Category Archives: church

a perfect little play for the start of a new century

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Since I always need to have my own seriousness deconstructed, I was delighted to find this cartoon at truthdig this morning, celebrity being what it is. Mr. Fish has in effect sent up both my reaction to the viral spread of yesterday’s Obama celebrity video and the video itself.

Here’s another celebrity, deconstructed in the act of studying us humans. One of the things that make writing this blog fun (aside from the fact that people do occasionally read it) is the opportunity it gives me to discover new blogs as I read the ones I know and branch out.

Apropos of deconstructing celebrity, I stole the title of this piece from a review by Kathryn Osenlund of a recent play by Steve Martin. Here’s a sample deconstruction in the speech of one of Martin’s characters.

I was walking down the street one afternoon and I turned up the stairs into my flat and I looked back and he was there, framed in the doorway, looking up at me. I couldn’t see his face, because the light came in from behind him and he was in shadow, and he said, “I am Picasso.” And I said, “Well, so what?” And then he said he wasn’t sure yet, but he thinks that it means something in the future to be Picasso. He said that occasionally there is a Picasso, and he happens to be him.

Elvis turns out in the course of Martin’s play to be a third transformative figure of the twentieth century along with Picasso and Einstein, neither of whom understands the other (or himself) very well. So . . . the great Elvis moves through space/time like god reading the dictionary, trying on various incarnations without necessarily understanding any of them. It makes sense. I’ll be sure to remember later today when I cast my vote for Barack, for whom I cheered myself hoarse as Ted Kennedy downtown two nights ago.

more on the Advent letter

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I’m grateful to Fr. Jake for pointing out that the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Advent letter went out to the primates some time ago, so that its release to the public after the release of the ABCs Christmas message was accidental. But I still think, with Fr. Mark Harris, that the two messages are in conflict with one another, and that the conflict is unfortunate. I don’t see any Machiavellian purpose in the disconnect, but I’m thinking of something else Father Jake says: “[The Archbishop] does not consider it appropriate to state his personal convictions. He has set them aside, in an attempt to ‘articulate the mind of the Communion.'” And I’m thinking, OK, Maybe so. Fr. Jake also says that “Dr. Williams has polled the Communion, and has now come out in support of what he considers the majority view.”

I’m grateful as well to The Episcopal Majority for putting me in mind of Fr. William R. Coats’ reading of the Archbishop’s letter. Fr. Coats reads the letter far more positively than I do from a perspective much like my own, except that I think Fr. Coats may be better informed about the Communion than I am. My differences with Fr. Coats start with this passage:

What [The Archbishop] hopes for is what I call round two – the Covenant. This business to which we must all sign on to [sic] may in fact be the way we all do come together, so long as it doesn’t specifically turn on us. . . . Even Williams summation of Anglicanism at the beginning would be something I suspect we could sign on to – even the Biblical orthodoxy part (so long as no specifics are mentioned).

I’m not at all sanguine about the prospect of a covenant, any covenant; but that’s an argument for another day. Fr. Coats’ essay has garnered commentary to this effect:

The ABC is not taking sides. But he is defining the debate as much as anyone else. Extremists on both sides criticize him for not taking their side.

I thank him for staking out the middle. The place where unity trumps posturing.

I agree that the Archbishop has attempted to frame the debate. I do not agree that he has staked out the middle. If I understand Fr. Jake’s argument–and I acknowledge that I may have misunderstood–I agree in thinking that the Archbishop has attempted to identify himself with what he believes to be the stronger side politically. The politics of the Anglican communion have gone against TEC and against claims to social justice for gays and lesbians at least since 1998, with the adoption of the communion’s now infamous resolution on human sexuality. Now a reactionary trend has begun to affect internal TEC politics with the passage of resolution B033 at the 2006 General Convention and its “reconfirmation” by the House of Bishops in September 2007.

Actually, I don’t think there is a middle to stake out, though I realize that some within TEC are trying to find one. Nor is it a case of Fr. Jake’s way vs. the Archbishop’s way or the way of moderation. Not wishing to cast aspersions upon any person, clergy or lay, I merly point out that a political position that subordinates a legitimate claim to social justice to the exigencies of ecclesiastical polity is not moderate but pusillanimous. Those who argue against the legitimacy of the claim to social justice at least have a position for which, presumably, they are willing to take responsibility. But it’s also interesting, to say the least, that the blogger at Rather Not, prefers to remain anonymous.

ABC’s Advent dance

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According to Fr. Mark Harris, the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Advent letter to the primates is “filled with affront and seeming offense. It is not a letter of blessing.” I agree, though I’m not sure I entirely agree with Fr. Harris’s assessment that finds the letter merely “something of a mess and a disappointment.”

It seems to me that the heart of the letter is its evocation of what the Archbishop asserts to be a common understanding of scriptural tradition against which The Episcopal Church has made “a decisive move that plainly implies a new understanding of Scripture that has not been received and agreed by the wider Church.” To this framing the Archbishop adds:

Where such a situation arises, it becomes important to clarify that the Communion as a whole is not committed to receiving the new interpretation and that there must be ways in which others can appropriately distance themselves from decisions and policies which they have not agreed.

Moreover, it seems to me that while the Archbishop grants that “it is part of our Christian and Anglican discipleship to condemn homophobic prejudice and violence, to defend the human rights and civil liberties of homosexual people and to offer them the same pastoral care and loving service that we owe to all in Christ’s name,” the weight of his rhetoric supports those in the church who agree that there is a “deeper question . . . about what we believe we are free to do, if we seek to be recognisably faithful to Scripture and the moral tradition of the wider Church, with respect to blessing and sanctioning in the name of the Church certain personal decisions about what constitutes an acceptable Christian lifestyle” [italics original]. In other words, as faithful anglicans we are free to minister to “homosexual people,” but we may not legitimate their behavioral choices if they do not choose to lead celibate lives.

To be sure, the Archbishop has said these things before, but in this letter he says them with a particular stated intention.

[I]t is historically an aspect of the role of the Archbishop of Canterbury to ‘articulate the mind of the Communion’ in moments of tension and controversy, as the Windsor Report puts it (para. 109). I do so out of the profound conviction that the existence of our Communion is truly a gift of God to the wholeness of Christ’s Church and that all of us will be seriously wounded and diminished if our Communion fractures any further; but also out of the no less profound conviction that our identity as Anglicans is not something without boundaries. What I am writing here is an attempt to set out where some of those boundaries lie and why they matter for our witness to the world as well as for our own integrity and mutual respect.

It has long seemed to me that the Archbishop is politically and theologically a tory and that he characteristically frames the questions that confront the Anglican communion in a Burkean frame. I see this letter as no exception, except that the ABC makes it clear that he is speaking on behalf of a “mind of the communion” that is articulated in the Windsor Report, a written document, and that he speaks so as to make participation in the upcoming Lambeth conference contingent upon “willingness to work with those aspects of the Conference’s agenda that relate to implementing the recommendations of Windsor, including the development of a Covenant” [italics original]. I’m quite disturbed by this language, and I think the ABC, while he may understand the polity of The Episcopal Church, does not respect that polity. And hence, it seems to me that the ABC’s letter is more confrontational that Fr. Harris’s metaphor of a “slow dance around the issues troubling the Anglican Communion” implies.

And there are two other aspects of the letter that disturb me. the first is the Archbishop’s plan “to pursue some professionally facilitated conversations between the leadership of The Episcopal Church and those with whom they are most in dispute, internally and externally, to see if we can generate any better level of mutual understanding.” the ABC says he “will not seek any predetermined outcome,” but I strongly suspect he has a pretty good idea already “about the future pattern of liaison between TEC and other parts of the Communion” since he says as well:

This will feed in to the discussions at Lambeth about Anglican identity and the Covenant process; I suggest that it will also have to consider whether in the present circumstances it is possible for provinces or individual bishops at odds with the expressed mind of the Communion to participate fully in representative Communion agencies, including ecumenical bodies.

Finally, I think it is really too bad that the ABC includes the following exhortation in his discourse:

. . . I have said that the refusal to meet can be a refusal of the cross – and so of the resurrection. We are being asked to see our handling of conflict and potential division as part of our maturing both as pastors and as disciples. I do not think this is either an incidental matter or an evasion of more basic questions.

Perhaps, but this language is an appeal to force, akin to questioning the patriotism of a political opponent. And if somebody throws theology back at me, I must reply that the history of preaching is full of informal fallacies, and much worse. I wish I could think of something positive and uplifting to say here at the end, but I can’t. I think the ABC’s offering of this discourse as an Advent message is more than unfortunate. It makes me sick at heart, and it utterly contradicts and erases the inclusiveness of the ABC’s Christmas message I so loved yesterday. I feel tricked and betrayed.

+Rowan’s Christmas Message, and mine

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Episcopal Cafe reprints Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams’ Christmas message today. the original was delivered on BBC Radio and may be found at the Archbishop’s website.

One of the main things that Christmas means to me is that God actually likes the company of human beings, God starts living a human life in the middle of the world when the life of Jesus begins, and that suggests that as the Bible says – God actually loves the world, he likes to be with us, he likes us to be with him. And what flows from that for Christians, is the sense that human beings are just colossally worthwhile. God thought they were worth spending a lifetime with and all that spills over into how we see all kinds of human beings; the ones we don’t like or the ones we don’t reckon very much, the ones we don’t take very seriously. But they are all to be taken very seriously, they are all to be loved. And so Christmas, as I see it, is the very beginning of that sense of huge human dignity in all the people around us, and that’s what I think we are celebrating, that is the most important thing. I hope everyone listening has a very happy Christmas.”

I’m struck by the simplicity of this message, by it’s generosity, and by the way it parallels +Katharine’s Christmas message. I’m wishing I could put my arms around them both.

John 3:16 has long been a chief Christmas text for me. I like it best in Luther’s German: Also hat Gott die Welt geliebt . . . , of thich there is a wonderful paraphrase by Heinrich Schütz. You can hear a fragment of it here that concludes with my favorite passage, auf das alle die an ihn glauben, nicht verloren werden . . . , “so that all who believe on him might not be lost.”

auf das alle: alle, alle, alle . . .

I love this text. It is part of the fabric of my being. I could no more separate myself from it than from my own name. Perhaps the psalmist meant something of the kind in writing, “If I forget you, O Jerusalem . . . .” This is not belief in the modern sense. It has nothing to do with what is today sometimes called a belief system. But I think it may be belief in the sense the gospel writer meant in the centuries before Irenaeus; not what Luther meant–Luther was too much of an individualist on his own part, if not for others. But I believe Schütz loved the text as I do: as musicians, perhaps, love the word of God.

auf das alle: alle, alle, alle.

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