March 15, 2006
Choice
“When power leads us to arrogance, poetry reminds us of our limitations. When power narrows the area of our concern, poetry reminds us of the richness and diversity of our existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses.”
John Kennedy spoke these words in relation to the state and the way we govern ourselves. In our time, I hear them equally in relation to the church and the way we understand our ministry. Our common need for poetic cleansing in both church and state has never been more obvious and demanding. Nor has our capacity for the ecclesial stewardship of the parables of Jesus — which is our poetry — to understand and appreciate the metaphor of life ever been more in want. In few places is this more evident over this past decade or so than in those dioceses — including the Diocese of Tennessee — where there has been precious little “poetry.” Where there has been instead only denial, grandiosity, and an addictive confusion of authority with power together with all the movements and systems that will use almost any means to achieve such control.
Pretentiousness has led us in Tennessee beyond our limits both financially and spiritually. And those always questionable and so-called “big holy audacious goals” rather have been swamped by the sham it. The fear of inclusiveness, ie, our common humanity, has insulted God’s imagination and thus narrowed our vision and blinded us to the richness and diversity of our Anglican heritage. Our spiritually incestuous deployment and placement practices have both sapped our will to be faithful and compromised our stewardship of the Gospel. The bishop, himself, has publicly declared in convention and in a most un-Anglican fashion that there “is no middle ground.”
We are faced now in only a few days with the critical choice of a new bishop for the Diocese of Tennessee, a broken place masquerading as a whole one. Our collegial polity by which we must make such a choice has been severely compromised over this past decade by an understandably bewildered indifference of the laity and an inexcusable and embarrassing intimidation of the clergy. How we choose and how we face the change which demands that we choose takes the full measure of our spiritual maturity. It requires the kind of courage Ernest Hemingway called “grace under pressure.” And it requires wisdom of a biblical dimension.
Such wisdom is not only a matter of the mind but of the intuition and the heart. As the Book of Proverbs attests, there is a radical and refreshing feminine consciousness about such wisdom, a consciousness we do well to embrace for our enlightenment and leavening as we move into this time.
John Hines, once our presiding bishop, said that “A bishop’s job is to keep his church family on the firing line of the world’s most desperate needs and to learn to accept the exquisite penalty of such an exposed position.” Indeed, how can Christians so evangelize at all when the most visible cause they proclaim isn’t Christ crucified but the schismatic dismantling of his church? The Gospel is not about this. The Gospel is about that “firing line” of conversion of life and suffering servanthood, of love and freedom from fear, of self-denial, giving up illusions of control, and embracing God’s in-breaking kingdom as servant leaders.
May whomever we choose to serve and lead us not only come here to influence others and champion some lesser cause, but to be open to influence and the cause of Christ, not only to acknowledge and respect the freedom of another, but to seek to enhance the other’s capacity to make a difference. May whomever we choose serve with us to achieve a collegial bond of caring and reconciliation that the world may so know that we are Christ’s and know so by the way we love one another. For there is, indeed, such an Anglican way, and this is it. There is no greater, no more faithful evangelism. Such poetry can only cleanse.