July 22, 2012
The 8th Sunday after Pentecost
The Rev. Josh Griffin
An Entirely Different Episcopal Critique of Liberal
Christianity
This past week, in the wake of The Episcopal Church’s 77th
General Convention in Indianapolis, the internet has been abuzz with opinion
pieces (and opinionated rebuttals to these opinion pieces) about the future of
mainline Christianity in the United States. As our Church prayerfully approved
liturgy for same-sex blessings, conservative pundits decried a Church which had
become unmoored from its “traditional” foundations.
Showing little understanding of historical Anglicanism,
Douthat writes that the Episcopal Church “still
has priests and bishops, altars and stained-glass windows. But it is flexible
to the point of indifference on dogma, friendly to sexual liberation in almost
every form, willing to blend Christianity with other faiths, and eager to
downplay theology entirely in favor of secular political causes.”
The problems with Douthat’s analysis range from false causal
assumptions and factual inaccuracies, to a total lack of understanding about
just what Anglicanism is—a
non-dogmatic tradition of common prayer. Writing in the Huffington Post, the
Rev. Winnie Varghese, of New York City, penned one of the best replies to
the Times piece, writing that “liberal and
progressive Christians believe…[that] those liberation movements from the 1960s
on… were right, and [that] our church should change in response to that
revelation.”
Varghese goes on to
write, “If our increased thoughtfulness in understanding the human condition
causes us to be open minded in a way that offends your prejudices, yes, the
Episcopal Church might not be for you. I hope I'm being clear,” she continues, “I
believe our decline is a sloughing off of the baggage of [the] establishment
and [the] American Empire and [from] not quickly enough embracing an expansive
view of humanity within our Eucharistic communities.”
Many of those who are
upset with our affirmation of queer sexuality are very concerned that the
Episcopal Church has turned away from the Bible, which is funny, because we
actually take the Bible very seriously. We take it so seriously that we cycle
through (most of) it every three years and some of us, myself included, are
quite committed to lectionary preaching. (As a mentor of mine likes to point
out we read more than a few hand picked verses from Paul, the Old Testament,
and John’s Gospel.) Not surprisingly today’s readings are well suited to
address the debates currently circulating in electron-land.
The question of gay,
lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered persons and the Church is another example
of the old insider/outsider problem which affects all human communities no
matter how small—and it’s certainly nothing new. It is precisely the pastoral
problem to which Paul is dealing with in his letter to the Church at Ephesus.
(Ephesians 2:11-22) Addressing non-Jewish followers of Jesus, who, being
uncircumcised Gentiles, he writes, were once “aliens from the commonwealth of
Israel, and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without
God in the world.”
That was then, but
“now in Christ Jesus you who were once far off have been brought near…in his
flesh he has made both groups into one and has broken down the dividing wall…”
Jesus, teaches Paul, “has abolished” all religious logic that elevated Jews
above Gentiles, “creat[ing]… in himself one new humanity in place of the two”
and reconciling “both groups to God in one body through the cross.”
Rev. Varghese is
right. The movement of God is towards the elimination of social
domination and toward a leveling of hierarchical categories of human
identity—that much is clear in the arc of the Biblical narrative. God’s Spirit,
we believe, erodes all formulations that hold some people at the margins so as
to benefit the few.
Following Paul, we
Episcopalians understand the work of Christ to be the work of
reconciliation. But to the chagrin of
some observers, we als take human difference seriously. Paul’s universalism should not be
misinterpreted, as it was and is by many missionaries; it is not a call to remake all people into the
“universal,” white-European, landowning man of the Enlightenment. The mission of the Church today is not the
obliteration of difference, but rather the compassionate embrace of all
Creation, and the work of building and sustaining beloved communities among,
within, and between all manners of people.
Rev. Varghase is right
to see the living, active, and restless Spirit of God at work in social
movements. This morning’s first lesson (2 Samuel 7:1-14a) is a testament to the
uncontainability, irreducibility and unpredictability of that which we call
“God”. King David says to the prophet
Nathan, “You know, it really isn’t fair. I live in a great big house of the
finest cedar, but the ark of God lives in a measly tent out back.” Nathan says,
“Do what you’ve got to do, man, sounds good, I’m sure God won’t mind.”
But later that night,
the word of the Lord came to Nathan, “Go ask David if he really thinks he is
‘the one to build me a house to live
in?’ Remind him that ‘I have not lived
in a house since the day I brought up the people of Israel from Egypt to this
day, but I have been moving about in a tent and a tabernacle.’ In fact,” God
says, “I don’t remember asking anybody to build me a house. David’s got it
backwards. Nathan, go tell David that the Lord will build him a house.”
We would do far
better, wouldn’t we, if we thought of the Church as movement, not an
institution or even a non-profit organization. God just won’t be pinned down
like that. God has other plans: to build the Kingdom of God, a divine kingdom,
a kingdom for humans becoming divine, not becoming gods, but becoming like God,
and learning to love with an open hand.
We don’t always
recognize it when the Spirit moves to challenge and overturn daemonic
hierarchies of domination. Many have
seen God’s spirit at work in the aspirations of Occupy Wall Street—a radical
democratic movement which seeks to establish autonomous zones of communitarian
democracy outside the reach of the corporate capitalism and it’s politicians.
Almost overnight the Occupy Movement changed the political discourse in this
country, reinvigorated progressive politics, and unlocked the mental,
emotional, and affective blockages, which have long cramped our collective
social imagination.
But one notable
parish, Trinity Wall Street missed a great opportunity. As Occupy encampments all across the country were
being suppressed by local governments, often violently, Occupy Wall Street (OWS)
thoughtfully and respectfully turned to Trinity for political sanctuary, asking
to relocate it’s camp to a piece of Church owned property. When Trinity Wall
Street refused, many were disappointed,
including Archbishop Desmond Tutu.
Several local priests and the Rt. Rev. George Packard, retired Bishop of
the Armed Services were arrested and prosecuted for civil disobedience after
joining OWS members in nonviolently laying claim to the vacant parcel.
The Episcopal Church
has a long way to go. As Varghase writes, “We have been a denomination of
privilege, but we are working on that.” The Times editorial was right about one
thing: there is an affinity between “liberal Christianity” and a host of
secular liberal institutions. If, as Douthat claims, “the Episcopal Church and
similar bodies… don’t seem to be offering anything you can’t already get from a
purely secular liberalism,” then we have a huge problem on our hands. It’s just an entirely different problem than
he has in mind.
In his stunning 2010
book, The Death of the Liberal Class,
the seminary-trained journalist, Chris Hedges observes that for the most part,
the institutions which have been pillars of liberalism, including the media,
the university, the arts, the unions, the Democratic party, and the mainline
churches have bought into the neoliberal ideology of corporate-capitalism,
which revolves around the mythology of abstract growth at the expense of human
and nonhuman wellbeing, thriving, and increasingly, life itself.
In a word, political
liberals talk a good talk but have sold out people at the bottom. A splintering of “causes” and the reduction
of politics to “issues” has left the liberal class “obsolete” and clinging “to
its positions of privilege within liberal institutions.” And “[l]iberal religious institutions,” writes Hedges, “which should
concern themselves with justice, embrace a cloying personal piety… and small,
self-righteous acts of publicly conspicuous charity.”
If
Hedges is correct, and on balance I believe he is, then Douthat is also correct
about one thing: the Church should
split from the secular liberal class. We
should split from those who talk a good game but make peace with all manner of
corporations whose time has frankly come. We might start by challenging the
power of coal, oil, and gas industries and the big banks that fund them, as has
been prophetically suggested by Bill McKibben, a lay-Methodist, in a disturbing new piece in Rolling Stone.
This type of
resistance is thankfully now official Church policy, after the Resolution B023
on climate justice was adopted by this year’s General Convention. (Locally, in our region, at the very moment
when our atmosphere really cannot afford to absorb very much more carbon, the
coal companies are desperately seeking to export coal to Asia from West Coast
ports. You might google the group: “No Coal Eugene” to
get involved.)
Rather than continuing
to vie for the recognition of the power elite and their politicians, Christians
might do better to conceive of ourselves as communities on the move,
communities tasked with, what the Italian theorist, Bifo Berardi, in The Soul at Work, calls, “the creation
of social zones of human resistance, zones of therapeutic contagion.” How’s that for a mission statement? “Our Church is a zone of human resistance to
social evil and we offer a contagious form of therapeutic personal and social
transformation!”
In theological terms,
we are tasked with affirming life in this moment of planetary exhaustion and
pervasive social death. Ours are the works of resistance and restoration, of
resurrection and reconciliation, and such works require us, always, to
undertake some risk.
In today’s gospel (Mark
6:30-34, 53-56), Jesus just can’t beat the crowds. He tries to get away, to
take the disciples away for a break, for a little rest, just to breathe, but
his compassionate healing love was Jesus was too recognizable, “When they got
out of the boat,” we are told, “people at once recognized him.” They “rushed
about that whole region and began to bring the sick on mats to wherever thy
heard he was. And wherever he went, into
villages of cities or farms, they laid the sick in the marketplaces, and begged
him that they might touch even the fringe of his cloak; and all who touched it
were healed.”
To whom are we
recognizable? For what are we recognized? Are we recognizable to those who have
been oppressed, dispossessed and kicked to the curb? Are we recognizable to the
Earth? Are we recognizable to God?
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