I did not grow up in California. I grew up in northern Virginia, under the shadow of the Capitol and the Pentagon, where gay people did not exist.
Then, I went to West Point, into the Army, where gay people did not exist.
Next I went to Virginia Seminary in 1988, a school that, at the time, had an express policy against gay and lesbian students attending. Consequently, gay people did not exist.
Then I graduated, twenty-nine years old, a brand new priest, having never consciously met a gay or lesbian person. I went to Hawaii for my first job as a priest. Every priest in the diocese was at least a generation older than me, meaning they were ancient. They had all been there forever, and here I was a brand new priest in my first church. I was looking for friends, looking for colleagues who were my age, with similar experiences, and there were none.
I was invited by the Hawaii Council of Churches to a conference that included people from all different denominations. I walked into the room, and I looked around, and everyone appears at least a generation older than me.
But there was one young woman, who seemed to be about my age, so I went up and introduced myself. Her name was Maggie Tannis. And I fell in love. I knew this was going to be a friend. As we conversed, I was looking for areas of commonality, and she said, “I just finished seminary, I just moved here with my spouse and my dog, and I’m starting my first church.” And I was spellbound. I had just finished seminary, I had just moved here with my spouse and my dog, and I was starting my first church. And just the fact that she used the word “spouse” indicated to me that she must have a military background, because that’s how people in the military talk.
So I said to this woman, who I knew was going to be my friend, “And what’s your husband’s name?” Maggie replied, “Well, my spouse’s name is Linda.”
Now, my head spun around a few times. I’d never imagined a sentence like that before. The Church was just beginning to really wrestle with their stance on gays and lesbians. I’d heard about it academically in seminary, but it wasn’t really anything that included me. Then I met Maggie. I decided that she was going to be my friend, which was really cool. A real live lesbian! I could get to know her, and learn more about the issues that I’d only experienced intellectually in seminary.
Maggie and Linda ended up becoming best friends with Andrea and I. We would go to the beach together, and have dinner together, and when our daughter was born Maggie was our first babysitter.
I noticed that in Maggie’s and Linda’s relationship I couldn’t find anything that was different from the relationship that Andrea and I had. They had the same kind of boring fights, they had the same depth of love, the same strength of commitment—I couldn’t see any difference.
Then I went to Maggie’s church. She was at a Metropolitan Community Church, which was a denomination that was serving mostly people who were gay and lesbian. The music was spectacular, the spirit was spectacular, and they were singing and they were praying and they were praising— there was a spirit in the building that was just electric. In addition to that intense energy, this was in the early ‘90’s. People in the front pews were dying of AIDS. There was an intensity, an urgency in their worship- these people weren’t praying in the abstract. There was an immediacy to their faith that bound them into a closeness and a community that was spectacular.
I started having trouble figuring out what the problem was in the Episcopal Church. I only preached once a month in Maggie’s congregation, and my next opportunity to preach had this passage. The disciples come up to Jesus, and they say, “Jesus, we saw someone casting out a demon in your Name, and we told them to stop, because he wasn’t one of us.” And Jesus said, “Anyone who does a deed of compassion in my Name is one of us.”
Now, wrestling with that scripture and seeing these deeds of power that were being done in Maggie’s church, and seeing the quality of love that Maggie and Linda had for each other, the scales fell from my eyes.
Suddenly, all of the arguments about why people who were gay and lesbian shouldn’t participate fully in the life of the church just did not make any sense. To me it became obvious that people who were gay or lesbian should be fully welcome and acknowledged in their ministries and their relationships in the Church. I began to look back on my history and realized that I had, of course, been in community and communion with people who were gay and lesbian; I just did not have the eyes to see it.
I am telling you all of this because I want you to know something of my experience with gays and lesbians. Also, the Episcopal Church has been in the news lately. I want to give some perspective about what’s happening in the news, and why it’s happening. I want to talk about what’s at stake, and what’s *not* at stake in the current debates.
In order to do that, I need to go back and talk about the Anglican Church and how it began. Most people, if you ask them how the Anglican Church began, they will say it was because Henry VIII needed a divorce. Well, technically, the Anglican Church did break away from Rome because Henry VIII needed a divorce. More important were the political repercussions—being out from under the thumb of the Pope was powerful. But at heart Henry VIII was Roman Catholic, and he didn’t change the Church in England very much. However, Protestant ideas had been flowing across the Channel and to England for decades, and the priests in England started to hear about these ideas.
When Henry VIII died, and Boy King Edward took the throne, his two Regents were very Protestant, and under their leadership England became very Protestant. They went into all the monasteries and trashed all the statues, and took the candles off the altar, and made other changes to the Church in England. Then Boy King Edward died, and Mary took the throne.
Mary, during all of this time, had retained a Roman Catholic chaplain, and she had become increasingly angry about what was going on in her country. As soon as she took the throne, she made the country Catholic again. She went and superglued all the statues together, and took the candles and put them back on the altar, and she went and killed all the bishops who would not recant their Protestant ideas and become Roman Catholic again. She burned hundreds of people at the stake. She got the name Bloody Mary because of this.
Imagine— throughout England, each village only had one church. The poor villagers, they show up one day, and they’re Catholic. They show up the next day, they’re Protestant, and they hate Catholics. They show up the next day, they’re Catholic again and they hate Protestants. The country was a mess when Elizabeth the First took the throne.
It was Elizabeth the First, blessed be she, who was the real architect of the Anglican Church; and it is also because of her that we’re in the mess we’re in now. She wanted her people, her subjects, to stop killing each other over these ideas of doctrine and dogma. She wanted a country that would pray together. So she came up with this idea, this radical idea for the time, that we were not going to concern ourselves with the details of what every individual person believed.
She said, “I will not inquire into the minds of my subjects. What is going to unite the Church of England is simply that we pray together.” You can be as Catholic as you want, you can be as Protestant as you want, you can be as liberal as you want, you can be as conservative as you want. What’s going to unite us is that we kneel in the same pews, we come to the same altar rail, we drink from the same cup, we eat at the same table, and we become one Body.
Elizabeth the First set the stage for a Church that was based on prayer rather than on doctrine. We prided ourselves on being open and inclusive and tolerant, no matter what you believe, just so long as you participate in this communal life of prayer. And we believe, if you just participate, if you kneel at this altar faithfully over time, your soul will be shaped; we will become one in communion. We’re not going to tell you what that looks like or what you have to believe. That was a piece of the genius of the Elizabethan Settlement, and how that stage was set centuries ago.
Now take that openness and inclusion and bring it across the Atlantic and put it in the Colonies. And imagine that the same people who wrote the Constitution for the United States, three years later, wrote the Constitution for the Episcopal Church. It is a Constitution that embraces democracy, that embraces this egalitarianism, and is skeptical about Popes, kings, and bishops.
We do have bishops. We like bishops, because they remind us of our relationship with all other bishops and Christians around the world, but we don’t give them too much authority. Our Constitution was written so that each Diocese is fairly autonomous, and there is no hierarchical authority.
The closest thing we have to a Pope in the Episcopal Church isn’t the Presiding Bishop. The Presiding Bishop has no authority over dioceses. Our equivalent to a Pope is a democratically elected Convention that meets every three years. Now, not surprisingly, this Convention consists of two houses- The House of Bishops, which is a lot like the Senate, and the House of Deputies, which consists of laypeople and clergy elected from every single Diocese. In order for a bill to become law in the Episcopal Church, it has to be approved by both Houses. If it’s something really controversial, like whether we’ll let women be priests, it not only has to pass the House of Bishops, but it also has to pass the House of Deputies, with a supermajority of clergy, and a supermajority of laypeople.
The Convention is a very deliberate body. It only meets every three years, which means that we only make changes when we really believe that the whole body of the Church is behind it, and the supermajorities are behind it, and the laypeople agree, and the clergy agree, and the bishops agree—it’s a very slow and deliberative process. Now add to that our passion to respect the dignity of every human being, and you have the Episcopal Church.
It is that openness and inclusion theologically, tied to this very egalitarian political process, which is passionate about respecting the dignity of every human being, even the ones that disagree with us. This has helped us to weather profound changes in the United States, including the abolition of slavery. There was a time when people of color were not allowed to drink from the same chalice as caucasians. The full integration of women into the life of the Church was another profound change. We have weathered these social changes very carefully, thoughtfully, prayerfully, and with a passion for the minority. At one point, in the issue of women’s inclusion for example, the minority were women who felt the call to ordained ministry. Now, the minority is people who don’t think women should be ordained. It is really messy, but we try hard to include this broad range of differences in belief within our communion and our community. It is not what we *think* that binds us together. What unites us is that we pray as a community.
That is how the Episcopal Church in the United States developed. The Church of England also spread all over the world, and there are thirty-eight different Provinces. The United States is one, Canada is one, Australia is one, there are several in Africa, and each Province developed differently based on their culture. There are other Provinces that are very autocratic. In some Provinces the Bishop rules supreme; that is just how the Church took root in that soil.
In the last decade, the Episcopal Church in the United States has moved very far toward fully including people who are gay and lesbian in the life of the Church. At the General Convention in 2003, which I attended as a representative of Idaho, we passed a resolution that said those bishops who are choosing to bless same-sex unions in their Diocese are free to do so, and they are not violating our bonds of communion. We also passed a resolution that affirmed the election of Gene Robinson as the Bishop of New Hampshire, who is an openly gay man in a committed relationship. I was there when that vote was cast. The room, full of over 800 Deputies and many spectators, was absolutely silent.
There was no cheering, because we knew that there were people who were heartbroken when that decision was made. It was a respectful and holy place, and was a respectful and holy decision. That was in 2003.
Since then, what has happened is that there were people who were upset about that decision. Through every controversial social change that has happened in the Episcopal Church, a population was really upset. A subset of that population chose to leave. So, with welcoming people of color, people left. With welcoming women, people left. At the blessing of same-sex unions and ordaining a gay man as a bishop, a small group left. Another group was upset and just stayed. This time, the group that was upset started to contact the bishops in other Provinces.
Let me talk about our relationship with the other Provinces. There are thirty-eight Provinces around the world, and we are siblings. There is no connection of authority from one Province to another; we care about what the other Provinces do, because we are all in the same family. But there is no Pope. The Archbishop of Canterbury is like the Queen of England— he doesn’t have any specific authority over any of the Provinces, but he is our symbol of unity.
There are two meetings of bishops that happen globally. One is, once every ten years, all of the Anglican bishops in the world meet at Lambeth Palace for tea. They drink tea and they talk about stuff. And it just so happened, at their last meeting in 1998, that they passed a statement that said, we don’t think gays and lesbians should be fully included in the life of the Church, nor should we acknowledge their full inclusion. There was a strong dissenting voice from the United States. Because the bishops don’t have any authority over us, their statement was interesting, but it really didn’t matter in terms of telling us what to do.
So once every ten years all the bishops come together. Every two or three years, the Primates, the heads of the thirty-eight Provinces plus the Archbishop of Canterbury, all meet to have tea and talk about stuff. That group of thirty-eight bishops doesn’t have, or hasn’t had up to this point, any particular authority over the Church in the United States.
Well, that is beginning to change. Those thirty-eight Primates met in Tanzania a couple of weeks ago, and they did two things. The first thing was they issued an ultimatum to the Episcopal Church, asking the Episcopal bishops, just the bishops, to not allow the blessing of same-sex unions in their dioceses, and to not consent to elect any gay or lesbian person to be bishop. Their second ultimatum was, if any parishes in their dioceses seceded because they were upset about where the Church was going, the rights to the property of that parish would not be contested by the Diocese. Our House of Bishops has been asked to respond by September 30, or our status in the family will be reduced. We really don’t know what that means.
The other thing the Primates did at the meeting in Tanzania was bigger. They wanted to put in place a covenant that all of the Provinces would endorse. If you want to be part of this family, you’re going to sign this covenant. This covenant does a couple of things. It makes these thirty-eight Primates kind of like a Pope. The thirty-eight Primates would pay attention to what’s going on in all the Provinces, and if there’s a Province that steps out of line, they can censure the errant Province somehow. They also want to give the decennial Lambeth Conference the power to set what authoritative teaching is for the Anglican Communion.
This is a huge change. And while the Episcopal Church being “bad” is the presenting issue, the Primates’ response is a global change that alters the nature of the Anglican Communion. The House of Bishops is meeting this coming week. When the bishops return, they will want to discuss this issue with their parishes. Then, they will meet once more before the September 30 deadline, and at that final meeting, they are going to have to decide how they will respond.
I think that it is unlikely that the House of Bishops will capitulate to everything that is being asked of them. There are a lot of bishops, our Bishop included, who are uncomfortable with the House of Bishops making a decision that doesn’t include the House of Deputies, which represents the laypeople and the other clergy in the Church. But there are also other bishops, including the Bishop of San Francisco and the Bishop of Washington, D.C., who have already said they are not going to stop allowing the blessing of same-sex unions in their dioceses. So it is not likely that the House of Bishops is going to give in to these demands. Also, it’s really questionable whether all thirty-eight Provinces will affirm this covenant. The frightening thing about this covenant is that it would, in effect, turn us into a Church with a Pope and disallow the beauty of diversity that we’ve had for so long.
We don’t know where we’re going. I’m pretty sure that the Anglican Communion as we know it is not going to continue. We are either going to become more closely bound together, which will limit our diversity and freedom, or we will be more loosely bound, and the Episcopal Church will be somehow separated from the rest of the Communion. That is what’s at stake—the final outcome of the broader, international relationship between the Provinces. To me, the sad part about becoming separated from the Anglican Communion is that we would lose the voice that disagrees with us; we would become a denomination which is more homogeneous.
I don’t want to become a denomination that is more homogeneous. I want to be a denomination that has a wide diversity of opinions, and that includes opinions that differ strongly from my own. If we become more loosely connected to the Anglican Communion, we’re going to lose a piece of that diversity. We’re going to lose a piece of our family. And that’s sad.
However, this is what I want people to really understand. What’s *not* at stake is that Trinity Cathedral is not going to stop being welcoming; we will not stop acknowledging the presence and active ministry of the people who are gay and lesbian in the congregation. That is not going to change. And, what’s *not* at stake is that changing in the Episcopal Church. The scales have fallen off our eyes as a national Church; and we can’t stop acknowledging the fact that gays and lesbians are active members of the Church, fully included members of the Church. So if you’re anxious about that, let that anxiety go. That’s not going to change.
What may change is our relationship with other Anglican Provinces. The other thing that might change is that within the Episcopal Church, there are dioceses and congregations and people, perhaps in this congregation here, who are uncomfortable with where the Episcopal Church is going. If a piece of the Anglican Communion breaks off, or we break off, there may become a conservative Anglican Communion and a liberal Anglican Communion. In that case, we may lose some members to the formation of a conservative Anglican Church.
Now, that doesn’t bother me in terms of numbers; but it does bother me in terms of diversity. What is going to change, what is at stake, is that we may lose the conservative voice in the Episcopal Church. And that’s sad. That is what’s at stake. What is not at stake is whether or not people who are gay and lesbian will continue to be included in the life of Trinity Cathedral. What’s not at stake is whether people who are gay and lesbian will continue to be included in the life of the national Episcopal Church.
What I ask is for your prayers this week, as the bishops wrestle with how to respond to these requests. I ask your participation, as the bishops come back and our Bishop invites us to talk about where we’re headed. And I also invite us to continue to be a church that is bearing great fruit in Sacramento. We are a model of inclusion, and a model of how a Christian community can be welcoming to people who are gay and lesbian, and welcoming of people who differ politically. We have great numbers of Republicans and Democrats all coming together at one altar to worship and to pray together. We are this congregation of diversity, and this is where the conversation is going to happen in Sacramento—that is our charism, and that is not going to change.
I invite you to move with courage and hope into the future, and don’t worry about your life at the Cathedral changing. Amen.