Episcopalians newly discovering their church home or long-time members who may have forgotten why they love the church will appreciate Unabashedly Episcopalian. Bishop Andy Doyle has mined the Baptismal Covenant and his own experiences leading the Diocese of Texas. The result is a heartfelt, smart and practical book that calls Episcopalians to wake up to the church s unique gifts and story, and equips them to share that witness in their neighborhoods and out in the world."
Unabashedly Episcopalian
Proclaiming the Good News of the Episcopal ChurchBy C. ANDREW DOYLEMorehouse Publishing
Copyright © 2012 C. Andrew Doyle
All right reserved.ISBN: 978-0-8192-2808-6Contents
Chapter One
We Are Episcopalian
We are tied together in a single garment of destiny, caught in an inescapable network of mutuality.
— THE REV. DR. MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.
On Wednesday, September 7, 1774, at the inaugural session of the Continental Congress, with the weight of war and the hope of freedom on their minds, the Reverend Jacob Duché, an Anglican clergyman and rector of Christ Church in Philadelphia, was invited to read prayers to the Congress. As it happened, the 35th Psalm was appointed in the Book of Common Prayer as a part of Morning Prayer that day. Duché began, "Plead my cause, O Lord, with them that strive with me: fight against them that fight against me. Take hold of shield and buckler, and stand up for mine help."
On June 28, 1836, it was an Episcopal service that accompanied James Madison, our fourth president and founding father, to his grave. And they were Episcopal prayers that comforted the mourners in their grief.
It was an Episcopal service of Morning Prayer with hymns that inaugurated the Atlantic Charter between British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and American President Franklin D. Roosevelt on the deck of the HMS Prince of Wales on the eve of World War II. And at the service commemorating Roosevelt's third inauguration, in the midst of war, an Episcopal prayer was used to petition for our enemies and pray for peace. As an Episcopal seminarian, Jonathan M. Daniels followed the call of Martin Luther King, Jr. to come to Selma, Alabama, where he lived with an African- American family and helped integrate the local Episcopal Church. On August 20, 1965, Daniels was shot while saving the life of a young black woman.
Three years later, at the Washington National Cathedral (an Episcopal church), Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. climbed the thirteen steps into the pulpit during an Episcopal service and said:
We are tied together in the single garment of destiny, caught in an inescapable network of mutuality. And whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. For some strange reason, I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. And you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be. This is the way God's universe is made; this is the way it is structured.
I remember watching on television then president-elect Barack Obama begin his day by walking into St. John's Episcopal Church, Lafayette Square, prior to being sworn in as our 44th president of the United States on January 20, 2009. In the days surrounding the inauguration he would attend a national prayer service in Washington National Cathedral, and deliver a speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial where Martin Luther King, Jr. dreamed his dream.
In New York City, on September 11, 2001, St. Paul's Chapel (the chapel in which George Washington, our first president, worshiped following his inauguration) became an epicenter for relief workers and a nation in crisis. In this modest chapel of the venerable Trinity Episcopal Church, Wall Street, some five thousand volunteers transformed an eighteenth-century landmark into a sacramental vessel pouring out love and care.
Episcopal relief workers have rebuilt homes, assembled temporary shelters, and provided clean drinking water in the wake of tsunamis, earthquakes, and hurricanes. After Hurricane Katrina we led efforts to rebuild cities across the Gulf Coast from Mississippi to New Orleans to Texas. We have housed tens of thousands in Haiti. We have labored in the midst of the urban poor and bleak rural desolation.
The Episcopal Church welcomes all and we have a tradition of putting into action the words of Isaiah, which Jesus spoke in the synagogue in Nazareth (Luke 4:18–19): "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor." Like Jesus himself, we the faithful members of the Episcopal Church have sought through the years to make God's love incarnational—to make God's love real in the mission and ministry of our church.
The Episcopal Church is the community in which I was raised, the son of a priest. It is the faith tradition that I was baptized into at the college chapel on the campus of Southern Methodist University, where my parents helped to lead the Episcopal Student Center. It is the tradition I studied as a young adult prior to my own confirmation; having memorized the Lord's Prayer, the Nicene Creed, and the Catechism (or the church's teachings) from the back of the "new" Book of Common Prayer of 1979. I knelt before Bishop Jose Guadalupe Saucedo of Mexico, at that time a diocese of the Episcopal Church, and was confirmed. I came to appreciate this tradition even more in my adult years as a summer camp counselor and camp staff member at Camp Allen, an Episcopal camp northwest of Houston, as a participant in college mission at the Canterbury Association at the University of North Texas, and as a member of the staff at St. Stephen's Episcopal School in Austin, Texas.
When I discerned a call to serve Jesus Christ in the ordained ministry, the Episcopal Church gave voice to my own faith and belief in God and God's revelation. The tradition of daily Morning Prayer and the singing of hymns and canticles rang throughout my theological studies at Virginia Theological Seminary. The words and prayers of the Book of Common Prayer comforted me as I ministered to the victims and their families at a deadly bonfire collapse at Texas A&M University in 1999.
This tradition has supported me at my best and challenged me at my worst. In this church, I have found the clearest reflection I know of the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic faith delivered to the saints and handed down through generations of the faithful. This faith sung and prayed by a thousand tongues before me—this is the church I love. It is the Episcopal Church and its particular and unique witness to Jesus Christ that inspires me to mission and inspires my desire to be a better bishop and human being.
Bound by a Promise
Why begin a book geared to the newly baptized and confirmed, and those who long to recall those vows, in this fashion? You have taken a profound oath to God and to your community in the sacrament of baptism and/or confirmation or by reception into the Anglican Communion, and you have done it specifically in the context of an Episcopal Church. You have made a covenant with God, one that is rooted in the waters of baptism.
It is my hope that, as you turn these pages, you will explore your sacred promises to God and walk your pilgrim journey with greater intention. More importantly, I hope you will find what many have found: that God is calling you to serve and minister in the world around you. The combined work of prayer and mission has been the bedrock of the Episcopal Church (and the larger Anglican Communion) since its birth in the sixteenth century and its development under the leadership of Queen Elizabeth I and the Stuart kings in the 1600s. You are a part of a long line of Anglicans who—strengthened by liturgy, sacrament, prayer, and Scripture—take their faith seriously.
In the Episcopal Church we understand that our promises are to God and to our fellow human beings as well. These are promises made to help build up stone by stone the reign of God, and they are promises made for the communities in which we live and move and have our being, the communities we call home.
The reality is that the Episcopal Church has always found its mission rooted in contexts across our country and across the sixteen other nations worldwide in which we find our home. We are a great and global church with wide-reaching partnerships that are changing lives on a daily basis. Countless people whose names we know and even more whose names we do not know have called on the strength of our tradition and our liturgies, from the firefighter at Ground Zero to the woman in the pew praying the Psalms out of the Prayer Book.
It is my prayer that you, in your own life, will find that same strength. It is my hope that all who are seeking might find in the Episcopal Church the possibility and reality of a strong relationship with God. I pray that you will find a store of wisdom you can draw on when you are unsure of a course of action. May you find a deep well of spirituality that you can draw from when you are in trouble, fearful, or in pain, as well as when you are celebrating life's joys. I hope you will discover that the firm foundation of Jesus Christ revealed in our baptismal promises and in our tradition will be a foundation upon which you may, with others, reshape the world. We in the Episcopal Church have a particular and beautiful way of understanding the redeeming work of Jesus Christ, and we stand as bearers of the gift of God's abundant grace for humankind.
There will come a time in your life, a moment when every word will matter, every prayer spoken or silently prayed will count, every action will be an opportunity for change. Into these moments, let the wisdom of our Episcopal heritage, worship, prayer, and Scripture be present for you, uphold you, and sustain you.
We do all of this worship and prayer and tenacious pursuit of living out our faith for one reason. We are called through Christ's own love and by our baptism to devote our lives to the coming of the reign of God. We understand a virtuous citizenship that beckons us to fulfill our duty and responsibility as missionaries of God's love in the world around us. So we pray:
Send us now into the world in peace, and grant us strength and courage to love and serve you with gladness and singleness of heart; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
Chapter Two
Choosing to walk the Pilgrim way
Celebrant Do you desire to be baptized?
Candidate I do.
Jesus said, "Follow me." — LUKE 9:23
Sociologists, observers of culture, and church leaders have been talking for some time about an important book: Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers. Published in 2005, the book is based upon some three thousand interviews with teenagers, and it highlights the emerging sensibilities of this new generation of spiritual pilgrims.
The authors claim that five concepts make up the foundation of this generation's faith, which together add up to a perspective they call moralistic therapeutic deism. It asserts the following beliefs:
1. A God exists who created and orders the world and watches over human life on earth.
2. God wants people to be good, nice, and fair to each other, as taught in the Bible and by most world religions.
3. The central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about oneself.
4. God does not need to be particularly involved in one's life except when God is needed to resolve a problem.
5. Good people go to heaven when they die.
This is not a bad set of beliefs to live by. In fact if the whole world abided by these basic beliefs it would be a far better place. But I would say that we as Episcopalians have a different way of seeing the world and our place in it. When we are asked if we wish to be baptized, or when we reaffirm our baptism, we step forward and say to the world that we believe differently. There are some things we hold in common with all religious beliefs and others we hold in common with the larger family of Christian believers. But when we rise and affirm the faith of the church and reaffirm our own faith, we are challenged to be a particular and unique people of God.
* * *
Not Just Any God
The Baptismal Covenant we make with God and our communities says we believe in a God who created and ordered the world but who ordered it for a particular purpose: for beauty and relationship. We believe in a God who watches over human life and interacts with all life on earth, with a particular relationship to the human community, through Jesus Christ. We have faith in a God who desires that people be good, nice, and fair to each other, and who says we have a responsibility to take care of each other when we are poor, hungry, alone or in need.
We accept as true that Jesus Christ is the living, resurrected example of how humanity is to treat one another, and that we ought to seek to emulate his Way. While it is a good thing to be happy and to feel good about oneself, we do not believe that this is the central goal in life. Our faith teaches us that God asks us to sacrifice our lives for others' sakes.
The center of our life is God, and God most identifies with the weak and poor. We believe focusing on consumerism creates disordered lives that are out of proportion with the wider needs of the world around us. We believe in a God who is with us in our problems and with us when things are going well. We believe in a God who is a companion along the way (Luke 24), who calls us "friends" (John 15:15), and who eats and drinks with sinners (Mark 2:16). The God we proclaim is present with us in all our doings. We do believe in the kingdom of heaven, but we believe that we participate in bringing it to life today. We do not spend a lot of time concerned with life after death; we spend most of our time working to make heaven real in this world. We remind ourselves that Jesus' work was teaching and proclaiming the good news of the kingdom of God and curing every disease and every sickness among the people, and that he said, "Follow me" (Luke 9:1–23).
When we as Episcopalians step forward and choose to make our confession of faith, we remove ourselves from a general belief in a general God who participates generally in our life. We choose specifically to walk the pilgrim way with God and to live out a particular revelation found uniquely in the Episcopal Church.
* * *
Not Just Any People
Geneticists speak of something called a meme. The concept originated with Richard Dawkins, a geneticist who has also gained fame as part of the atheist dialogues that are currently popular. Meme theory is basically the application of Darwinian genetic theory to culture, language, and narrative. Dawkins argues that the human attachment to God comes out of fear and anxiety about having our basic needs met. For Dawkins God is like a story—or a genetic trait or a meme—that keeps getting replicated because of our anxiety and fear.
As you can imagine, Dawkins and I disagree. For the Christian, words have meaning and substance. What we say is very real. But that language is more than a social construct. As people of the Word of God, we believe our language and our actions are rooted in the language and activity of God. We believe that what was spoken before all that is seen and unseen is the ground of our proclamation today. When we stand up and make our promises before God with the congregation and community as our witness, we create a verbal vessel of grace that makes its way through creation and draws us ever closer to the divine being and to one another.
You and I are making in our faith statements not simply promises about how we believe; we are also making statements about the kind of people we wish to become, and the type of world we wish to live in. When we step forward, we are saying we are not atheists or even just good people. When we step forward, we are proclaiming that we are Episcopalians and that we have a particular and unique vision of the world around us.
This unique worldview is not formed by capitalism or some political theory. Our Episcopal worldview is formed through a life lived in connection with sacraments.
In the Episcopal Church there are two gospel sacraments: one is the Eucharist and one is baptism. These are considered to be gospel sacraments because Jesus gives them to humanity and the church as specific signs of the grace of God. We say we have seven sacraments (like the Roman Church) and we do; but for Anglicans the five additional sacraments are secondary and are not given by Jesus Christ to the church. Instead, the sacraments of confirmation (the second half of baptism), marriage, anointing the sick, reconciliation, and ordination are fondly referred to as sacraments with a little "s" because it is the church itself which believes they are sacramental vessels of God's grace. They are not necessary in the life lived to God, though they can aid in a life lived with God. In the words of our catechism, we believe all of the sacraments are "outward and visible signs of inward and spiritual grace, given by Christ as sure and certain means by which we receive that grace."
* * *
Not Just Any Church
When we step forward and make our promises as baptized Episcopalians, we say we believe in a particular kind of church. No other church globally (except those who began as missionary churches of the Episcopal Church) has a Baptismal Covenant quite like ours.
By answering the questions at the heart of the Baptismal Covenant, beginning with the question asked in the presentation, "Do you desire to be baptized?" we are stepping into a church that is a particular community grounded in the ministry of Jesus Christ, whose ministry was a continuation of the Torah life of our Jewish faith ancestors.
We are also proclaiming our faith as part of living today, physically putting on the church we claim as our own. We are becoming Episcopalians. We are choosing, as I think you will discover, a particular rule of life. Not unlike the communities in which the authors wrote the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John, we today make our communal life particular in our place and time. We are unique and rooted in our contemporary contexts, and yet connected to our ancestors.
We understand that an important part of being the church is returning to the Bible. There are many pop movements and psychological and philosophical treatises out in the world, but we proclaim uniquely that we will live by the rule found in a certain body of work which stretches out over generations and which we call the Holy Scriptures. The church is described in these texts as a body of which Christ is the head and of which all baptized persons are members. Saint Paul wrote, "And God has put all things under his feet and has made him the head over all things for the church, which is his body, the fullness of him who fills all in all" (Ephesians 1:22).
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Unabashedly Episcopalianby C. ANDREW DOYLE Copyright © 2012 by C. Andrew Doyle. Excerpted by permission of Morehouse Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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