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

December 2019

Engaging All Disciples Day in Clinton. Photo: T. Petty

As their Engaging All Disciples Day hosted by Christ Church, Clinton, the congregations from the Clinton, Dubuque and Maquoketa revival cluster, focused on what it means to have a rule of life. Fr. Kevin Goodrich, a Dominican Friar himself and Rector of St. John’s Dubuque, offered various kinds of “rules”—from that of a religious order (and in particular its Third Order rule), to what his own congregation was working on as a congregational rule, to a more personal rule. The latter was more wholistic in its approach than I was expecting, seeking more to define the elements that make up the rhythm of one’s day, week, month and year. I was surprised to find that I am paying more attention than I thought to such things and can claim a positive rhythm to my inner life—which, nevertheless, is still better described as a “method to my madness.”

I was also surprised to hear from the gathered group that day that quite a number of the treasured saints attending acknowledged difficulty in personal prayer. It was one thing that made the idea of a congregational rule of life so significant. We suffer from inconsistency, and sometimes genuine blockage to spiritual practices, and thank God that we are not alone, but in community whose rhythm continues on—often made possible by the very ones having prayer difficulty at the personal level, and yet who consistently turn up to assist at the altar, to sing in the choir, or to furnish the altar. It is also a phenomenon that from time to time includes those who officiate and preach, and confirm and ordain. Many times God carries us through our willing participation, even when we feel that we are in the dark.

At no time in our calendar is this concept of being in the dark underscored more than during Advent. We often see Lent as the time for a spiritual Spring clean, and possibly that is a good way of seeing it—mending relationships, getting rid of unhelpful habits and lingering wastefulness—and Advent is about accepting how and where we sit in darkness and let the expectant light that begins to shine in the distance open up new things and have us attempt new practices. “Come, Lord Jesus” is not a bad prayer with which to start. Then I would direct you to the pages of the Book of Common Prayer that invite us to personal prayer—pages 137-140. Start there, and see how the light will grow. The key is the ten minutes in which you actually stop and let this sampling of our common devotional life take you forward.

One of the aids I use for the daily awakening of my being is The Celtic Prayer Book. It comes in two volumes and provides readings from spiritual writers and from Celtic spiritual lore, and is produced by the Northumbrian Community in Northern England. I admit that its reading comes after coffee, but it forms part of the morning awakening.

For today, George McDonald writes, “To believe in the wide-awake real, through all the stupefying, enervating, distorting dream; to will to wake, when the very being seems athirst for Godless repose: these are the broken steps up to the high fields where repose is but a form of strength, strength a form of joy, and joy but a form of love.”

As we enter a new Christian year, we have some significant actions before us – Lambeth, the Iowa leg of the Companions Young Adult pilgrimage, exploring what it means to walk our neighborhoods and see God’s Faithful Innovations, the Small Church Summit and, oh yes, the unfolding of the Bishop transition process, and the beginning of our own goodbyes as the visitations enter a final round. It is good to know that we have a community rhythm that carries us, and that it is our will to wake that carries us up the broken steps to the high fields where repose is strength, strength but joy and joy (that joy to the world) is love.  

In the peace and love of Christ,

+Alan

The Rt. Rev. Alan Scarfe, Bishop of Iowa

Sermon, 167th Convention

Joel 2: 23-32; 2 Timothy 4: 6-8, 16-18; Luke 18: 9-14

Please be seated.  Well first of all welcome to all of you who are listening in on livestream this morning. I’m told there are forty of you gathering that way. That’s wonderful; and if it doesn’t quite kind of get through all the time, well, just have a good time anyway.

We have certainly had a good time here at convention. We have just been upstairs (on third floor), and were embroiled in a heated resolution debate.  It is amazing what live TV can do for your sense of hurrying up. We managed to get here on time. In fact, we haven’t yet finished convention. And so, to all of you out there, I ask the convention to give you seat and voice. And best of luck with your voice.

I am always amazed that we have this historically produced lectionary that somehow manages to come up with lessons that seem so appropriate to whatever is going on around us currently. It is as though there was a secret “knowing” of what we might need for a certain time.

“The time for my departure has come,” writes the Apostle Paul. And if I didn’t have that written into my being already—by Evensong last night we were being reminded that we are now in transition. And as I heard the officiant say that, I thought to myself, “I’m not dead yet!”

“The time of my departure has come,” says the Apostle Paul. And yes, twenty-four hours ago I said the very same thing. I hope, with Paul, I can also say “I have fought the good fight; I have finished the race; and kept the faith.”

And yet all of that is premature and somewhat presumptuous! For Paul, the reference to escaping the lion’s mouth was literal! Death was at his doorstep. It was his life’s ministry that was coming to its close; and he knew it. A resigning bishop in contemporary times merely resigns from a position within the Church using the canonical language for “reason of advanced age."  Yes, we write a letter to the Presiding Bishop and that is the reason we have to give: “for reason of advanced age!” But I hope that the life of ministry and the service of Christ goes on, and for some time yet.

But Paul was reaching his final days. He clearly had been tried and, it seems, sentenced, and found himself standing alone at his trial. All those with whom he had had fellowship down the years, even those he had come to Rome to be with, it seems that none of them were present as it came to the time of his trial. He now awaited his final act of faithful service. He probably knew that his Roman citizenship had rescued him from the lions in the Coliseum, quite literally, but it was not going to rescue him, not from the Roman sword.

For him, the race was run. For him, the fight was done. And for him, all that was left was to keep the faith until the last darkening of his eyes. Just one final act of courageous faith stood between him and the One whose face he had once seen on the Damascus Road. It was a face that he had always sought to keep before him, saying as he once did to the Corinthians, that as he looked upon that face he prayed that the likeness of the love of Christ might, from glory to glory, appear and shine within his own face. He would soon see that which he urged so many of us to press on to see—His Savior face to face as he readied himself to submit to the martyr’s witness.

For most of us—and I am not saying all of us—for most of us in this building, it’s hard to imagine such a time. And yet, some of you here, you know persecution and you know martyrdom.

We all know that our faith rests upon such acts of courage and trust. Ultimately it is because God carved out such an act of self-sacrifice and self-offering upon the Cross in His Son, that God then asked us as Church to follow suit. And so we are the beneficiaries of such courage. We stand upon the sacrifice and self-offering of so many others. And even as we sit here, others continue to make that offering.

No great change seems to come easily. No great shift of our culture or of our perspective on life, within and without the Church, seems to occur without some degree of self-offering, without lives poured out as libations. Because our preference is to have tingling ears; our preference is to follow things that just comfort us. And, as we have heard this weekend, it is not even our passions or our visions, not even the warm feeling Christ brings us that is essential, but what actions of Christ— bringing food to the hungry, making shelter to the homeless, bringing justice to those that are afflicted—at whatever level of society it needs to be done—that is what is important. This we have been reminded about at this convention.

It’s not just our passion; it’s not just our vision; or our vision statements, but the reality of what we do, or with whom we stand, or whom we give our time to be with, and in whose shoes we are going to walk—all of this makes the difference, and brings the change God seeks.

We have been told by our convention speaker, Shane Claiborne, how this can happen through small things—and how many wonderful small things you are engaged in as we saw on Mentimeter – and so through that smallness, the transformation of the Kingdom can come. We might thank God that not many of us are asked to make the final act of submission—to have our lives physically taken from us for Christ’s sake. But we thank even more those who have so responded—and we know that we live as we do because they have died for a much greater love than we could embrace or know. That is the peace that is given to us, and is offered to us, which surpasses human understanding, guaranteed upon the price of Calvary, and everyone who has so imitated Christ down the ages.

I may stand before you nearer the end of ministry together as people and Bishop, though I pray, as I say, that we are nowhere near to the end of our service in Christ’s Name and God’s Kingdom. And it is good. But the Gospel reading today reminds us at such a time, how we are to present ourselves always before our God and before one another.

Jesus had taught and was teaching his disciples to pray.  And as you may recall from last week’s lessons, how important it was to Him that they not grow weary in that act of prayer. The gospel last week reminded us that they were to persist in their praying and not lose heart. If an unjust judge without any respect for God or his fellow human beings, would nevertheless listen to a persistent widow, we know how much more eagerly God who loves us wants to answer our cries for justice, peace, and the welfare of human beings. He wanted His disciples to be persistent and not lose heart; and yet in the midst of that assurance, and being confident in offering prayer, they were to be reminded that God’s favor is never appropriated for our own ends.

Yes, we are to be persistent in prayer, but always aware of our station as sinners who are saved by grace through faith, and not of our own steam or worthiness. We barely lift up our eyes under heaven. Our first words are “O God, have mercy upon us as sinners”—even while we then go on to pray for peace in this world, for the justice of God to roll down upon this earth. As we pray for all of the good things God desires, we remember who it is that offers such prayer and is heard. It is the tax collector; not the Pharisee.

Also from our reading last week, when Jacob turned Israel by wrestling a blessing from God, he would always be remembered because of his limp. We also limp along, ever reminded of whose we are and for whom we live. There is a humility with which the blessed children of God walk. It is what enables us to come alongside people, and to be with them.

That is a message for any of us facing retirement, and who may be proud of our achievements. It is a message for us as we enjoy this experience of being this Iowa Episcopal branch of a much broader and greater Jesus movement.

Finding the simple way. Finding the simple way. I don’t know what we expect will happen with that theme as we move forward. I don’t think we really know. We borrowed it from Shane’s community, really.

Maybe it’s about “strategic review?” Maybe it’s about sharing our resources that way? Maybe it’s about dismantling the entire diocesan structure altogether? So that the time we have can be more among the poor? So that the energy we have can be more for justice? So that the money we have can be better distributed among the needy? What kind of constitutional amendment do we need to perform that? To say that we don’t come only to our churches as much, or any more? We come into our neighborhoods. And we support the churches in our neighborhoods with our neighbors, and join in what they are doing. And if there is no such place, then we will  provide our own. I don’t know I’m just talking off the top of my head. (Or maybe the bottom of my heart!)

What would it look like? How can we make these structures of ours pliable, more porous so that we can make decisions about what we do with the circumstances and events we are faced with, and given? And how can we do that and still stay grounded in place as Anglicans?

You know, I invited a man (in Shane Claiborne) to come among us who ended up in that kind of community. And I wanted his witness to percolate among us on how that might work for us. And so, bring it to your vestries, bring it to the Board meeting, bring it to your living rooms as you gather together. Think about these things. How can we really get alongside people and not just be institutionalized in everything, everything we do?

Finding the Simple Way is a call to “humble ourselves in the sight of the Lord,” before the presence and desires of our Loving Creator God, and to follow where Jesus leads us to go. He needs us to go very small indeed. We have to squeeze into those places where He squeezes in. And there’s no place for self-righteousness there, just as there is no place for contempt of others there. And this includes all sides of our current political factions, and our cultural divides.

There is no place for self-righteousness on the one hand, and no place for contempt on the other. And that is a hard requirement in such an age as this. “God, have mercy upon us” is our daily prayer and with it comes the promise that it is such voices that God will lift up to do remarkable things in Christ’s Name, and the question is—can it be done through us?

So I invite you to embrace with abandon the promise of God that we receive through Joel; to let the Spirit be released upon us, within us, and through us; to act with boldness because our feet are invited to be set firmly on the ground, and all self-aggrandizement is pushed aside for the sake of God’s love. And having settled that score with ourselves and with God, we let the Spirit of God take us where She will.

Donna and I are terrible gardeners. And we invite you to our garden any time if you are in need of some good weeding. I thought Creeping Charlie was a friend, but now he’s a carpet. So, we are not good gardeners, but God seems to have used us as spiritual gardeners.

As I say, Donna and I have always been soil turners and planters in this spiritual thing somehow. We rarely see the fullness of the harvest. We see God’s reviving spirit among the people we have served as we drive away looking through the rear-view mirror. Time and again that has happened with us. Even in Eagle Rock, where we were for thirteen years, the church was closed last year. But now we see resurrection.  The Church was closed and the keys handed over to the Bishop. He in turn handed them to some young people and said “Here, I have a church for you.” And they have transformed the place and  become instruments of God's resurrecting spirit. And if I dare say it—they are fulfilling all the wishes and dreams that we may have had together when we were there with the people of God at St. Barnabas.

It is true that I have secretly tried to do a deal with God that we would see a harvest in our time here; but who knows? I do see it in the seventy percent of active clergy I have been blessed to ordain; and, certainly in the new group coming through to be ordained as transitional deacons this December. I see it in all those amazing ideas you have had for Engaging All Disciples; your ways of responding to the call for prayer during the Revival; the amazing ongoing march of new generations of young adults and youth into leadership; in the generosity towards our companions; and in the growing deep involvement of you all in your communities, bringing the values of the gospel into your spaces.

Yet, turning to our Old Testament text for a moment, nothing of that ranks with what God promises in Joel. We do not live necessarily in drought plagued places so that the concept of a full early and later rain does not mean as much to us as it did for the children of Israel. Maybe there are similarities to other agricultural situations you have experienced. But I remember what it meant in Swaziland when the rains broke upon us as we sang the Sanctus in a small mission church. The rains clattered the corrugated iron roof. And the people heard this joyful thundering after experiencing months and months of drought. It was like the heavens opened and the angels and archangels were cheering with the people for what had come upon them. God says that such refreshment of the rains will come. The floors of the threshing halls will be filled with grain, and the vats will overflow with oil and wine.

And those external blessings will be more than matched by an overflowing expression of the exuberance of the Spirit. Sons and daughters will proclaim God’s word on things. All generations including the elders will dream dreams, even if they might not all live to see them fulfilled.  And it will be the younger generations who will turn those dreams into vision and reality.

The followers of Jesus experienced this happen to them. They made the connection at Pentecost with Joel’s words.

And so, my prayer is, will you? I pray that there be a time when the life of the Spirit is so pulsating through your veins and your hearts, that somewhere in the midst of it all, you look back and you say to one another - remember when we held those Revivals? Remember when we were trying to share, or learning to share God’s love? Remember when we walked those neighborhoods? Remember when we gathered to learn how to welcome, invite, connect; and when we sought how to connect with this new generation now entering the digital age?  Remember those creative ways to renew our liturgy, and to create new worship spaces?  Maybe we didn’t think then that we knew what we were doing. Somehow, we found ourselves doing “silly things sometimes” in our enthusiasm to bring change in Jesus' Name? Remember all that? All of it, in all of it are the expressions of the real Pentecost that can happen among the people of God.

America loves awakenings. Somehow as a people, you have to have an awakening every now and then. You’re a sensational people; you love sensation; and God knows that. So you have a history of sensational awakenings of the Spirit. What we have been messing around with over these past few years (since the Revival 2017) is precisely “messing around.” We’ve been dipping our toes in the water and not yet plunged in. Joel’s image is of something far more amazing.

Joel, we will say, was right. The Spirit has come upon us; and we have humbly submitted to Her. And we hear God calling everyone through us to find their way back to God, just as we have.  Wouldn’t that be great? Can’t you imagine? Can’t you feel it? Can’t you just reach out and grab it? And, let the Spirit into yourselves as the people of God?

You know once we are all a bubble with the Spirit of God at work in us, God will still bring alive all of our traditions, all of our liturgies, all of our beautiful renderings of worship and being together. But that won’t be the primary conversation. We will be taken up with something else. We will notice what we’ve not noticed much before; and we will notice with love, people we’ve not noticed before. And we will ask questions about their situation we’ve never raised before. All these things will be about how God’s love can be made known here and there and everywhere.

You know, once again this February, we are going to be reminded that we in Iowa are positioned to test our nation’s political realities. And I want to ask: is it possible that this is a particular charism or calling of the Iowa people? I don’t know the background of the creation of the caucus and how you became the first voting group in the country, but I know that you take great pride in it. And you do well in sorting through the first candidates in the election process. So I think it is why we are also called to try out and test things of the Spirit. It is in such fertile souls as yours that God can now reap the great harvest.

So, my prayer is that God so works within us and among us this year, as we go and walk and take the bold steps into our neighborhoods; and that we will see what God is already doing, and what is not being done, and that for which God waits for us to partner with God to do. We are being called to see our neighbors how God sees them. To let them know, whether they know it or not, that they are Beloved. There is absolutely no limit to how all that can be expressed, experienced and enjoyed.

Let us pray,
Lord, I am no longer my own, but Yours. Put me to what You will. Rank me with whom You will. Let me be employed by You, or laid aside for You, exalted for You or brought low by You. Let me have all things. Let me have nothing. I freely and heartily yield all things to Your pleasure and disposal. And now, O glorious and blessed God, Father Son and Holy Spirit, You are mine and I am Yours. So be it.
Amen

October

Fridays might never be the same. On Friday, September 20, millions of young people filled city streets across the world demanding with one voice that those in power and influence act on global warming. This past Friday there were millions more. One, now famous, sixteen year old girl—began taking Fridays off of school to sit at a prominent place in her hometown, with placards warning against climate change and demanding grown-ups with power act. These young people are convinced that their future is in serious jeopardy. If you didn’t catch her address to the United Nations, please do yourself a favor, and look it up on YouTube. And I invite you to take some time to learn about other youth climate activists that are working to save the planet.

Where all this is going, I don’t know. There are a number of you who have heard the cry much earlier than I, and seek to call us to attention and action. I do know that a disastrous “tipping point” to which scientists are urgently attesting, does not come “in the final hour” during the last 5 or 10% of the time we have. When you fill a jar of water with sand, the point of no return or “spilling point” comes at 50%!

Insects, birds, and now the oceanic life, and in the UK the tree population are under watch. On the road to the Manchester Airport, as I returned from caring for my mother in convalescence, there was a chalked message across the highway bridge, inviting us to join the “Extinction revolution.” In a different time, we might say that’s something from a dystopian novel. 

We are the rich man in the mansion. And Lazarus lies at our gate, first to be afflicted by drought, floods, hurricanes, imperiled waters and food insecurity. And this is not politics, though we must look to those invested with our trust to use the power of our common resources to act, or move over and let others of more courageous will do so. It is more a matter of asking the question—how then shall we live? 

Listen to the prayer we uttered on Sunday, “You declare your Almighty power chiefly in showing mercy and pity…Grant us the fulness of your grace.”

Listen to the Scriptures we recited on Sunday, “the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil.” It entraps us in senseless and harmful desires. On the other hand, true gain is found in godliness, combined with contentment. And if we are blessed with riches through inheritance, or our creative spirit and skilled industriousness—then carry your wealth with humility; be rich in the good works your wealth affords you to do, and be ready to share, recognizing the real perspective of faith is the treasuring of God’s abiding presence and love.

Hypocrisy goes with the territory when handling this subject, but our lectionary has brought us to this consideration. We are the rich man in Jesus’ story in Luke last Sunday. Who is Lazarus? And how do we learn to see him?

At diocesan convention in a few weeks, we are aspiring to a theme of “The Simple Way.” We have invited a speaker, Shane Claiborne, who asks these types of questions. His aim in life is to follow Jesus and especially as His relationships and teaching connected with the poor and least in His society. I am assuming he will inspire some of us, and yet also challenge us. 

It’s good to recall that, at the point our lectionary has brought us thus far, Jesus was just revving up His confrontation with the religious establishment of his day, and challenging the behavior of those around Him. Lives of faith impact our relationship to the resources around us, and our stewardship of them and how we treat both people and material things. He moves onto dangerous ground and ultimately suffered the loss of His life because of it. We know that wasn’t the end of the story but we cannot let knowing of the resurrection lessen the significance of what irked the authorities to remove His menace. In fact there is a gift of hope that says we can be bold to shift from possession to sharing and releasing—precisely because loss and death is not the end of God’s story ever.

Some have wondered about the timing of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr; how did it become time to have him removed? What nerve was he hitting? It just happened to be at a moment in which he had begun to deeply engage economic inequality, had announced the Poor People’s Campaign 5 months before, and was bringing profound questioning to the military spending of the nation and about the effectiveness of the Vietnam War. 

Jesus had no doubt about where his meddling would take him. This has got to be part of the story of our salvation. Jesus died because He called us to share, and to do that we have to be willing to let God turn us inside out. He called us to share a common life (which His disciples attempted early on). He included orphans and widows, tax collectors and prostitutes in this shared life. He also died because He called us to share God and access to God with those very same people whose poor and tragic circumstances seemed to us to reflect an absence of the blessing and the Divine favor. He died because He saw no bounds to the sharing of God’s love for all whom God made; and He saw them as God’s children. 

God shows power chiefly through mercy and pity. Chiefly! Sometimes God also simply lets people like the rich man abide with the consequences of their behavior and attitudes. They say that we are at the tipping point with the consequences of our actions towards the planet. Maybe we are at a tipping point with God’s readiness to show continued mercy and pity. God let Lazarus die; so did the rich man. And then, in the perspective of eternity, the real gap between them appeared. 

Jesus told the story with the hope that hearts of his listeners may be pulled into God’s love. It is never too late to have ears that hear; or hearts that respond with openness; or voices that offer prayers that God might grant us the fulness of grace in how we live. That fulness sees Lazarus; and finds strength to take him in. What will we be doing next Friday?   

In the peace and love of Christ,

+Alan

The Rt. Rev. Alan Scarfe, Bishop of Iowa

September 2019

Over Labor Day weekend a group of young people from the diocese met in Council Bluffs to create Happening # 47. Happening is peer led. It is an invitation to take time away from the normal routine (including cell phones), and to delve in a deep and focused way into our relationship with God, with one another and with one’s own blossoming sense of identity. Key to the experience are the testimonies or presentations of the Happening team young people on different aspects of living the Christian life. The few adults present are there for support—in providing meals, offering spiritual counsel and sacramental worship (my role this weekend), helping with tech support, schedule coordination, and what might be called “gopher” (go for this or that) work. Two young people serve as Co-Rectors and are in charge of all proceedings. The days are long and the outcomes always rewarding.

The participants form small groups to reflect together on the various topics of faith development that are presented. And they make up a name for themselves. One group, this weekend, got stuck on finding a specific name that appealed to them all, and so they called themselves by the initials of their first names—MGCSK! And since none of them were Polish, they worked out an acronym – My God Can Save Kindness. Now, I may have been susceptible to sleep deprivation and jetlag, having just flown back from England, but the name, and the prophetic statement behind it, intentional or not, blew me away!

My God can save kindness—a commodity in increasing short supply, it would seem, these days. And please note that we were cocooned during the weekend, and not fully aware of the hurricane hanging over the Bahamas or of the shooting sprees in Odessa, Texas.

We were inviting these young people to shape their identity and commit their life’s meaning and purpose on the person of Jesus Christ, and to explore what it is to follow Him at this time in history and in their lives. We presented words as seeds, which we pray will bear fruit in their time. But the endeavor shifted something in me—though probably not for the first time, but certainly as if for the first time, to use a phrase from Marcus Borg.

While the second most ferocious storm was hanging off the coast of Florida, a different one was coming together within me. On Sunday morning I took time away from the group downstairs at St. Paul’s, Council Bluffs and presided over their weekly Eucharist. The Hebrew Scripture from Jeremiah proclaimed that the people of God had forsaken God, “the fountain of living water, and dug out cisterns for themselves, cracked cisterns that can hold no water” (Jer 2:13). The spiritual revolutionary self of my teen years had seized on this sentence of Scripture more than fifty years ago and let it drive me, all the way back then, in calling for institutional reform, especially in the Church. Suddenly it had burst into flame once more, only this time it seized  me through the eyes of this generation’s teens.

How do young people shape identity in the world we are creating? To whom do they turn for role models? We have built a system of cisterns that are cracked, including in the Church—created for power, control, self-preservation, and self-aggrandizement, and tailored to make sure we remain ahead of the game while the devil can take those lagging behind. In such a world kindness is a strong impulse, and a rare one. It gives itself away; it exposes itself to be vulnerable; it walks with the prisoners and tortured as if in prison (and tortured) ourselves ( as the writer to the Hebrews reminded us this very same weekend). The Way of Love cannot be a sentimental, feel-good hashtag for our life and faith. It has to have sacrifice—self-offering—behind it, because it comes to us proclaimed in the hard form of the Cross. Jesus died in love with us all, not just as Love. And such love’s source flows from a fountain of living water. It is not stored in broken cisterns. If we are not giving ourselves away, we are drying up. And one powerful sign of our bankruptcy is when kindness strikes us as the thing my God can save.

Our convention theme this year is “Finding the Simple Way.” It’s a call to imagine our faith as if for the first time, to forsake broken cisterns that do not fulfil God’s life-giving purpose, and to recover the fountain of living water, the Spirit to whom we are connected in Christ at baptism. It’s what the war-torn and poverty stricken migrant culture of our world is demanding. It’s what the incessant pounding of destructive hurricanes and other as yet unseen impacts of our breaking, fragile home of a planet is demanding. It’s what the tragic consequences of our idolatrous loyalties to ourselves apart from others is demanding. It’s what the endless stream of new generations seeking nurture, direction and their becoming is demanding. And it is what my God (who) can save kindness is demanding.

In the peace and love of Christ,

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