Radical Hospitality, Profound Inclusivity
Good morning! It is an awesome thing to stand in a room filled with so many of my heroes.
It is awesome and, truth be told, a tad bit terrifying. So pray with me please:
Gracious God, may we live without fear knowing that you love us, you protect us, and you long for us to live out your hope for our world. Amen.
About 10 years ago a young woman called and
asked if we might have lunch. She was in seminary in the ordination process. Over lunch she said to me, "I wanted to talk with you because so many of the women priests I've encountered in this diocese seem to be angry, and you don't."
I stopped eating and I started teaching. Political lesson Number 1: never confuse the presence of humor with the absence of anger.
Secondly, I consider myself to be the third wave
of women priests. I was ordained in 1990 by Jack Spong and by the time I was ordained the Diocese of Newark had largely and successfully settled the question of women's ordination. Then in 1992 I moved to Chicago, where the issue was not nearly so settled.
It is a very good diocese now because of a lot
of hard work that has happened in the last 10-15 years.
But in 1992 it was a diocese where the memory
of women being transferred in and out on paper and in person in order to be ordained was not all that distant. (Although the system worked and women were ordained, don't ever think that it wasn't painful.)
Chicago was a diocese in 1992 where there
were no women rectors. It was culture shock for this girl from Newark. So I looked at that young woman and said, "I may not seem angry, but that's because so many of our sisters have used their anger to trample the barricades of the system so that you and I can have the privilege of being ordained.
"Make no mistake," I said. "It is their anger
that has pushed back the waters of oppression so that you and I can walk through on dry land. I'm not angry. I'm profoundly grateful." (The lunch finished up pretty quickly after that.)
I'm also grateful to you all for something else.
In 1986 I was a student at Union Theological Seminary. I was a Roman Catholic and it was dawning on me that what I had known since I was eight was undeniably true--I was, in fact, a lesbian.
I knew that as a woman and a feminist the
Roman Catholic Church was going to have a hard time with me--but as a lesbian the hierarchy would despise
me. I knew that as sure as I knew I had a call to the priesthood.
I remember standing on the corner of 122nd
Street and Claremont Avenue in New York City, and thinking that, in spite of it all, maybe--just maybe-there was hope. That maybe I could find a home in the Episcopal Church.
Why did I think that? Because I knew women
I had been introduced to--women straight and gay-whom I deeply respected, women who were doing exciting, creative and life-changing work in the Episcopal Church. These women gave me hope--just when I thought part of my life was falling apart, these women gave me hope that I could be a feminist...that I could be a lesbian...that I could be a priest.
Many of those women are sitting in this room
todayand I am profoundly grateful. You changed my life.
I have to tell you that was my initial perception
of the Episcopal Church. I believed that it was a place of radical hospitality and profound inclusivity. Ordained women were accepted and gay and lesbian people were mainstream--that's what I thought. Imagine my surprise when I learned otherwise.
Imagine. That is actually what I invite you to
do now--imagine. I want you to imagine the Kingdom of God, the Commonwealth of God. Imagine what you want the Episcopal Church to be. Imagine that place of radical hospitality and profound inclusivity. Imagine the table in the Kingdom of God.
Who's breaking bread together? Who's sitting
at that table next to you?
Fill that table with your heroes, with your loved
ones who have died, the people that you like--oh, and the ones you dislike, they're there too, because it's the Kingdom of God--God's kingdom, not yours.
Imagine the kingdom of God--that table--the
bread you'll break, the stories you'll tell, the dishes every single one of you will wash together.
Imagine. William Blake, the 18th century poet
said that "Imagination is evidence of the divine."
Imagine the kingdom of God in your community. We see bits and pieces and slices of it all the time. Imagine what it would look like full time.
Here are some snippets of where I've seen it
throughout our church.
Imagine, if you will, the joy and delight on the
faces of a lesbian couple who on their 15th anniversary receive a card congratulating them--from a Japanese American couple in their 80s who were married at that church 50 years before.
Imagine.
Imagine a church on the verge of closing, a
matriarch, her two sisters and her daughter having given everything they have to keep the place afloat. Imagine the bishop coming to tell them it's over and in the course of the conversation realizing that the church where her daughter was married and her son was buried won't be around for her to be buried from. When that sank in, imagine the matriarch saying, "Wow--I guess we really have died."
And imagine letting that settle over the room
and then the wisdom and vision of the bishop saying, "You know, as Christians we have a belief about that. If you died you can rise. The problem is when you're dead and you think you're alive."
Imagine that congregation, being raised from
the dead and, seven years later, when the woman died, imagine having her memorial service on a Sunday Morning at 10 O'clock--during the main worship service-with an overflowing crowd including people who had never met her and yet knew that the parish existed because of her.
Imagine.
Can you imagine a girl being baptized at age
eight and, three years later, her father dying and the church gathering to bury him. Two years after that, the same young woman being confirmed, with a mentor so truly connected to her life that, when that young woman's mom became ill, she stayed with her mentor until her mom recovered.
Then, in a moment of teenage carousing, it was
the mentor she called to drive her home. It was the church and her mentor she turned to when her mom got remarried and she was unsure of the whole thing.
"Will you who witness these vows do all in your
power to support this person in her new life in Christ?"
"We will."
Imagine a woman, after having seen Gene
Robinson interviewed on 'Good Morning America,' getting into her car and driving over to the local Episcopal church--a church she had driven past countless times without stopping--and imagine her pulling up in the parking lot, knocking on the church door, asking to see a priest. And when the priest appears, saying to her, "I want to be a part of the church that chooses someone like Gene Robinson to be a bishop. Can I take Communion this Sunday?"
Imagine.
Can you imagine the kingdom of God. Can you
imagine a church that is active, vibrant and alive, a church that takes seriously its ability to make use of multimedia resources to help us see the holy in our midst? Every week during Lent, instead of reading the psalm, their eyes and ears are treated to a prayer rich with images and music, prompting them to encounter God's work in the world. Visuals just like the ones we've been seeing during noonday prayers.
Can you imagine the installation of a dean, followed by a neighborhood block party and barbecue, bringing together a spectrum of the city to dance in the streets as one?
Can you imagine a New Year's Eve when
300...400...500 people from the community are lined up outside a congregation's door, waiting to bring in the New Year by walking a labyrinth?
Can you imagine a small anticultural parish raising a boatload of money to send their priest and a parishioner--who happens to be an African-American and a doctor--to west Africa to offer medical attention at an Anglican mission?
Imagine a hard-living homeless man--in various stages of sobriety--being the first one to hug a newly ordained priest and the entire congregation standing around rejoicing.
Can you imagine, my friends, the slices of the
kingdom of God in our midst?
It is the notion, the hope, the faintest tendril of
smoke, that our church may be a place of radical hospitality and profound inclusivity, that keeps us going.
It's why I believe we're all here because we've
all felt at one point or another that sense of profound love that includes us and transforms us.
We're here this morning--the Episcopal
Women's Caucus and friends--not because we enjoy beating our heads against the bureaucratic walls of the church but because we can imagine the kingdom of God--God's commonwealth.
The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of
God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit is calling all of us to create and proclaim a church of radical hospitality and profound inclusivity, a church where there are no outsiders.
We can imagine it.
We can see it.
With God and each other, we can make it so.
Amen