TURNING AWAY FROM JESUS Gay Rights and the War for the Episcopal Church By Garret Keizer ------------+------------ REP 0 R T Do you love me? -Jesus to Simon Peter, John 21:16 As an American Episcopalian I belong to a family of forty-four autonomous churches (1) called the Anglican Communion, which currently numbers some 80 million members around the globe and which is now close to schism because of a bitter dispute about homosexuality. I must admit that until quite recently I did not pay much attention to what is often called "the crisis in the Anglican Communion"-in spite of, though perhaps also because of, the fact that for many years I worked some hours of each week as the lay vicar and later as the indigenous priest of a small Episcopal church in rural Verrnont.(2) I had other things on my mind. But while I was making the rounds of my parish, things were afoot in the larger church that were not dissimilar to the zealotry and self-delusion that would mesmerize our national politics and mire us in Iraq. In other words, what might strike you as an irrelevant story about a religious dispute is in some ways your story, whether you are religious or not, and whether you like it or not. The story invites us to ask if what we see happening to the institutions we love is not at least partly the result of our having loved them less attentively than we supposed. (1)Of the forty-four churches, thirty-eight are large enough to count as provinces (a collection of at least three dioceses). (2) My ordination was under a special canon of the church that allowed for indigenous clergy in places too small, poor, or remote to have a professional priest. I have never been to seminary. ** The bulk of the article may be up behind a subscription paywall. Excerpts below; ** "Archbishop Desmond Tutu, for example, has compared homophobia to apartheid. Still, his stand is hardly typical of his continent, and it took no great leap of imagination for those losing the ideological war in the United States to wonder if they might fare better by forging alliances in warmer climes. Some will find the idea of American conservatives using foreign bishops to support the interests of a white male hegemony in the Episcopal Church altogether preposterous, though it is perhaps no more preposterous-or less effective-than using the votes and tax dollars of working-class Americans to further the interests of the corporations that take away their jobs. It's the old drill of building a network, capitalizing on the most divisive issues, and locating the funds." (7)" (7) In a 2005 online article "Following the Money," Jim Naughwn cited donations from non-Anglican, right-wing foundations to splinter groups like the American Anglican Council and to the Institute on Religion and Democracy, which began "an in-house effort called Episcopal Action." *** "This all sounds compelling to me, though, as I tell Douglas, I remain an unreconstructed binary thinker, my view of the world being pretty much divided between people who have a pot to piss in and people who don't. My tendency-perhaps my temptation-is to see the church crisis, at least in America, as I see most other political disputes between bourgeois conservatives and bourgeois liberals: as cosmetically differentiated versions of the same earnest quest for moral rectitude in the face of one's collusion in an economic system of gross inequality. It goes without saying that by touting this stark binary, I, too, am seeking to establish my rectitude. Still the question remains: How does a Christian population implicated in militarism, usury, sweatshop labor, and environmental rape find a way to sleep at night? Apparently, by making a very big deal out of not sleeping with Gene Robinson. Or, on the flip side, by making approval of Gene Robinson the litmus test of progressive integrity, a stance that I have good reason to believe would impress no one so little as Gene Robinson himself. Says he: "I don't believe there is any topic addressed more often and more deeply in Scripture than our treatment of the poor, the distribution of wealth, of resources, and the danger of wealth to our souls. One third of all the parables and one sixth of all the words Jesus is recorded to have uttered have to do with this topic, and yet we don't hear the biblical literalists making arguments about that." If this is sodomy, sign me up." *** "He took my leave and saying, 'This is what church is supposed to be." He knew which briefings I'd been to and which ones I was scheduled to attend the next day, and I think he was urging me not to despair. How could he tell? I support the full inclusion of lesbian and gay persons at every level of the church and state, but could I have at least a partial inclusion of some gaiety? I say this as someone who likes a solemn liturgy and a formal handshake and whose only beef with the so-called frozen chosen is that many of them are not frozen enough. I am talking about something else. I am talking about sitting at a press conference and thinking, Here we've got a Presiding Bishop who's a woman, a marine biologist, and an amateur pilot; an Archbishop of Canterbury who's a poet, a scholar, and a self-identified socialist; and there they sit like two sad-faced intelligent bears as we bait them with inane questions about the suing of renegade churches and the "healing of homosexual affliction." A life is for this?" *** "My non-Christian readers are likely to see this disquisition on sacraments as a bit of obscurantist trivia having little to do with them or with the subject of this essay, and if they do, my trap is sprung. Yes, the eucharist has meanings peculiar to Christians-but it can also be taken as a universal symbol of how any community shares its wealth, its bread and its wine, what the old socialists called the roses and the bread. The consecrated wafers placed on the tongues or in the upturned hands of the faithful, one per person and all the same size, have a secular equivalent in the basic allotments of health, education, and welfare-of life, liberty, and the off chance of happiness-that every citizen at the common table can expect as his or her due. If the obvious implications don't make you squirm, if they fail to explain why I resolutely refuse to apply the word "left" to the progressive side of "the gay debate" in my church or to just about any debate going on outside the church, then nothing will. " **** "This assignment wasn't my idea, I want you to know. Becoming a priest wasn't my idea either. I was asked, and I did what I could. I said my last service five years ago and I have no plans to resume. The people in this parish know better than to ask me even to lead the Psalm. After all those years of talking, my wish is to keep still. Yet here I am again, on assignment and on my knees, and in my head I am back in the pulpit, where the lay reader has just delivered a homily he found on the Internet like a pearl of great price. He's a better preacher than I ever was, and a humbler one too, for at this very moment I am addressing the entire Lambeth Conference, I am addressing both houses of the Congress, I am addressing the nominating conventions of the two grand old parties of the United States, but only three words will come out of me, and they are not even my words. I hear them all the time in this church, which is one reason I come here so seldom. They blaze from me and at me, relentlessly in both directions, like lights on the M-3 on a rainy night until I am driving blind with shame and with rage. Feed my sheep. "