Welcome to the new school year!

So, first, the news, in case you’ve been living in a cave and haven’t heard yet:  The Episcopal Church has declared gay people to be REAL people--and gay Christians to be REAL Christians, eligible by baptism for all the orders of ministry.  Why it should have taken so long and been so painful to do this is a mystery.  It is hard to argue with this obvious piece of Good News if you have ever read the Good News, or any of the many theological tomes on the meaning of baptism and the meaning of the Church.  As Bishop Barbara Harris said at one point at the Convention, “If you don’t want GLBT folks as bishops, don’t ordain them as transitional deacons.  Better yet, don’t baptize them in the first place.  Don’t initiate someone and then act like they’re half-assed baptized.”  (Sorry.  That’s a quote.  From a bishop.)  In any case, we have, after decades of sturm und drang, arrived back where we started two millennia ago—with a church in which baptism is supposedly the primary determinant of Christian identity and full membership in the community.

On a different but related note, in  her opening address to the Convention, Presiding Bishop Jefferts Shori talked about what she calls “the great Western heresy”: in her words,  “that we can be saved as individuals, that any of us 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.”  As someone in my household would say, “You go, Kate!”  This is both good news and powerful theology.

Finally someone is saying out loud that “being saved” has nothing to do with having a personal relationship with Jesus, or walking on the sand with him, or having him visit you now and then at home.  It has nothing to do with the kind of experience I was subjected to as a young teenager, when the older kids down the block, who I thought were cool, invited me over for a visit and it turned out to be a personal bible-reading-and-proclamation session when you really couldn’t say at the end that you didn’t accept Jesus as your personal Lord and Savior.  That’s not being saved.  Jesus himself was never about those kind of individual relationships, gathering about him instead a band of followers; and the earliest and consistent response to his teachings and presence was the formation of communities.  Converts were always welcomed into a community of believers, not just to Jesus’ place for a one-on-one chat.  Jesus promised to be “where two or three [were] gathered” in his name, not riding solo in anyone’s pocket.

To prove the point, we need only look at today’s epistle, a paean to the central theme that the Church is community; a community of all its members—the ones we like and the ones we don’t like, the ones who fit and the ones who don’t fit, the ones who are nice and the ones who aren’t nice, the ones who get angry and the ones who are peacemakers.  In such a community, a community of the baptized, of the saved, a community of Christians, we speak truthfully to and about one another; in this community, we forgive each other and do not remain angry; in this community, we say encouraging, not disparaging things about others; in this community we are kind and generous and helpful.  This community is the Church. 

Most of us here at St. Stephen’s smile knowingly at a list like this, since we know we’ve got a great community.  Most of us count each other among our closest friends, have a great time with each other socially, help each other out in need, enjoy working on common projects together, gather happily for endless “extracurricular” church events.  We know each other well, share our secrets and our tables and our homes, meet our significant others, live a common history.  This is our family, our tribe.  St. Stephen’s, we know, is almost legendary for the camaraderie, the closeness, the love that characterizes its community.  We can hardly wait for Sunday morning for another chance to see each other. 

This is not an accident.  We are here intentionally.  Some of us were outcasts from some Church of the Unwanted.  Some of us were seduced by our exceptional music program.  Some of us came for the smells and bells so hard to find elsewhere.  Some needed the kind of inclusive church home that General Convention just finished legitimating.  Some live nearby, though many fewer than in the “old days.”  Some have been coming here for generations.  Some just wandered in and decided to stay.  But pretty much all of us think we have the warmest, friendliest, happiest, safest, closest church community anywhere.  St. Paul would be pleased.

Or at least he’d be pleased if it were true.

Before you get all huffy, I’m not making any blanket condemnations.  Very often—most of the time--we are just what we think we are—a great group of great friends with a common faith and a wonderful place to get together and work that out in practice. 

But take a look at the epistle again.  Some of us, for example—and I am ashamed to admit that I am one of them—have definitely let the sun go down on our anger.  Lots of suns.  Some of us are guilty of slander, or malice and certainly of gossip.  We’ve used lots and lots of harsh words against each other.  There’s a whole cottage industry in trashing each other in any parish, and it operates here as well.  We aren’t immune from the pettiness, arrogance, and antagonism that flare up even in loving communities. 

The irony in this is that it often stems from the very thing we treasure—our closeness.  So much do we treasure that, in fact, that we often turn all that caring and joyful interaction inward among our own special selves.  Indeed, sometimes we are actually rather smug about it.  We like our tribe so much that sometimes we’re unwilling to extend ourselves very far beyond its borders.  Oh, of course we’re friendly to newcomers and chat with them at coffee hour and all that “ministry of welcoming” stuff. 

But when I look out from up here I see quite a few people who aren’t newcomers any longer who are sitting alone—probably not because they want to be alone, but because, Hey! We’ve got our pew where we always sit with our peeps (kind of like in colonial days, when you paid for your own pew), and that other person sits there, and, well, you know, they could come over here if they wanted company.  

We must guard against becoming insular, of creating churchy cliques that operate more like individuals than like communities.  We must guard against adopting the behaviors that drove us out of those other churches in the first place.  We must work at being what it is we believe ourselves to be.

Do you know if that person really wants to be alone?  I mean, you don’t—why should he?  Do we think that woman is a little crabby?  So what?  She doesn’t have to keep up a sparkling conversation during mass.  Does that person behave oddly, or smell a little off, or speak a different language, or dress badly?  Is she too young, too old, too gay, too straight, too fat, too thin?  This is a church!  Go sit with him or her! 

What of those who need a little assistance to attend church with us?  Do we have people who are shut in because they cannot get here?  Are we willing to make an effort to be sure they’re included?  How far are we willing to go outside our comfort zones?  How willing are we to put our time and energy and maybe even a little risk-taking where our mouths are? 

Heck, you might even find you like that person you’ve been trying to avoid.   Remember, this is the warmest, friendliest, most liberal, most inclusive, most together church in Christendom.  Make it be so.