First, may I say how honored I
am to be invited to be here with
you in this convention.
I am grateful to the Episcopal
Church USA for many occasions when
I have learned from you and been
supported by you. In the 18 years
I was Primate, I spent over a year
not only in the USA but also in
overseas dioceses. Personally,
I have managed to visit 46 of the
50 states as well as the District
of Columbia and the Virgin Islands.
And I'm working on getting to the
last four states.
I am particularly glad that this
invitation came through your Bishop,
whom I met many years ago when
I was a member of the Joint Standing
Committee of the Anglican Communion,
and he was on the staff of the
Communion working on issues of
human rights at the office of the
Anglican Observer at the United
Nations. It was clear even in his
younger days that he was a man
to watch, and you are both benefiting
from that talent and shaping its
development. Again speaking personally,
it is a joy to be on the Pacific
coast, the place where I was born
and educated. I am a native of
Vancouver, the more northerly one,
though I have lived elsewhere for
50 years. But it is always grand
to return, especially when the
rest of Canada is colder.
My first visit to Oregon was in
1948 when we went to visit family
in California. We drove south on
Highways 99 and 97 (my father wanted
to see Crater Lake) and back on
Highway 101 (my mother wanted to
see the Oregon coast.)
Convention theme
I want to do two things: first
to support your theme for this
convention and your Bishop's words
of last evening, and to do that
partly through my own experience;
and second, to bring some of that
experience to bear on the challenges
of Anglican life at the moment.
The Gospel of Matthew ends with
the words we heard last night.
The verbs are clear and strong:
go, make disciples, baptize, teach.
Matthew intends them to reinforce
the legacy of Jesus. What is that
legacy? It is Luke who spells that
out, particularly in the first
chapters of the Acts of the Apostles.
It is a community, the called community,
which we call Church. Unlike other
great religious founders, Jesus
did not leave a book-he left a
community, and the community wrote
the books. A community which was
to "go," that is, to
reach out beyond itself; "make
disciples," that is, to grow; "baptize," that
is, to incorporate growth within
the community; "teach," that
is, to ensure that the community
is a place where we meet God in
Jesus Christ.
All these words together make
up an inviting Church-a word to
which I shall return. The challenge
for us is to recover, both as individuals
and as the Church, these verbs
where we are weak, and to reinforce
those verbs where we are strong.
Where are we weak? In "going." In
actually inviting people. We North
American Episcopalians and Anglicans
are often compared unflatteringly
to, for example, East Africans
in this regard. But the challenge
to invite others to come with us
is more than simply a matter of
strengthening the nerve of individual
members; it is equally a challenge
to parishes and dioceses as organisms,
as living entities. If I am to
invite someone to share the life
of a community which has been life-giving
to me, the community must be, at
the least, welcoming, and even
more, be inviting and engaging
as a community. That corporate
responsibility is no less important
than our individual responsibilities.
Where are we strong? I learned
this from bishops in Kenya, who
envy your Church and mine for our "baptizing" and "teaching" capacities.
True, in Kenya people are converted
by the thousands. But sometimes
their integration into the corporate
life of the Church "in the
Anglican tradition" is so
weak that the influx of large numbers
leads to strife, division, litigation,
and even schism.
Personal Experience
I say these things with a conviction
reinforced by personal experience.
My youth involved being sent (not
brought) to Sunday School, being
sent to confirmation class, receiving
the laying on of hands and Holy
Communion-and then quitting.
It was in my university years
that friends actually invited me
to their church. It was a church
in Vancouver's "downtown eastside," arguably
the worst slum in Canada. It was
then, and I dare say now, scarcely
congenial to a nice middle-class
youth. But it was a church whose
instincts were all directed to
reaching out, to including, to
teaching the faith, to serving
the local community. So I care
about all these issues.
My parents were appalled when
I first began to discern a calling
to ordained ministry. Shaped by
two world wars and a depression,
my parents wanted to see their
children educated and better situated
in life than they had been. My
mother, thinking of the slum parish,
the Anglo-Catholic tradition, all
very marginal, put it succinctly: "You'll
never go anywhere in the Church."
Well, I've gone a number of places
and, more importantly, learned
more than I could ask or ever imagine.
I want to offer some of these experiences
in these times of stress.
Working Through Disagreement
Let me begin by quoting the legal
officer of the Anglican Communion,
John Rees: "The Lambeth Conference
of 1988 said that 'authority in
the Church works through, rather
than in spite of, disagreement." It
could hardly be otherwise in a
worldwide Christian community characterized
as "a learning Church as well
as a teaching Church." Recent
history -I mean the twentieth century-has
been marked by the Church's willingness
to engage with difficult and divisive
issues such as birth control, polygamy,
divorce, and the ordination of
women. It will not escape your
notice that these issues involve
the always tense intersection of
religion and sexuality.
It has fallen to your province
to raise all but one (polygamy)
of those contentious issues. Why?
What next? My basic learning through
the years is that we don't know
where we're going unless we know
where we've been. That's a fundamental
principle-that's why the evangelists
wrote the gospels, and Paul and
others of the epistles-to tell
a new generation where we've been.
Let me take one example: In the
early years of our separate existence,
our Anglican forebears did not
write the dogmatic and systematic
texts of Calvin, or the radically
challenging thoughts of Luther,
or even undertake the institutional
overhaul of the Council of Trent.
Our strongest and deepest sixteenth-century
thinker, Richard Hooker, wrote
a book called The Laws of Ecclesiastical
Polity. He wrote about the community-it
needed its roots both in scripture
and tradition-but it also needed
its roots in the place and the
time where God had placed it. And
from this has sprung the ethos
of Anglicanism, a worldwide communion
made incarnate in local churches
(what we call provinces). The great
twentieth-century exponent of Anglican
life, Bishop Stephen Neill, is
the source of the quotation, "not
only a teaching Church, but a learning
Church." And, we learn, from
deep local roots. Hooker reinforced
the concept of a Church as inclusive
as humanly possible, a concept
that would be shaken by the departure
of Roman Catholics in the sixteenth
century and the Puritans in the
seventeenth century. But the principle
endures.
I said that your province has
addressed these issues before many
others. But you address them not,
as some outsiders would suggest,
out of sheer cussedness or meddlesomeness,
but from a desire to put together
your biblical and theological heritage
with your pastoral heart, which
prays for the wholeness of the
society in which God has placed
you. And, you do this with a powerful
desire for unity. I always keep
in my mind the observation that
in the aftermath of the most divisive
moment in the history of your nation,
the Civil War, your Church was
unique among the non-Roman Catholic
churches of the day in that it
did not divide into northern and
southern as so many others did.
It is an inspiring example, and
you know more about it than I,
and it inspires most of your leadership
today.
Three Vignettes
I want to close with three vignettes
from one of the places I have been
in a long and "peculiar" life
in the Church, namely, as a Primate.
After the Lambeth Conference of
1988, your Church moved to ordain
a woman to the Episcopate, the
very thing many at that meeting
had feared. The first meeting of
the Primates after that event wrestled
with the question "What is
the glue of the Anglican Communion-what
holds us together?"-scarcely
that ancient piece of glue, the
Book of Common Prayer of 1662,
in a Church where vast numbers
of Anglicans worshipping on a Sunday
don't speak English. The provinces
have created a Council, the bishops
have a conference called Lambeth,
and the Primates have a Meeting.
In the last half of the twentieth
century there were two Congresses,
one in your country and one in
mine, and I pray that the hoped-for
gathering of 2008 in South Africa
will bring together a body predominantly
made up of laity. We meet. It was
Desmond Tutu who said, "we
meet." And the Primates should
know-when they are together, it's
the Primates Meeting. (I have quoted
Desmond so often on this subject,
that he says that actually I said
it and just attached his name to
give it credibility-not so!) Once
when I offered this observation,
someone responded that, as glue,
it sounded pretty thin. My response
was to say, "But what if someone
says, 'I won't meet'?" That
is the end. The refusal to meet
is serious beyond words, and we
are now seeing it.
It was your province and mine
that together called for the first
world-wide Anglican meeting in
1867. The Anglican Communion was
not created by that meeting, but
the beginnings of an ongoing process
of growing together was established.
Meet (and right!,) as the liturgy
says. And we continue to meet.
Some feel they must say "I
cannot accept where you are going,
and I must leave." Sad, but
a principled statement. We do not
say "I cannot accept where
you are going, and you must leave." That
is also the end.
We recently had a meeting of some
Canadian Anglicans who feel strongly
about some of the contemporary
divisions. They required that anyone,
participant or media, who wished
to attend, must sign a statement
agreeing to some very particular
positions within Anglicanism. That
excluded all media, Church and
secular-a strategic blunder-but
it went seriously against Hooker
and history.
You call this meeting a "convention," a
coming together in Latin; we call
it a "synod," a road
together in Greek, we meet together.
At another such meeting, we were
wrestling with the challenge, raised
by some people in the Church, that
we Anglicans have no criteria for
determining what is essential in
doctrine and practice. As the debate
wore on, a Primate from the south
offered (characteristically for
an African) a gospel text: the
parable of the wheat and the tares.
Let both grow together until the
harvest and the Lord of the harvest
will decide. And, a northern Primate
pointed to the words, in the Acts
of the Apostles, of the Pharisee
Gamaliel, that if any new undertaking
is merely human it will eventually
fail, but if it is of God it will
be unassailable in the long run.
The example this primate used
was the doctrine of the Divine
Right of Kings (and it was a doctrine,
biblically based and theologically
defended, not merely a political
theory). An Archbishop of Canterbury
was martyred for it, yet I have
heard little of it in my lifetime.
So the word for our criterion is "time."
It is a challenging word. It reminds
me of Archbishop Robert Runcie's
constant reminder that "we
are in for the long haul," and
it stands as a challenge to us
who live in a culture that wants
to see everything done by yesterday.
It is a call to a patience that
can only be made incarnate by meeting.
The third vignette is more recent
and comes from a meeting of the
same folks. At a certain point
the leader reminded us of the printed
schedule for the day, which called
for a Eucharist at the end of the
morning. One person intervened
with the challenge that he and
some others would feel that such
a celebration would be impossible
until the outstanding issues were
resolved to his satisfaction. Some
voices were raised to support that
statement, and others to question
it. The already electric air of
the meeting was becoming supercharged.
After a time the president announced
that he was going to the sacristy
to vest and at the time appointed
on the schedule he would go to
the altar. And everyone else met
him there.
This was an example of focus-focus
on what is essential in our life
as community, as Church-namely,
the meeting with God in Christ
in word and sacrament. So, meeting,
time, and focus.
Meeting: It needs to be organized
(something your province does well)
but also valued, nourished, and
cherished.
Time: It requires patience. We
North Americans live in a society
driven by issues and impatience-we
want it done, and, as I have said,
done yesterday. Older societies
have much to teach us.
Focus: What is absolutely of the
essence and what is peripheral?
May God bless you in this meeting,
this diocese, this province, and
all of us together as we meet and
wait upon God.
