One of the phrases from Scripture that comes back to me with some regularity whenever I talk with people who are suffering is one that many of us know well from Psalm 139, “For it was you who formed my inward parts; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works; that I know very well.  My frame was not hidden from you, when I was being made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth.”

How many of us need these words at various points in our lives?  How many of us need the reminder that we were formed by God before consciousness – that we were loved before our biological parents even knew we were stirring to life?

I have friends who are all over the political and theological map.  They come with a range of experiences, views, and doctrinal interpretations and I value their faith, intellect, and integrity.  I find myself physically ill when those who are more “conservative” are called bigots because they are wrestling with Scripture faithfully in light of social change.  I find myself deeply frustrated when more “liberal” friends are disregarded because their faith is second-guessed as they try to remain active in the Church even as they see it re-enacting sexism, bigotry, or homophobia they long to see left behind.

What I am seeing emerge, particularly in new generations of clergy and believers, are interesting blends of conservatism around some aspects of faith and liberalism around others.  For example, I see theological conservatives active as voices for social change.  I see theological liberals coming to the most traditional of liturgical churches.  I see a combination of pragmatism about the work of evangelism in which ideological differences are set aside for the sake of Kingdom building.  Yet, I also see a zero-sum mindset at times in the Church in which one side sees the need to “win” on a given issue while ensuring the ostracism of the “losing” side.

Yet, in all of this, I see a longing for the Church to be that which gathers people from all over the map (literally and figuratively) and gives them a shared home and hope.

I write this with an eye toward a theological dissonance that has emerged with greater clarity for me over the years.  I find myself returning to my pro-life roots.   I also find my sense of the need for greater welcoming of LGBT folks being strengthened.  Politically, this is a challenging place to be.  Our national political dialogue makes enemies of these positions.  Yet, theologically, the Venn diagram has come into focus for me a bit and it rests, in part, on that promise of Psalm 139.

“You knit me together in my mother’s womb.” Reading this one line of Scripture (and it is difficult to read any one line in isolation of course) I find myself challenged to think more deeply about what it means to be pro-life.  A God who knows us and inspires our creation and who guards us in the womb must be a God who longs for our protection when we are most vulnerable.  Yet, that vulnerability does not end when we are born.  Indeed, to be pro-life must mean that life is absolutely precious and must be tended and cared for in all the ways a civilized society can manage.  This must mean robust care for mothers and children before and long after birth.

The vulnerability we all share as human beings is particularly acute among those who are LGBT.  They find their worth questioned and their dignity undermined in ways that I never will.  The God who knows us in the womb must, I assume, know wherever we may find ourselves on the gender and sexuality spectrum.  The many people in the congregations I have served who are LGBT are not people who chose “disordered affections” at some decisive moment in their lives or were recruited by wizened gays and lesbians.  They were born this way and long to live as God has called them into being.  They were known in their mothers’ wombs.

The God of creation – the God of new birth – imparts an inherent and inviolable dignity as we are made of the very likeness of God.  The conferral of God’s love cannot, I believe, only happen at the second of physical birth.  The intricacy of God’s working in and through us begins with the Word – in the beginning.  Our longed-for birth comes out of a creation that is, like Christ himself, held in the heart of God from the beginning of time.  We are in the beginning – we are with God – at rest in the fullness of Christ’s own being as heirs of an eternal promise that stretches before our consciousness.

I believe that people make poor decisions across their lives.  Some will drink.  Some will smoke.  Some will hurt others.  Some will try and fail.  Some will never try.  We will sin, we will fail God, and God delights in our salvation.  There are choices we all make that God counts as part of our growth – part of the process of turning toward God in hope and for healing.

I do not believe that being gay is one of those choices.  I do not believe that being born is one of those choices.  The God of grace knows us as part of his created order from the very beginning and calls us good.

The Church’s call is to protect the vulnerable – to protect that which God has called into being.  Of course, through our own fault and through the fault of others, we will be drawn into a web of sin and sin-stained choices.  War, poverty, famine, and more are all part of sinful cycles in which we are caught up.  Yet, through it all God calls us to be faithful witnesses that his mercy endures.  That his love is made manifest.  That the Body of Christ can heal a broken world.

There are a host of policy options that must be considered when thinking about abortion – any realistic person knows this.  Yet, it seems dangerous to pretend that legal abortion is somehow an anodyne or sanitary policy choice.  It is the ending of life.  Camille Paglia, the noted scholar, who is very much pro-choice (she would even say pro-abortion), noted recently that, “Progressives need to do some soul-searching about their reflex rhetoric in demeaning the pro-life cause. A liberal credo that is variously anti-war, anti-fur, vegan, and committed to environmental protection of endangered species like the sage grouse or spotted owl should not be so stridently withholding its imagination and compassion from the unborn.”

I suppose this is where I find myself – trying to do soul-searching about what it means to hold in tension all that which is held in many quarters to be diametrically opposed.  I am not much of a theologian really – I have no advanced degree work in theology beyond a basic degree in priestcraft (an M.Div.) so I do not know how any of this squares with neo-Platonism, Barth, natural law, Radical Orthodoxy, or the like.  I have almost written this piece a few times – never quite sure how or what to say – or what might be theologically tenable.  I do know though that God keeps stirring me to think and pray more deeply about these things and to have the humility to know that I might be wrong.

By his holy Incarnation Christ entered the world as a child in the loving arms of a mother – he entered with vulnerability and relying on the care of a Mother and a guardian.  For God so loved the world, he gave his only Son.  I firmly believe that it was because God so loved the world that you and I were given to it too.  We are here for the love and through the love of God to be that love for those who find themselves broken, lost, and bereft.

Whether still in the womb or whether struggling with what it means to be both gay and Christian – God has given us a greater, deeper purpose and promise than we can ask for or deserve and he has called us into being to be for the most vulnerable a word and witness.  We are known in the womb.  We are wonderfully made.  May we have the courage to share that news with many.

Robert

An article floating around about our political culture talked about the fracturing of shared reality which makes political compromise or progress nearly impossible.  Our political reality seems to be one of subjective perception and a denial of objective truth which informs and forms our ability to find consensus around critical issues.  The article focuses particularly on the use and acceptance of scientific findings and the politicization of science as a primary example of the breakdown of our willingness and ability to allow fact or expertise to stand in the way of our opinions or emotional responses.

The phrase “fracturing of shared reality” struck me as a potent one in considering the role of liturgy, theology, and formation in the Church.  Sometimes small things strike me as interesting – for example in a Facebook group recently an Episcopalian commented on the use of the term Blessed Sacrament and tabernacles.  The comment was “I thought Anglicans did not believe in that.” Whatever parish this individual calls home has not reinforced the shared doctrinal compromises and commitments that define us as Anglicans.  The shared reality of the Anglican (and ultimately Christian) experience is fractured at the individual and local level when core doctrinal truths are underplayed, ignored, or dismissed.

This is playing out in ways across our Church and the Anglican Communion.  The breakdown of a shared story – or at least a shared way of engaging the story of God in Christ – has had serious ramifications for our life together.  An example in the Episcopal Church might be the acceptance of Communion without Baptism in some parishes out of a sense of radical hospitality or welcome.  Divorced from the deep theological and traditional understanding of the link between receiving life in baptism and having that life nourished in Communion we find parishes and priests engaging in a practice that breaks the common bonds that have formed us as both Catholic and Reformed in the name of a subjective perception of what constitutes welcome.

That bond, given voice in the ordination vows of priests to uphold the “doctrine, discipline, and worship” of the Episcopal Church, is one that forms us and defines us.  It is a bond that is a gift of the Spirit which has moved over the ages and given us a shared sacramental reality by which we are given life and through which our very reality is formed and framed.  Our spiritual and theological dissonance triggers two questions.

Is it Jesus?  Are we alone?

If we believe that Christ is coming into the world freshly and powerfully in each celebration of Communion we are then confronted with a host of other questions which are not pedantry but are crucial to our whole selves meeting Jesus in his rise self.  Do we sing?  Do we kneel?  Do we come with joy or with trembling – or with trembling joy? All of this is to say that the question of whether it is or is not Jesus then triggers in us a deep and ongoing dialogue around how we engage the reality of the claim and the truth of the Presence.  Only the agnostic can look away untouched by such a reality.

Are we alone?  Do we alone approach the throne of grace by ourselves, in sinful or altruistic isolation?  Is it me, myself, and my God?  Or are we coming as a community of grace – a community in the throes of the Holy Spirit – to find ourselves ever more deeply in Communion with one another in the reality of our lived experience as a community and in the reality of the Present Christ?  The lonely and alone find ample reason to doubt and to undo the past burdened by the fear of isolation and an uncertain future.

A community of faith, however, approaches the Altar with faithful assurance that just as Thomas touched the wounds so we are being invited to touch the bare reality of an ever-given salvation.  This is not ours by right or by entitlement but by grace alone and it is found only in the Body of the Church.  Gathering along with us, as we say at Communion, are angels and archangels – and we are joined too by the long dead and the recently mourned.  We are joined by those of ages past who live in the greater presence of the ageless one.

Communion is the shared reality formed by the Fracturing of the Body on the Cross.  The nobility of the Incarnation, the inhumanity of the Cross, and the promise of the Resurrection are laid bare on every Altar and given to be the food of every Christian.  To this we respond in the only way we can – with adoration and a great thanksgiving.

As parishes and individuals decide for themselves what they believe or what they feel we find ourselves ever more broken – our shared reality ever more fractured – to the point at which we are no longer able to call ourselves one body.  The atomization of the Body is a broken response to a broken world.  We too often find that Church does not suit us or that the bonds of canon and collegiality simply do not allow us our full range of creative expression.  In those moments our need to be special, to make a statement, contributes to the fracturing of our shared reality.  The virtue of authority is not that it keeps us all in line but that it keeps us humble – checking our sense that we know best with the wisdom of a wide body that has prayed and wrestled through the ages.

Some things are simply unchangeable – immovable fixed points of faith.  Yet in a cultural context in which every person feels the need to get it their way and right away and when a consumer mentality drives nearly our whole range of daily experience, the simple statement that the Church (the deepest reality of which is the very being of Christ) holds and shares Truth is a dangerous statement of spiritual defiance.  Yet that Truth – that we are not alone and that we adore Jesus made Present – creates a particular set of burdens on the faithful.

We are formed by the patterns of reception and obedience that a real engagement with truth demands.  When confronted by the reality of God our first thought must be of salvation and transformation – this requires obedience and faithful witness as stewards of Good News not the pride of crafters and creators of that news.  We receive this Good News as a faithful family of belief and witness that stands across the ages and inherits not cultural artifacts of empire but the living foundations of Kingdom.  We stand alongside and in dialogue with the voices of past faith not as interrogators and prosecutors but as heirs and guardians.

There are many who will claim that what makes Episcopalians and Anglicans special is our tolerance and diversity of belief.  Yes and no.  What we think makes us special is our tolerance and diversity – what truly makes us special is the shared inheritance of grace and a way of being together that allows diversity of perspective to flourish.  That shared inheritance is a framework and foundation that still makes bold claims on the faithful – it is not our creativity that makes us unique but our fidelity to our heritage and witness to the Living God – our shared reality.  While there are many traits, markers, and practices that make local communities vibrant and attractive there is an ultimate source from which we draw that is deeper than Church or denominational affiliation.

Ultimately we are the Church’s to be shaped.  The Church is not ours to shape.

This is a harsh reality for many of us and yet it is not ours because the Incarnation is not ours.  The mystery of the Trinity is not ours.  The changing of bread and wine is not ours.  The Virgin Birth, the Transfiguration, the Ascension, and the Resurrection are not ours.  The metaphysical realities that guide and break and reform us are a shared reality which we marvel at and share.  The Church is bigger than us because the shared reality of the Living God is bigger.

What then do we do as practices, doctrine, and more are atomized and reduced to the subjective experience?  How do we begin to contemplate our fractured shared reality?  I suppose we gather together and stand with Jesus as we are asked, “What is truth?”  Standing before Pilate was the very answer.  Standing before us, on every Altar, is the same answer – the same truth which will defy the ages and forge our common identity if we will let it.

Do we believe it?

Robert