A Vocation Amid the Church's Churches; Reflections by a Chastened Anglican
by Ephraim Radner (Dec 8, 2004)
Spilt Blood
A friend of mine once accused me of being in the "thrall of pessimism". What he meant by this was not that I worry too much, or that I am overly anxious, or gloomy even on sunny days. He referred rather to my purported embrace of the negative with such fervor and intensity as to turn it into a kind of transfiguring anti-dote to normal realism. As when people nurse their grief to such an point that lament becomes a cause for living; or resentment the power of purpose. Pessimism as usually understood, of course, is depleting rather than exciting; but is it ever in fact opposed to the "real" or the "realistic"? And if the "real" that is God's is pried open by the Cross, is it in fact ever "pessimistic", in either the usual or the mind-altering sense, to follow Christ into and through the gates of death and resurrection? And is it a form of debasing slavery to what is wrong with the world - or the Church - to expect such gates to swing open even in their midst?
After almost 25 years serving as an Episcopal priest in the church that baptized me and nurtured me, and that offered me the vows by which I have bound myself to God and the people of Christ, I now see my friends leaving her. Laity, clergy, theologians -- many of them angry, most exhausted, all in tears over the still unrestrained fall of the church they have loved and given themselves over to. A fall into what? Into a downward spiral of disdain for the Scriptures, for the witness of the Communion of Saints, for the wider household of God, and often for the simple decency of self-control. A fall into a disdain for the Lord's own cherishing of the "little ones" - the poor of the world and their faith, the faith of common people who had guarded the faith they had been given to pass on. And at the same time, we see the basic virtues of this divine care replaced by an uncomprehending arrogance among the church's leaders, one of almost willful oblivion in the face of the pleas of friends and neighbor for an honest stock-taking. It is pessimism, I suppose, to catalogue these realities repeatedly; and perhaps it is also a kind of thralldom to refuse to run away. But thralldom to what, "really"?
For I remain in this church, and in the communion of which it is a part. I do so, even if less and less upheld by the colleagues of my first love, and more and more considered by them as at best spiritually quixotic, perhaps even deluding of others. I respond as a slave, therefore, with the following confession. It is drug up, as every genuine Christian confession must be, from the uncertain depths of my own passage into the pull of God's purpose for human regeneration. Because, as in all confessions, I too must admit to having become old and to my love having chilled. I too must be made new. But for the slave, bound to place, any mirror to my life must hang in this small room, and not in another's palace.
As a summary, I will say this: I remain within the Anglican Church and struggle for her integrity because of her blood. Blood has been spilled within her for the sake of Christ and His people, and it is only the humble and patient honoring of that witness in all of its uncertain outcome that can open me (and, the Lord willing, those around me) to the work of God's forgiveness and redemption. Her blood, in Christ, to allow for the recognition of the truth of all blood. Blood has been spilled, and remaining is the place God transforms its loss and the causes of its flow into the reasons for my hope.
Now let met offer the first of several theological explications, given in the course of a kind of historical tale. By "spilt blood", I do not refer only to the technical act of "martyrdom", but to the witness of lives expended and love lost in the service of Christ Jesus - for sweat and fatigue, intercession and waiting, gentleness and rebuke, all offered up and shared round, for the reality figured in the brow of Jesus in the Garden (Lk. 22:44).
There is a sense, of course, in which all ministers - an Episcopalian priest in my instance - would have lives easily, and perhaps not too remarkably, immersed in these kinds of acts, simply by virtue of their being professionally inserted in various ways into the daily round of a host of persons. The tugs of pastoral relationship are manifold and diverse, drawn in the midst of almost every conceivable passage of existence. But the fact of such a network of pastoral intersection would be a sentimental rationale for a purported religious obedience within a church, if described only these terms. Many retired ministers die relatively alone, the vast web of their past relationships, for all their complex pulls from across time, lost and forgotten along with the entire and now crumbled "professional" enterprise that often seemed their only motive. These are not, at first sight, a firm basis for a divine vocation that breaches the walls of eternity.
And I would indeed be a sentimentalist in this regard, were it not for the fact that I have discovered - as have many - that the spilt blood of this offering and its sharing (however domestically described) has been in fact exhibited often in the midst of hatred and ignorance, even violence and despair, all bound up with the very acts themselves, all bound up with the places they were performed, all bound up with the Church of Christ herself, taken up by God in His Son. Blood spilled, even though sin would lap it up. Blood spilled, that is, in a faith exposed. To honor this is to be roughly wrenched by it as well, to be disciplined by it and, God willing, pommeled (1 Cor. 9:27) even for the seeing and receiving of God's grace. The "tugs of relationship" are seeds of the Kingdom only to the degree that they are embedded through faith in the real world. And this I have learned through the very struggle of the Church to be held by her Lord accountable and renewed in the midst of, not apart from, her losses.
If there is blood spilled, therefore, it is because the Church herself and her members must be changed. This is the first principle of hopeful pessimism with respect to the Church: she is a sinner. The intrinsic historical corruptibility of the Church of Christ stands at the basis of our vocations to serve her in the midst of death. Such corruptibility, I realize, is often contested by the Church herself. Yet the moral vulnerability at her root is both so obvious to her members (not to mention the world at large), and also so avoided by them as to have created a whole spiritual tradition for modern Christians, one of a strange and giddy swinging between repudiation and stubborn defense in her face. It is a tradition, mind you, that has left us exhausted and pulled apart. Which is why I realize that when I claim, as I must, that we might find our Lord certainly and inexorably coming to us and reaching us in just this place of ecclesial corruption; and that we must mark our ecclesial homes today by their indelible need, and not by their purity; and that we can only hope for the Church in terms of such need, absolutely met, stated, and then fulfilled - I realize that, for the exhausted and the divided, such claims seem too foreign, perhaps too inhuman to accept.
But no more inhuman than the world in which the Church has found her home, as one created to be entered in the form of a servant.
Corruption and Crown
And now to the tale.
When I worked in Burundi in the early 1980's, it came as no surprise that here, in a country torn to its roots by communal assault and internal and suppressed sorrows and hatreds, the Church of Christ should also find her soul mixed in with the biles and bitternesses of her home. That priests and bishops, catechists and clergy, the baptized and their labors should all reflect, even in their attempts to mark a different story, the deeply planted fears and angers of a vast and poorly grasped human disdain for the gifts of God - this could have been predicted. I had read a little of the world's history and the Church's story in its course, and I knew by heart a string of Christian complicities. But the truth of such events, for Christian and non-Christian alike, is always hard to stare at calmly face to face. The well-worn charges against Christianity's impotence before - and perhaps abetting of - human evil are not, for all their commonplace reiteration, to be brushed aside when finally encountered in the flesh.
Burundi has been part of a local and decades-long epic of human madness. For all the books that have appeared recently, especially on the more spectacular - but analogous - terror of neighboring Rwanda, these Burundi and Rwanda together still await their Agrippa d'Aubign�, a tragic poet who can clothe such cruelty in the verses of an angry religious righteousness. For as d'Aubign� recognized unwittingly in the violence of the 16th-century Reformation, the Christian churches themselves were the active vessels of the nation's deeply repugnant and self-aimed wrath. There are priests, ministers, nuns, and bishops today being held in Rwanda and elsewhere for "crimes against humanity". With them stand those they have taught and baptized. We have heard of their deeds, even if we look aside. Indeed, the majority of the perpetrators in this world's far-flung region of recent death received the waters and chrismation of the Spirit from the Church, and made testimony to the Lord's movement in their lives sometimes with the public avowal of the assenting people of God. In this, they are like the rest of us.
It is easy enough to find the secular press evaluating the Christian Church, in such a context, with summary articles that state the obvious most of us acknowledge but refuse to understand. Like this one, from the widely-disseminated Afrol news agency: "The extreme cases [of Christian complicity in Rwanda] include the Anglican bishop Samuel Musabyimana, who allegedly 'was responsible for killing or causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the Tutsi population with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a racial or ethnic group'. Another extreme is the sentence against two Catholic nuns, Sisters Gertrude Mukangango and Julienne Kisito, for their involvement in the slaughter of at least 5,000 civilians that had sought refuge in their monastery at Sovu. Archbishop Augustin Nshamihigo and the coadjutor Bishop of Kigali, Jonathan Ruhumuliza, were seen describing the government responsible for orchestrating the genocide as 'peace-loving' at a Nairobi press conference in early June 1994. The accusations against clergy of the Free Methodist, Presbyterian, Baptist and Seventh-Day Adventist Churches are equally shocking. According to survivors, Bishop Aaron Ruhumuliza, head of the Free Methodist Church in Gikondo, Kigali, helped the militia carry out a massacre in his own church on 9 April 1994. Michel Twagirayesu, the President of the Presbyterian Church of Rwanda and a former vice-president of the World Council of Churches, is alleged to have worked closely with the killers in the Presbyterian stronghold of Kirinda, Kibuye, betraying parishioners and fellow-clergy alike, according to a report by African Rights." ["The Cross and the Genocide", a 2001 feature article by Rainier Hennig for the AFROL news service; see Rittner, Carol, Roth, John K., Whitworth, Wendy, eds. Genocide in Rwanda: Complicity of the Churches? [St. Paul, MN: Paragon House, 2004]; Mbanda, Laurent, Committed to Conflict: The Destruction of the Church in Rwanda [London: SCM, 1997]; Nyankanzi, Edward, Genocide: Rwanda and Burundi [Rochester, VT: Schenkman, 1997]).
Burundi's conflagrationary hell has been ordered differently than Rwanda's in certain key respects, but common too with the churches' basic implicated complicities, bound to the acts of ordinary Christians and their leaders. I lived, in the 1980's, amid the fragile and still-restrained angers, even as they were being secretly woven into the fabric of a new and terrible pain to be spread across the nation in the 1990's to the present. It was a quiet, if wearyingly tense time. Still, if I served within a hiatus of sorts, it was one filled, it now appears, with the march of unseen and unmet forces of disintegration.
But this was the place and time also of the ordinary self-offerings of the Church: of teaching the faith to common people, to catechists and ordinands; of digging in the Scriptures and being wrestled by them, however unwillingly, in a common if often enforced and uncomfortable fellowship; of friendships tentatively and sometimes extravagantly embraced; of hurts, feints, forgivenesses tried; of repeated and renewed appeals to God's grace and intervention, mercy and blessing; and to the growing recognition of bewildered vulnerability before profound and inescapable sentences of condemnation and of calling.
My departure ended up being fraught with the unexpected and unsettling confusions of deportation. While the event subverted a range of hopes and plans, it also brought more into relief the character of the ordinary network of relation that had grown in our midst. Having left in a sudden and painful expulsion, whose political significance was aimed less at me than at local Christians, the costs of enmity and of conviction, of loyalty and of love, were all suffered and borne by colleagues and brethren left behind whose sometimes compromised and sometimes noble witness within a strangling political culture bore testimony to the demands of the Gospel and to the breadth of grace needed and received.
This was all spilt blood, that would in time - for some, and who came from many churches - become the embodied gift of mostly unrecognized martyrdom in the 1990's. Courage grows slowly, for most of us, as a kindled flame from within; and these flames had small beginnings in the struggle for a friend removed. I am aware, if only as a distant rumble, that there were those who died in the last decade because of their faith and love for Christ and His people and world, assaulted by the very murky and troubled forces I had ignorantly and to some extent negligently disturbed, precisely by my having been attached to their ecclesial lives in the Lord. The value of ordinary self-offering, done in the midst of normal Christian encounter and responsibility, turns out - when God sometimes reveals its destiny - to be costly beyond imagining. (And so today, it seems we have lost divine imagination.)
The Israel of God and the Churches of the Nations
There is a danger in viewing the Church through the particular so intently as to render the view unintelligible to the vaster vision of the saints. "My" experience does not elucidate my friends' and colleagues', let alone the questing Christian on his pilgrimage. Rwanda and Burundi are not the world, let alone America. They represent, we might suspect, ecclesial reality only as a tangent. Unless, that is, they are the sign of the larger body, in the same way that members often reflect the condition of the whole. In this sense, we are signs mirroring each other across the globe, a circuit of semaphores constantly waving. This is another aspect of "communion", even in perversion. For we cannot escape the need to confront the strange mixture of death and life in this place, in this "Church" living in this place, if, that is, we wish to understand ourselves.
It makes no sense, for instance and as far as I can apprehend it, to say as the Pope did in May 1996 to the Rwandan people, that "the Church ... cannot be held responsible for the guilt of its members that have acted against the evangelical law", and that each person is only accountable individually before God. For if the Church offers the life-giving gifts of Christ's Body through the instrument of her members, through their own spilt blood - and this we are forced to affirm, forced by the Holy Spirit in time, forced even from the defended bulwarks of our ecclesial bastions -- so too does she receive and bear the judgment against her faithlessness through the willful blasphemy and failures of the children she has born and taught. This is not some conclusion of logic; it is simply the implication of grace's reality given, received, squandered, denied, and sometimes sought anew.
Israel is spoken to by God as His own people and His own child. This is a promise and relationship, however, that is given in the lives of her members one by one, and also imaged in their choices and their actions (cf. Hosea, esp. c.4). Though the Church is ordered for a "blameless" offering to the Lord (Col. 1:22) - just as Israel herself will be (Ps. 45:13ff; Song of Songs 6:9; Is. 61:10) - her passage to this end is given in dust and earth (cf. 2. Cor. 4:7ff.), within the contingent and corruptible character of a life destined for resurrection (because dying and disintegrating) not for bodily assumption (1 Cor.15:42ff.). The very writing of the New Testament, in all of its hortatory and testifying breadth, is premised on this reality of struggle, within and with the forces of corruption. And the reality is asserted, again and again, as expressing the very divine power and purpose of the Scriptures (cf. 1 Cor. 10:6ff.). Those who deny this movement by which the Church lives as Israel herself in Christ, the one and the same in His body, subvert the claim to resurrection that each is promised.
It is one thing to speak of the Church's "unfailing holiness" as a promise given by God; a promise to be fulfilled through the mystery, often hard, of His providence; a promise that is experienced through the humiliating burdens of our "imperfection" (cf. Lumen Gentium, 39, 48). It is quite another thing to relegate such imperfection to detachable individuals separated from the ideal Church's somehow "truer" self and currently transcended life with God. The latter simply cannot stand the test of grace: for there is no Church for which the Lord does not die because of her incapacitated need (cf. Eph. 5:26).
The corruptibility of the Church is not therefore simply a perspective to be adopted according to the wills and weaknesses of members and of the world's onlookers, as they are subjectively buffeted by hard facts. It expresses in history the enfigurated character of the Church as the body of the ongoing Israel taken up in Christ, a real - not a theoretical - handle by which God molds His people according to His own will into the image of His Son. And thus not only to acknowledge abstractly, but to remain physically and with the offering of one's heart within the place of her corruption, like Jeremiah, is not the acquiescence to pessimism, but a kind of proclamation of the grace of God's ongoing embrace.
The Pope's remark - "the Church cannot be held responsible for the guilt of her members" -- in fact, bespeaks more the public demands upon an organization bent on perceived survival, than it does a description of her divine calling. That calling is one into the Scripture's Kingdom as it reconfigures the world within which the Word sows its seed. And it is just these organizational values of the Church's earthly drag that have found their demonic expression within her submersion and masquerade as the "churches'" multiple self-assertions, in America no less than in Burundi: Catholics, Anglicans, Presbyterians, Methodists, Adventists, Baptists� gathered in a "shocking accusation". The final commonality, the final unity of Christian ecclesial existence - of the "churches" -- in places like Rwanda and Burundi was seen only in the shared deaths of their members at their brethren's hands. This is not something we can foist onto our neighbor. Not if we have prayed together, have read the Scriptures together, have broken bread together, have wept and forgiven, spilt tears and sweaty blood. I remain, with all the others, in order to be rightfully accused.
To be sure, the "common deaths" of the wicked and the complacent and the lost were ones emblazoned with a range of faithful witness in the face of Christian betrayal to the point of "shedding blood", of "martyrdom" in the strict sense - a reality in which the Pope himself had earlier seen the image of the "one Church" (Ut Unum Sint, footnotes 137, 139). But the context of this imposed unity of blood, a context I had worked in and been lulled within over years, years merged with the present in too many ways and places, proved in fact to be the diverse venalities of competing sects, whose need for standing and power thrust them all into the habits of silence before and cooperation with the social dynamics of mutual destruction. No Christian dare turn away before the judgment here meted out to the accepted divisions of the Church; nor dare we attempt to circumvent the historical maze in which spilt blood has been spattered as a sign of hope in the midst of our instincts to justify ourselves. I fear today we are all surrendering to the current of such circumvention, more and more. But I remain with some hope of being truthful to the landscape of God's coming.
After a seminary education that opened to me the strenuous truth-seeking of multi-denominational scholarship - and the earnest engagements of Reformation and post-Reformation theology are nothing if not muscular exertions - I discovered in Burundi the actual domain and geography of the churches whose best minds I had scrutinized. I prayed with the Catholics and Methodists, built with the Pentecostals, broke bread with the Brethren, sang with the Independents; and maintained a sullen and silent distance with them all, even while the fires of the earth were stoked during these in-between times when we carelessly watched at the gates. In this, we each threaded our ways among the peoples of our intersecting and repeatedly self-defining flocks.
The relationships between the churches and the peoples deserves a new, more sobered Bossuet to delineate in the broad strokes of a "universal history" - for the world's fate is tied less to their diverse wisdoms than to their mutual plays and spats, and to the matches they light among themselves. Providence works along the lines of Scripture, and the Church in Scripture's thrall.
A few years ago I wrote a book about the division of the churches. Many people found it too pessimistic and abstract - pessimistic, because it argued for an incapacity of effective witness by the Church that had been internalized and made inexorable through division; and abstract because it seemed to contradict all the concrete virtues of Christianity all over the world. But I would argue, in contrast, that we only give in to pessimistic abstraction by trying to leave behind the present realities of our ecclesial situations; we become prey to the forces of idealization and ultimately disappointment.
And we live with so much disappointment in the churches these days. Ironically, this disappointment feeds our enthusiasms, discovered here and there in new loves and new energies, constantly reconstructing themselves in our claims to some final overcoming of the last ecclesial disease.
But the intrinsic corruptibility of the Church enacted in the multiplicity of "churches" is no accidental perception, one that a young, na�ve, and inexperienced priest in the face of an impotent and fractured ecclesial witness - such as I was while watching Burundi unravel -- simply makes with the regret of distanced puzzlement, and then, if he were of a healthy disposition, moves on. It marks the deeply rooted flaw of Christian life as it sorts through time's provision (the store of peoples, churches, hierarchies, claims, demands, styles, individualities) and loses itself in this mass of local detail. For the reality of plural "churches" stands in a special relationship, in fact, to the reality of "genocide" itself. This, at least, is what I have felt forced to conclude - a conclusion that holds no church or denomination today, for all our differences, our relative "orthodoxies" and missionary efficacies and virtues, free from a condemnation that surely should transform the habits of our hoping.
Genocide and the Gentiles
Genocide, I must confess, raises a uniquely critical question for the Church with respect to her corruptibility (and actual corruption) as bound to her division. One should be wary of attaching this unimaginably horrific historical referent of the word to a "merely" theological problem; but in this case, the Church cannot be detached from this history, and this fact breeds theological confusion in itself that has now engulfed the churches. The concept of genocide, to be sure, has come to have a number of specific legal and culturally symbolic meanings attached to it over the past few decades. In the Church, however, the "killing of a people" (the genos or ethnos of the New Testament, the gens of the Western tradition) represents a specific action in relation to God: it constitutes the reversal of a divinely willed process by which the Nations (gentes) or Gentiles are reconciled together. Such reconciliation of the Gentiles, according to the Scriptures, is given by granting each people a redeemed survival and health, in and through Israel, in a variegated praise of God (cf. Rev. 4:6ff.; 14:1-7).
Thus genocide, as it touches the Church, stands as a horribly subversive act by which the "peoples" are permitted and even forced to remain outside the "light" of Christ "given to the Nations and the glory of [God's] people Israel" (Lk. 2:32); and by which the Church herself chooses to remain bound to the primordially unordered life of the Nations themselves, in all of their independent developments, confusions, self-enclosures, and sometimes explosive assaults. What is a church that ties itself to genocide - and what church has not?-- but a church that has devoted itself to the cause of one "nation against another"? I can see no other judgment possible. I have seen none other given.
The converse, however, must also be true: genocide expresses the Church as contentedly Gentile in her interior purpose, as a grouping of the "churches". It is obvious that as the Church participates in genocide, the Gospel she proclaims is denied. But the peculiar character of this denial is that its touches and exposes the very nature of the Church herself as she has willfully and rebelliously chosen to exist, and expresses a profound perversion of her promised form. There are places in the world where it is obvious that there is no pure Church; and where the only Church that does exist is the one whose multiplied impurities, given in the churches, are yet the only means of grace at hand - but a grace that drives us to another place. There are places where this is obvious. But where it is less than obvious, there merely hides the truth of some future self-evidence. Even here, surely, I must remain, in part, so that I can be driven out and elsewhere.
Paradoxically, only as a "people" submits to the elected priority of Israel's calling, that is, to the "unnatural" and "engrafted" character of its own life with God, and thus to the perpetual costliness and humility of its service in the world of peoples (Romans 11:20ff.), can a Gentile nation receive the fullness of its created purpose. Jew and Gentile mark the primary division of humanity, as the Italian philosopher Vico understood; and to insist as we do on struggling in faith within realms distanced from this one barrier to be overcome, is to leave the powers that uphold Gentilism unopposed and free to destroy the earth in an endless cycle of grasping and reprisal. Once the Church has sunk into a life of competing "peoples", bound up with the very "nations" themselves in various ways, she has reconstituted her ecclesial self-ordering in terms of a Gentile rebellion. The divided Church becomes the mirror of the Gentiles themselves, in all their "raging" against God and His Messiah (Ps. 2:1).
It was odd to hear, on the day of my ordination to the priesthood in Burundi, the bishop of Bujumbura preach a sermon on this fact: that a Jewish Savior should welcome a Gentile nation on the shores of Tanganyika, who then in turn should anoint a half-Jew pilgrim from the New World like myself. It was frightening too, because in this narrative the force of God's reordering of the Peoples with His People was momentarily lifted into view, hands laid on head, just as around us were being readied the instruments by which its power could be turned against its goal. I was ordained into a contradiction that the Church had contracted with a stubborn Gentile world. But the contradiction remains in our very midst, still to be resolved.
There is no doubt in my mind that, from the perspective of the Church, the shadow of genocide as it has enveloped large swathes of world and her peoples in time and as it has darkened the witness of Christians in so many places, is in part also a veil laid upon the Gospel by a Church returned to the multiplied assertions of her straitened Gentile origins. That Germany in the 1930's and '40's embodies the very type of this bondage, wherein divided Christians betrayed their "unity" only in their savagery against Jewish Israel, seems to me an inescapable conclusion. And its enfigurated tendrils seem to have ramified, backward and forwards through time and into even the corners and highlands of Africa. If there, also rooting themselves in America's soil.
I grew up with a sense of the hovering shadow of this type and its branches. Facing towards the American sun, and all the expectations of the bright days ahead it promised, there were still behind me the looming clouds that had swallowed Europe, and the half-remembered and obliterated families of grandparents left behind in Poland and Russia. You can look at a photo of a relative under the Czars and feel the same subdued unease that a Mayan relic gives a hotel vacationer on the Mexican coast - something lost that you dare not consider too long if you want your money to hold out. To learn Christ for me involved a vague avoidance of this backwards land, an unconscious struggle to allocate to the past alone the bits and pieces of the churches' abject failures. These gradually began to encompass, as I grew more aware, Las Casas' horrified complaints, the Middle Passage and its interminable destination in the Americas, and even the realization eventually that the nations and their churches had left with the Jews and their pits hundreds of thousands of Gypsies, homosexuals, and mentally "defective".
Like many American Christians still eager with a new-found faith, I long thought that the Church should (and could) "make good" on all of this, better her witness, learn from the past and move ahead. Was this not what the "churches" themselves were assigned to achieve - various Ministers for Improvement? The politics of "inclusion" - inclusion here and there, each in our church's different way and talent -- seemed to flow easily from this, and I supported many of the outlooks connected with it. Until little by little the bits and pieces of the churches' abject failures drifted up from the past and began to float about the present's surface, the flotsam of an interior self-delusion. "Doing better" is too complicated at thing to manage, when darkness reigns. Indeed, as it appeared when Rwanda and Burundi's horror exploded over and over and the "good churches" (including my own) found themselves tongue-tied and otherwise occupied - with the hard work of inclusion for one thing - the politics of "improvement" proved as often as not to be governed by the well-policed processes of self-protection. In these there is little room for self-questioning, re-writing the story, repentance, renewal.
Then true religion began to assert itself in my mind and on the face of the earth, as Leszek Kolakowski maintains - "the Sacred revealed to us in the experience of our failure; religion indeed the awareness of our insufficiency, lived in the admission of weakness" and "evil" - and the churches' striving into a renewed incorruptibility began to appear more and more as a denial of faith itself (Religion [New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1982], p. 199).
This is when I began to read the Scriptures in a new way and to realize that they presented the form of God's work in our midst - Israel and the Nations! Jesus the Christ! - and not simply the lofty (though frequently domesticated) measure of our choices, to be striven after. And in this context not only do the politics of inclusion disintegrate before the shape of God's history-making - as if, in the present debate, we could ever define our sexual nature apart from historical form of Jesus' the Bridegroom coming to call us - but so do the simple judgments of our moral purity before the Gentile onslaughts upon confused humanity - as if, in the present debate, "gay" persons represented the clarity of our common rebellion, and not simply one smudged mirror among the many that we hold to ourselves across the Nations's corridors. American and African today are lifted high, in different respects, only for a common bringing low in this one respect of seeing ourselves for who we are in the genocidal fashionings of our faith.
So there is a call and a work, even here, in this nation as in others. But that is our hope.
Repentance and Hope
The "unfailing holiness" of the Church marks God's promise in such a world of churches. That the Church is not completely lost amid the churches is only because of the blood her members' have willingly split of themselves, cast among the interstices of the jumbled meeting of the nations into which ecclesial life has devolved. That is to say, only because God Himself has come to dwell in the midst of a world still being counted according to the calculus of nations, has come into small places, into hidden habitations, into stables and caves, villages and homes, waiting still for the Gentiles' gifts, fleeing the wrath of the "old man" of hostile Jew and Gentile, finding a way between their multiple attacks, and growing "in wisdom and in grace", emerging in the humbled prayers and songs of a still-scattered tribe, the "diaspora" of a stricken flock (1 Pet.1:1) -- only because the Body of Christ still lives within the cracks, and flourishes there with all the light of a new if unrecognized creation , only because of this do the churches still move towards the promise of the Church. I remain in order to be moved.
The cracks, after all, run wide and deep, connecting the ends of the earth beneath her oceans. Blood has been split in cities of the East, in fields of the South, in America and England too. Not as remnant drops, to be dried, swept up, and spirited away from the conflagrations of the West; but just as in Africa, to seep into the small edgings, to run together, and to reveal the entire, teeming world of God, His divine insects red and glowing, against which we rage upon the surface. We too have prayed, and worked, and broken bread, and sung - sullen and distant though we have become, while the waters rise -- even in the Episcopal Church. Let not the world and the nations avert their eyes. I mourn in dread for the flood and the falling of this church. But the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ must be honored at the tombs of the martyrs, if no where else.
I know that for many years, and even into the dark time's resurgence in the 1990's, I was remembered before God in prayer by Barundi colleagues whom I had left behind -- just as I and others in America who had never met them did the same. They prayed sometimes with affection, sometimes only out of hope for a restored and helping contact in the midst of restless need. But those who have interceded for me with hearts "thrice-battered" by the furors of the day - morning, noon, and night - as much as by the pressures of the Triune God, cannot be walked away from. Not I from them, nor they from us. It would be an anti-Samson self-mutilation, though bound to the same desperate end, to be blinded to such a reality whereby even churches are redeemed. I remain because, if the Holy Spirit is in hiding, we have been given clues as to where he lurks, clues to be seized among the interceders.
What other call could there be, than to train our eyes to see this? To listen anew to the first call into the Kingdom - near at hand, growing secretly, apprehended only by those able to see and hear (Mk. 4:26ff; 10ff. ) - and thereby to "repent" (Mk. 1:15)? If He is resurrected, he still awaits the question He has sown in our hearts, "what then shall we do?" (Acts 2:37) and the apostolic answer to its query. The "true Church" emerges into view only as the churches themselves stand before our Lord with such interrogation and response. The True Church is given to those who seek passage through this confrontation (Rev. 7:13ff.). She is not chosen before the fact.
The present crisis of Anglicanism, as of all the churches, and the sheer tumbling down of the Episcopal Church in the form of a portent, has led for many to an almost frenzied demand for ecclesial reordering, that comes in the form of reshuffling. Choices of affiliation are laid out like wares in a market before the hungry; new forms are proposed; comparisons are argued; collectors are consulted; choices are demanded; grasping is barely restrained; merchants are celebrated. This is the repetition of Gentile rage; and it will lead where it has always led.
If I remain in the "Anglican church", it is first of all because I cannot see how I can be opened to the vision of the Church apart from the training of the eye and ear within the placement of this passage here. For I bear within my own heart the vessel of the Church's restoration, just as the Lord has scattered her seed throughout a still warring world. It is a recognition tied to the responsibility of that strange command to "love oneself", at least as the basis of genuine self-giving (Mk. 12:31). This Gentile, in this Gentile church, must be changed through and through.
And I struggle here, not for a noble liturgy, nor for a sense of revived purity, nor for a unique theological posture. These were perhaps once treasures held, but no longer worth our lives to guard in the last days. The sense of the Church's corruptibility permeates the English Reformation as much as anywhere; and if many of Anglicanism's gifts in fact respond to this sense, their purpose now seems buried. I struggle therefore only for the open stilling of a "nation's" rage. I struggle for repentance. "Just so, I tell you, there is joy before the angels of God over one sinner who repents" (Lk. 15:10). Anglicanism, and the Episcopal Church within her, has few gifts left to share but this. But what greater gift? For even here, "wherever the Gospel is preached in the whole world, what she has done will be told in memory of her" (Mk. 14:9). Could there be any call, any holiness, any goal more perfect? And if there is a providence in the raging of the Gentile Christian, if the nations of the churches are still useable by God, if genocide - the genocide, that is, of the churches -- has driven us anywhere, it is perhaps simply to a place, seemingly alone, stumblingly bound to a habitation however isolated, a place of being found. I remain in order to be found.
But to be found where? In the "land of promise". Still here. For there is no greater promise than God's to Israel - not for her sake only, but for the Nations of the world (Rom. 11:29). The promise, however, takes the form of denials remembered - denials now even being lived - and resistances overcome. The Church of Christ, furthermore, is not "another" Israel, but the same (Gal. 6:16), in the very power of this overcoming, by reasserting, recasting, renewing in the act of engrafting. She is the place where Jew and Gentile are reconciled in the Cross that neither one of them wants or understands, but which stands as the very highway by which the Nations stream to Zion - streaming through Africa, streaming through America, streaming through Anglicanism and through all the churches of the peoples. Ever a relentless mob.
And here, the virtues of the given, are our bread: the nourishment of the Scriptures, the faith taught and received, the uncomfortable but inescapable fellowship; the halting and binding; the forgivenesses tried in the face of embedded insult; the repeated and renewed appeals to God's grace and intervention, mercy and blessing; the intercession of the small saints; the call, unceasing precisely because I cannot quiet its enunciation by my flights, pressing for repentance; the blood spilt.
I am not sure but that "communion" is anything more than this, at this time; I am not sure that it can mean anything more than this if it is to assume any greater form in the future. Thus, I admit a certain skepticism in the face of documents whose goals I share - like the Windsor Report - but whose ecclesiological premises aim so high from the start as to discredit realistic hope of a second order. Thereby they tinge themselves with a little of the "theology of glory" that Luther so warned against. The grandiose claims of the Church "looking like the Trinity" in its relational effulgence are properly deflated in a world where Gentiles have made the Church the idol of their genocides. Indeed, Christian theology has neatly managed the churches' evasion of their impotence and need by erecting such contraptions as would continually tell us that we are, "in fact", quite different from what we do; when of course we are nothing of the kind (Matthew 7:20-24).
And hence, the actual calls made by Primates and Commissions and common folk to subject ourselves to the spilt glory of the faithful, the only cogs of communion that move, the only avenue of movement, are conveniently avoided. Being clear about the Trinity does not make one a better person, as perhaps Athanasius has learned before God somewhat to his discomfort. Rather it helps us to praise God rightly, though only from the heart that has given itself over to a form of praise in the first place. The Episcopal Church's problem is not that she does not have a sufficient grasp of the Trinity's inner bonds (though she may not). It is that, seeing them clearly or mistily, she still thinks only of herself, and relates to others only as one Gentile to another, as one tax-collector to another, as a nation among nations, as one who rages and mutters. In such a world, where Anglicanism is but a group of Gentiles speaking to Gentiles, tax-collectors to tax-collectors, one nation to another, one group among other such groups; where there are only churches who have denigrated the promise of the Church; where the "shocking accusations" against Catholic, Anglican, Free Methodist, Presbyterian, Baptist and Seventh-Day Adventist Churches are leveled day by day; in such a world as this, Christ's "communion" cannot be today the reestablished order of God's ecclesial being; it can only be the beginning of a host of repentances. So, if I remain, it can only be in order to take up the cry.
But such a modest goal, despite the inflated rhetoric of Commissions and Critics, Converts and Apologists, is exactly what the honoring of God's gifts today involves. I have broken the Lord's bread - the bread of eucharist, the bread of tears, the bread of the Word, the bread of a body spilt - broken it with Americans, Barundi, Sudanese and Canadians, the English and the Irish, sinners and saints, Gentiles (yes, and Jews!), and here I must be changed, here is repentance demanded, here is the first place of being met and found. In the corruptible church, nothing is escapable, only receivable. "Communion", if no more than this, if only scratched out among Anglicans in this place and Methodists in another, and Adventists if they will somewhere else, is still today shown to be a rare gateway onto Jordan's bank, where the Baptist's cry is heard again and again too the voice spoken to the Church, "this is my Son; listen", in whose wake the accusations can be stilled. How can I run from the grace of God?
This is too hard a vocation, perhaps; who can listen to it? (cf. Jn. 6:60). Maybe only priests; maybe only theorists; maybe only pessimists? No; if it is a vocation at all, it is one given to all; and with men, all men, it is impossible (cf. Mat. 19:26). That is what we should say. But we should go on, and also say the rest.
I continue to believe that we can speak the truth and that we can hope at the same time. That is neither the transfiguration of pessimism nor is it naivet�, since such a conjunction of acts is testimony to a divine reality that overlays our confusions. Look here, I would testify: we can hope in a God who is as He says He is and who works according to His Word in a world and with a Church exactly as they appear to be. This is who God is and what God does: the One who takes the rebel Nations and makes them one with His people Israel in and through Christ for the praise of His Name. I would be taken, even here, so that grace may be the word last spoken.
