Rules for Resolutions at Diocesan Convention

Tweaking some of my fellow Anglo-Catholic friends about the Blessed Virgin Mary was fun for a couple blog posts, but it’s time to get back to some holy wonkery, and the clock is ticking. While I was asleep in a post-General Convention stupor, I failed to notice just how quickly the 2012 convention of the Diocese of Indianapolis was approaching. It’s still a little over two months away, and important deadlines are rapidly approaching. I have some people to get in touch with in a hurry.

Quickly now:

1. Resolutions for consideration by the convention are due by August 26. That’s THIS Sunday. They may be submitted via e-mail. Instructions here.
2. Nominations for diocesan committees are due by September 1. You may nominate yourself. A nomination form, including a list of the responsibilities of the various committees, can be found here.

I’ll get back to these in a bit, but first: Diocesan Convention, whether in Indianapolis or elsewhere, is really important. A fundamental principle of the Episcopal Church is that the basic unit of the church is not the parish, but the diocese, of which the Bishop is the leader. Conceptually, any ministry done in a particular parish is an extension of the Bishop’s own ministry. The Bishop derives her authority from the laying on of hands going back a great many generations to the touch of Jesus himself. That’s why a Bishop carries a shepherd’s crook. This does not make the Bishop magic, but it does make her well-connected.

So, the Bishop commands a great deal of authority, through both the literal touch of our Lord and Savior and the considerably less mystical means of the constitution and canons of the Episcopal Church and the Diocese of Indianapolis. Mystical or not, the constitution and canons spell out that the Bishop’s authority is shared with her flock.

Let me state it forthrightly: laypeople and clergy all have power to influence the way things are done in our dioceses. We just have to use it.

What I am not calling for is for anyone reading this to prepare a raft of resolutions. That’s basically the last thing we need.  General Convention was littered with well-intentioned but basically meaningless resolutions, and the same thing happens at diocesan convention, too.

From the 174th Convention of the EpiscopalDiocese of Indianapolis, I give you two examples:

Equitable Education for All Our ChildrenResolved, that the 174^th Convention of the Diocese of Indianapolis affirm Resolution B025, Equitable Education for All Our Children, adopted by the 76^th General Convention of the Episcopal Church, and urge the implementation of this resolution, as appropriate, within our diocese and our parishes.

Renew and Strengthen Economic Justice MinistryResolved, that the 174^th Convention of the Episcopal Diocese of Indianapolis affirm Resolution C049, Renew and Strengthen Economic Justice Ministry, adopted by the 76^th General Convention of the Episcopal Church, and urge the implementation of this resolution, as appropriate, within our diocese and our parishes.

Note the weasel words – “urge”, “as appropriate”. Note the total lack of specificity in assigning any specific action. I can guarantee you that I voted for these things as a delegate last year. Because the last thing I was going to do was be the jerk from All Saints who voted against Equitable Education for All Our Children, especially when the resolution calls on me and everyone I know to do precisely nothing.

So a few ground rules before you go submitting resolutions:

1. Is this resolution likely to pass unanimously? If so, can it. The resolution probably hasn’t called anyone in the room to do anything meaningful.
2. Does the resolution call for someone in the church (not government officials) to do anything concrete? If so, we’re on to something.
3. Might the resolution legitimately call on you to do something concrete? Better yet. There was an interesting resolution that passed at last year’s Diocesan Convention requiring a research project on the system of Township Poor Relief in Indiana. The township poor relief funds carry large amounts of cash on their balance sheets, where they aren’t helping the poor, and given today’s low yields, aren’t even earning interest! (See Matt 25:27 for what Jesus thinks about that investment strategy). But if I recall correctly, it was suggested that the Bishop kick that project over to the Deacons. I’m not sure if this has been done or if this resolution will appear on the ever-lengthening unfinished business report (the reading of which should frankly be promptly followed by confession and rending of garments; then maybe absolution). I’m not blaming the Deacons, by the way (the Indianapolis Star hasn’t been able to crack this issue, either) – just saying it was an easy one to pass because we kicked responsibility to someone else. Full disclosure: I believe I spoke in favor of this resolution. Maturity comes slowly, y’all.
4. Does your resolution contain an escape hatch? Note that these most often take the form of non-committal verbs. If so, edit those out right this minute! If you provide an escape hatch, it will be used.
5. Does the resolution involve money? If so, just make sure you really know what you’re talking about, and you really understand the way the budgeting process works in your diocese and what the actual resources available are. Get help from someone who does know the numbers. There’s a perfectly wonderful resolution regarding support for the Episcopal Church in Haiti committing $500,000 of Diocesan resources to reconstruction efforts. It passed, but it’s pretty problematic. The draft budget for 2013 at this stage completely ignores it. Another one for the unfinished business report? Also - guilty. I voted for it.

So what subjects might deserve a resolution? I can think of two off the top of my head. First, we have a major resolution that passed at the General Convention, C095, establishing a committee to imagine a restructuring of the national church (I've put my name in for this, and maybe you should, too. You've got till August 23 to do it). But as one Bishop pointed out during the debate on this resolution in the House of Bishops, this is a call to reimagine what our dioceses look like as well. A restructuring of the national church is a good and necessary thing, but the dioceses and the parishes are where we spend most of our time (and money). A resolution adapting C095 for diocesan use would make a whole lot of sense. This is my project for the next few days.

Also, specific to the Diocese of Indianapolis here...our website is sorely in need of an upgrade. Fact is, we did one two years ago. There's no reason to lay blame, but we must acknowledge that this did not work at all. Let's allocate some funds and get something usable. We will all feel better. Keep in mind that the audience for a diocesan website is almost entirely church insiders, not outsiders. Easy accessiblity to diocesan resources for parishes is vital.

I'm sure there are other things we need to address (besides the budget, obviously, about which...more later), but not much. One of the great problems of General Convention and Diocesan Conventions is that we so rarely get our geographically dispersed groups together, it's shame we spend so much of our time in legislative snoozefests rather than sharing with each our successes and frustrations, and building networks across distance.

To that end, I'm excited to see that this year the Diocese of Indianapolis is creating room during one of the breaks for workshops. This is an excellent idea (Acts 8 gathering, anyone?). Let's see how short we can make our legislating, and spend our time together instead exchanging ideas, stories, and experiences as we work for the one who is coming into the world.

UPDATE 9/15/2012: I referenced the diocesan website being in need of an upgrade. I recently learned that one is well under way, and caught a sneak peek of it during a brief moment when the new design was accidentally made public. I'm not sure what the launch date is, but it looks very good.

Assumption Eve: the BVM Achieves Liftoff

I generally find it hard to have a lot of conviction about the Assumption of Mary - the idea that Mary's body, upon her death, was assumed into heaven. There's certainly no direct scriptural support for it, just the analogy of the prophet Elijah, who himself apparently disappeared into heaven.

Mary was a great prophet (possibly the greatest of the prophets, let those who oppose the ordination of women take note). What does a prophet do but speak the word of God, and what better way to speak the word of God than to literally give birth to it (John 1:14)? Add on a treatise on economic policy that politicians of all stripes would do well to study carefully (Luke 1:46-55) and you've got yourself a real prophet here.

So even though there's approximately zero in the way of scriptural support for the idea that Mary was taken directly into heaven, I'm inclined to just go along with it. First, the concept does no harm to the faith. Second, without something like the Assumption, how on earth do we end up with apparitions of Mary, and I love me some Virgin of Guadalupe (which I believe to be simultaneously a fraud and an act of God, but that's a topic for another time). Third, who am I to deny Jesus the right to rapture up his own mother?

But the Assumption, like the Ascension of Jesus into heaven, does run into a practical problem. Namely: we can totally fly into space and see that heaven isn't there. Nonetheless, my previous post notwithstanding, I really, really like Mary, and I like to imagine her life. Lacking any better imagery of where Mary went, I just went with a sort of holy NASA in a little snippet I submitted to a New York Times writing contest, where the challenge was to describe the sky in three sentences (I didn't win). This Assumption Eve, it's all I got:

Try to imagine the Assumption, how it must have felt for Mary, full of grace, the first woman to touch the sky (not Amelia Earhart, not Sally Ride). Perhaps it was a breezeless August day above Jerusalem, and she watched the earth recede through circles of carrion birds surveying Golgotha's latest harvest. The air whistling across her ears was alpine, now arctic, then gone, as she floated past the rings of Saturn and wondered which of the twinkling lights in the distance was Heaven's golden door.

There's Nothing Special about the Blessed Virgin Mary

Jesus is a pretty unusual guy. The core of Christian belief is that he is simultaneously fully divine and fully human. That's an intellectual puzzle, but a little easier to work through when you put it in practical terms.

Take the wedding at Cana (John 2:1-10). Jesus and his mom were at a wedding, and mom notices the wine has run out. Though she's just a guest at the wedding, she's apparently the hostess with the mostest and she notes this to her son, who basically says, "Seriously, you expect me to do a miracle so the best man doesn't have to do a liquor run? Not gonna do it." But after a minute he relents and produces thirty gallons of the best wine ever. So we see Jesus as just another guest at a wedding, aware of his power but reluctant to use it for trivial purposes. In the end he apparently concludes that communal celebrations are important enough to deserve God's grace, and the wedding feast continues. Party on.

The letter to the Hebrews puts the meaning of the incarnation this way: "For it is not as if we has a high priest who was incapable of feeling our weaknesses with us; but we have one who has been tempted in every way that we are, though he is without sin. Let us be confident, then, in approaching the throne of grace, that we shall have mercy from him and find grace when we are in need of help."

On August 15, the Episcopal church, along with many other denominations, will celebrate the feast of the Blessed Virgin Mary, mother of our Lord. My own Anglo-Catholic parish will transfer the observation to tomorrow so more people in our parish can participate in our practices of Marian devotion. I don't begrudge Mary her feast days, but we do ourselves a disservice if we set her apart too much.

If you accept the basic premise of the incarnation, then the person of Mary is pretty mind-blowing. Because it means that Mary, a regular person like you or me, was literally the Mother of God. Dude, like, wow.

The concept that a normal woman could give birth to God is so mind-blowing that the Catholic church has gone out of its way to state that, in fact, Mary was no normal woman. Through the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, which has found some traction in other denominations as well, the Catholic church teaches that Mary was born without original sin. The implication here is that Jesus couldn't have been born from just any woman. It had to be Mary. And the reason it had to be Mary, apparently, is that the genetic cooties of original sin are stronger than the grace of God. This completely misses the point of Mary, and further errs in trying to impose limits on God's power.

Mary's not special. Like us, she probably mostly tried her best, but failed from time to time. She probably talked back to her parents and had petty quarrels with Joseph. And yet for some reason God chose her as a dwelling place for a time before coming into the world.

Pondering why God chose Mary will lead us down blind alleys. Martin Luther notes, "The angel witnesses that she is on the same level with all other saints. He does not praise her for her piety, but simply because of the great grace of God by which she is chosen to be the mother of His own son." Ponder not the why, but the what.

And what is the what? In his letter to the Romans, Paul writes, "From the beginning till now the entire creation, as we know, has been groaning in one great act of giving birth; and not only creation, but all of us who possess the first fruits of the spirit, we too groan inwardly as we wait for our bodies to be set free." (Rom 8:22-23)

The hope we have in Mary is that we, like her, are active participants in the birth of a new creation. If God called on Mary, a sinner like us, to be his home for a while, God may also call on us the same way. We do not have to be perfect to produce holiness. We just have to listen for God's call, and say yes when it comes.

So by all means, let's celebrate Mary. We'll be processing around my church tomorrow with great clouds of incense and some big honking hymns. But let's remember that Mary's no more special than we are; she's only one of us.

This is all I'm going to say about Chick-fil-A

Christianity doesn't ask you to be perfect (thank God), but it does ask you to try. Someone tell me what's trying about eating at Chick-fil-A because Mike Huckabee told you to. Was waiting in the drive-thru line hard? Was figuring out what to order agonizing? Tell me how you helped bring about the kingdom of God by eating at Chick-fil-A yesterday.

Because let me tell you something about Chick-fil-A. While some people talk about their cardboard factory-farmed chicken, I don't care. Chick-fil-A is delicious. It has herbs and spices that make the chicken smell so good that I occasionally surreptitiously ate it during my vegetarian years while I was slouching around College Mall in Bloomington. Their bite-size breakfast chicken sandwiches are perfect to eat with some fruit and trick yourself into thinking you're eating something healthy (you're not).

Now the good news is that I don't really know where there's a Chick-fil-A near me and I wouldn't buy it anyway because I've known about their politics for years. But it turns up at various office functions and I'll be damned if someone else has paid for that delicious chicken and I'm not going to eat it.

But Jesus is about burdens, y'all. Light burdens, but burdens nonetheless. And eating delicious chicken to do exactly the opposite of loving your neighbor? Not a burden.

An uneasy compromise on same-sex unions

So the General Convention authorized the use of a liturgy to bless same sex unions! Hurray! But part of what it took to get it passed was to leave the use of the rite in each diocese to the discretion of its bishop! Um...

So, the positions two bishops are taking on this item are attracting attention. Bishop Kee Sloan of Alabama, who voted for authorizing the rite, has declined to permit its use in Alabama. Bishop Edward Little of the Diocese of Northern Indiana, issued a pastoral letter that in no uncertain terms forbids the use of the liturgy in his diocese. This is not a surprise since he voted against authorizing the liturgy at General Convention. Given that, it's surprising that he took the further step to say this:

Second, priests of the Diocese of Northern Indiana who, for pastoral reasons, wish to use "The Witnessing and Blessing of a Lifelong Covenant" may travel to a neighboring diocese to do so. I have spoken with the bishops of Chicago, Western Michigan, Michigan, Ohio, and Indianapolis (dioceses that border our own), and they have agreed that Northern Indiana priests may request permission to use a church in their dioceses for such a liturgy. Those priests should also apply for a "license to officiate" from the bishop of the neighboring diocese, since the liturgy would be under that bishop’s sacramental covering rather than mine.

These actions are attracting no shortage of criticism and in some cases vitriol (here and especially here for examples, albeit fairly tame ones). And let me be crystal clear on what my position is: I believe that the existing rite of marriage in the Book of Common Prayer should be authorized for use for same-sex couples.

But that is not where we are today. Today we are at an uneasy middle ground, where we have a kind of odd, not altogether satisfying rite (it's here in draft form; there were some modest revisions made at General Convention but I can't track down the revised text), that's a lot like marriage but not really, not strictly speaking a sacrament but treated as though it is, and that can be forbidden by fiat by your local bishop.

Dissatisfying as it may be, this represents enormous progress. The reason the A049 resolution contains the ability for bishops to forbid the use of the liturgy in their dioceses is because that is what it took for it to pass. Without that provision, this resolution would almost certainly have died in the House of Bishops. Further, I think it oversimplifies things to assume that everyone who opposes same-sex unions opposes a role for gay people in the church.

While not all bishops have officially given word one way or the other, it appears that same sex blessings will be made available in most dioceses of the Episcopal Church. I do not know what is in Bishop Sloan's heart, but it seems he voted against his present conscience to be generous to those in other dioceses for whom making this liturgy available is tremendously important. And while Bishop Little voted against the resolution, he has found a way that same-sex couples in his diocese can have their union blessed by a clergy member they know, albeit at the very sad cost of having to do it in an unfamiliar church.

A049 was not the end of the road for same sex marriage in the Episcopal Church, but it seems at this point that the correct approach is not to proceed by taking shots from the blogosphere or questioning the motivations of bishops of good will (it seems that not all of them are, but that's another story).

Instead, we should remember that life in Christ is not instant perfection, but lifelong conversion. Jesus tells us that "my yoke is easy, and my burden is light." Indeed that may be, but there is a yoke, and there is a burden. For those of us fortunate enough to live in dioceses where same sex blessings are permitted (that means me if I maybe one day ask my beloved for his hand in whatever -- no promises!), our burden is to use the rite, magnify the Lord with our unions, and convert hearts. And it will help if all of us - both those for and against same-sex blessings - will celebrate that we can disagree and yet stay together as a church.

This is cold comfort for my brothers and sisters in Northern Indiana and Alabama who yearn to see their unions recognized by the church. Colder comfort still for my brothers and sisters in the Diocese of Albany, whose canons have been interpreted as forbidding any member of the clergy from participating in or even attending a same-sex union, even if in lay clothing (that is absolutely baffling to me; given Jesus's choice of dining companions I find it hard to believe he'd refuse to attend a same-sex union, even if he disapproved). I don't have anything to make this right.

But this is the nature of the compromise that got us this far. We agreed to find a way we could do this and still live with each other. We get to keep praying together, serving together, and talking to each other. Far better this than the alternative.

Toward a Positive Vision of Liberal Christianity

Can the problems of the Episcopal Church be summed up with one silly t-shirt? That may be an overstatement, but New York Times columnist Ross Douthat got me thinking about it in his recent column, “Can Liberal Christianity be Saved?” Douthat argues that recent decades declines in mainline Protestant church membership and attendance is related to the church’s engagement in the divisive cultural debates of our day, principally but not exclusively the role of LGBT
people in society and the church.

Douthat cites two principal factors behind this. One is the influence of thinkers like retired Bishop John Shelby Spong, whose work eviscerates the core of orthodox Christian doctrine. The second is the failure of the church to articulate religious backing to its concern for social justice that in any way distinguishes the church from secular voices advocating similar positions. He's wrong on the first, and correct enough on the second that it's worth talking about. That's where the t-shirt comes in.

But let's deal with Spong first. I think Douthat vastly overestimates the influence of people like him within the church. Spong is not an instigator of where the Episcopal church finds itself today. His work is a last gasp of a line of inquiry that included Bishop John A. T. Robinson’s Honest to God and Leslie Weatherhead’s The Christian Agnostic. The latter book concluded that it’s ok to be a Christian and deny the gospel miracles and the virgin birth, as long as you’re still on board with the physical resurrection of Jesus. Spong does Weatherhead one better and dispenses with the resurrection, too.

What all of these books have in common is a struggle to identify what is true about scripture and the creeds in the face of scientific discoveries about evolution, medicine, cosmology, and the like. Weatherhead’s book, alas, credulously relies on some junk science about spiritualism to support some of its conclusions. The debates contained in these books were perhaps necessary as the church grappled with the discovered world and chose not to be a faith that denies the facts in front of it. This is a good thing. But these authors erred in allowing discovery to constrain revelation, rather than expanding their understanding of revelation to accommodate discovery.

As quickly as I dismiss Spong and his intellectual forbears, I should acknowledge that the conversations they started opened up my own understanding of the claims of scripture and the creeds and gave me a vocabulary to express my own views. The idea of the virgin birth, the resurrection and second coming of Jesus, etc. do not require us to deny objective scientific reality, but they do live in tension with it. There is our daily lived reality, and a deeper real reality. We experience that real reality as if it is on the other side of a veil: close, but often invisible,
occasionally seen, only once in a great while truly breaking through. I cannot quantify how many other Episcopalians see things in this or a similar way, but I’d guess that it’s a greater proportion than those who say the Nicene Creed with their fingers crossed. It’s also not a unique or new idea, as I recently learned when I chanced upon a fascinating lecture on Jewish scholar Franz Rosenweig while driving the other night, but it's one that members of the church may not feel comfortable articulating.

Douthat’s second critique – that Episcopalians have failed to articulate a religious reason for their positions is worth spending more time on. It’s easy to get defensive on this point, to say, as some have, that if Douthat comes to any Episcopal church on a Sunday, he’ll find a congregation at prayer as sincere as Douthat’s own Roman Catholic parish. One might also reasonably argue that there’s some heavy-duty theological work behind the rite for blessing same sex relationships approved at the recent General Convention. Both of these things are true.

But these objections do not negate Douthat’s observation. To experience the church as a praying community, one must first walk in the doors. There’s no question that in our denomination, though certainly not in every parish, over the last couple decades, more people have been walking out than in. Heavy duty theological discussion deep in the pages of the Blue Book may be wonderful, but it’s no good if few within the church can restate them. Indeed, in the House of Deputies at the recent General Convention, just about the only folks expected to read the many hundreds of pages of documentation underlying all manner of legislation, referenced theology and the Bible rarely enough to make much of the debate in the house indistinguishable from what might occur at any other organization of humanists unusually well-versed in parliamentary procedure.

(On the other hand, perhaps we shouldn't judge the deputies too harshly for this, because one alternative to the status quo is some horrific proof-texting extravaganza. But I digress.)

Moreover, the Episcopal church has a problem not just in stating its reasons grounded in faith for the prominent social stands it has taken in recent years. It also has difficulty defining its reason for being in terms that involve God, or for that matter, positive terms of any type.

Take, for instance, what is perhaps the Episcopal Church’s most visible vehicle for attracting believers, the “Top 10 Reasons to be anEpiscopalian” t-shirt. The reasons are apparently derived from a Robin Williams HBO special a decade or so ago. They are:

10. No snake handling.

9. You can believe in dinosaurs.

8. Male and female God created them; male and female we ordain them.

7. You don’t have to check your brains at the door.

6. Pew aerobics.

5. Church year is color coded.

4. Free wine on Sunday.

3. All of the pageantry, none of the guilt.

2. You don’t have to know how to swim to get baptized.

1. No matter what you believe, there’s bound to be at least one other Episcopalian that agrees with you.

I’m going to set the question of whether t-shirts are an effective means of evangelism to one side (I think they can be helpful, but they shouldn’t be at the top of anyone’s list), and focus on whether this is really how we want to define ourselves as a church. Reasons 10, 9, 7, 3, and 2 all define the church in negative terms. Rather than saying what the Episcopal Church is, these reasons just define us in opposition to other Christians and they're smug to boot. Number 6 and number 5 don’t mean anything to outsiders. Number 3 and number 2 manage to demean what should be one of our top selling points, our sacramental life together. Number 2 further discredits immersion baptism, which is a perfectly valid and meaningful option. Number 1 simply reinforces the popular point that Episcopalians don’t really believe anything. Number 8 may be the only one worth saying in the
way it’s presented: it says something positive about our church and articulates a reason grounded in faith for it.

None of this is a judgment on Robin Williams’ comedy routine, by the way. I’ve never seen it; it may be very funny, though one certainly hopes there's more to it than these 10 lines. And there’s certainly no harm in making jokes about our church – that, too, is one of our selling points. But I emphatically do not think that these top 10 reasons should be adopted as any kind of official statement by the church, and the fact that these t-shirts were on sale at the national church’s booth at General Convention and are sold by a church affiliate certainly seems to indicate that they are.

I wouldn’t bother attacking this defenseless t-shirt if it were not broadly indicative of how we talk about ourselves as a church. We have a hard time saying who were are. Too often we define ourselves in the negative. It’s my bad habit, too. This is particularly perilous in a post-Christian culture. Trying to define ourselves this way implies that our evangelism strategy is to engage in a market share game, where we try to pick off converts from the Catholic church or our more fundamentalist brothers and sisters. Meanwhile the proportion of unchurched Americans is steadily rising, and we need to act as if we have something to offer those who do not yet believe. How do we tell our story?

To that end, the Bible study we undertook at the second evening gathering of the Acts 8 Moment (summarized here), is instructive. 30 or so people spent some time as a group reflecting on the story of Philip and the Ethiopian eunuch from (you guessed it) the eighth chapter of Acts. Here it is:

Then an angel of the Lord said to Philip, ‘Get up and go towards the south to the road that goes down from Jerusalem to Gaza.’ (This is a wilderness road.)²⁷ So he got up and went. Now there was an Ethiopian eunuch, a court official of the Candace, queen of the Ethiopians, in charge of her entire treasury. He had come to Jerusalem to worship ²⁸and was returning home; seated in his chariot, he was reading the prophet Isaiah.²⁹Then the Spirit said to Philip, ‘Go over to this chariot and join it.’³⁰So Philip ran up to it and heard him reading the prophet Isaiah. He asked, ‘Do you understand what you are reading?’³¹He replied, ‘How can I, unless someone guides me?’ And he invited Philip to get in and sit beside him.³²Now the passage of the scripture that he was reading was this: 

‘Like a sheep he was led to the slaughter,
and like a lamb silent before its shearer,
so he does not open his mouth.
³³ In his humiliation justice was denied him.
Who can describe his generation?
For his life is taken away from the earth.’ 

³⁴The eunuch asked Philip, ‘About whom, may I ask you, does the prophet say this, about himself or about someone else?’³⁵Then Philip began to speak, and starting with this scripture, he proclaimed to him the good news about Jesus.³⁶As they were going along the road, they came to some water; and the eunuch said, ‘Look, here is water! What is to prevent me from being baptized?’ He commanded the chariot to stop, and both of them, Philip and the eunuch, went down into the water, and Philip baptized him.³⁹When they came up out of the water, the Spirit of the Lord snatched Philip away; the eunuch saw him no more, and went on his way rejoicing.⁴⁰But Philip found himself at Azotus, and as he was passing through the region, he proclaimed the good news to all the towns until he came to Caesarea. 

We talked about all kinds of aspects of this story (there's a whole lot in here -- what about that wilderness road?), but I just want to focus on one of them as a starting point. Philip's conversation with the eunuch starts not with the miracles, nor the virgin birth, nor the resurrection, nor the threat of the outer darkness, nor a liberal commitment to social justice, but with the profound mystery of the sacrifice of Jesus. He goes straight to the heart of God's compassion for creation, and builds from there. The foundation of our faith is that God became one with us in the person of Jesus, sacrificed himself for all of us, and gives us hope in the resurrection.

This is kind of heavy stuff, and it's a little weird. I've noted before how I never really got the resurrection (until I did), so the next task is to connect this foundational understanding to our personal stories and our collective actions as a church. This is far from a sufficient solution, but it is a starting point. It involves saying something positive about the God who grounds us, not putting other believers down.

Biblical support for pet funerals

I'm reluctant to contribute anything further to the debate about the Jay Akasie article about the General Convention in last week's Wall Street Journal, considering how easy it is to knock down his errors (see Scott Gunn's blog for a comprehensive list), but I can't stop myself from weighing in on the pet funerals question.
Let's be clear that the General Convention did not authorize pet funerals. It authorized a service of comfort for someone grieving at the loss of a pet. It's actually a lovely document, but compare it to the burial offices in the Book of Common Prayer and it's easy to spot that there is no equivalency here. This is a kind pastoral office, not a theological statement on the soul.
Still, would it be so wrong if it were? In one of tonight's Psalms for evening prayer, we come across this: "Your righteousness is like the strong mountains, your justice like the great deep; you save both man and beast, O Lord." (Ps. 36:6). I don't know about you, but this sounds like a virtual mandate for miniature caskets to me.