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 2nd 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 21st 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.
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.
