Like Herding Cats

I don't know how many of you are following the current goings on in Minneapolis with the Episcopal Church General Convention.  It's hard not to, I guess, as the media is having its usual field day with a hot potato event, and, in fact, is probably contributing to the circus.

Gene Robinson was affirmed by the House of Deputies yesterday afternoon to be Bishop of New Hampshire.  His confirmation process then moved to the House of Bishops for debate and a vote this afternoon.  Suddenly, about an hour before the vote by the bishops was to take place, comes an email from a man in Vermont who claims to have had inappropriate touching made by Gene Robinson two years ago.  And then, just as suddenly, allegations of connections to a pornography site come out.  All, not so surprisingly, via the conservative faction in this mess.  The vote in the House of Bishops was, of course, postponed until a full investigation could be made.

I haven't done enough research yet to know fully what's going on, but I have been out to the website www.outright.org to check on the pornography links aspect.  It is a website ministering to teen and young adult gays and lesbians offering them healthy ways to express themselves, among other things.  Robinson apparently had something to do with setting it up.  As near as I can figure, somewhere down the tree is a link to a link which has a link to a pornography thing.  I couldn't find it.  Neither has anyone else, yet.

All that stuff aside, I am seething tonight.  This isn't about biblical values and the teaching of the church.  This whole bruhaha is over fear of change, plain and simple.  Strangers in the church have always been treated as a threat and this situation isn't much different.  Robinson is the first openly gay man to be elected bishop (emphasis on openly...odds are there are a few purple people still in the closet), and he's a threat to the way things have always been.  If you're going to use biblical arguments to keep him out, you'd better go all the way and follow ALL the proscriptions in scripture, not just a select few.  If you're going to say he's simply unacceptable and write off 28 years of loving, pastoral, ministry, then you might just as well sit by yourself in the pew, because, ultimately noone will hold up to your standards.

Studies, which the church have commissioned, have shown that North America is now the largest mission field in the world.  The reason North America is the largest mission field, which the church fails to see, is the church itself, the arrogance and self-righteous posturing in Minneapolis as the most recent case in point.

I received an email from one of my sometime parishioners the other day which said she would no longer be coming to church because of the current situation.  She could not accept the election of a gay man to be a bishop in the church because it was an affront to "our Father in heaven."  I have not replied to her yet (and when I do, it won't be by email), because, even though the situation is ridiculous in my mind, I have to remember that people are genuinely hurting over this, albeit for the wrong reasons in my estimation.  So I still have to console her in her grief over her losing a place in which she had found solace and helpful counseling (from me, she said, and it wasn't personal).  I want to plead with her not to leave, to reason with her and help her to at least see the other side of the argument, but that's the problem with issues like this.  Folks have their minds made up before any reasonable thought.  It simply is in a fearful response to something they themselves could never experience and therefore it must be bad.  I will simply have to let her go in peace, with my blessing and prayer that she will find some spiritual home which will care for her.  I find it a difficult thing to imagine, though, that she will, if she is hoping to find comfort in a place which judges others so harshly.  The Episcopal Church is really messy at times like this, but messiness is how things move into new realms.  I have to trust the Spirit and remember that I don't know God's mind anymore than the most conservative bishop in the House does.  The difference, if I may be so bold, is that I know I don't and I'm willing to live in the ambiguity.  I'm not sure the other side does or is.

And so, a poem, not mine (unfortunately), which may come to explain the maddening truth of the Church, and why some of us get old before our time.  It is by Killian McDonnell, O.S.B., from his yet to be released book Swift Lord, You Are Not.

11:11:05 PM
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