February 2018

Episcopalians at the Iowa Statehouse for a hearing on the death penalty bill

”Well, here we go again! Looks like the legislature will indeed begin considering the death penalty reinstatement within the next few days. I hope you, and your people, will want to join me in expressing our Church’s opposition to this measure.” These were the words of Bishop Epting, sent out to the clergy of the Diocese on January 31, 1997! And yet today, in 2018, they are as applicable as they were twenty years ago.

“Here we go again.” On February 1, members of the Diocesan clergy sought to make the case against the reinstatement of the death penalty at a bill hearing at the Capitol. I am appreciative to hear that the bill seems to be stopped in committee, thanks to their testimony and that of others. Building the kind of society we value is a difficult task. Our efforts are guided by the message and person of Jesus and yet we reach differing conclusions at the implementation level. Each of us also have different elements of human inter-connectedness that grip us as worth more of our energy and commitment than expressing our grocery line opinion.

In 1998, we had at our disposal the legislative watch of the Ecumenical Ministries of Iowa. Through that organization we could share our passionate interests and also keep each other from growing weary in our well-doing across denominational lines.  I am grateful today for the work of Connie Ryan of Interfaith Alliance of Iowa, and our own Wendy Abrahamson who serves as our eyes and ears on Capitol Hill. I invite you to join Wendy and me for the second annual gathering of Episcopalians on the Hill over breakfast at 8:30am on Thursday February 15^th.

About the time, in the late nineties, Iowa was wrestling with the question of the death penalty reinstatement, we in California were talking about the impact of immigration on our culture and the value or not of English only propositions. Even more locally, at my home parish of St Barnabas’, we were engaging in a motion made at a vestry meeting that “the homeless were to be discouraged from our parish functions.” We agreed to spending two months for vestry members to engage church members on the issue, and then we decided that we would take it up again at the third monthly vestry  meeting. During the two months the lectionary happened to be from Year C. and we were hearing readings from Luke’s Gospel. Time after time the causes of the poor and the lost, the Prodigal and the Samaritan, were being put forward by Jesus. I was accused of “cooking the books” and yet I was following the Gospel readings of the day.

Luke is above all the gospel written among the Gentiles. It seeks to apply the significance of Jesus words and actions as they find living expression in the expanding world of a Gospel that Jesus sent out through us to the ends of the world. It is about hospitality and welcoming, leaving your own comfort zones and seeking the lost stranger. The parish, I am glad to say, heard Jesus through Luke, and our active ministry with the homeless stretched on for more than thirty years. Nevertheless, there came another generation that raised the same question, and, from what I hear, it seems Luke was not part of the response. Sadly, a different conclusion was reached, and a most significant ministry has been lost.   

Good things can be undone quickly by well-intentioned people. We must not stop listening to the Gospel. This Lent, Presiding Bishop Michael Curry is inviting us all to read along with him the Gospel of Luke. Let us join him and find the strength to answer the words “Well, here we go again.”

In the peace and love of Christ,
+Alan

The Rt. Rev. Alan Scarfe
Bishop of Iowa

January 2018

One of my favorite presents to give at Christmas is a book. I miss the now closed Cokesbury bookstore in Des Moines where one afternoon in December, I would take a basket and, armed with the list of Diocesan staff, I would say a quick prayer for the Spirit’s guidance and let myself be taken around the store matching books with persons. Maybe the Holy Spirit also misses Christmas shopping with me, and I am sure finds many other opportunities to find instruments of joy, curiosity, and enrichment as we are matched with the Spirit’s gifts. I always would buy an extra one of the books chosen for myself as a Christmas present. One such book gift is the Book of Joy by the Dalai Lama and Archbishop Tutu. For some of you that is probably last year’s news, but good books and ideas stand even the test of our fast-moving times. It is my reading and spiritual practice for the opening of 2018.

It is no surprise that the first few chapters rattle off aspects of human living that are as far away from joy as you could imagine as they deal with fear, stress, anxiety, frustration, anger, sadness, grief, despair, loneliness, envy, suffering, adversity, illness and the fear of death. Clearly these are the obstacles to joy. Joy however is declared as a by-product not an end achieved in or for itself. It is the by-product of eight pillars of human practice: perspective, humility, humor, acceptance, forgiveness, gratitude, compassion and generosity.

Jesus ties joy to prayer, when He invites His disciples in these words, “Very truly I tell you, if you ask anything of the Father in my name, He will give it to you. Until now you have not asked for anything in my name. Ask and you will receive, so that your joy may be complete” (John 16: 23b-24).  So, what if in this New Year which we have just entered, we make the eight pillars of joy our prayer requests, and not just for ourselves but for every human being, and do so in the very midst and in spite of the twelve elements of joy’s obstruction? This is Epiphany light shining in the darkness. Or it is a reminder as Archbishop Tutu beams forth that “you are made for perfection, but are not yet perfect. You are a masterpiece in the making.” This is God’s blessing for a New Year.

In the peace and love of Christ,

+Alan

The Rt. Rev. Alan Scarfe

Bishop of Iowa

December 2017

“Tell out, my soul, the greatness of the Lord!

Unnumbered blessings give my spirit voice;

tender to me the promise of his word;

in God my Savior shall my heart rejoice.”[1]

As we enter the season of Advent, this rendering of the Magnificat by Timothy Dudley-Smith will be offered in many places of worship. This is the season of telling, or at least the beginning of the telling. On Sunday, Advent One, we will, with Isaiah, invite God to “tear the heavens and come down” (Is 64:1). Later we will read how the “people who walked in darkness have seen a great light” (Is 9:2), and be encouraged to let the law and the prophets, culminating in John the Baptist, enter our consciousness to tell us, “first stable on the left beyond the obvious.” There we will find the source of that great light. God in Jesus, “the Word became flesh and blood and moved into the neighborhood,” as Eugene Peterson paraphrases John 1:14 in The Message.

It is story-telling time. And we do it with glad hearts inspired by the Christmas story. However, I run ahead of myself for I want to do justice to Advent. This year, of course, the month of December contains within itself all four weeks of Advent. That comes at a cost. Christmas Eve falls on a Sunday and so the dilemma is raised—can’t we merge one season’s final Sunday (Advent 4) with the beginning of another (Christmas is Christmas Eve/Day through Christmas I this year)? It really makes it difficult to get the troops to spend that Sunday lunch and afternoon “greening the Church”—swapping the décor. And after all, people can only be expected to come to church once on any given Sunday, can’t they? I have already received these kind of arguments (or justifications) for blending the seasons.

My response is—do not yield to the temptation. Do not short-change the story. Perhaps be even darker on Sunday morning of Advent Four—contemplate deeply on the urgency of our dark times. Let us give voice to the things that are gnawing at us for which there seems little hope. And into that volatility, uncertainty, confusion and ambiguity (or VUCA as Bishop Doyle names it in A Generous Community: Being the Church in a New Missionary Age), let us place in their divinely strategized context Mary and Joseph and the Becoming One with the name that means “saving people from their sins.” So let “the light dawn upon us,” and let its marvelous implication of growing revelation of where our hope lies break around us in incremental power—all the way to the fullness of Light as experienced in the Transfiguration at the last Sunday of Epiphany.

Give yourself over to the liturgical calendar and reclaim this holy time. Adapt your Christmas activities to fit into your spiritual priorities of welcoming the gift of God and honoring that God hears our cries and has pitched the divine tent among us. And let curious people know why you have become counter cultural.

Advent is the beginning of the beginning. Christmas is the beginning itself. Epiphany is the revelation of what has begun. And by Lent we are perhaps so aware of the pure grace of God’s gift of light that we are ready to bring it into our internal darkness and let the process of enlightenment go deeper and more personal; until Holy Week helps us put an end to our old selves and brings us God’s newness of a Risen Life.

I am now way ahead of myself. So, let us return to the present. Advent is a time to grapple with the dark things of our world, yes, even as we are decorating our homes. It is a time to read books that challenge us in their efforts to make sense of our VUCA world, where for many authors there is no expectation of a Divine deliverer. We let the pain of our society get to us even as that same society is wringing every ounce of hope and joy it can from the story we are living as Christian people. We, however, are not oblivious to the joy around us. We see the signs of God’s approaching. (After all, in human terms, God took nine months for God to make a Savior if God was truly to empty self and become one of us). This is a time to listen more intently to the story we recite at every Eucharist, which is probably a strong reason we have become so attached to being Eucharistic communities. And our prayers are invited to carry a certain urgency and expansiveness about them.

Those who have received Christmas cards from my family know that they are not likely to reach you until after Christmas. I confess that I aim for Epiphany. Perhaps that is the right trajectory. If we want to reclaim Advent, we have to extend out our Christmas to its traditional twelve days culminating in Epiphany. We can still buy presents ahead of time. (Again, Mary carried Jesus to term, and had her outbursts of joy as expressed in the Magnificat). And we make our preparations that bring increasing light into the darkness. Yet our highest energy for launching festivities, card sending and for reconnecting with friends and honoring them with gifts would come from Christmas Eve/Day and extend into Christmas week and through the New Year to Epiphany.

What if we paced ourselves this way? Who else does something similar to that? Of course, the Jewish tradition of Hanukkah—based on a very different narrative and covering eight days—but perhaps the one the early disciples would have understood better than what we do now. The fruit never falls far from the tree.

In the peace and love of Christ,

+Alan
The Rt. Rev Alan Scarfe
Bishop of Iowa

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[1] “Tell out, my soul, the greatness of the Lord!” Words by Timothy Dudley-Smith, The Hymnal 1982, #437,438

Las Vegas

October 3, 2017

Dear sisters and brothers in Christ,

"Nation plunges into familiar nightmare" is the headline of USA Today that greets us thirty-six hours on from the mass shooting in Las Vegas. "Is it terrorism?" the pundits are asked as they scramble to find an underlying explanation. I suppose that would bring some kind of comfort, though there really isn't any to be found in this situation. Last night people gathered in vigil, and tonight, at 5:30 pm, we will come together locally at the Cathedral Church of St. Paul in Des Moines for a service of lament. Yet even "Oh Lord, how long?" is inadequate as God has already spoken and acted on the issue and we do not like God's answer.

"Those who live by the sword shall die by the sword." "Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God." "Love one another as I have loved you." "The earth will be filled with the knowledge of God as the waters cover the sea." "For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God."

Of course, it is not that simple. Vulnerability is the gift we offer each other in desiring to fulfil the law of Christ "to love one another." The vision of the children safely playing in the streets and the old folk hanging around for conversation remains the prophet's dream, and it assumes a form of vulnerability. We believe that God restores us by returning us to an innocence that is child-like. As we pray and lament, we need to ask ourselves what kind of world do we really seek? What satisfies us? When will we decide violence and weapons of violence have no place among us? The children and old folk in the streets surrounded by protective SWAT teams or streets only entered through metal detectors doesn't quite capture the spirit of the prophecy.

I read that there are about 5 pages of governmental regulations related to safety in ladder use for human protection - even though ladders only kill about 300 Americans a year. Of course we register and have national access to the identity of every automobile because we acknowledge that that is the most lethal machine most of us have at our disposal. We have even recognized the dangers of second hand smoke and have managed to limit a very addictive habit. We are working hard to address a similar epidemic with the use of pain killers. But we cannot manage to name gun use as a human health hazard.

We are simply not healthy enough as a society to be gun happy. And unfortunately we are not happy enough a society to become gun-free. In the meantime, children get hold of them and accidentally kill their siblings; gun access is too easy a temptation for those suffering from suicidal thoughts; too many temperaments are too volatile and readily prone to violent reaction to make a gun too deadly to be at hand; and for some life is too mentally fragile that the available use of a gun as an instrument of mass destruction of human life is a tragedy waiting to happen. If this is not a public health issue, and needs to be treated as such, I am not sure what is.

Are we champions of human liberty? Then let us recognize that the license of some is in fact endangering the liberty of all. And we can alter that differential with sensible gun safety laws that truly protect the rights of everyone not to have to worry about being in a public space. There has to be a tipping point and to that end I pray. 

God has spoken. And what God is often willing to do is hear us when we ask to be brought back to our rightful minds. Or, maybe it will be terrorists that in turning our own freedoms against us actually manage to bring us to that point. How much better it would be to find our own resolve for the greater good in handling our guns, as Australia has done, and in one movement decrease the danger we pose to ourselves and close the opening we offer to our serious enemies.

This has to be the will of the whole people, and we who are strengthened by the Spirit of the Prince of Peace can take a lead. Each day in this nation, ninety-two souls who are victims of gun violence and accidents meet God to ask that very question. Their lament is not "How long, Oh Lord?" but joins God's lament to us "How long, my people, until you see your answer for peacefulness and health is among you all along?" 

In the peace and love of Christ,

+Alan 

 The Rt. Rev. Alan Scarfe, Bishop of Iowa