayer book revision, women’s ordination (first as priests then as bishops now even as Presiding Bishop), gender equality in the work place, gay and lesbian rights, blessing of same-sex relationships, world economic justice, and on. This is as it should be, both that the list goes on and that there should be heat received for taking stands. Heat improves the strength of the metal or proves the metallurgy faulty. So be it.

The core truth for us is that there can be no real peace without justice, no real love without sacrifice, no real faith without works. German martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer called this “the cost" (or heat) "of discipleship.” Unless we take stands that prove our mettle as Christians we have no integrity, no real part in the Word.

About the knowledge of such things, let me say that I know a lot more about the church and God’s will now than when I was young – and a lot more about people and what motivates us – and a lot more about institutions and systems as they both help or hinder our advance as a people of God. From what I know today, I can say without reserve that I’m prouder of being an Episcopalian than I’ve ever been before and preciously because of stands taken by others in the years that I’ve been a priest and rector. And I am sorely convicted and deeply humbled by the fact that it’s taken me years to come up to speed in the Spirit with these brave others.

This is an exciting church era in which to be alive. Good things, godly things are happening and don’t let anybody tell you otherwise. I know of a priest who told a parishioner of mine the Episcopal Church is “going down the tubes.” The priest also celebrated being about to retire and finally "done with this mess". What strange things to say and for two reasons: they show a singular lack of loyalty and trust in the Holy Spirit, lack of humility really, and display an all too prevalent arrogance among the baptized especially the ordained clergy namely that we know and can truly judge what is happening ultimately. This is God's work and not ours to judge. You and I did not become Christians to please or prove ourselves, or to win contests over others, but rather to serve others and glorify God, a work by the way that is never done as we die and in dying "go from strength to strength in the life of perfect service!"

Lord, help us to be more open and faithful, especially in celebrating the Strangeness of You, differences of others, and our common humanity.

The call today for responsible Christians is to attend to the Center, what Anglicans have always known to be the Middle Way and secularists have taken to calling the Common Ground, although when it comes to living the gospel I’m not sure how helpful the secular notion of a common ground really is. Slavery for example, for centuries had a common ground of understanding and support, yet we now hold slavery to be unacceptable; so too with the oppression of women and degradation of minorities. Whatever the social common ground may be, it’s wrong if it allows any such indignities and violations of gospel humanity. Yet such former accepted practices were countenanced by official keepers of the gospel as an accommodation to the common ground politics of their day; actually those "authorized" gospel keepers were complicit in making the gospel itself a slave to the common ground.

Friend, Christians are not called to a common ground but to Holy Ground! So it is that we must take difficult stands in troubling times, even be perceived as causing the trouble, though often because others have not in their day met their duty well and rightly. It’s like Social Security and the National Debt: you can have “the livin’ is easy” in your day, but what will you have done to your children and your children’s children, in their day?

I believe the Episcopal Church in General Convention this summer returned to the common ground. Our leadership turned back from that scary Holy Ground on which we had trod three years ago. By this I mean bishops and lay delegates who voted for Gene Robinson and allowed for the blessing of same-sex relationships (at the discretion of local clergy), said publicly before going into this Convention – “If I’d known how much this action (three years ago) would upset the Anglican Communion, I might have voted differently.” Shame on them!

Gospel principle does not accommodate to accepted practice; gospel principle informs and transforms practice. Said at length and in greater context, I feel many in Convention this past June caved in to the pressures of extremists from the right in particular from those in Africa whose living situation is influenced historically by Evangelical 19^th century British missionaries and contemporarily by Fundamentalist Islam bordering or ruling their societies.

Too much of our Christian dialogue is out there at the far side of everything, at the extremes. Extremism has come to be our accepted given reality, the determining norm of every conversation. We have lost the ability to reflect and speak and act from a rationale center: either someone is for peace or for war, in support of a group or people or nation or not, a true believer or not. As if there is no Middle Way, no regard for mitigating and opposing conciliations. The ability to analyze, interpret, resolve and act with regard for complex, complicated, conflicting, convoluted, contradictory, chaotic forces and do so with gentleness is sorely needed today. To hold the center while others are pulling off into extremist, absolutist positions, that’s the true measure of our practice today.

Children of the Lord, stand your ground; yes, stand your ground! Yet let it be holy ground on which you stand. Holy ground!

SUSAN HOWATCH IN HER 1999 NOVEL The High Flyer takes the story of our Western times – the story of corporate corruption, material excess and spiritual opacity – and weaves it along the satisfyingly nuanced lines one has come to expect of her writing, that is if one is a cognoscenti fan and Christian believer and knows the spiritual opportunities inherent in such a topic. The story also as one might expect was dismissed at review time by popular critics as preachy and moralistic, opportunistic even, themselves not unwitting to God-talk but above and beyond all that of course. For those who have ears however, listen!

Out of the power- and success- and money-hungry corporate culture of the 90s, Howatch fashions the atheistic life of her heroine Carter Graham, a high flyer in London’s world of tax law and corporate life, and subjects it to evil and death. Howatch then makes with this stuff of our common humanity a timeless weave of grace and redemption with which to comfort a soul in its darkest hour. Here is a lesson to be remembered (present in all of Howatch’s fiction), namely the Christian hope that as God has done in the past, so again God will do or in different words and more to the point of our topic, using biblical language, God is ever present to redress our imbalances as in “the hungry shall be filled with good things, and the rich shall be sent away empty” . . . though not necessarily in the way literalists, whether of the Western or Eastern stripe, might wish.

A recurrent theme in Howatch's novels (especially the Starbridge series), this mystical turning of God's favor upon all who come to God's altar of opportunity in the midst of "trouble, sorrow, need or any other adversity" satisfies the thoroughly modern spiritual reader yet perplexes even repulses the reactionary fundamentalist. The Howatch twist that catches and causes us to pause and reconsider matters spiritually is this - we are at once ourselves both the rich and the hungry. This is a profound insight worthy of Christian saints throughout the ages, and a message we need repeated often especially in our overheated world of religious argumentation. In the words of that witty 1970 environmentalist cartoon - "We have met the enemy and he is us!"

Toward the novel’s end Howatch tells the story of a father and nine-year old son traveling in the Lake District on holiday –

They see signs pointing to “The Sheepdog Trials” and the son thinks it would be a grand spectacle for them to watch. Following the signs through hill and valley, they finally arrive at the Sheepdog Trials which are in fact what the signs proclaim them to be – a contest of sheepdogs leading a flock of sheep through a series of trials or tests, and being judged for skill and aptitude in their several performances. The boy however is sorely disappointed. He wanted to see a white wigged, black robed judge, stern and foreboding, peering out over a courtroom of jurymen and fellow citizens and especially upon an accused soul standing in a cage. Maybe a murderer to be convicted and sentenced to death by hanging!

How like that boy we are in our elementary school understanding of God’s love and justice, and our desire, anger even to see things resolved in black-and-white. How much more like the sheepdog judges is our God who does not condemn to death those who fail, but only encourages them to try again to do better next time, always against an empowering background of improved instruction and discipline for success. We look for hangings with phenomenal interest and concern for sin and judgment, Old Testament-style, while the Eternal Being in whose image we are made and in Whom nothing is lost that is created, calls us to model love and justice tempered by mercy, New Testament-style.

Remember the One “who died for our sins and not for ours only, but for the sins of the whole world.” All else bows before this one surpassing grace! How hard is that to get, one asks and then shrugs immediately, realizing very hard indeed especially when looking to the centuries long sectarian foment of the Middle East and the culture wars of our own Anglican Communion.

The spiritual learning for high flying Carter Graham is mostly implied or “out there” beyond the last chapter, leaving her spiritual outcome as it were a work in progress, and that is a good thing come to think of it (except perhaps to dyed-in-the-wool Baptists). Spiritual lessons as universal absolute truths are commanded of all souls in every generation hence, the value of tradition and the practice of religion as keeper of sacred knowledge. It's good to cycle stuff on out into the future (provided we've got the right take on the conversation to begin with). Yet as relative transient experiences each generation is condemned to learn anew these same spiritual lessons again the hard way, one painful lesson after the other, soul by soul. I suppose this is God's way of tempering the truth, making it capable of cutting through the denials and deceits of each age, while leaving room for these same truths to adapt to new realities as yet unknown over time. Both immutable and malleable at the same time.

Evangelicals in general, fundamentalists in particular are strong on the former understanding but weak to the latter. They cannot reconcile their desire for harsh judgment of grievous wrongdoing done by others (readily albeit selectively quoting, "The Bible says . . .") with their own need for loving acceptance of sins done by themselves ("Make me a forgiven sinner!"), sins no less separating them from God than the sins of others. They lack an Anglican tolerance (others might say taste) for ambiguity and paradox and mystery and what the Christian existentialist Camus called "reasonable culpability". They have to separate themselves from those others, as if their objectivization of others as sinners (not forgiven) thereby rejoins them alone as sinners (forgiven) to the Ultimate Other. Yet sin only separates (especially the sin of condemning others); sin cannot join or restore; only living sacrifice can restore to justice what sin has done. All sin separates. Only virtue can repair and heal, and ultimately only Christ's virtue at that.

The meteoric rise and fall of 90s’ corporate star Kenneth Lay, a regular Methodist churchgoer and community philanthropist (with ill-gotten gains) is our most recent poignant example of how awry high flying human aspirations and desires can take us in “scattering the proud in the imagination of their hearts,” as we in the Anglican know of things, would say. Millions were affected adversely by Lay and his fellow corporate conspirators. Yet "there's a wideness in God's mercies" that will embrace Lay and countless others who have done foul deeds unworthy of our forgiveness. That's the good news indeed that is The Good News - we're not the ones doing the judging, thanks be to God. The bottom line is - Christ died for our sins and not for ours only but for the sins of the whole world - even those whose sins have caused us immediate and lasting harm, pain and suffering, dammit.

Biblical literalists (including atheistic heroines whose lives are being transformed) don’t quite get how the sheep fold together at day’s end, good and bad alike. Even the canonical gospel writers, inspired as they were, couldn't resist anthropomorphizing the revelation of God's grace, God's love in sacrifice, with their own touch of anger and vengeance. Howatch gets it though and gets it right even if we are not quite sure of what it is.

In the end there is always hope. Although we do not yet know what for, Howatch knows this hope includes the whole of humanity. There is no hope unless it includes the whole of humanity. Billy Graham Ministries and all those descendant community churches scattered around the country in fancy new digs may have sure knowledge of who goes to heaven and who goes to hell, and how we can tell the difference in this world, but for Howatch and the rest of God’s Anglican children, there is always and in all ways grace (and more grace to come) to be considered. Thanks, Susan.

"DO THE GOSPEL!" ENJOINS A FRIEND from Florida. For us that means advancing the global Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) designed to combat the root causes of basic human suffering in the world today. The MDGs are supported by a growing coalition of world organizations including the United Nations (the commissioning agency), the G8 nations, the Episcopal Church’s Episcopal Relief and Development Fund, the One Campaign (led by U2 rocker Bono) and the Earth Institute at Columbia University. These diverse humanitarian groups (if one can conceive of any G8 nations in such terms) are among the leading forces now rallying millions of people to help achieve the eight Millennium Development Goals -

Goal 1: Eradicate Extreme Poverty and Hunger
Goal 2: Achieve Universal Primary Education for Children
Goal 3: Promote Gender Equality and Empower Women
Goal 4: Reduce Child Mortality
Goal 5: Improve Maternal Health
Goal 6: Combat HIV/AIDS, Malaria and Other Diseases
Goal 7: Ensure Environmental Sustainability
Goal 8: Create a Global Partnership for Development

How you participate in helping to meet the MDGs depends upon your situation in life and what you hear the Spirit calling you to do as an individual or member of a small group. Perhaps you will read a lot about what’s going on in this war to make poverty history and by your informed conversation with others, maybe in a study group, grow the Spirit of Matthew 25:37-40 into an ever-widening circle of belief, recognition and commitment. Or you will be moved to contribute money by carefully selecting a reputable charitable organization that is known to be working on behalf of global relief and development. Or you might go all out and become a volunteer on mission. Or even organize a group of volunteers such as our diocese does for medical mission pilgrimages to El Salvador (our companion diocese in Central America).

The bottom line is rather than being distracted by the angers and frustrations of politics in the Anglican Communion or Middle East, which is spiritually debilitating and enervating over time, what better thing to do with your own life and energy than to commit in a personal way toward fufilling the MDGs. They are all about doing the Gospel of Matthew 25, 21^st century style: that is, with coordinated cross-border planning, shared personnel and material resources, using the best of modern technology and scientific methods, things done from bottom-up with human ingenuity and care and compassion, and measured accounting of outcomes. Isn’t it time we got past the politics of nation states and culture wars consuming our energies and dividing our fellowship and unity as the church, the body of Christ and people of God?

Think about this - when your last day comes upon you, which do you think the Lord our God and Judge will want to know of you, how many people you argued with about God’s disposition or who you helped among the least of these his children in their time of suffering desperately? Being a Christian today means doing the Gospel, not arguing about who is going to heaven or should go to hell, but doing the Gospel and in today’s world that means helping others. Our bishop in CNY wants us “to be the passionate presence of Christ for one other and the world we are called to serve.” Or said in different words, in the context of this posting - think more about MDGs and less about General Conventions and you will be happier and more likely a blessing in the heart of God.

This message, the central message of our Presiding Bishop-elect Katharine Jefferts Schori’s mission outreach agenda for the next nine years in the service life of the church, was brought home to me recently last spring at a week-long Clergy Leadership Conference in Connecticut. On our reading list was Tracy Kidder’s Mountains Beyond Mountains (Random House, 2003), about the extraordinary life of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Harvard-based infectious diseases specialist and medical missionary to Haiti who though not yet 50 years of age has already through profoundly personal charismatic outreach and by employing the latest public health sciences, improved the lives of thousands of people and changed world health protocols for the better around the globe. It is a remarkable story about a man who will be acclaimed a hero of the first half of this century and an inspiration to generations of practical idealists in the future (reading my daughter's alumae magazine recently, I see Mount Holyoke College for example has made Mountains Beyond Mountains required reading for the entire academic community this year).

Doing the Gospel today, and not just talking about it at least not that portion of the gospel represented by Matthew 25:37-40, is in large measure, borrowing from the mission statement of the Earth Institute, about “mobilizing the sciences and public policy to build a prosperous and sustainable future.” By “sciences” is meant not only earth science, biology, engineering, health, but social sciences as well including theology and religion. All have a part to play in realizing the future envisioned by the MDGs and it is an important and vital part that the church plays, namely bringing to the table of humanity our unique knowledge and understanding of ultimate meaning and purpose in life, along with a sustained history and sustainable manner of behaving that has long served the world with hope for a better future.

So let’s get about it – the goals are out there to be achieved, the time is short - four millions lives a day are at stake, whole peoples and nations are at risk in regions around the globe - and God is calling us to be faithful. Speak in your local faith community today about coming up to speed on the Millennium Development Goals. "Do the Gospel!"

For more on MDGs and the policies and practice behind them, go to: for a general overview www.unmillenniumproject.org/ or for a close-up look try the Millennium Villages Project www.earthinstitute.columbia.edu/or to get involved www.er-d.org/programs_36756_ENG_HTM.htm.

OUR PRESIDING BISHOP-ELECT Katharine Jefferts Schori has proclaimed a major focus of her new administration will be pursuing the global agenda of what are called the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Bishop Jefferts Schori will need all the help she can muster in support of these goals and to hold back countervailing forces on two fronts: the clash of civilizations in an ongoing increasingly violent, wide-spreading world war that will likely outlast her 9-year term of office and the self-obsessing culture war within the Anglican Communion that is doing systemic violence to the fabric of Anglican faith and practice.

Our greater central task reasons Jefferts Schori - here moderates everywhere should find holy ground in agreement - is to help meet basic human needs in a world that is suffering desperately and for whom we are called to be the compassionate presence of Christ. The newly elected Presiding Bishop’s work is cut out for her. She will need all her skills as an airplane pilot and oceanographer and moral theologian to maneuver the church successfully through these times.

Recent Episcopal administrations at 815 2^nd Avenue, NYC (headquarters of the national Episcopal Church) have failed at important moments in contemporary history, witnessed symbolically by twice-removed Presiding Bishop Edmund Browning picketing his fellow Episcopalian President George H. W. Bush outside the White House in protest of the First Gulf War (a pathetic display of pastoral bankruptcy in the office of the Presiding Bishop and thorough lack of understanding of what was at stake globally) and the craven act of P. B. Frank Griswold pushing a last-minute resolution through General Convention which effectively gave up holy ground reached at great prophetic cost to the church.

The latter refers to 2006 G. C. Resolution B033, a backroom accommodation to reactionary bullies reminiscent of Neville Chamberlain’s “peace in our time” diplomacy on the eve of World War Two. Resolution B033 instructs the church to abstain from ordaining to the episcopacy any person whose manner of life would present a challenge to the wider church: at once an obvious drawback from the 2003 G. C’s consent to the election of a homosexual bishop - and by extension an affront to all social justice principles held dearly in the church - and an untenably compromised resolution given the same Convention’s consent to the election in the Diocese of Northern California of a man who has been married four times.

Nothing more need be said about Browning, a cheerleader for the Democratic Party at prayer. But about Bishop Griswold’s disturbing last step: it was an uncharacteristically unilateral, pre-emptive act of an otherwise successful, much-needed centering administration. Hopefully Resolution B033 will not be the defining moment of Griswold’s tenure in office, nor will it augur the character of Jefferts Schori’s administration as she was co-opted into pleading on behalf of the resolution before the House of Deputies. A church that espouses transparency, openness, inclusiveness; that acts prophetically, courageously, honestly; that follows in the Spirit where others dare not tread and where itself has hope for what it yet knows not, such a church as ours needs better and more consistent leadership.

What matters now is that the church give no more ground to political or religious extremists, nor support such craven behavior by any other authorities in the name of a false peace. The only way State-sponsored terrorists will win the war for fundamentalist Islam is by the peoples of the West thinking foolishly that our values and purposes are the same as those of our self-declared enemies. Radical Islamists question not the firepower of the West but the willpower of the people, and therein lay their greatest hope – that their fanatical religious devotion is greater than the devotion of Christians - and that they can win the war between civilizations because Christians no longer have the stomach for the good fight and will compromise basic values and principles in order to keep their standard of living and domestic comforts. They are wrong. We have not even begun to rally our true inner strengths to the challenges that are being put before us.

Lord, give us faithful leaders to persevere and prevail in these troubling times, for the sake of humanity as we know it revealed in Jesus your Son.

Again, the role of the church in these troubling times is to think globally and act compassionately, with the MDGs as our focus for agenda and the motivation and model of Christ as our constant guide. While our military and law enforcement agencies do the work that has been evilly forced upon them, and over which they will triumph at great cost, we must prepare the future order of humanity by living faithfully the mandates of Matthew 25. Whither we go is not so much the matter any longer as is how we go, how we move into the 21^st century and who we serve along the way.

Let us serve the whole of humanity, O God; and let our service be in your way of love with living sacrifice, peace with equal justice, judgment with tempering mercy, faith with practical works, devotion with observable discipline, O Lord our God.

BRITISH AUTHORITIES DISRUPTED a terrorist plot to simultaneously blow up several aircraft midair between the U.K. and the U.S. using explosives smuggled in hand luggage . . . That’s how this morning’s edition of the WSJ Online, which I use for my Internet home page, opens. The news is a steely reminder that we are at war. This terrorist plot out of the UK we are told, has earmarks of al Qaeda going for a global statement on the fifth anniversary of 9/11. The alleged terrorists are all Pakistani in background. One of the leaders hiding in Pakistan is accused of murdering his uncle in 2002.

We have been at war for over 25 years now, since 1979 when militant students of radical Islamism took 52 American citizens hostage in the US Embassy in Tehran, during the failed administration of Jimmy Carter. Four years later Hezbollah, formed in the mid-70s as the militant organized terrorist arm of Syrian and Iranian foreign policy, bombed the US Embassy in Beirut killing 63 people and then executed the homicidal suicide attack on the Marine barracks also in Beirut, killing 241 Marines. The Marines were there to secure a safe retreat for the Lebanese army and PLO factions at risk by Hezbollah’s aggression into southern Lebanon and the subsequent violent conflict with Israeli forces defending their northern border.

The list of radical Islamic violence targeted against military and civilian populations around the world needs to be recounted in the mind of Western peoples everywhere for we are at war, a war between two civilizations, and the world as we know it and the hope for a better future hangs in the balance. Who will win? What of our way of life if we were to lose? These are real questions everyone on the side of Western civilization need to recognize and answer. Our enemy is set on world disruption, the annihilation of the Jews, the domination of all peoples by radical fundamentalist Islam, and the destruction of America.

Christians don’t get to sit this one out any longer. We must choose sides in this great contest and do so reluctantly but choose nonetheless. It is no longer a matter of living blind to the fierce, strange cultural realities of the Middle East while enjoying our privileged comforts in the West. The Middle East and the West are inextricably bound together now, though at present in a death struggle: the result of over 100 years of failed foreign policy and weak resolves in the West, of our living off the misappropriated natural resources of other peoples and nations in the Middle East, and of being complicit in the rule of Middle Eastern autocracies so anathema to our own way of life in their oppression and degradation of their own people, yet supported by us for our own convenience. Nonetheless, we must choose one way or the other. And how are we to live with our choice as Christians? How are we to live spiritually?

There is sin abounding on all sides in this latest and most dangerous world war. Yet the past and how we got to the present is no longer the matter of the day. These are dangerous, troubling times demanding firm resolve and clarity of purpose. We must deal with now and how we do will determine whither goes our future and the future of world civilization. The first and immediate need is to cut off the radical terrorists and their ability to do violence, at the same time standing down their supporters principally in Iran and Syria, and if possible enabling and empowering new orders of indigenous governance and control in all the nations of the Middle East. Then and only then can everyone together set about the long term work of redressing the imbalances that are at the root of the hostilities. For now though the work of the day is cutting off terrorists.

All will change, both the Middle East and West in this great conflict of civilizations, and yet all will be for the better, all will be well in the end. The Lord our God will make it so. The hard part for us as Christians in the West will be in sanctioning the use of force in response to the real and present dangers of rampant State-sponsored terrorism. Admittedly the underlying issues will not be resolved by engaging the terrorists with deadly force, but the issues will never be addressed without first capping the violence at its evil sources. You expect police to keep your neighborhood safe and intervene when violence occurs (preferably before it occurs), so too should we expect the same of our military and law-enforcement agencies in these troubling times. Or to say the same thing differently using a healing metaphor, you would not deny the doctor’s knife or laser or chemotherapy in the hope of removing a cancer from your body, nor should we deny the use of force for the purpose of achieving a greater good for the global body.

Pushed to choose between a West that has learned over the centuries how to moderate their own extremist tendencies including when appropriate the use of proportional force to protect innocent civilians or a Middle East that has not shown any will or ability to control the radical Islamists and their homicidal bombers and paramilitary terrorist organizations, I choose the West. Pushed to choose between what motivates the peoples of Christianity or Islam in the main – and I believe this choice is a matter of life or death for civilization as we know it and hope for it in the future – I choose the West. I choose the West knowing in my Christian heart that in the end, having won, we will make a greater, just peace for the peoples and nations of the Middle East than they would do or support if the winners, on our behalf. We’ve done so before in Germany, in Japan and will do so again in Afghanistan and Iraq and soon, if necessary, in Syria and Iran. Meanwhile, what has Islam done in over 500 years?

In a word, I have no desire to see my children’s children at the mercies of a radical fundamentalist mullah. The issue for me then is how to support the good fight and advance true civilization. I would not have us advance as arrogant Christus Victors. I would rather have us advance as humble Christian men and women resolutely seeking the holy ground of an inclusive, open, transparent, free and forgiving society. Let us then advance in Christ's image toward what once was called confidently the Kingdom of God and not with Christians only but with people of good will everywhere.