“We too have a dream…based on the Church’s prophetic stance on justice and peace”

On By Jesse ZinkIn Sudan1 Comment

Folks who know I’ve spent some time in Sudan have lately been in habit of beginning conversations with me like this: “Isn’t the news from Sudan awful?!”

I never quite know how to respond. On the one hand, yes, it is true: what filters out in the wider world—and onto top-of-the-hour NPR newscasts—is pretty bad. On the other hand, Sudan and South Sudan are both hugely complex places that make me uncomfortable rendering sweeping judgements. Yes, it seems renewed war between north and south is a real possibility. On the other hand, there’s news of a (church-led) peace conference in Jonglei, a separate, non-border part of South Sudan, which, before the doings of the last few weeks, has been a source of awful news. At the same time, a conflict that has been going on for nearly a year continues in the Nuba Mountains and elsewhere along the border.

So when people ask me this question, I—who have no special insight or knowledge beyond what is publicly available to all—usually say, yes, there’s been some bad news but I have a lot of hope about the future.

One reason for hope centres on the ongoing role of the church in peace-building. Several Catholic and Episcopal bishops recently met in Yei and articulated some of their hopes for the future. The statement is worth reading in its entirety but here are a few extracts:

The Church is not only for Christians nor for South Sudanese. The Church identifies with the poor and oppressed of any creed, ethnicity or nationality, wherever they are…. We bring to the world not the voice of politicians, parties or movements but of the people on the ground, who are suffering a humanitarian tragedy and whose human dignity and human rights are not respected by their own government.

Martin Luther King famously said, “I have a dream”. We too have a dream, a vision, a conviction. Our dream is based on Gospel values; on the Church’s prophetic stance on justice and peace; and on the dignity of each human being, created in the image and likeness of God. Where others see problems, we see the presence of God and the opportunities which God’s presence opens up for us. The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, for he has anointed me to bring good news to the afflicted (Luke 4:18). Our dream is an expression of this Good News….

We dream of people no longer traumatised, of children who can go to school, of mothers who can attend clinics, of an end to poverty and malnutrition, and of Christians and Muslims who can attend church or mosque freely without fear. Enough is enough. There should be no more war between Sudan and South Sudan!

Blessed are the peacemakers; they shall be recognised as children of God (Matthew 5:9). We take this very seriously, and we stand committed to do all in our power to make our dream a reality. We believe that the people and government of South Sudan desperately want peace. We believe the same is true of the people and their liberation movements in the Nuba Mountains and Blue Nile. We do not believe, however, that a lasting peace will come unless all parties act in good faith. Trust must be built, and this involves honesty, however painful that may be. We invite the International Community to walk with us on the painful journey of exploring the truth in competing claims and counter-claims, allegations and counter-allegations. We invite them to understand the peaceful aspirations of the ordinary people, and to reflect that in their statements and actions.

So, get involved in Sudan. Pay attention. Become an advocate. Do what the bishops are asking and walk with Sudanese on “the painful journey of exploring the truth.”

Is the news awful? In many places, yes. Is the situation without hope? Absolutely not.

Dislocated Liturgy

On By Jesse ZinkIn Episcopal ChurchLeave a comment

In her new book, Still: Notes on a Mid-Faith Crisis, Lauren Winner has a section on “dislocated exegesis.” That’s the practice of reading a familiar Bible passage in an unfamiliar context, say, in front of an immigration detention facility.

I thought of that when I read this post from my fellow seminarians at Nashotah House in Wisconsin. It seems a bunch of them put on cassocks, left behind the confines of their seminary, and went and chanted the Great Litany and Compline.

My friend Nathaniel, who wrote that post, calls it one of the most profound liturgical moments of his seminary training:

I was deeply impacted by the juxtaposition of the rhythm of liturgy with the pulse of the city.  Indeed, we might call it a “secular liturgy.”  The ebb and flow of quotidian humanity passed before us: buying and selling, eating dinner, parking, going from point A to point B and back again, waiting for a rendezvous, panhandling.  I was overwhelmed with the sense of how God delights in his creation, and how he yearns to bless, and to transform, and to open all of these to being Eucharistic.  He longs for these liturgies to be transparent to his work and to his love in the world; to turn all of these banal experiences into sacrifices of thanksgiving through union with Christ.

Slowing down, being still and silent in that place, and listening to the Spirit, I suddenly had a sense of the presence and the nearness of God.  I have never experienced this in a city before.  I have always experienced cities as being somewhat cold and godless, full of noise and distraction.  And yet, standing in silence, hearing all the noises of the traffic, and distant conversations, and doors opening and closing, I experienced a beautiful cacophony that is no different than anywhere else where human hearts beat, and that God is no further there than in the monastery secluded in the deepest wood or emptiest desert hermitage.

Liturgy is one of the great strengths of the Anglican tradition. How else could this idea be adapted in your context?

The distinctiveness of the Episcopal Church

On By Jesse ZinkIn Episcopal ChurchLeave a comment

Samuel Seabury asked a question on Twitter recently:

(Isn’t Twitter wonderful? Dead Episcopal bishops tweeting. Seabury’s old foe William White is online as well.)

I think Seabury asks a good question here. If I remember my history correctly, at the time the Episcopal Church was being born, there were no other churches in the new United States of America that had bishops. Congregationalists, Methodists, Quakers all stressed local governance.

In this context, naming the church “Episcopal” is something a bold move. “Look at us,” it says, “we have bishops and we are connected to the historic, true church. We are distinctive.”

So as the Episcopal Church once again struggles to find its way in a changing world, I wonder if asking Seabury’s question again is helpful: in the current religious marketplace, what makes the Episcopal Church distinctive?

Relatedly, is highlighting our distinctiveness the way to go? Or should we be stressing what we have in common, not only with other Christians but with all folks everywhere?

Beyond “open communion”

On By Jesse ZinkIn Episcopal Church5 Comments

As if the current raft of controversies isn’t enough, the Episcopal Church is moving towards open debate about the relationship between the Eucharist and baptism. The other weekend, I attended a gathering in the Diocese of Connecticut on this issue.

What struck me at the gathering was not so much the arguments about the issue at hand (which I’m not going to rehash here, although I do find that this article has a helpful new take on old questions) but that each speaker acknowledged in one way or another that the questions raised by this debate go much deeper than the relationship between the Eucharist and baptism.

I think this is right. This conversation is bubbling up in the church at this particular time not so much because of a sudden, pressing need to re-evaluate the church’s historic teachings on baptism and the Eucharist but because it is a useful proxy issue for countless other conversations the church needs to be having.

As I see it, the debate about baptism and the Eucharist is also about the following (and this is a non-exhaustive list):

  • What is the church’s relationship with the culture in which we find ourselves? One way of asking this is to wonder about the relationship between the claim to “radical hospitality” and “anything goes” nature of our world.
  • People are wounded. The way the world works exacts a huge cost on people. I think of this anytime I hear people preach a theological anthropology that stresses the goodness of people—we are all “magnificent creations of the divine” as I heard recently. Rather than stressing the way in which Jesus brings about change in our lives, the church is in a position of preaching that we are all really just OK and we can all be “radically included.” We preach that because so much of the world says otherwise.
  • Relatedly, what do we do not want in church? As one of the speakers at the event said, “If you ran a church that was ‘radically inclusive,’ you’d probably be in jail.” How do we say “no” in the church?
  • I have a hard time imagining that we would be having this debate if church attendance was growing. In this light, proposals for open communion can look like a desperate attempt to get people to stay in church, out of fear that if we tell them they need to be baptized first they’ll never come back. How do we avoid approaching ministry from a position of fear about church decline?
  • Do we value theological coherence in the church? If we do, I have a hard time seeing how we can square the baptismal ecclesiology that has been so prevalent recently with open communion. I suspect we don’t value coherence so much as we value “bums in pews”… and we’re willing to do anything we can to get them there. What would an ecclesiology that takes no account of church size look like?
  • How is our liturgy related to our witness to the world? Do we have to have Eucharist at virtually every service (“Eucharistic inflation” as I’ve heard it called)?

Whatever the outcome of the various resolutions that are pending on this question, it seems unlikely that there will be much change in practice. Those who do now give communion to those who are not baptized will likely not change. If the canons are changed, it seems unlikely that congregations supporting the traditional teaching of the church will change either.

But what could change is that the church could have a larger conversation about some of these larger questions. Rather than getting lost in a welter of confusion over a question that really isn’t going to change much, maybe we could start addressing some of the serious underlying issues.

What other questions does this issue raise for you? And what else would you like to see the church discuss?

Remembering St. Peter’s, Ellicott City

On By Jesse ZinkIn Episcopal Church1 Comment

For the last few days, I have been processing the news of the shooting at St. Peter’s, Ellicott City, a church I have visited and preached at on more than one occasion. The shooting resulted in the death of Mary-Marguerite Kohn, a priest I remember well. The church’s administrative assistant Brenda Brewington was also killed.

I was invited to St. Peter’s because the congregation has long supported African Medical Mission, the organization I worked for when I lived in South Africa. In fact, AMM’s Jenny McConnachie was at St. Peter’s just a few weeks back. As the stories about the shooting have made clear, St. Peter’s is a congregation that was committed to ministry with all kinds of people from all walks of life. (It seems the shooter was a homeless man who had been served by the St. Peter’s food pantry.) It’s in the nature of a church that was founded to minister to mill workers in Ellicott City.

Over the weekend, I had a look back at one of the sermons I’ve preached at St. Peter’s. The text was the rich man and the eye of the needle. I noted this paragraph:

We’ve seen how wealth can help us build walls around ourselves. We’ve seen that Jesus is calling us to make ourselves a little more open and a little more vulnerable to the world around us. The phrase I want to use to describe this is the same phrase that we use to describe what Jesus did – incarnation. Reconciliation begins when we choose to go to a new place in the world and simply exist. God used God’s immense power to choose to exist in an entirely new way, among humans. We have wealth and power and we must use it to exist in a new space. Sometimes that new space means getting up and moving from North America to a shantytown in South Africa. But sometimes going to that new space means simply exploring a different part of the town you’ve lived in your entire life. Sometimes going to that new space simply means going down to the end of the pew after the service and talking to the person you’ve never met before. God’s mission of reconciliation requires of us an incarnational ministry. That means we have to simply be in a new and different way and in a new and different place. It is both a reassuringly simple and monumentally difficult task but it is at the centre of our Christian calling.

In reading about the shooting, I’ve been struck by just how much emphasis Mary-Marguerite put on exactly this kind of incarnational ministry. St. Peter’s didn’t need me to tell them about this; they just needed to look at their co-rector.

I’ve written and preached about vulnerability frequently. (The Incarnation is the central idea in my new book.) But I never had anything like this in mind, perhaps one reason I’ve found these deaths so shocking. In my Good Friday sermon this year, I preached about daily crucifixions that are all around us. These three deaths are one example of exactly that.

St. Peter’s other co-rector, Kirk Kubicek, preached a beautiful sermon last Sunday that just about sums it up:

It is their commitment to serving their brothers and sisters whoever they might be, and believe me if you spend any time in our office you eventually see every kind of brother and sister there is, that sent them home to the heart of Love. We will never know why, but we do know they and the man they were serving are with the God who says, You are my Beloved – with you I am well pleased….

And I still see two women who were and continue to be exemplars to us of what it means to abide with Christ – what it means to be known by Christ.

In truth, right now they are where they have always been – in the heart of God’s everlasting love.

Mary-Marguerite’s funeral gets underway in just a few minutes in Baltimore.

News from Sudan

On By Jesse ZinkIn Sudan1 Comment

If you have been reading the news from Sudan lately, you will know that it is not good, and that the two countries are teetering close to all-out war.

Here is this, from Bishop Abraham Nhial of the Diocese of Aweil, with news from his diocese on the border between north and south. (I travelled with Abraham to one of the critical border regions last July.)

Dear all,

This letter is to update you all about the current war situation in South Sudan, as many of you have seen it in television and it read it in the newspapers, the war is back to us. As we are watching television and reading about what going on through the newspapers, we learnt that many people are killed, wounded, displaced and their properties are looted or destroyed by the soldiers from Sudan government leaving them in horrible situation.

As I write this letter many of displaced people go to bed everyday without food even one meal in a day is not there, leave alone shelters to protect them from the rains and no clothing to cover their skinny bodies. The displaced persons have experienced great trauma and great suffering now more than ever because no one was affecting war again soon. In fact, people were preparing to cultivate their farms and they were working hard to start new life the new nation.

This letter is to inform you friends of the Diocese of Aweil that two thousand eight hundred and sixty people are displaced by the recent fight in the North Barh el Ghazal State. Therefore, I am appealing to you all, individually, a church and a community to pray for us, advocate on our behalf and consider to support if you can to save the lives of your brothers and sisters in Christ from dying of hunger. Please may you all show them the love of Christ the need now at this difficult time in their lives. I will becoming to USA on May 08 and I would love to visit some of you if you want me to speak in your church, business, school or community  gathering etc.

As usual, I am truly thankful for everything you do every single time. There is no bigger blessing than friends like you always stand with us in time of trouble like this; may God bless you and reward you all for your services.

With love always!

Bishop Abraham Nhial
ECS Diocese of Aweil
South Sudan

It’s worth underscoring that advocacy really does matter and that the United States can play a significant role in this situation in preventing the outbreak of what would be an incredibly disastrous war. Have you talked to your senators or representatives lately? Now’s a good time to start.

“What we have here is a failure to communicate!”

On By Jesse ZinkIn Anglican Communion, Grace at the Garbage Dump2 Comments

Here is a story that should come as no surprise to anyone:

The Anglican Communion faces a shortage of qualified communicators, according to an international Working Group on communications. The group—consisting of communications professionals from five continents—concluded that the Communion life was at risk of being detrimentally affected by some Provinces’ inability to source and share their news and stories widely.

In my travels around the world church, I routinely encounter fascinating, inspiring, and transformative work that is going on—and realize almost no one else knows about it. I’m convinced that communications is part of the church’s missional witness to the world but we’re not doing a great job of it.

Here are at least some of the reasons why I think this is happening:

  • English is the de facto language of the Communion. If you are among the majority of Anglicans who do not speak English as a first language, you might not want to write down your story and share it. Many Anglicans, I’ve learned, are eager to talk in person about what they are doing but reluctant to commit those same thoughts to paper, at least in part, I think, because they think they lack the ability to do so.
  • Folks engaged in the most fascinating ministry around the world often spend so much of their time in ministry that they don’t make the time to tell their story. This is a perfectly understandable impulse but it is one that drives me crazy. We want to hear your story! We want to be able to pray for you and support you and we can’t do that unless you tell us what is going on.
  • People are humble. This is wonderful. Lots of people I’ve met engaged in transformative ministry around the world just don’t think that what they’re doing is all that important and can’t see why anyone else would want to know about what they’re doing. Humility is a great Christian virtue—but a little well deserved tooting of one’s own horn wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world.

And so we get stuck in the position we are in now: no one really knows what else is going on around the world church. The loudest, shrillest, and most destructive voices dominate the conversation. And everyone thinks we’re falling apart. But we’re not. I’m really convinced of that. We just need to tell the story better.

Part of the reason I wrote my book, Grace at the Garbage Dump, is to counter exactly this tendency towards miscommunication. It tells the story of work in one diocese in one particular province. But books like it could be written of the work in countless dioceses around the world.

How do we argue in the church?

On By Jesse ZinkIn Episcopal Church2 Comments

I once met an Orthodox woman who was flabbergasted to hear that in some parts of the Episcopal Church, Mary is not venerated. “I know there can be different practices on the Eucharist and other things,” she said, “but I just don’t see how you can be a Christian and not venerate the Virgin Mary!”

I thought of that woman the other night when I had a conversation with a very good friend of mine about communion with the unbaptized. This is the practice of sharing communion with all who come to the rail, regardless of whether they are baptized or not.

My friend, who opposes changing the practice, said, “I can’t see the point of having a conversation with someone who disagrees with me on this subject. It just seems so obvious what the answer is.”

My friend also supports the full inclusion of gays and lesbians in the church. I pointed out to him that his comment is more or less what has been said by those who oppose changing the church’s teachings on homosexuality.

Everyone draws the line in a different place. Mary. Homosexuality. Communion. We all (and I include myself here) have issues on which we are unyielding and absolutely convinced of our own rightness.

We’ve had a decade or more of trench warfare in the Episcopal Church on sexuality (which continues). It has conditioned us to think of a major liberal / conservative divide in the church. What is interesting about the communion debate is the way in which it complicates this divide, as my friend demonstrates. This actually fills me with hope.

I hope that in this conversation about communion we will learn again how to disagree with one another. I hope we learn that the liberal / conservative understanding of the church is not set in stone and, in fact, doesn’t do a very good job of capturing its full diversity. I hope we can learn that Christian unity is not about ensuring that everyone believes and does the same thing. Rather, Christian unity is about recognizing a pattern of faithful living in another person, a pattern of living that shows that one’s life has been transformed by Christ.

It is very easy in any debate—sexuality, communion, Mary—for the stakes to escalate quickly and for anathemas to start being thrown around with reckless abandon. (It has always been so in church history.) What if, in this conversation about communion, we could start by focusing on our patterns of faithful living and pursue ways of building these ties? What would it be like for people who disagree on communion to come together for prayer, instead of debate? As much as I am filled with hope, I fear that Tom Ferguson is right and the communion question will quickly become one which “will just become another flashpoint as we organize ourselves into our little mini-communities, desperately trying to find the people who are like us, and, hence, the true Episcopalians.”

I’m not saying that conversation on this topic, and many others, is not necessary. But it’s striking how quickly we think debate can be the only thing we need to do in the church when, in fact, it’s a small part of what it means to be a Christian wrestling with a difficult topic.

The way in which the church argues can be a key part of our counter-cultural witness to the world. Maybe on the communion question we can begin to get it right.

More than leading worship

On By Jesse ZinkIn EcumenicalLeave a comment

I mentioned that Yale’s favourite son, Mark Miller, would be involved in the worship at the ongoing United Methodist General Conference this week and next. It turns out he’s doing more than that.

You can read about Mark’s point of personal privilege last night or watch the whole thing here: Mark begins at 51:24 and goes for about three minutes. It’s well worth watching.

I know that Robert’s Rules must be followed but it is interesting that the General Conference will give Mark a microphone all he wants, so long as he is singing or leading music, but when he wants to actually talk about something, especially something this important, he’s asked to stop.

I’ve sung under Mark’s direction in the Gospel Choir these last few years and deeply admire, respect, and like him. What I am reminded of in listening to him speak is a) the deep difficulty in holding honest conversations across lines of difference and b) the deep importance of doing so nonetheless. These conversations don’t get easier but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t keep trying to have them—in a way that is loving and truthful and opens a space for all voices to be heard in a safe place.

Lessons from our Methodist Siblings

On By Jesse ZinkIn Ecumenical2 Comments

I’m no expert on the United Methodist Church but I do know the UMC’s General Conference is happening in Tampa this week and next so I spent some time on its web site this morning learning about what is going on. Given that we share an interim ecumenical agreement with the UMC and we’re both mainline denominations in the United States, I figure Episcopalians have something to learn from what is going on.

As I understand it—and my advance apologies for being a neophyte on much of this—some of the following issues are under discussion:

  • There’s a proposal to make the head of the UMC Council of Bishops a full-time position, much like (it seems to me) the Episcopal Presiding Bishop gives up her previous jurisdiction to take the role. The bishops just approved that idea. It’s unclear what the Conference will do. At least some Episcopalians are, I’ve read recently, urging a return to our old model, in which our Presiding Bishop kept a local jurisdiction in addition to the larger responsibilities. Meanwhile, the Council of Bishops has agreed it will only be meeting once a year. Some Episcopalians have suggested something similar for our own House of Bishops.
  • Bishops have a much different role in UMC governance than in The Episcopal Church (as the name of our church alone should tell us). I love this line from an article about a speech by the outgoing president of the bishops: “Bishops do not get a vote at General Conference, and they cannot address the assembly on legislative matters without special permission. Goodpaster acknowledged the bishops’ common lament that they often have nothing to do at General Conference ‘but sit around like wilting potted plants.'” Can you imagine that being said at a General Convention? Me neither.
  • Meanwhile, there are “huge” proposals for restructuring on the table. We Episcopalians have been doing restructuring by emergency budget for the last several years, cutting programs left and right because there’s no money to fund them. The UMC, it seems, has taken a more systematic approach to the topic and will be voting on those proposals at this General Conference. (You can read about the original proposal from this article from 18-months ago. The recent letter from the UMC bishops is also helpful.)
  • The UMC is looking at how it trains its future clergy, including doing away with the promise of job for all ordained clergy. I get the sense that many Episcopal dioceses around the country are having significant conversations about the future of ordained ministry. This doesn’t seem to have risen to the national level, however.
  • And, of course, issues related to homosexuality in church are on the agenda, attracting some of the most attention outside the church.

Any other issues you see as being significant and relevant to Episcopalians that Methodists will be considering at this conference?

One interesting note is the global nature of the UMC and the way jurisdictions in other parts of the world are equal members of the church. This is a conversation for another time but it’s a contrast to our Anglican practice of raising up autocephalous churches.

Also, the General Conference web site is much better than that of General Convention. They’ve got podcasts and everything! If you tune into the live stream at the right time, you just might get to see Yale’s favourite Methodist musician, Mark Miller, leading worship.

UPDATE: Mark is doing more than leading worship.