Sermon for Diocesan Convention
February 10, 2007
The Bishop’s Sermon
33rd Diocesan Convention
Diocese of San Diego
St. Paul’s Cathedral Church
II Corinthians 5: 17-20
John 17: 20-26
Come Holy Spirit: Touch our minds and think with them, touch our lips and speak with them and touch our hearts and set them on fire with love for you. AMEN.
I.
A couple of weeks ago, my mother sent me a photograph that she had found of our family. It was taken when I was about nine or ten years old, at my grandparent’s home—I think it is from Christmas. Almost immediately the picture held great power over me. You see it is the only photograph that I have in my whole family are together. My guess is this photograph predates my parent’s divorce and my brother’s first arrest by at most three years. While I know that even as the camera captured this moment in time, my family was in bad shape, dysfunctional in the clinical parlance. But we were together. You can see my father’s hand gently on my side and my sister in the middle seemingly and always holding us together.
Now let me fast forward to my wedding in the summer of 1981, divorce and prison has splintered my family, yet for this moment as polite southerners we came together. It was difficult and tense. But there we were celebrating being family and interconnected in spite of our failures, our hurts, our fears, and our grudges. Hurt, betrayal, and unresolved conflict did not prevent us from coming to the Eucharistic table.
I share this with you because I imagine that each of us has some story of union and brokenness in our own history. Each of us knows how hard it is to be together and to repair damaged relationships. We also knows that once connected and accountable to each other that spiritual bonds can never be completely forgotten or broken.
II.
Today, we will come together and reaffirm our baptismal faith. We will renew our promises in this covenant which is the bedrock of our unity. We reunite in our love and faithfulness to God and to each other as we participate in the reign of God.
At this time last year, I spoke of the reconciling ministry of Jesus Christ as central to who we are. Some have suggested that our current disruptions and splits in some of our congregations has taken too much time and energy and is a distraction to mission. While admitting that these events have been burdensome, I cannot artificially separate the ministry of reconciliation from the core mission of the church. We do need to work on the unity of the church, not just with our Anglican family but across our ecumenical family as well. Jesus’ last prayer recorded in John’s gospel must be our prayer:
The glory that you have given me I have given them, so that they may be one, as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one, so that the world may know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.Jesus calls us to unity so that we can do the ministry of reconciliation in the world. I must hasten to add that this is not sippy and simple reconciliation. It is demanding reconciliation. It honors differences and expects conflict to exist as we discern in community God’s will. But it is always and inexorably founded on unity—“that they may all be one.”
Noble laureate Archbishop Desmond Tutu underscored this costly and relentless spirit of reconciliation when he said at the Ninth Assembly of the World Council of Churches,
Jesus was quite serious when he said that God was our father, that we belonged all to one family, because in this family all, not some, are insiders. Bush, bin Laden, all belong, gay, lesbian, so-called straight-all belong and are loved, are precious.
Our work of reconciliation is tied to who we are as created in the image of God, persons of inestimable value. Because God is Father who creates, the Son who comes to redeem, and the Holy Spirit that sustains us, we become different in our baptism. We see each other and the whole human family as precious. Thus, the crescendo of the baptismal covenant propels us to be a people of action, love, and transformation: “Will you strive for justice and peace and respect the dignity of every human being?” Reconciliation, while including efforts to assuage our own divisions, goes far beyond this and encompasses all our ministries.
III.
As I will share with you in my convention address this afternoon, I have not laid aside the responsibility to work at repairing the divisions of our church. It is simply a part of the ministry of this church. To quote the ordinal for a bishop, if we don’t work “night and day in the ministry of reconciliation,” then we can not do what the apostle Paul so eloquently stated our principle work to be:
All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, in Christ, God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting the message of reconciliation to us.
As we look beyond the walls of our churches and even into the interior of our souls, we come face to face with wars and poverty, violence and abuse, scarcity and neglect. We see in ourselves and in every village, city, and nation the deep need for reconciliation.
And so while attentive to our own brokenness and failures to be fully reconciled as one Christian family and as one Anglican/Episcopal fellowship, we first ask for God’s, and each other’s forgiveness, for our failure to be fully reconciled and then we turn our attention beyond ourselves to the whole human family.
And we do this as we tell the story of Jesus and his love. We tell it in our worship through sacred Scripture and voices lifted in sounds of praise. We tell of his love in our Eucharist as we raise and share the bread of heaven and the cup of salvation. We tell of Jesus when we share our faith story with others and bring them to a place of knowing our Lord Jesus Christ.
To tell the story, our congregations must be communities of formation for the Christian vocation. If we are to be evangelists in this Twenty-first Century, we must be renewing our own spirits and increasing our understanding of the faith once delivered.
And our work of evangelism and formation, inextricably connected, moves us to our servant ministry. It binds us with people that we do not know and whose concerns would not naturally be our concerns. It takes us to the poor, the outcast, to the other. When we delve into the story of Jesus, both once upon a time and for all time, we are shaken out of our assumptions. We live into a sense of abundance found in Christ’s love that propels us into service.
I am particularly drawn to connecting our ministry of service to transforming the lives of children around the planet. Whether it is through supporting the work of Episcopal Community Services with over one thousand children, working through Episcopal Relief and Development to meet the Millennium Development Goals, our helping in the St. Luke’s Refugee Network’s tutoring program, we have a calling to dramatically change the future of all God’s children.
And so, we must work to reconcile and to love. A few weeks ago, Gordon Schieble, our rector at Good Shepherd, Hemet, said “Service is love in action.” And so let us be formed in our Christian faith so that we can be reconciled to each other, love in action. Let us tell others of Jesus, love in action, and let us strive to lift up the children of Imperial, Riverside, Yuma, San Diego Counties, Tijuana, San Salvador, Gaza, Bagdad—for they are all God’s children.
IV.
I began with a personal story of my family, but in reality as I look out on this community, I know that more and more you are my family. And as a family, God challenges us through our baptism to a broader view of family and our responsibilities as members. Praying words from the Book of Common Prayer, we ask God to
Look with compassion on the whole human family; take away the arrogance and hatred which infect our hearts; break down the walls that separate us; unite us in bonds of love; and work through our struggles and confusion to accomplish your purposes on earth; that, in your good time, all nations and races may serve you in harmony around your heavenly throne….
In our lives and families, it is hard to hold the bonds of love together in the midst of struggles and confusion. In the book, A River Runs through It” by Norman Mclean, and the movie by the same title, a Montana family lives through the joys and sorrows of family. The minister father touches on a great truth in one of his last sermons: "… you can love completely without complete understanding."
And so we must love. That is what the waters of baptism that first flowed through the River Jordan bring—love, which in action is service. It is the only way to reconciliation. Again returning to Mclean’s A River Runs through It, let me quote its final words ends:
Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world's great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs.
It is these waters that wash over us and work the mystery of an ancient healing balm. These are waters teeming with new life, flowing over the Words of God and the words of that great cloud of witnesses that have gone before us. We have known this water. We are of this water. We are one. We are family. We are God’s family. We are one; What God has joined together let no one separate.