I had a long conversation with a friend who was born and raised a Roman Catholic, still is…but a very open minded one. (not that there aren’t other Roman Catholics who are open minded….just as in the Episcopal Church there are the open minded ones and the ones not so much so) We were bemoaning the fact that the church, and by church we meant the church universal, is so fractured…even within our own denominations we have decided divisions whether they be matters of ecclesiology, theology, polity, or issues of social and economic justice. We agreed that our divisions have rendered us anemic at best and ineffective at worst in our efforts to fulfill the Gospel imperatives found in the teachings of Jesus. Our divisions have caused us to acquiesce to a self absorbed isolated individualism….which ironically is a reflection of the culture itself.
I remember attending a conference a couple of years ago in Montgomery. It was an intentional ecumenical gathering of Lutherans, Episcopalians and Roman Catholics, rubber chicken and green beans, I remember. The panel assembled were all bishops from these respective denominations, and their task was to make some statements about ecumenism and then the audience could ask questions or make comments. The Episcopalians and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America are now in full communion, but the Roman Catholic Church vis a vis the Lutherans and Episcopalians are not….so what we heard most from the Episcopal and Lutheran Bishops and the Roman Catholic Bishops were the reasons we are not in communion, not how we might be but how we are not….some reasons were theological….but most had simply to do with the way we ordain (matters of Apostolic Succession one example) and probably more importantly who we ordain, women the chief stumbling block. Finally the Catholic bishop sighed and said perhaps in God’s good time he will find a way to bring us together some day, but that that day seemed distant. It was an altogether an unsatisfactory answer, and the conversation soon deflated.
I wondered at the time….what if the criteria for full communion were not how and who we ordain, as if the church’s identity lies solely with its clergy, most especially bishops (there was a gathering between the Episcopal Bishops and the African American A.M.E. bishops at which our bishops, and I’m sure ever so politely, told the A.M.E. bishops that they weren’t really bishops! seriously)….What if our baptisms and the work called for in our baptisms were the criteria…Habitat for Humanity has a saying: When we gather to build a house for one of our least….when we have a hammer in our hand there are no theological differences, they say….What if we Christian people (including bishops) lived out the Baptismal Covenant…If we continued in the teaching of the faith….continued in breaking bread together… what if we persisted in resisting evil in what ever form evil presents itself…what if we when we’re wrong admitted so and changed our ways….what if we acted and spoke as if this faith to which we belong were true…what if we loved our neighbor as much as we revere ourselves….and what if we gave our lives for the cause of justice and the dignity of all people…..these are the rudiments of our Baptismal covenant with God….a covenant, a working promise….What if?…. I believe the church would be a power for good beyong all reckoning…and our differences, that we seem to deem so profound, we would see at last as the petty and self serving abdications of the lives we are meant to live….lives at one purpose for the world’s sake…what Jesus prayed for as he was about to die….that we might be One….What if?
Your examples show that the Church suffers from a lack of imagination. Liturgy revitalizes our imagination every time, if we are attentive. But what we proclaim in liturgy is audacious and scandalous. We proclaim that death, though real, has no power over us. It could be that this belief is so strange, scary and countercultural that we just can’t go there. So we retreat to comfortable, but ultimately irrelevant, debates about what constitutes a valid ordination and how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. Yet even at the grave we make our song…Alleluia, Alleluia, Alleluia.
I believe imagination is the operative word. JF