House of Bishops, Kanuga Conference Center, North Carolina, 12-18 March 2015

It is customary for the time at the spring House of Bishops to be an opportunity for retreat. The pattern has been early morning meditations, generally of a very personal, though ministry-related, nature from colleagues. Then we follow up with a time for prayerful reflection until gathering again for table sharing. The afternoons are set up for engaging speakers and various topics in-depth around the gathering’s theme. This year’s schedule was not so kind and hence this comprehensive report.

This March the theme has been “Curiosity, Compassion, and Courage.” The concept of being curious was linked with a call to openness—to being curious about your neighbor or the stranger in an affirming and attentive way. “Seeing the blessing of difference,” as was stated in one of the meditations. Compassion flows from such curious engagements and at times, the courage to walk with someone very different from ourselves may be demanded of us; hence the connection within the theme. We opened up our plenary sessions by giving an afternoon and evening to exploring racism. We saw the film Traces of the Trade which I hope we will bring to Iowa soon as we refresh our own inquiry into racism and especially for those of us who often “don’t know what we don’t know.” The meditations dealt with race and culture which also included reflections on Ferguson and its broader implications by Wayne Smith of the Diocese of Missouri; economics and class as particularly viewed through the lens of Native peoples; and the impact of growing up in an interfaith environment. Often, this powerful testimony is allowed to take us into our own silence before God until we are ready to share even in our intimate small groups at tables. But this year, with the shadow of General Convention over us, we quickly moved from reflection to brief sharing to upcoming GC topics.

“TREC, sex and elect” is how one of my table colleagues defined what will consume us at General Convention in Salt Lake City this summer. We certainly spent a whole afternoon on the report from the Task Force on Marriage, and again on The Reimagining of the Episcopal Church (TREC) Blue Book report. “Elect” (of the new Presiding Bishop at General Convention) was more of a constant buzz than a specific subject matter, as it will be until finalists are revealed in May and we gather for the Q&A at General Convention itself. The broader spectrum of things that we will handle at General Convention was the subject matter of the various groupings of bishops who gathered on the penultimate evening according to their specific interests.

It was disappointing, but not a surprise, that the issues raised by the Standing Commission on Social Justice and Public Policy (on which I have served for six years) did not make the scheduling “big time,” though our issues were there around the edges. We squeezed economics and class into the shortest day—Sunday—when, ironically, a number of us (myself included) were heading out to the golf course for what, for some of us, is our annual game of golf. I will never break 50 (over par that is) on that kind of frequency.

We hope however that the question of wealth disparity, food security, developing relational-based approaches to social justice and poverty alleviation (including Just Faith) and budgetary priority spending are all things that will get good attention in Salt Lake City. The Bishops United Against Gun Violence, of which I am a member along with more than sixty others, are planning to take their initiative for safer and more sensible gun laws to the streets on June 28th, and planning for that moved forward this week. Incidentally, my own spare time was taken up in seeking to respond to raised concerns about the passing through the Iowa legislature of a new omnibus gun law that is a step back from safer or more sensible gun legislation. I was grateful to have a partner on this with Bishop Trimble of the Iowa United Methodist Church as we sent a letter to every Iowa senator while they can still amend the bill.  

For this General Convention I am a member of the legislative committee receiving resolutions about our Church’s policy on Peace and International Affairs. Invariably this focuses on the Palestine-Israel situation and will also involve questions of our Church’s position with regard to “robotic and Cyber warfare.” There are calls for a stated position on gender violence across the globe, and we expect resolutions on global aspects of human trafficking as well as terrorism. These are particularly important to our relationships with our companion diocese, and I especially think of the Diocese of Swaziland where gender equality and resistance against gender violence is one of their major strategic goals as a Church in mission.

We were invited to name three things that we see in the possibilities for Church reimagining from the report being considered at General Convention. My three were: collaboration, neighborhood, and adaptation. We are being called to work together in following Jesus into our neighborhood and to be willing to adapt ourselves to meet the needs we find there as we seek to offer God’s good news.

Our time together was greatly helped by an introductory session led by The Rev. Dr. Eric Law of The Kaleidescope Institute who brought his teaching on “Grace Margin” and “Cycle of Blessing” or “Holy Currencies” to us. I believe that Eric is an inspired prophetic mission facilitator for our time. He just makes sense as he explains how we are invited by God into cycles of blessing. It sounds like jargon, but it works when you see living examples.

For example, Eric described six currencies that we all have at our disposal—mediums of exchange which carry value such as gracious leadership, time and place, money, wellness, truth, and relationship. In Ferguson, he noted that gracious leadership, truth, wellness, and relationship were lacking. However, The Salvation Army brought its currency of time and place (its camp site) and money into the situation and invited law enforcement and community young adults to come together for a week. In other words, through the gracious leadership of The Salvation Army, and the gracious leadership of those willing to come to the camp, they developed relationships out of which could come truth-telling and wellness. The immediate end product was to have youth and police walk down the street together. This was an alternative reimagining, and it is an example of the Church in mission in Ferguson.

We cannot tell what following Jesus into the neighborhood and “carrying light” will mean for us. And yet it is encouraging to hear even while at Kanuga of the kinds of open conversations you are having around the Chapter meetings and the plans for the 2016 diocesan budget. You are endeavoring to write your own Indaba questions when what is presented might not capture your imagination. You are also writing your own future with God. And that is a great gift. The Holy Spirit is at work among us and in us and I am excited about what your engagement in God’s mission, even at this conversation and early networking level, will produce. As we speak to one another, there is a keen listening going on for the Voice beyond our voices. I suppose that, too, is a good way to describe our constant hope for any House of Bishops meeting.

Below are links to daily accounts of the House of Bishops meetings from The Episcopal Church Public Affairs Office.

March 13, 2015

March 14, 2015

March 15, 2015

March 16, 2015

March 17, 2015

Reflections from Swaziland, 10 December 2014

Jet lag can have its benefits. It is almost four in the morning and I have completed my email thanks to the wifi at our B&B, and I even have alertness to start this blog.  How intent and consistent I can be as time passes and we arrive in Swaziland, I cannot say.

Our travels have been very smooth. The idea of gathering at the Cathedral with family and friends to send us off, both for lunch and a Eucharist, was a marvelous one. The liturgy our chaplain Elizabeth Popplewell had developed ended with an extended “send off blessing”. I invited people to form family and friend groups so that the travelers could be prayed over by those sending them off.  In the Eucharist my wife Donna had prayed for all our connections – especially at Atlanta which was a small window of time for such a trip, but proved effortless – and with our luggage at the end of our flights. Her prayers were answered. What remains is her final request – for God to bless our connections with the next generation of our Companion Relations in Swaziland. May our hearts find one another and our common hope to be ambassadors of reconciliation in Christ be ignited and launched.

One of my responsibilities at the Conference is to teach on Sunday morning about the Cross. It dawned on me this early morning that our theme for the trip and our logo for the t-shirts give me my opening image – “Under One Tree”. I think it was intended to convey that special meeting place in the rural areas of Swaziland where previous trips have met with people and leaders – a symbol of a gathering together. And yet of course, it has even deeper meaning when we understand that we all are gathered by God under that one tree on which Christ gave Himself for the world. Never too early to capture the Spirit’s nudging. Pray for us as we gather in Swaziland.

Watch this space and the Under One Tree blog for updates from Bishop Scarfe and others among our delegation to Swaziland.

Reflections on Visitation to Calvary Sioux City—17 August 2014

I believe that I found the real Field of Dreams on the corner of K49 and C38 in northwest Iowa. It is stunning and so essentially Iowa at its most classic. My only regret is that I did not follow my instinct and stop to take a 360-degree video from the center of the junction. Given Iowa rural traffic, I had the time. Instead I was able to zigzag my way home through countryside I had not passed through in all my travels.

I was finishing a full day that began with a Eucharistic celebration with the peoples of Calvary Sioux City and All Saints Storm Lake. The latter came over to present a couple for reaffirmation and reception while their newly baptized son witnessed. Seeing that the son was 15 years of age, and indicating that if I had baptized him I would also have confirmed him, we went ahead and I confirmed him too, along with another young man from Calvary. An older man returning to the Church and seeking to reaffirm his faith and membership made up those presented.  Both congregations are experiencing growth these days.  There was optimism and good energy, too, at the Chapter conversation/teaching session on Saturday afternoon where we were enriched with people from St Thomas and St Paul’s in Sioux City, and from St George’s Le Mars. It was the discovery that one of the matriarchs from Le Mars was fighting cancer that took me to go further north to visit with her at the nursing facility, and to come across the corner of K49 and C38 on my way home!

Calvary Sioux City is a plucky congregation. It is helped by being the home of a large, four-generation family of Episcopalians whose ancestry probably goes further back than that. The confirmand was the latest to assume responsibility for his baptismal vows in this formal way. The congregation, however, continues to be alert to the most recent offerings on congregational development. They carried on the liturgical space and action ideas of Richard Giles from Convention 2012, and they inspire conversation that leads to thinking of what it might mean to be Episcopalians for Sioux City rather than separated in our individual mission goals as congregations. Their attitude encouraged me to preach around this idea, especially coming off my time in Bradford on vacation. The clergy of Sioux City do know each other well. And it is very possible that they might be able to launch for us this new sense of mission within a defined community, not just as individual units, but as the Episcopal presence collectively. What would it be like if vestries devoted one vestry meeting per quarter to meet together with other vestries in their city or county to discuss mission together? And what if that grew to become a routine ecumenical experience?

Two additional pieces of ministry during the weekend was first to welcome the pastor and deacon of the South Sudanese congregation that had been nesting in TrinityDenison. They have submitted a formal request to form an Episcopal mission for their people with 27 founding members. The second activity was to meet with the bishop’s committee of St Paul’s and affirm an extension for Bishop Mabuza’s time with them through 2016. The search process will begin in Fall 2015 by which time we hope there will be a wider pool of candidates, and an ongoing growth of the leadership at St Paul’s. The Bishop’s Committee is now eight people plus two youth representatives—one for the youth in general and another for the acolytes. I have asked Bishop Mabuza to oversee the work with the South Sudanese community in the western region, as well as to receive an aspirant discerning holy orders from Calvary. In many ways it was a very fulfilling weekend of work for the Gospel.

Sermon at Calvary, Sioux City—17 August 2014   

                                                                                      

Readings: Genesis45: 1-15; Romans 11:1-2, 29-32; Matthew 15: 21-28 

I have just enjoyed a few weeks back home in Bradford where I was raised. Bradford has become quite a center for immigration over the years. People are given citizenship by way of their participation—if that is the right word—in the British Empire. Hundreds of thousands—now several millions—of people, especially from the India sub-continent have come to places like Bradford over the past 50 years with an increasing concentration of families from Pakistan and Bangladesh, the Muslim nations carved out of India after World War II.

Whole school districts are Muslim. Two or three large Mosques mark the landscape as you look over the city from the hill on which my childhood home stands. Christians are torn in their reaction. The Cathedral hired a Muslim for their communications officer. And yet there are others who think every Muslim must be proselytized and that their religion is not of God.

I was in a meeting of clergy and lay leaders who have sought to pray for the people of Bradford in an intense, ongoing way. They cast a middle-of-the-road approach to the Muslim as neighbor—simply asking, if a Muslim family approached your church inquiring about your faith in Jesus, what would you say and how would you approach their inquiry?

Today’s Scriptures lead us to reflect on God’s expanding vision out of which our faith in Jesus Christ grows. Joseph sets us up: “You meant it for bad,” he says to his brothers who, if you recall, tried to kill him or at least lose him for good by selling him off as a slave. “You meant it for bad, but God turned it to good.” Read the chapters in Genesis that tell Joseph’s story. It is a great tale of pride, jealousy, deceit, humbling, restoration, forgiveness and providence. Look up chapters 35-50.

Joseph ended up in Egypt after he was sold into slavery. After a bout in prison, he became Pharoah’s right-hand man, saved the nation and region from the ravishing effects of a long drought and famine by making judicious preparation, having been tipped off by God in a dream. It is worth making a musical about his life! Eventually, he was reunited with his brothers who needed food during the famine and came to Egypt for it. In our passage today, Joseph reveals his true identity to them and is able to forgive because he has seen that, “God, not you, sent me here?”

Is it possible that there are other situations, even as we live, that one day 50 years on or even less, to which we might say, “God, not you; not national pride, not international strategy, sent me here?”

Paul could never fully settle his thoughts on the implications of the coming of Jesus for his Jewish faith, the faith tradition of his upbringing. He wrestled with the fact that God had come in Jesus Christ and had established a new way, truth and life. Where did that leave the Jewish people, and what did that say of God’s promises? His hope was that they would recognize Jesus for themselves, as he had done, as the fulfilment of their Messianic hopes and dreams.

What he was careful to say was that we owe everything to the faithful of the Jewish tradition, without whom we would never have known a framework into which Jesus was manifest. Nor, he surmises, would we have received mercy without their disobedience. It is a very difficult suggestion, but one with which he sought to find some resolution or peace to his dilemma.

It is a strange phrase: “God has imposed all in disobedience that He may be merciful to all.” He warns that if the Jewish people can be superseded, so much more readily can Christians who are merely “grafted on” to salvation history. Whether Jesus was actually being confronted with this same dilemma in the woman from Canaan is also challenging. Is it all right to suggest that He was, rather than assume that He was stringing her along using the language of others without adhering to it Himself to make a point? Or did she really stop Him in His tracks and open His eyes?

We know that she was right. Later in John we will read of Jesus praying for sheep of other folds.

The Bradford prayer group shifts focus from Churches as congregation growers to Churches as community witnesses, prophets, social reformers, peacemakers, reconcilers, wisdom bearers. Jesus stepped beyond his religious tradition as its fulfilment and its judge. His actions and teaching were deemed blasphemous. But is He not the same today? Is it possible that He stand as fulfilment and judge of every religion, including that built upon and around His own revelation and teaching.

One thing is sure—our disobedience to the essence of following Jesus within or without our tradition may still become a means for God to bring His mercy to others beyond us. Could that be the peacemakers and the true innocents of every faith?

Bishop Leslie Newbiggin, a great ecumenist, believed that the Cross of Christ—God’s great self-giving to humanity—is the standard by which all religion is judged. God is always in the innocent who suffer, among the peacemakers and justice seekers who offer what time they have on this earth for the good of others. And it is by that Cross we are all fulfilled and judged, Christianity and Christians included.

Reflections on visitation to Trinity Episcopal Church, Denison—20 July 2014

A congregation never knows what lies around the corner. Trinity Episcopal Church is part of the Trinity cluster which includes St Paul’s, Harlan and Trinity, Carroll. The three churches share a priest, though they are independent of each other in their governance. They serve different communities. Denison has a large Latino population and has recently attracted other non-Anglo peoples. My conversations with the cluster after the retirement of long-serving priest, Glen Rankin, two years ago have centered around the idea of centering the call of a new priest around the Denison rectory and seeking a bilingual priest who could initiate a Spanish-speaking congregation. To this end the Board of Directors of the Diocese approved a grant to Trinity to help renovate the Rectory, which was augmented by one from Trinity, Carroll on behalf of the cluster. Last year we met together for several rounds of bible study in an effort to reinvigorate the cluster and talk about their common future.

One Sunday morning about a dozen Anglicans from South Sudan turned up in Denison for the morning worship. They quickly became a part of the community, and decided to connect with Trinity as part of their regular Sunday service. The group was organized with a pastor and deacon who, though raised Anglican, had been formed and called to ordination through an independent Bible College. In effect for our canonical purposes they are pastors ordained not in the historical apostolic tradition. The group grew, and participated in the cluster’s joint events, such as the picnic Eucharist in last August which was one of my visitations to the cluster. (In effect, I do three visits every eighteen months, one to each Church).

The small group of members from Trinity worked hard at receiving their new guests—painting the facilities next door which had been a local pre-school, overseeing the completion of the renovated rectory. New life and energy were flowing through the congregation. Eventually the South Sudanese leadership realized that the morning service time did not fit the work schedules of many of their people, and began holding an afternoon worship on Sundays. The new parish priest, Diana Wright, attended but the service was in Dinka and led by the pastor and deacon, using a well-worn Anglican prayer book.

On my visitation, the cluster gathered in the morning, about two dozen of us, and in the afternoon we worshipped in Dinka and English with almost five-dozen South Sudanese. About fifty people came forward for reaffirmation of baptismal vows and the laying on of hands. It was a hot day, and at times I felt like I was back in South Sudan.

The arrival of the Dinka was not the only surprise up God’s sleeve for the people of Trinity. A few months ago they were approached about the use of their pre-school for a new Pentecostal congregation led by a pastor from El Salvador.  And so at the end of my visit, I paid a call on the Central American congregation gathering for 4pm worship next door in Trinity’s Hall, bringing greetings and offering welcome. They were about thirty-five in number.

We simply never know what God has in store for us. It is a joyful and hopeful story, but not without its problems. The congregations, especially the two Anglicans, have to learn how to grow together without one overwhelming the other. How can they be life giving to each other? In one way simply offering a structure within which to become tied to one’s historical ecclesiastical roots is a gift on the part of the people of Trinity. Cultural difference, especially in terms of understandings of leadership and gender, is an ongoing issue. Mutual expectations of responsibilities on both sides in terms of the upkeep of the buildings and how to make decisions that are of mutual benefit while acknowledging the canonical structure of our governance are other things still to be worked out. I left for vacation after my trip to Denison full of hope and ready to work with what might become a new chapter in the life of the Diocese as we work on creating our first South Sudanese congregation based in partnership at Trinity. I returned to find that we are not quite there yet, and that there is more work to be done on seeking how to be in mission together with Christ with these communities of each and all. I have decided that it is a good problem to have, and an important one to resolve quickly.

Sermon at Trinity Episcopal Church, Denison                                                                 

Readings: Isaiah 44; Romans 8: 12-25; Matthew 13: 14-30, 36-43

This week I had to break down and hire a young man to take a stab at my garden. It has really overgrown—with weeds that look like trees hiding in the bushes; and flowerbeds minus flowers taken over by more weeds and growing seedlings of nearby trees! It is a jungle. It is a mess and rain on my only day off is not helping me get any handle on it.

I wish I had at least been intentional and sown good seed; and could blame an enemy for mixing in the weeds. But no such luck. My garden has had a few good years, and more bad ones; but this is the worst I have experienced. How quickly things get away from you. We should blame Adam and Eve. Leave things untended and disaster happens. And so I have hired a savior!

I have just been away at the Episcopal Youth Event where I learned that the five marks of mission of the Anglican Communion can be reduced to five words—tell; teach; tend; transform and treasure. Tend and treasure are the two words that stand out with respect to the parable Jesus tells us today: the wheat and the tares.

According to the Apostle Paul, we live in a physical or natural world groaning under the weight of its very way of being. Maybe that is how he looked at his own garden. It is probably accurate to say that Paul was not an ecologist, and yet his words sound very appropriate to our understanding of what is happening within nature today. In fact the hardship of human battles with nature have been with us from the beginning, even to the point that the Creation story ends with disobedience causing humans to be thrown out of the idyllic state of Eden (where presumably flowers blossomed without the need for tilling and care) and were condemned to a life of servitude towards nature. It would have to be tamed by us to provide food and nourishment, or simply not to be overrun, not to mention having a garden for simply enjoyment.

So for Paul the great reversal that had taken place in Jesus Christ—where out of death had come life—had its impact, too, upon nature and our relationship with it. Our freedom is to be nature’s freedom. For Jesus restores all things in God. The enemy in the parable is defeated. Whenever, however, the Scriptures speak of such future things—there is always the sense and recognition that restoration and salvation happen even as we labor and struggle. It is always “while we were yet sinners (that) Christ died for us” as Paul says to the Corinthians. New life comes out of and with suffering, and that suffering is the struggle of the Spirit and the flesh, or the struggle of being a disciple of Jesus Christ.

My jungle backyard could be the last word. I could just retire to my room, close the curtains and never give it another thought. This year it certainly has proven too much for me. Calling on help—bringing another in to work with me became my hope. In that simple act there was a refusal to let decay become the last word.

The early disciples or followers of Jesus needed to know the lay of the land. They needed to know that not everyone would receive their good news about Jesus, though many would. They also needed to know that patience was a virtue in the lives of faith. Jesus would not leave them unprepared or naïve about the struggle before them.

The listeners of Jesus would be aware of the familiar weed that grew among the wheat—which in its early shoots looked a lot like wheat. Underground, its roots would tangle with the wheat roots and to pull up one was to risk the destruction of the other, the good other. And so it became best to let them grow up together until their distinction became clearer around harvest time. The weed also had the additional element of being poisonous. So they were not to rush to judgment, nor be premature in their discernment, but show patience. Patience and longsuffering are important fruits of the Spirit, by the way.

Jesus also needed his disciples to realize that their work of following was not without resistance. There was an enemy of the Gospel rooted in nature itself and in our self-centeredness. These realities from Jesus’ day are as present to us today as they were then. Life has not changed, nor has human nature. And so in a few moments I will ask: “Do you reaffirm your renunciation of evil and do you renew your commitment to Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord?” and “Will you continue in the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, in the breaking of bread and in the prayers?” To which as followers of Jesus, we say, “I will with God’s help.” And God promises to give us that help in the activity of the Holy Spirit in our lives.

The challenges and the choice is not to be overwhelmed; to know when to call for help; to trust that nature itself is freed when we find our freedom of Spirit—our love, our joy, our peace, our hope, our faith, our gentleness, our patience, our meekness, our perseverance—all as ways of life.    

This is what you have been seeking to do down the years. You would not still be gathering if that were not so. Your future lies where it has always been—in the purposes and mission of God which you are continually asked to tell, teach, tend, transform and treasure.

What you cannot afford to do is lose faith, to get overwhelmed by nature’s wildness and Satan’s adversity, to become fixed in the past and retire to your room with your curtains closed and to turn on each other in frustration and in the toughness of the task of being a follower of Jesus.

In a few moments I am going to invite you to be prayed over. I am going to remind you that the Spirit who has begun a good work in you can and will direct you and uphold you in the service of Christ and Christ’s Kingdom. I urge you to receive this gift of prayer into your own hearts. Jesus’ own disciples and the Church they founded needed to be reminded that He was with them always—not because it was easy going, but because it was tough going. Yet in the end, with Isaiah, they would say to God’s question, Who is there beside Me?, “No one, Lord, not One. There is no God like you, and we are glad to be your followers and your servants. Here I am Lord, use me until that day of harvest when all is made clear.”

Amen