Out of Nowhere

Jesus brought with him an ambiance of truth. He said he was the truth. When Pilate asked him What is truth? he just stood there. Such pales these days. The ambiance fades.

The new news is the old news that the CIA is lying to Congress. The new director is supposed to apologize for the years 2001-2008. Strange fruit. Those years and those who led us then should have got us accustomed to lies. One might make a case that the CIA is a school of lies for lying is spying’s life blood.

One can get so in the habit of lying that one might forget the difference between truth-telling and lying. One trouble I’ve found is remembering lies. Lies are harder to remember than truths. But the CIA is the only government agency I know of that actually has intelligence for its name. Makes me think that maybe there’re such things as intelligent lies or that they would have us believe so.

Anyhow, it’s comforting that some of us still get out of joint over lies and lying. Pilate probably wouldn’t have known the truth if it hit him square in the face which, of course, it did, and he didn’t. But there are refreshing signs that there are still people around who know the difference or else, of course, they may be lying about it. I hope not. I hope that one place we can still be sure truth is being told is among those of us who claim to follow the Way… the Way of truth and life… and still know the difference.

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Presiding Bishop’s Opening Address

[July 7, 2009] The following is the opening address of Episcopal Church Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori, presented July 7 to the Church’s 76th General Convention.

General Convention opening address
7 July 2009

The Most Rev. Katharine Jefferts Schori
Presiding Bishop and Primate

Greetings to all the dioceses; visitors, ecumenical and interfaith from around AC. We give thanks to the diocese of Los Angeles for hospitality, and to the many volunteers. It is already a great convention.
When I was growing up, my mother often reminded us of what our grandfather used to say to her and her siblings when they were in trouble, “We’re going to have words, and you’re not going to get to use any of yours.” Well, we are going to have words. I’m not going to chastise; I am going to talk about crisis. And you are going to have abundant opportunity to use your words – they will fill the coming eleven days. As you use those words, remember that they are meant to image and imitate God’s effective word, and accomplish what God intends for a healed and reconciled creation.
Crisis is always a remarkable opportunity – that’s how Christians are meant to engage crisis. Crisis is about focusing on the most important and most essential things first. Pilots talk about crisis management in the shorthand of aviate, navigate, communicate – fly the airplane, figure out where you are, and then call for help – but keep on flying the plane. The crisis management called First Aid deals with breathing and bleeding and heart beats, and then moves on to other, less critical issues.
In the tradition that you and I have inherited, crisis response has a lot to do with caring for the most vulnerable – who is sick or hungry or dying or grieving? In the kind of crisis called a disaster, it’s about ensuring that people have food, water, shelter, and medical care. Schools are important, but you can worry about rebuilding them after the flood has receded.
The word crisis has its origins in the Greek krinein, meaning to judge, separate, or distinguish. A crisis is time for decision-making, and a response cannot be avoided. The early English use of the word had to do with the turning point in a disease process – like the height of a fever – will it lead to death, or will the fever resolve and the patient begin to heal? In the gospels, the essential crisis is contained in Jesus’ decision to turn his face toward Jerusalem.
General Convention is always a time of critical decision-making. This 76th General Convention has some connection with other memorable Conventions – like the one in 1967 that adopted the General Convention Special Program, and the 1976 General Convention that permitted the ordination of women to the priesthood and episcopate. We’ll hear echoes of those debates in our conversations at this one, as we consider the needs of the poorest around us, and the inclusion of those who do not have full access to the life of this Church. We may revisit some of the critical conversations of the last General Convention as we consider how the life of this Church intersects with the life of other Anglicans. Underlying all of those debates will be the reality that we do not have the same kind of financial resources to address them that we had three years ago – that is another kind of crisis, both local and global.
However, this is not a TSA announcement that the threat level has risen from orange to red, or a reminder to keep an eye on your luggage. Not a bad idea, but hardly good news. This IS a gospel announcement that our journey is meant to be toward Jerusalem, rather than sunning ourselves in the sands of the Negev or floating in the Dead Sea. This IS a reminder that we’re supposed to travel light – no extra sandals or tunics or lunch bags. Our mission is to keep traveling, bearing the good news of Jesus and working to transform the world. This crisis is an opportunity to refocus on what is most essential. When we have done that, we WILL go on our way rejoicing.
The decision-making we face here is an opportunity to choose the direction of our journey into God’s mission. Will we turn our faces toward Jerusalem, or will we wander back out into the desert? How will we engage God’s reconciling mission – in sharing the good news, healing the world, and caring for all of God’s creation? How will we discover anew that we ARE in relationship with all that God has created, and that we’re meant to be stewards of the whole?
Lane Denson reminded us recently that stewards are wardens of the styes – keepers of the pigpens. We’re beginning to notice that our global garden increasingly resembles an odorous sty. But it’s not pigs who are the problem – pigs are neat and tidy if they have enough space. The problem is with their keepers, who see the pigs only as bacon and ham producing machines, rather than part of God’s good creation and therefore deserving of appropriate respect.
The crisis of this moment has several parts, and like Episcopalians, particularly ones in Mississippi, they’re all related. The overarching connection in all of these crises has to do with the great Western heresy – that we can be saved as individuals, that any of use alone can be in right relationship with God. It’s caricatured in some quarters by insisting that salvation depends on reciting a specific verbal formula about Jesus. That individualist focus is a form of idolatry, for it puts me and my words in the place that only God can occupy, at the center of existence, as the ground of all being. That heresy is one reason for the theme of this Convention.
Ubuntu. That word doesn’t have any “I”s in it. The I only emerges as we connect – and that is really what the word means: I am because we are, and I can only become a whole person in relationship with others. There is no “I” without “you,” and in our context, you and I are known only as we reflect the image of the one who created us. Some of you will hear a resonance with Martin Buber’s I and Thou and recognize a harmony. You will not be wrong.
I said that this crisis has several elements related to that heretical and individualistic understanding. We’ve touched on one – how we keep the earth, meant to be a gift to all God’s creatures. The financial condition of the nations right now is another element. The sins of a few have wreaked havoc with the lives of many, as greed and dishonesty have destroyed livelihoods, educational possibilities, care for the aged, and multiple forms of creativity – and that’s just the aftermath of Ponzi schemes for which a handful will go to jail. If we want to be faithful, we need to be continually rediscovering that my needs are not the only significant ones. Living in Ubuntu implies that selfishness and self-centeredness cannot long survive. We are our siblings’ keepers and their knowers, and we cannot be known without them – we have no meaning, no true existence in isolation. We shall indeed die as we forget or ignore that reality.
There is another related element to this crisis, the one that has to do with the particular means and purpose of our gathering. How do we keep the main thing the main thing? How will we insist that this Domestic and Foreign Missionary Society remember that God’s mission is our reason for existence, and that it has most to do with loving our neighbors? The structures of this church are resources for God’s mission, but they are not God’s mission in themselves, and if we get that mixed up, we will have turned our face toward the date palms of Jericho rather than Jerusalem.
The temptation for us here will be to see one small part of God’s mission, the part each one of use holds most dear, as the overarching reason for this church’s existence. The reality is that God’s mission will continue, whatever we do here, but it may not advance as effectively or penetrate as widely in the next few years if we get selfish or miss the mark. There are aspects of mission that are more appropriate and effective at the congregational and diocesan level. This church as a whole shouldn’t be running, for example, Camp East of Eden for kids from all over the church, but it could provide some liaison and connecting gifts, and share some best practices for camping ministry. Much of that work is already being done by Episcopal Camps and Conference Centers, and the job of the whole church in that response is thus mostly about making connections.
Some of the ecumenists in here will twitch at this word, but we should be in the business of subsidiarity – the church as a whole should not be doing mission work that can be done better at a more local level. The budget and the resolutions we will debate here should be about those things that affect the whole of this Church, and the vision of a renewed creation for all of God’s handiwork. We should leave smaller things and more local issues to more local parts of the Church. We might also consider putting in that category the big picture issues we can’t yet agree on – the ones for which we have many, more local, and varied understandings, recognizing the different contexts may require different responses.
Jesus’ critical decision to journey toward Jerusalem is about the city of God’s dream, Yerushalayim, the city of peace, the city of shalom, the city of God’s holy mountain, toward which the nations stream. We Christians often think the only important part of the Jerusalem story is Calvary, and, yes, suffering and killing in that place still seem to be the loudest news. But Calvary was a waypoint in the larger arc of God’s dream – it’s on the way to Jerusalem, it is not in Jerusalem. Jesus’ passion was and is for God’s dream of a reconciled creation. We’re meant to be partners in building that reality, throughout all of creation. This crisis is a decision point, one which may involve suffering, but it is our opportunity to choose which direction we’ll go and what we will build. We will fail if we choose business as usual. There will be cross-shaped decisions in our work, but if we look faithfully, there will be resurrection as well.
Will the words we use in the coming days reflect the word of God incarnate in our midst? Will our words imitate God’s effective word, speaking shalom to creation? That’s our decision, individually and collectively – that is our opportunity to live Ubuntu. This is our moment of judgment, our crisis. We can make our decisions in hope, and we can speak the love of God to the world through this Church, and we can do it together.

For more info contact:
Nancy Davidge
Offsite Media Liaison
The Episcopal Church
ndavidge@eds.edu
Mobile: 617-901-4200

President of the House of Deputies Opening Address

[July 7, 2009] The following is the opening address of Episcopal Church President of the House of Deputies Bonnie Anderson, presented July 7 to the Church’s 76th General Convention.

76th General Convention
President of the House of Deputies, Bonnie Anderson, D.D.
Opening Remarks
July 7, 2009

Presiding Bishop Katharine, Secretary Straub, Deputies, Bishops, Members of the Triennial Meeting of the Episcopal Church Women, visitors and guests. It is with great pleasure that I welcome you to the 76th General Convention of The Episcopal Church and our exploration together of Ubuntu.

The General Convention, meeting once every three years is the world’s largest bicameral legislature. The General Convention holds all authority in The Episcopal Church, other than the authority to change the Core Doctrine of the Church. Of course, the ultimate authority for all we are and all we have and all we do resides in our beloved Jesus Christ.

The General Convention can be fairly described in a variety of terms including constitution and canons, rules of order, legislation, politics, group dynamics, worship, this list goes on. The Convention can also be understood theologically. It is rooted in the promise of Jesus to be with us when we are gathered as a community and St. Paul’s famous imagery of the Body of Christ. These foundations allow us to believe that God is present and can be known in conventions as well as congregations. The House of Deputies has a particularly important role in this theological construct. It requires the whole body – bishops, priests, deacons and laity – to be the full image of Christ for the church and for the world. The Episcopal Church has intentionally structured its General Convention to reflect this theology rather than one that relies on a special part of the Church to fulfill that role. We believe that God speaks to and through all of the orders and members of our Church.

God’s Episcopal Church is my Church. It became my Church about 35 years ago for a reason that may seem simple. The Episcopal Church welcomed me. I don’t mean the kind of welcome that gave me coffee and shook my hand,, although that is important too. The Episcopal Church welcomed me in a way that told me the truth about who I am. The Episcopal Church told me that I am a child of God. The Episcopal Church told me that the gifts that God has given me will be put to good use. The Episcopal Church welcomed me in a way that brings me closer to wholeness. Here is a short illustration of what I mean:

I grew up not too far from here, in a largely Hispanic, Roman Catholic neighborhood in a town called Santa Ana. I was the white kid with the divorced parents who lived with her mother and sometimes her grandmother.
I was an anomaly.

But strangely enough, that neighborhood, that community not only welcomed me, they embraced me: There was always room at someone’s table when I was hungry, when I was lonely there was someone yelling outside my back door that it was time to walk to church. I was welcomed and included, no questions asked. I was and am thankful for that community beyond words. They literally saved my life.

All the neighbors knew about each other – what was important, who needed special attention. But the neighborhood church, where I walked to Mass every single morning for 15 years, there was not one single adult associated with the leadership of the parish, who knew my name. I was told about Jesus Christ at Church, but I experienced Jesus Christ in my neighborhood.

So years later, when I walked into a simple Episcopal church in rural Pennsylvania with my husband and our three kids of our own in tow, I was welcomed in a way that touched the place in my heart that I had kept in reserve for the generous and loving people of my childhood, not too far from here.

These kind caring Episcopalians fed the rural poor of our community where we lived and paid hired hands to do work they could have done themselves just so someone else would have the dignity of a job in hard times. The community was their mission field.

On the third Sunday we came to Church, Ellie sat next me. She had introduced herself to me the first Sunday we were there. She sat beside me each Sunday thereafter. She had a huge brown crocodile purse – the kind that has a small crocodile head a little tiny feet on it near the clasp – our kids were mesmerized by it. After church on a particular Sunday, she nudged me and dug down in her purse. She handed me a crumpled paper with a list of names and phone numbers written by a shaky hand. In a display of what I call uncanny “gift perception”, Ellie had decided that if the church had a babysitting co-op it would enable more people to be available to work in the community. She thought I would be the perfect co-op organizer. I did it. And for the second time in my life, God put me in the midst of a loving community of people who showed me what it is to love my neighbor as myself. The “penny dropped”. I got it. We find our place in creation where the story of Jesus Christ intersects our own stories.

So here we are today, ready to build upon the work done by 75 other General Conventions and all the thousands of bishops, deputies, ECW, guests, visitors, who have gone before us.

But, we say, these are tough times. Time to hunker down.

I bet if we went back through history and interviewed Episcopalians from those 75 General Conventions gone before us, EVERYONE would say they lived through tough times. Their lives would reflect tough times in the form of such things as the dustbowl, famine, war, natural disasters, starvation, civil rights, racism, depression. Our time right now, is tough but it is marked by another TYPE of tough times marked by terrorism, and a declining economy. Ours is a tough time, but our forbearers would probably say that they had tough times too, and they did.

In our tough time, there is one major but very subtle difference. The difference is this: – because of technology, available travel, communication, we have the capability to SEE, and, to some extent, to UNDERSTAND not only our own tough times, but we know about the tough times of people all around the globe. In June it was announced that the first half of 2009 pushed another 105 million people into hunger, raising the total number of hungry people in the world now to more than one billion.

In our own Diocese of South Dakota, while I was visiting on the Lower Bruille reservation, which is in the #1 poorest county in the U.S., where there are several Episcopal congregations, at a free lunch program a young boy stuffed mashed potatoes from his lunch into his pocket so his grandmother would have something for dinner.

One of the toughest things about these tough times is that we can’t hide from them. Our technology enables us to see and to know not only how we are effected, but how the global economic crisis is disproportionately affecting the poorest people in the world.

It is within our reach to do something about it and THAT is the toughest thing about our times. As economist Jeffrey Sachs said as he stood on the chancel steps of St. Mark’s Cathedral in Minneapolis, ”For the first time in the history of the world, we have the resources, the technology, and the capacity to wipe extreme poverty off the face of the earth. The only thing we lack is the will.”

Some of us have the will. Over 50% of our approximately 7,000 congregations have embraced the Millennium Development Goals as a mission focus. 82 of the 110 dioceses have sacrificially pledged 0.7% of their diocesan budgets toward global poverty eradication and the MDGs. In 42 countries, Episcopal Relief & Development has touched the lives of 2.5 million people.

The vision of building the “Beloved Community” in the Diocese of Louisiana, for example, has been embraced by over 100,000 volunteers and a $10 million dollar investment from contributions made to Episcopal Relief & Development for this purpose which has conservatively produced 20 times that amount in benefit to the community. Many of us are responding to God’s call to mission, but what if ALL of us did it? What if all of us did it as if our lives depended on it? Think of it!!

As my friend Deputy Rushing says, “The church does not have a mission, God’s mission has a Church”. Mission is the reason we exist at all- to be out in the world serving as the face, hands, heart and feet of Jesus Christ, bringing healing and reconciliation and renewal to our broken world. We are called by God to be this kind of people. And we so badly want to do it. Since 1991, General Convention has concurred 58 resolutions about mission. Calling us out into the world to join God in the ministry of peace and justice. We are so clearly called to do this.

We say we want to do it. And some of us are doing it. But despite all this there still exists a huge gap between the needs of the world and the response of our church to those needs. Together, there is so much more we can do.

And there’s they key word- together. We are only effective in responding to God’s call to the extent that we fully grasp the reality that we cannot do this ministry alone, as individuals. In the Episcopal Church we have hundreds of thousands of ministers – over 2 million. We must learn how to identify, equip and build leadership for mission in our congregations if we are to be faithful to God’s call to mission. We must learn how to call others into action with us and band together around places of common interest to do the work God has given us to do. We must no longer be afraid to ask other people to join us in action.

At this General Convention we will have mission conversations, we will explore the leadership art of Public Narrative as one vehicle through which we can call others effectively to act with us. Public Narrative is not an agenda, another congregational development gadget, or a spiritual autobiography. Public Narrative is a method, an art form even, that links the truth of who we are with individuals called to mission, to the truth of our community here also called to mission, to the specific and urgent needs of the world. Public Narrative is linked stories about ourselves, our church community and the need of the world, that, when mastered, has tremendous amount of power and capacity to call people to action.

So right here, right now, let us begin. Let us invest our love in the Holy Spirit, and set our hearts on mission with everything we have. Where we have already begun, let us intensify our efforts. Where there is need unmet, let us begin new ministry. Let us listen deeply to one another at General Convention. Let us learn a new leadership art that we can develop here, then take home with us and use if it works for us. For, we are the Episcopal Church and we have the community, the liturgy, the history, the intellect, the resources and the passion to make an historic and effective impact on the world’s suffering. This is our moment. Let us claim this moment and let us celebrate this moment. Then let us go back out into the world together – and do it.

Thank you.

Common sense and a sense of humor, said William James, are the same thing, moving at different speeds. A sense of humor is just common sense, dancing.

Makes me wonder whether common prayer and a sense of humility might be the same thing, moving at different speeds… a sense of humility, just common prayer, dancing?

Anglicanism, as Terry Holmes has said, is a mode of making sense of the experience of God, a particular approach to the construction of reality, or to the building of a world. Nothing so well helps order this experience as the Book of Common Prayer. Through the repeating cycles and the one-time crises of life, it tells us and the world who we are; it tells us what we believe about ourselves and our relation to God. If we listen to its rhythms carefully, it can center us and protect us from letting too much distance show between our sense of humility and our sense of humor.

Perhaps then may we experience the incredible lightness of being. Common prayer dancing, indeed.

A friend of mine somehow overlooked and never celebrated her son’s second birthday. It’s become a running family joke, probably because he recalls it and reminds her every year when his birthdays come around. But the older he gets, the better he likes it. He can claim to be a year younger than he actually is.

The church is long on anniversaries as special ways of remembering and has liturgies to celebrate and “keep” them. We call the one-time kind — baptism, confirmation, marriage, ordination, death — “crisis” liturgies, the repeating kind — birthdays, holidays — “cyclic.”

Independence Day is cyclic. So much so, that we tend to relish more the music, the celebration, the fireworks, the red, white, and bluishness of it all, than the meaning, the purpose. In this last decade of so many unilateral international policies, the language of the Declaration is even more worth our careful appreciation of our founders’ intentions as to what a new nation is about. It is well worth listening to National Public Radio as there is read the Declaration in their broadcast the morning of July 4th when all their staff with those familiar voices turn us through the great phrases. It can be a joyful and renewing reminder, as well, for a family to take time in their celebration to read together this short document, taking turns, paragraph by paragraph.

It begins… “When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.”

In that preamble alone, there resides at the core of our national history our declared membership “among the powers of the earth,” our belief in Nature’s God, and our “decent respect to the opinions of mankind… ” We dare not allow ourselves or our leaders ever to forget this. Let us keep this anniversary and this celebration to remind us again and again of such stewardship.

A friend of mine stopped wearing her wristwatch in an effort to force herself to ask others for the time and as a reminder to cool it on her increasingly brash independent behavior.

Those who declared our independence a couple of hundred years ago probably didn’t wear wristwatches. Maybe that’s why their Declaration submitted their arguments to a candid world and to God. They didn’t seem so much to want affirmation where they felt uncertainty, but to want to witness to the inseparably relational nature of human being. Ironically, their conviction that we are actually interdependent was the sound of silence in their great document.

For a recent while, we lost sight of the considerable courage of our founders and replaced it with bravado. Their political experiment was the total opposite of unilateralism and, instead, proved to be the very gift to humankind we’ve so pitifully claimed to offer by saying “my way or the highway.” Thanks be to God, it doesn’t quite seem to be that way anymore.

Maybe this Day of remembering, we might leave our watches at home and remember how our founders even inspired the French to join us two centuries ago.

Independence Day 2009

It has been said that to sacrifice something is to make it holy by giving it away for love.

In the Eucharist, the place at which that action is perhaps most graphic is in the moment of offering bread and wine and money. In our congregation, we call additional attention to that with two short prayers through which we ask God to join with us in making holy what we are sacrificing, what we are giving away for love. We may not always be so conscious of this, but there it is, anyway, what the church has meant to do for twenty centuries.

On Independence Day or the nearest Sunday, as an exceptional way of adding to our celebration and, indeed, to our sacrifice, we offer together with these other symbols our nation’s flag, properly folded and placed in an alms plate. This reminds us that we are one nation under God.

Most of us are aware that there are many ways to display the flag, each with its own meaning. When it is to one’s right as in the president’s oval office, it symbolizes allegiance. When it is flown upside down, it is a sign of distress. When at half-mast, it is to indicate mourning. When a flag is torn, stepped on, or burned, the message is rejection and rebellion. When a flag flies at full staff, the announcement is peace, victory, rule or whatever adjective you might speak to the situation at the time. In our parish, it is not our usual custom to display our nation’s flag in our chancel, though such is far from uncommon in many churches.

Whatever way we incorporate our national symbol, it is well to keep in mind that Hebrew and Christian scriptures record two problems about patriotism as always having plagued the People of God. One is to become so conformed to a culture and its ways so as to merge the two, rather than bringing the culture into the ways of God. The other is to allow the rule of God to be replaced by the rule of the State. Consequently, we must exercise great care with how we use our national symbols.

We Christians are believers in the incarnation, and it is thus not always easy to separate the issues from the people or the symbols who embody them. Patriotism — about which these days some of us hear more than enough and others never enough — is one of those very important issues which we incarnate and which is not all that easy to separate from the person or the symbol that embraces it.

Few of us, I suspect, would deny that we are patriots. We may find it easier to say what that does not mean for us than to say what it does mean. One thing we all have in common on the subject, however, is the Declaration of Independence. It seems to me always useful — especially this time of year and in these perilous times — to read it thoughtfully as Christians, and perhaps to discover anew what our founders had in mind when they undertook this great American political experiment by which they told us what patriotism meant for them.

On the celebration of our nation’s birthday each year, National Public Radio broadcasts a reading of the Declaration of Independence. Their announcers, reporters, analysts, and essayists each follow in turn reading a short, self-contained passage. The familiar voices are nameless, and one can only guess whose they are. The anonymity seems not only tantalizing, but somehow appropriate, as well. I like to imagine our founders as they wrote and shaped this great proclamation maybe having read it aloud similarly as they sought to get the feel, the rhythm, the power, and the authority of it.

Hearing it in this way even more convinces me that, for whatever and surely well-intended reason, the document seems strangely misnamed. I believe it might better have been called a Declaration of Interdependence, instead. It may be well for us to imagine it that way in these difficult times of another, newer, but not all that different national crisis.

Clearly and well, of course, the Declaration establishes us an autonomous nation among all the world’s geopolitical states. That, in itself, is daring enough. But it continues uniquely and refreshingly to proclaim a new and radical political relationship not only with its own citizenry, but also boldly and courageously with all the earth’s peoples who care to join in such a venture. It takes an incarnational view of the very nature of human being and of the body politic as itself a faithful way to render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and unto God the things that are God’s.

We have just now lived in a time when independence has come to mean the license to run amok unilaterally. The founding sense of the Declaration seems scandalously misunderstood and to be masquerading alone as codependency here, as sexual, ethnic, and political insularity there. These distortions recklessly affect not only individuals and families and our thoughtful and creative governing system of checks and balances, but regions and nations across this entire planet, as well. We seem to be abandoning the very corporate nature of the stewardship which this founding document affirmed and for which it called.

The answer to all this is not, I believe, some blind, unquestioning loyalty which is no loyalty at all, but an out-and-out denial of one’s citizenship. It is not the impudent display of flag lapel pins all the while blatantly ignoring the Constitutional systems for which that pin stands and which one has vowed to protect and defend. Rather is true patriotism to love our country enough to see that in a nuclear age it is not going to survive unless the world survives. True patriots are no longer champions of Democracy, Communism, or anything like that but champions of the Human Race. It is not the Homeland that they feel called on to defend at any cost, but the planet Earth as Home.

If in the interests of making sure that we don’t blow ourselves off the map once and for all, we end up relinquishing a measure of national sovereignty to some international body, so much the worse for national sovereignty. For there is only one Sovereignty that matters ultimately, and it is of quite another sort altogether.

Oh, and there is a tidbit which we dare not overlook after a reading of the Declaration of Independence. It is that King George III entered into his journal on that vital July 4, 1776, “Nothing of any importance or consequence took place today.”

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Note: The useful reminders about ways and meanings of flag displays came my way from Pepper Marts, churchman, veteran, writer, and rattler of stained glass out in New Mexico. The splendid reflections on the meaning of patriotism belong to Frederick Buechner and appear in his “Whistling in the Dark,” Harper & Row, p 93.

It was Trauma City when our town’s swishy university discovered that all the door locks had come from Yale. Trouble was the keys had, too, so it was a campus-wide piece of bad PR all around. Certainly, the development office’s call on Schlage proved to no avail. It was almost as bad as the time a grant application misspelled Procter and Gamble.

I’ve recalled this event largely because keys, and by implication locks, are suddenly in the news. Specially keys to cities, an honorific frequently given to some dignitary usually either by the mayor or her representative. Not so with us and the Iraqis. Finally, TBTG, we’re moving out, but only from the urbs to the hoods.

So what did we do? We gave back the key, a big symbolic key to the mayor or his look-alike. Humor, thy name is irony. Over here, we’ve been bailing out eroding municipal infrastructures with megabucks, and now all we do is give a key, albeit a fancy one, to cities whose infrastructures we’ve spent the last six or seven years megabombing.

The church has been into keys ever since Peter got his set to the Kingdom. Trouble is, when Peter got them, let himself in, and might even have been prone to lead us all, Rome changed the locks. So far as I know, no Pope has ever offered a key even to the Archbishop of Canterbury, let alone to the Vatican and certainly not to the Kingdom.

Nothing is said that I know of about anybody making copies of Peter’s keys, but surely, to be on the safe side, somebody must have either tried to or are still trying, like some Anglo-Catholics I’ve met. What Jesus did with them after his Ascension, I suppose only his mom knows.

Grace and law together don’t make it much in the news. Law gets a lot more mileage, as does the possibility and fear that empathy will somehow stop it from being law. Then, too, it seems somebody’s always wanting to go so far as to change the Constitution to suit their preferences because they can’t understand why everybody else doesn’t have or need to have the same ones. But then stuff rendered to Caesar never seems to be all that grace full.

We got our planet — and universe for that matter — as mostly a matter of grace about which we did very little if anything to provide. Now that it’s coming unglued some of us have enough moxy and maybe even gratitude (there’s that grace again) to want to make a few laws to protect it from the other some of us who couldn’t seem to care less or maybe haven’t enough smarts to know the difference. If whatever’s inside the cells in our bodies started poking holes in their walls, it’d be something like what’s happening to the atmosphere in which we take for granted to move and have our being. The we’d really get fired up.

Steward comes from sty ward, the keeper of the styes, and you know what kind of shape they’re usually in. Maybe this tired, though perennially favorite churcher word can take on new meaning at the Big Fat Anglican Wedding out in Anaheim when we gather next month to make laws and resolutions intended to incarnate grace, though I’ve not a lot of hope about it.

The PB came to our town this past weekend. She was here to celebrate the 150th anniversary of our parish, an anniversary that we’re relishing, (and that my good friend of the Cambridge/Ely UK plateau jests at from the 800 year-old parishes he services as a Reader in the CofE).

In Bishop Katharine’s short and tumultuous three years in office, her mystique as a pastor has become increasing clear. When her pontifical peers have been too insecure to converse with her and have insulted her, instead, she merely absorbs their hateful energies into caring and nourishing energies of her own and then gives them away.

One of her stops while here was a short visit with our diocesan clergy, precious few of whom attended I regret to say, that illustrated her pastoral abilities even more profoundly. It is, of course, what we need most, shepherding. We cannot all be prophets, but she can be not only a prophet but a prophet whose obvious love for people transposes into justice and peace by her mere presence. This church, especially those of us in this stressed diocese, is more fortunate than it sometimes seems to have the capacity to appreciate, let alone to understand.