A Time to Gather, hosted by the Diocese of Brechin, at St Paul’s Cathedral, Dundee, 6 June 2020

Reflections from Bishop Alan and Donna Scarfe, Diocese of Iowa

First of all, our thanks to Bishop Andrew for inviting us and the people of the Diocese of Iowa to join with you, the Cathedral of St Paul, and the people of the Diocese of Brechin, in this gathering to stand in solidarity with the pain, hurt and outrage of black lives matter – prompted by the horrendous murder of George Floyd at the hands of police sworn to protect and serve.

Demand for police reform – even their defunding – are a strong part of the marches across the United States. But above all, the rage is about more than four hundred years of systemic racism and white privilege. And it’s about refusing to let well-meaning white folk get a pass for being well-meaning, or being content to “show up in support” (actors) while ignoring that racial discrimination and oppression is a system white privilege has built, and it is our responsibility as we partner with people of color to work towards its dismantling. Nor do we who are white get to be the ones who say when it is dismantled!

The collect from Morning Prayer for a Sunday reads: “Give us this day such blessing through our worship of You; that the week to come may be spent in your favor.”

Well, Micah the prophet, in our reading, tells us what God favors: “and what does the Lord require of you, but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?”
And where is God walking? God is walking with those who have taken to the streets these past few weeks. God is walking with those calling for reform – abolition of choke holds, stripping of police immunity for criminal acts in the line of duty, the expectation of colleagues to step in when an officer is using excessive force.

God is walking in the exposed places of neglect and discrimination in our health system, and in the economic disparity made all too clear by the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, during which people of color make up 60-65% of those who suffer the most dire consequences. God is walking with and in the young people who instinctively know that we have “hollowed out our democracy” (as George Packer writes in The Atlantic), and that our religious institutions have grown less relevant. They see complicity in all institutions with power brokers consumed by greed and power, and a desire to own people and the planet for their own ends. (Even as Bishop Budde, who had been so outspoken only a few days earlier when troops had forcibly cleared Lafayette Square in front of St John’s Episcopal Church to give the President “his moment,” returned to that very same spot to invite a prayer vigil, she had to engage the skeptical young protesters in conversation rather than in prayer as they raised concern that the Church was taking the public focus from the protest).

So, in the words asked of us by the leader of the African Methodist Episcopal Church in 2015 after the killing of nine African Americans attending bible study, “After the vigil, what about the vigilance?” After the blessing of this day, where is the week taking us?  

Well one response is that we have to let it take us where the young black leaders of this movement want to lead us, or tell us to go. That’s a hard expectation for a white privileged person like a bishop, for example, to assume. And those young people are telling us to “get our stuff in order” so that justice and equality can prevail, though to be clear, they don’t simply use the word “stuff.”

These are young people mostly born into a world where the guiding frameworks set up since World War II are increasingly irrelevant; and who are living in a nation that’s been at war with someone for their entire lives; and they have come of age under a government that is reckless with all the resources of this place and its people except for a few. They see politicians as “bought” and they see us line up in opposition to each other because a partisan approach to politics is easier to navigate than one which might engage fairly the complexities and diversities of a world, brought globally before us in this digital age of social media.

Today, as we gather here, we make a little step to turn this around. Today people from two dioceses, Brechin and Iowa, can shrink the distance between us and join our prayers together, seeking common action and resolve. We can all commit together, before each other and under God that we seek to be followers of Jesus who certainly grew up and confronted the corrupt powers of His day.

There are choices before us. The Presiding Bishop of The Episcopal Church, Michael Curry, connects the two crises of pandemic and racism with a simple symbol – the mask. “I put it on,” he says,” to protect you, and you put it on to protect me. It’s the Way of Love.” He is fond to quote Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s words that we learn to live together as family, or we shall all die as fools. It is going to be a matter of chaos or community.

This is time to listen to politicians of color too, like Cory Booker,  Senator for New Jersey, who speaks the same language of love as the Presiding Bishop. Senator Booker calls us to a deeper love. He says that this is a “test of us”—of who we are as a people. We don’t beat cruelty and name-calling and callousness with the same. We don’t assume the tactics of the oppressor. “This season of America is a referendum on our soul, asking, who are we to be with each other.”

Your gathering tonight helps us reflect on this. The beauty and power of the prayers, songs and readings you have chosen really help. We need this, and we thank you.

Tonight however I don’t have the last word. That belongs to my wife, as she speaks to us from her walking humbly with God.

From Donna Scarfe

Thoughts and prayers alone are not enough now.

In the US it is 400 years of living with societal oppression and personal accommodation to it for People Of Color to be able to live and work.

These Mothers, Fathers, Grandmas and Grandpas only want what every parent wants – that their child can exist without fear of bodily harm or social discrimination.

These Protests are not new – but they continue because of the lack of Collective Will to really look at and understand the Systemic Racism which underlies our Institutions.  

Change must come legislatively at a local, state and national level.  Many such bills for change have been proposed in the past 100 years but have been ignored or later dismantled by those entities whose benefit has been in keeping the status quo.

Now is the time to make the necessary changes in policing, employment biases, real estate redlining, political gerrymandering and governmental indifference to requests by People of Color who are demanding to be seen as EQUAL CITIZENS and not something OTHER.

This week has shown us that this call for justice is felt world-wide as protests have sprung up around the globe.

My awakening to this connectedness came in 1982 – the film Gandhi.  

In 1930 Gandhi and his followers made the Salt March to Dandi.  The British government had put a tax on salt and the people were walking to the sea to make their own salt. Met by British police, they persisted moving forward as line after line were beaten and hundreds of nonviolent protestors were injured. I felt deep in my soul– “This is what happens to MY people.  Beaten down but we get up and continue to fight for what is right.”

Prayers are needed because prayer puts us in touch with God who changes hearts. And God invites us to be the change we want to see in the world.

Easter Sunday 2020

Thank you to the people of Trinity Cathedral in Davenport for hosting this Easter Sunday service on behalf the diocese and welcome to all of you who are listening in and participating in this service online in this virtual way. There are many of you I hope across the diocese and maybe even some from beyond and even across the world—among our companions and other places.

Originally, I hoped to be with you in Davenport and to share in that service, but it was decided that it would be best for me to be closer to home here in the chapel of the Epiphany, and also to share in that experience of spiritual communion that most of us will be engaging in today as we receive body and the blood of Christ in this sort of virtual way.

Let us pray: Gracious God, may the living Christ, the risen Christ, be known to us even through that which is spoken; for you are the living Word and all words point to you; that you could become present and be with us, in Christ's name we pray.

There will be a time when we have passed through this present crisis and that we'll be able to take stock. On Palm Sunday I said this isn't a time for the prophets. Their time will come - to  evaluate and be able to give us what the “word of the Lord” is in the midst of all of this. Nor probably is “taking stock” the right kind of word or phrase to use. You don’t “take stock”—as in a detached way - of the kind of tragedy and loss that people are experiencing at this time.

Nor does the phrase do justice to the Herculean efforts in the emergency rooms. All we can imagine is being able to sit together and hold each other, and to have our heads in our hands, finding over time the opportunity to tell our stories; share the pain of what we've known and seen; and admire the incredible gift of the human spirit that has been revealed in people's bravery, resilience and creative ability to reach out and love one another.

And at such a time, we share Easter. Former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams writes (in Tokens of Trust) “the resurrection is in part about the sheer toughness and persistence of God's love.” This is because it happens around the worst of situations that humans can inflict on one another. The crucifixion of Jesus cleared the ground, he goes on to say, and establishes the presence of God— ultimately God who in spite of everything remains our God.

Peter must have felt some relief or ease at his distancing from the events of that first Easter. They were hellish. He had denied Christ. He had forsaken Chris. He had tried so hard to be brave and he had failed. Yet he found courage to return back to his friends in the upper room and face their recrimination. And at the news of the empty tomb, he didn’t hold back. He had immediately gotten up and gone. He may not have been as good an athlete as John was, but once he got to the tomb, he didn't hold back; he went right in to witness the event. Whether he was keen to see Jesus, or even expected to see Jesus we don’t really know. We are told that it had not entered their head that Jesus would rise again. They had not yet realized that the Scriptures pointed to the resurrection—maybe he only thought as did Mary that someone had stolen his body.

That day was one of conflicting emotion, and they didn't get resolved, perhaps, until later that evening when we are told Jesus did appear to all of the disciples in the upper room, or maybe not until a week later when Peter was fishing and Jesus appeared on the seashore, making breakfast.

How much more at ease, he seemed talking to Cornelius. Yes, he was shocked to be doing that, to be talking to Cornelius because he’d had to break through a further barrier of discrimination to bring the Good News to a Gentile. Yet he was at ease. The pieces had clearly fallen into place. He was able to speak of Jesus in a free and flowing way—this Jesus whose life of power in healing and deliverance, he says, we witnessed as being of a person whom God was with. He could even mention the terrible events of that week that he had experienced. as he spoke of Jesus being “hung on a tree.” Then with the same kind of equilibrium he talks of the Resurrection, the fellowship with the Risen One he had enjoyed, who was clearly bodily risen because he had eaten and drunk with them.  And then there was that commissioning, when Jesus had said to them, now all of you go and speak of what you have witnessed. “And that has brought me to you, Cornelius, to tell you of where you can find forgiveness, and peace with God’.

Yes, God had been in the middle of that horrendous experience, Peter could now reflect— “the worst that humans could do could not crush the eternal love of God, and I, Peter, am here to pass it on to you, Cornelius. We've come to the other side and there's good news to share.” That's the Easter message.

That's the Easter message. “We've come to the other side and there’s good news to share.” That's been the Christian message down the centuries and it will be our message as we endure this pandemic.

Rowan Williams again writes, “the reality of the new creation is that every moment of our history has been opened to a future of healing and promise…. God is the end of our story and our history cannot just fall away into final irredeemable chaos.”

Was it simply time that brought Peter into that new place? We know that time is a great healer. Yet for Peter there was more that took place. First of all, there was Jesus’s attention to him as a person. We see this in the risen Christ from the beginning – in his meeting with Mary. He gave her personal attention. In the gospel today we see that it was the mentioning and pronouncing of her name “Mary”,  that became her moment - of revelation, a life-changing moment.  And so, it was for Peter a few days later when Jesus personalized His encounter with Peter and asked “Simon Peter, do you love Me?” He asked him that three times. He personally, personally, connected back with him and in that connection all of Peter’s actions were forgiven and forgotten and Peter was restored.

And it was also something else, something all the disciples experienced. Elsewhere in the scriptures we’re told that when Jesus first appeared among the disciples as a community, He breathed on them and said “receive the Spirit.” He gave them His Spirit. Now, we are very conscious at this time of breathing on each other as potentially dangerous. Easter includes the reality that by breathing on us His spirit, Jesus passes on his life, His ministry and His calling to us as Church. “Contact with human beings who have received the breath of Jesus’ life is contact with Jesus, as specific human beings passed on the mystery of God to each other across the ages…. Christianity is a contact before it is a message” (Rowan Williams again).

Paul in the epistle to the Colossians, sees himself, and us, as raised with Christ, and recognizes that we must appropriate into our lives the very behavior of Resurrection People. By that he means that we set our minds upon those things that are above. And by this he doesn't mean externally pious behavior: piety or pious practices alone. But he means doing those very things that occupy the heart of God—peace and justice and faith and hope and love. These are the things that should occupy us. These are the things that are above as opposed to the things below.

This Easter, in the midst of the suffering we are witnessing and that many are experiencing, we all turn to different sources for inspiration. For me, it has been the memoirs of Ernest Gordon, a Presbyterian minister, and a Scottish soldier, who came to faith in the prison camps of the Burmese jungle. Actually, he was a prison worker on the construction of the bridge over the River Kwai, from which that movie was taken.

In his memoirs, Miracle on the River Kwai, he describes the horror of the camps and the cruelty and abuse of the prison guards, and how this had provoked like behavior among the prisoners. People were losing their sense of civilized behavior. It was becoming dog eats dog and the surrounding illnesses and death only eroded any sense of hope and goodness, or of positive thinking among the prisoners. In turn, Gordon himself grew sick and entered what they called the Death House, which actually was their name for the infirmary or hospital on site, where people literally entered and did not expect to come out.

As he himself got to the end of his own days and felt that his life was ebbing from him, he asked if he could move to the far end of the infirmary, which was an area reserved just for the dead bodies. There were no beds there, there was just a floor, but, as he said, at least it was quiet at that end of the building, free from the screams of the suffering and dying. His friends seeing his decision, made one of their own. They decided that rather have him die in the morgue, they could do something better and they built a makeshift bamboo hut for him to live in. It had open sides but it had a covering. And they laid him there for his final days.

One soldier stepped forward to become his sort of valet, or his nurse, during those final days. This was a man of faith, a very humble man of faith. Now Gordon had given up God long ago but this soldier’s continued offering of kindness and his unabashed trust in God was eating away at Gordon’s resolve. And they would enter into a conversation as Gordon asked: “if God is God, how could God allow all these things to be happening? Why is he not doing something?” “Maybe God does, maybe God doesn't”, his friend would say, “but we can't see everything that God is doing now. Maybe our vision isn't very good at this point, but we shall see and understand at some time. We have to just go on living and hoping, and have faith that life is stronger than death. Only God can give life and we have to receive it and live it daily”.

Over time, Gordon’s body began to respond to the kindness of his friend and he began to hear of accounts elsewhere where similar acts of kindness were bringing healing. A Spirit stirring was going on among the prisoners. He tells the story of one particular soldier, called Angus. He had taken in a dying fellow-prisoner. And Angus would take his own rations and then give them to his roommate. He wasn't just sharing them with his roommate, he would give them all to his roommate. He would slip off at night while he could and find medicine using his own resources, the very small resources—they got, like, 21 cents a day, I think, was money that they received - and he would use his resources to buy medicine from the local village and he would bring it and give it to his roommate. Over time his old roommate began to come back from the brink of death. But it was at a price. One day, Angus collapsed and died. The medical doctors within the prisons came to the conclusion that he had died of starvation. He literally had given his life for his friend. “No greater love has anyone then one gives one's life for one's friend”, Gordon’s soldier aide recalled.

Then other stories began to filter through of a similar kind of self-offering that was going on. It was contagious. Gordon wrote: “Death was still with us, no doubt about that, but we were slowly being freed from its destructive grip. We were seeing for ourselves the sharp contrast between the forces that make for life and those that make for death. Selfishness, hatred, greed and jealousy were all anti-life, but love, self-sacrifice, mercy and creative faith on the other hand to the essences of life—turning mere existence into living in its truest sense. These are the gifts of God to humanity.”

Gordon called this their Easter experience. And it was reinforced as they came to the end of their time of capture and they were heading home as former prisoners of war. Their train was in a side track, waiting for another train to come down the main line. The freed prisoners saw across the tracks another train also in a side track. It was full of Japanese, now prisoners of war, heading in the other direction. Without any kind of command or coordination, but just moved by the spirit, soldier after soldier on the British Allied side began to go across the tracks, taking their backpacks with them, and where they could, they began to minister to the sick among the Japanese. Among their former captors, they bandaged their wounds, they gave them food; and that spirit of Easter was being translated into everyday life. “Christianity is a contact before it's a message.”

This is an Easter for us like no other. We’re still resurrection people, invited to look up. How do we affirm ways of life-giving in our current situation? How do we contact even when we cannot touch? Jesus told Mary not to hold onto Him. It seemed a strange exchange, really. However, “she was being called to love and trust and serve, even though she can no longer caress his feet or hear His voice pronounce her name” (William Temple, Readings in St John’s Gospel). And so must we. For that's where we are.

How do we find the ways? How we do that is different for each one of us, will be different for each one of us. The day will come, as it did for Peter, when we will sit together. We will comfort one another. We will begin to recount how we've seen the loving God touch us, and be spread through us, into the world about us even in these days of not touching. And we will give thanks to God that we believe in a risen Lord, who amidst all that is thrown at us as human beings, remains our God—and not only ours, but the God of all creation. And in God's name, we say, and to God's glory we say, Christ is risen! He is Risen Indeed! Alleluia!

March 2020

Iowa Episcopalians visiting with legislators

Jesus once asked his questioners how it was that they could look at the sky and tell the weather, but were not conscious of the real life circumstances they were in. He was referring to end times, an understanding that history was finite, and that the will of God reigned supreme over the affairs of the human race. Now Jesus never succumbed to the folly that we could predict end times, and acknowledged that even He did not have that information. It was important, however, that we live with a certain humility of spirit that always gave room for the divine will; and never that we were the be all and end all of human existence.

On our travels recently, Donna and I saw a rather macabre church sign that read “God recycles; He made you from dust.” In January, on the UK TV nightly news there were back to back reports on the Australian wildfires; followed by pictures of a huge sandstorm, prompted by the fires, about to engulf an Australian city; and then a switch to farmers in East Africa trying to bat away massive swarms of locusts devouring their crops. As the camera switched back on the news anchor, he said “All we need now is a plague!”And as if on cue, enters coronavirus, or COVID-19

“Thought and prayers” don’t go over well when we are dealing with situations that we cry out for clear legislative action to prevent, like addressing new episodes of gun violence such as in Milwaukee. But we must admit to the fact that if even recent generations had experienced the string of events we are facing, we would find them on their knees. How do we give ourselves the “grace margin,” as Eric Law would say, to acknowledge our need of God? This season of Lent is timely arrived upon.

You could say that the gift of knowledge beyond their capacity was the offer of the serpent to Adam and Eve, in our reading for first Sunday of Lent. We may become too sophisticated for our own good, and a little humility could take us a long way. Interestingly, such humility is often expressed by those very experts who devote their lives to warning us of reckless, mindless pursuits that wreck our environment, or who have to seek answers to the consequences of these actions, or to find responses to the biological warfare we face daily and/or with the hidden enemy of an unexpected disease such as Covid-19, or a more known one such as cancer.

The irony is that we are thrust into this dilemma at a time when we are revving up to a national election, where knowing it all is a prime claim on every candidate’s lips; and that’s because we demand it of them. Modesty is not the order of the day. These are politicians and not prophets, or pastors. The more authoritarian a figure, the more the demand upon them to know it all.  That is what leadership has become.

On March 3rd, a group of Episcopalians gathered at the state Capitol to see our legislators at work, and to meet with Episcopal representatives. We were given an overview of legislation that might touch upon our Gospel values, and encouraged to build relationships with our representatives as a way of bringing influence to bear. These were individuals who practiced “grace margins” within their calling as politicians.

Jesus offered images for knowing our place in human affairs. He referred to His followers as salt, yeast, and light. Salt sustains life and preserves the taste of things; yeast acts as a hidden substance that only reveals the hardening consequences of its absence; and light offers the ability to see what we are doing, to provide perspective, and offer guidance. Without us the world becomes tasteless, hard and in the dark. Sound familiar?

Our Episcopalians on the Hill day was accompanied by a reporter from the Episcopal News Service. He asked me if I thought the Church should be involved in politics. I answered that our Baptismal Covenant demands three things of us—to be worshipping people (promising to attend to the apostles’ teaching, breaking bread and prayers); to be an inwardly aware people (promising to resist evil and have a penitential spirit when we fail); and third, to be a political people (working for justice, peace, truth, as we lift every one’s dignity and see Christ in all whom we serve). The latter work goes beyond food pantries and social welfare (necessary and good as they are), and seeks to bring grace into our very legal structure. What we are not, I said, was partisan. The apostle Paul sees this as working like the Body, in fact the Body of Christ. Every part needs each other; and that requires mutual respect, collaboration and common purpose.

Jesus did not survive the political intrigues of His time. And yet He overcame them. For the worst his political enemies could do to Him, could not hold Him. “He conquered death by death.” as the Eastern Orthodox acclamation at the Easter Vigil proclaims. In this assurance of victory, we engage the human struggle to read the signs of the times, for God has not stopped speaking in the earthquake and the fire, the pestilence and the plague, and we can never be too sophisticated not to pay attention.

In the peace and love of Christ,

+Alan
The Rt. Rev. Alan Scarfe, Bishop of Iowa