Category Archives: Reflections

I Want to Be Called a Missionary.

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I’ve read with interest a bunch of stories surrounding the “rebranding” of the staff and environs surrounding 815 2nd Avenue, and its various non-New York satellite offices, to “The Missionary Society.” The quest to find a suitable name for the offices and staff that compose our churchwide governance has always been something of an unreachable goal - I suspect the church won’t ever coin a term that works until Jesus returns in glory. I can think of at least four names I’ve either used or been told to use over the years: “the national church,” “815,” “the Episcopal Church Center,” “the staff of The Episcopal Church.” I should admit up front that I have plenty of problems with the new name, and the way it’s being adopted and promulgated. I’m going to term the organization “The Group Formerly Known as 815.”

But I was surprised to read on the Episcopal Cafe the other day an article written by Torey Lightcap that rooted some of the deepest concern about the change with its use of the word missionary.

Here’s why it surprised me: if, at my funeral, someone were asked to describe who I was, and s/he were to answer “He was a missionary,” I’d consider it the mark of a life, a ministry, and a baptism well lived.

So, I want to respectfully disagree with some of the concerns that have been made about the use of the word missionary. I want to do this by engaging in what I hope will be a wholistic manner with the article, rather than doing the old-fashioned “point-by-point” internet rebuttal. That doesn’t leave room for conversation - which, well, is exactly what missionaries often wouldn’t do in the past.

Let me be clear that my argument is not that the current rebranding is, in fact, conceived in perfection, suavely executed, and a work of sheer genius. It isn’t. But actually, I’m not that worried about the decision. It’s neither here nor there for me.

The essay (read it in full - it’s absolutely worth deep consideration) reminds us of the great historical baggage attached to the word missionary both within the United States and abroad - an assessment that I don’t dispute in the least. I grew up in South Carolina, in the midst of a strongly Conservative evangelical Southern Baptist culture - and can readily feel within myself the word missionary rousing a picture of undying and unyielding certitude and one-size-fits-all packaged faith solutions that are tone-deaf, insensitive to the needs of the world. Most of all, it reminds me of a picture of emotional manipulation. In other parts of the world, the baggage associated with colonialism is even stronger: forced conversions to Christianity under threat of death, genocide, slavery, heedless exploitation and mastery of other peoples and cultures for profit.The baggage of language is intense, painful, and deep. So the term missionary, it is argued, doesn’t play, and can’t possibly play; the weight is too deep, creates too many barriers, it is fundamentally exclusive.

The baggage of the word missionary - as it speaks to the modern mind - needs to be owned by the church for what it is: sin. It’s sinful to force people to convert to Christianity, because it doesn’t respect their dignity as a human being and it leaves no room for the beautiful stirrings of the grace of God that move within the soul in a free and unforced choice to follow Jesus. It’s sinful to view other people as a mark on a “conversion tally sheet,” because it fails to even begin to try and see a person, with wants, needs, joys, and fears - it fails to see the image of God within them. The sins that so many associate with missionaries need to be acknowledged and repented of by the church - full stop.

I’ve always been a strong believer that our call as a church is to present to the world a new and different narrative of what it means to be a follower of Jesus - yes, a missionary of Jesus - than the ones that have caused so much damage in the past. We need to recall words like evangelism and missionary out from wreckage that we attached to it through our own past sins.

For a long time, I ran from these words, having grown up in a culture where they represent so much that is damaging, and hurtful, and sinful. I wanted to be called anything but evangelical, anything but a missionary. I was happy to be called an Episcopalian. At least that term presented minimal baggage I had to wrestle with.

But to create new words, or find new terms for those that the Church has distorted over time through its own sin is, in many ways, to avoid the issue of that sin, and make a deft maneuver away from a difficult conversation we need to have with the world about our own faults and failings. It denies us the opportunity to be fallible, to be human, to be vulnerable to criticism.

And, above all, it surrenders to the idea that things have to remain this way - that the baggage of a history is so great it can never be overcome; that the wounds are so deep, that they cannot be healed. The gospel tells us this isn’t the case - that Jesus loves us with no exceptions. Period. They tell us that God’s grace is open to all, and is the way that we are pieced back together so that, step by step, we begin to see that great work of reconciliation that is God’s dream for the world.

To run from the word missionary because of history is to avoid a conversation that we so desperately need to have with the world: it denies us the opportunity to show the movement of the grace of Jesus Christ in our lives that led us to realize the actions that created all this emotional baggage was sinful. It gets us out of the difficult task of telling our story, admitting our failings, and then telling how Jesus has changed us, shaped us, and pieced us back together.

So I firmly believe that for the church to run away from the word missionary is to run from the promises of our baptism, and the people the gospel calls us to be; witnesses to the grace of God, to the power of God’s reconciling love for all. The words missionary and the word mission - as I know is repeated ad infinitum in the church - come from the Latin word missio - which has at its core meaning, the act of sending and being sent. Missionaries, therefore, become people “people sent out” - people, who, following after the example of Jesus Christ, are given for the life of the world. People who bear the good news; people who work for justice and peace; people who seek nothing less than healing, wholeness and the reconciliation of the world to God. Missionaries are people fully given over to others. It’s the word - more than any other - that encapsulates what the Great Commandment and the Great Commission charge us to be. As Christians, it’s who we are. It’s who I want to be.

The church can debate - and should debate - about the process by which “The Group Formerly Known as 815” chooses to rebrand as “The Missionary Society.” We can ask whether it was an astute and well-executed choice, or one that is bound to invite snickers and disdain, and even whether it was canonically permissible. We can debate about the leadership choices and principles inherent in the process. There’s a lot to wrestle with there, that should be wrestled with.

But as to being called “Missionary” - well, that’s a title that I would love to be worthy of. By God’s grace, someday, I hope to achieve it.

 

Editorial Note: Several spelling mistakes and typos changed on a second read. Apologies for that!

Thoughts Driving into a Dark Manhattan

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A Dark Lower Manhattan after Sandy.
(Photo Credit: Chang W. Lee/The New York Times)

In a bit of confusion - partly fueled by the terrible cellular service in New York since Sandy made her way through - I drove over to Manhattan this evening, thinking I might be shuttling some friends back to Brooklyn for hot showers, electricity, internet access and the like. It didn’t happen, and that’s fine.

By 6:30 pm, darkness had fallen over the city. Normally, my drive into Manhattan from Brooklyn is a rather uneventful affair. Traffic on the Belt Parkway or the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. Congestion as people decide whether to drive in via the Battery Tunnel or instead go over one of the bridges. People are looking either to get home, or to make their way to their evening’s plans in the city.

But tonight, the darkness in the city was near complete. There’s next to no electricity below 34th Street, so the view from my car stood in stark contrast to the usual. Instead of the normal wall of lights from buildings, or the sight of bright orange ferries moving between Whitehall and New Brighton, or cars making their way along FDR Drive, there was only the silhouette of empty, unlit buildings standing on the edge of the usually busy island; the occasional peeks of light from buildings uptown broke into the scene, reminding me of what the place normally looks like.

Even the bridges are half-dark. As I crossed the Manhattan Bridge from Brooklyn, the half way point - normally nothing more than a blink of the eye along the way - had its own line of demarcation. In Brooklyn, where I alighted, there were lights along the edges of the bridge, and on its suspension cables. But then, halfway over the river, suddenly there was darkness, and only the outline of the great steel suspension bridge against the even darker city.

By some happenstance, my phone was playing my music library track by track, in alphabetical order. I left Bay Ridge with Vampire Weekend’s “A-Punk” playing; and travelled the length of the Gowanus Expressway with “The Abduction of Margaret” by The Decemberists. Then, as I crossed the bridge into Manhattan, a familiar and favorite tune began playing.

Abide with me; fast falls the eventide;
The darkness deepens; Lord with me abide.
When other helpers fail and comforts flee,
Help of the helpless, O abide with me.

I certainly didn’t plan for that track to play. But it sure as hell caught my attention. Scottish Anglican poet Henry Francis Lytle, it is said, wrote the hymn’s text as he lay dying of consumption. He finished his work, and died two weeks later. I’ve heard more than my fair share of his text in my first year of ministry - officiating at twelve funerals inevitably points to a few favorite hymns, and this is one of them. But in a city that’s been brought to its knees by wind and water, it certainly struck a chord. The evening was at hand, and the day was past; indeed, the darkness was deepening.

Swift to its close ebbs out life’s little day;
Earth’s joys grow dim; its glories pass away;
Change and decay in all around I see;
O Thou who changest not, abide with me.

I spent most of my weekend trying to get the church buildings ready for the storm. The church was built around 1890, the rectory was added around 1910, and the parish hall was re-built after being leveled by fire in the 1930s. In many ways, they don’t appear to have been improved since: the fascia and soffits have noticeable breaks on the parish hall; slates are missing from the sanctuary; the rectory has a leak in its roof that causes water to fall with a noticeable drip-drop into the shower during any heavy rain.

The echoes of history are in every stone of this place. It’s the third oldest Episcopal Church in Brooklyn, opened in 1834 to serve the soldiers of Fort Hamilton, the army base that guarded the entrance to the inner portion of New York Harbour. At that time, it sat outside the bounds of Brooklyn, a long coach ride from Park Slope, where the nearest church sat. While he was stationed at the fort, Robert E. Lee, later the famed Confederate General, sat on the parish’s vestry. Thomas Jackson, who later gained his nickname as “Stonewall” for his stoic stand for the Confederacy at First Bull Run, was baptized in the font that sits just inside the door of the sanctuary. The parish seems to have chased off its first rector not long after its founding on suspicion that he might have sympathies for the Oxford Movement, although the history isn’t certain. St. John’s gained a reputation during a much later conflict - Vietnam - for the tombstones the then-rector placed in front of the rectory in which I now live, and for having meetings of Students for a Democratic Society in the Parish Hall. Instead of being accusing him of being a Puseyite, they called him a Communist.

Perhaps it is that sense of history, and the responsibility I feel as priest here, that led me to stress so much about the building. I was up on a ladder as late as 4:30 pm on Sunday, pulling down a loose gutter that had the potential to fly through our stained glass. The wind was already picking up by the time I retreated inside for the storm, where I would remain until the all clear sounded around midday today.

But today, as I descended into the blackness of the familiar world of Lower Manhattan - now devoid of its familiar hum of activity, its lights, its traffic signals - I couldn’t help imagine that the same burden of history - that same fear for a beloved place - must have been felt by any number of folks in this area. St. Paul’s Chapel, for instance, opened in 1766, and has been in use ever since. It survived the 9/11 attacks, and served as a place of rest for numerous first responders who worked for weeks in the wake of the towers’ collapse. Just hours before, the Hudson River was pouring into the new World Trade Center site with such force, the Governor later said, that they worried about the structure of the new pit itself. And there the historic old church sat - George Washington’s pew, 9/11 museum, all of it - just across Church Street from the raging river. The same kind nervousness could probably be felt by many thousands of people thousands of times over for any number of places now sitting in the midst of that darkness - for New York is a city of stories - stories forgotten, stories being written, stories being told - and so every park, every bridge, every street corner, every restaurant table has a monumental quantity about. And now, all these monuments are covered in darkness - forced into the darkness by the storm that exceeded what any of us could have imagined.

Not a brief glance I beg, a passing word,
But as Thou dwell’st with Thy disciples, Lord,
Familiar, condescending, patient, free.
Come not to sojourn, but abide with me.

The great scandal of the Christianity has always been incarnation. That God - who dwells beyond time, space, and comprehension - saw fit to dwell in this same world in which we live. After all, the world is much too messy for God. It is too transient - too much in flux. We want to dwell in God’s eternal changelessness. If the eternal changelessness of God saw fit to plop himself down in a stable that smelled of smoke, blood, sweat, and donkey shit two-thousand years ago - well, count us out.

Anglicans pride ourselves on being profoundly incarnational, which is fortunate, because changelessness, majesty, and splendor doesn’t seem to be our gig, while scandal does. One only need to look at the two thousand years of flying donkey poop that is the church’s history to realize that we don’t have much choice but to take that bent. As much as we might like to dwell on the fact that we’re the people whose Book of Common Prayer changed the scope of the English language and who stage royal weddings that everyone wants to see, we’re also the church that was founded by a King who wanted a divorce; a people who are far more apt to dwell on the taste of the communion wine than the life-changing reality that is its substance.

The dark buildings and the still city disturb us, haunt us, strike us as eerie, because they remind us of what we truly are in the large scheme of things. Bits of molecules that are pieced together into something larger for a time, only to fall back to the dust in the end. What we believe to be truly monumental is, in the scheme of things, more of a molehill than a mountain.

Elie Wiesel was once asked what his favorite phrase was in language. “And yet…” he answered. “…and yet.”

Come not in terrors, as the King of kings,
But kind and good, with healing in Thy wings;
Tears for all woes, a heart for every plea.
Come, Friend of sinners, thus abide with me.

And yet. We make mountains out of our molehills, and yet God sits with us as we are, nonetheless. In the still city, and in the darkness. We are always making our journey to return to the dust, and yet, Jesus tells us, and yet that dust is the very stuff of the new creation. That very dust is the the stuff of life.

We thrive because we are put into the donkey shit world of the incarnation. God comes not to bless our edifices, but to sit with us in our frailty. God’s heart yearns for us in the power outages, in the dark city, in the momentarily silenced stories. In the hiccups and in the bumps. And when we meet God in those strange places, things change for us.

“Life is short,” Henri-Frédéric Amiel famously said, “and we have never too much time for gladdening the hearts of those who are traveling the dark journey with us. Oh, be swift to love, make haste to be kind!”

When we meet God in the darkness, in the craziness, we are changed. Charged, even. And so we leave to go out into that city, and room by room, floor by floor, turn on the lights once again until it shines more brilliantly than any of our fondest memories can recall.

Grant us, O Lord, not to mind earthly things, but to love
things heavenly; and even now, while we are placed among
things that are passing away, to cleave to those that shall
abide; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and
reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever
and ever. Amen.


 

(Nota bene: While the Hymnal 1982 only lists four stanzas to “Abide with Me,” Lytle wrote eight. You can read them all here: http://www.risa.co.uk/sla/song.php?songid=26985)

Ordination and the Time Thereafter…

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It has become standard in the letters of agreement in the Diocese of Long Island for parish clergy to receive the weeks after Christmas and Easter off. I can’t even begin to say how grateful I am for this, especially given how momentous this December has been: in the span of two weeks, I was ordained as a priest, observed the final two Sundays of Advent, had our Transitioning Clergy meeting in Garden City (where I was asked to celebrate the Eucharist), the regular assortment of holiday parties and festivities, and finally, celebrated and preached at my first Christmas Eve Midnight Mass and Christmas Day mass. It has been an incredibly busy time, and I’m just now starting to have a chance to catch my breath, to reflect, to rest.

"Therefore, Father, through Jesus Christ your Son, give your Holy Spirit to David; fill him with grace and power, and make him a priest in your Church."

One of the questions I was asked most often after my priesting - by parishioners, clergy colleagues, family and friends alike - was “do you feel any different?” I’ve struggled to answer that question on so many different levels. If the question was “are you any different?” the answer would be simple - yes. I’m catholic enough to believe that there is an ontological change at ordination; ordination is not simply the church’s recognition of a pre-existing reality, or an installation into an office: ordination confers grace. That’s an easy question to answer from my perspective. But “do you feel any different?” - well - yes and no. I was struck at my first celebration of the mass on Advent III how often I felt like I was “play-acting.” At a core level, I know I wasn’t - but it was so very strange when, after 26 years of watching other people at the altar celebrating the mass using these same prayers, suddenly, it was me. I grew up as an Episcopalian, and have known nothing but the 1979 Book of Common Prayer, so the words I was praying were abundantly familiar. But for 26 years, they had come from some other person’s lips. Not mine. Perhaps the most astounding moment of my first mass, at least to my thinking, was when I elevated the chalice at the per ipsum at the end of the Eucharistic Prayer, and saw my own face reflected in the silver. It was sort of like having a loud voice shout at me, “Ready or not, you’re a priest now! Hope you like what you see…”

In time, I imagine celebrating the mass will turn back into prayer for me, as it was before I was ordained, either as a deacon or as a priest. It doesn’t feel like it yet. Perhaps because the smell of chrism is still quite fresh on my palms, and I’m very, very much new to this gig. It’s hard when the normal patterns of prayer are disrupted, when any big event fundamentally changes the way you relate to other people and to God. In time, you live into that new reality - but it does take some time. Falling down a few times as you get used to the new terrain. And being willing to get up, fall down a few more times, until the ground that once seemed so unsteady becomes the new normal.

So when did I first begin to actually breathe in the new reality - to not just be different, but feel different? Exactly one week later. One week later, I made the trek from my far corner of southwest Brooklyn to Larchmont, New York, to participate in a friend’s ordination to the priesthood. Interestingly enough, priesthood became real to me when I added my hands to the “holy huddle” in making someone else a priest. Not because I was no longer the “newest priest in the Church.” That common introduction of new clergy fades very rapidly, and at least to me, doesn’t mean much. Perhaps it was because in laying my hands on another person at their ordination, it was among the very first times I had was able to very clearly, visibly, and tangibly be a part of someone else living out their own call to discipleship. He went under the hands of the bishop, the college of presbyters lent our hands to the pile - and he came out a priest. And while I imagine he didn’t feel any different - at that point, I did. Because I could see where I played a part - a teeny-weeny, small, peripheral part - but a part nonetheless - in making a priest. A disciple. Just like Jesus told us to.

My job is awesome.

Reflections on a Baptism.

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On Saturday, I baptized “my” first baby since being ordained. It was an overwhelmingly joyful moment - one I personally very much needed, since I have already done six separate funerals or interments in the five months since I arrived at Saint Johns.

I repeated a practice here that was common in the church where I was raised: inviting all the young children present to gather around the font to watch. It was so thrilling to me to watch them crowd around the edges, each trying to get a closer look. I couldn’t help but remember doing the same as a child - standing on tip-toes trying to get a closer view - that memory very nearly made me lose my own composure.

But perhaps the thing that most struck me is that there is no “neat” way to do a baptism. You get wet pouring water from the pitcher into the font; you get wet as the baby squirms and knocks the shell out of your hand; you get wet, when, after the third and final covering with water, you raise the child back upright and the water streams off of its head. But, even if there is a neat way to baptize, I would argue strenuously that we shouldn’t attempt it.

Baptism is prodigal in its “messiness” - water gets everywhere. Things get wet, and there’s utterly nothing you can do about it. But, of course, the grace offered to us in the sacrament of Baptism is utterly prodigal, too - an unmerited and undeserved adoption as God’s children, a full knitting into Christ’s body the church, and heirs of the kingdom of God. There’s no clean, neat way to describe what happens - because the whole scenario is messy. We get baptized, and we get fundamentally, radically changed. And once that water covers us, there’s no going back. A friend once reminded me that there are two words affiliated with washing in the New Testament - bapto (I wash), and baptizo (I baptize). Bapto implies a simple dipping in water, much like taking a short bath, or washing one’s hands. But baptizo, baptism, on the other hand - denotes an fundamental change. It’s the difference between a cucumber and a pickle - you can dip a cucumber in some water, and it’s still a cucumber. But once a solution changes it into a pickle, it’s never going to be a cucumber again. Things are messy, and things change.

I loved the messiness of the baptism on Saturday. I may have even tried to be a bit messier than is prudent - raising the pitcher a bit higher so the kids around font would get a bit of the kickback as the water hit the font; using larger scoops of water than I needed; making no efforts to avoid getting water on myself or anything else.

But that’s just how baptism goes. Prodigal in its giving of grace. Fundamental in the way it changes things. And messy enough that once that water hits you, you know there’s no going back.