The unfortunate turns of events in the Anglican communion over homosexuality are filling entire blogs these days.  My friend Wayne keeps sending me article after article from all corners.  I bet more bytes and pixels have died needlessly on this than over any other current issue.

It was refreshing at least to catch the article from last week’s San Francisco Chronicle in which Matthai Kuruvila reported on the Episcopal Church’s Presiding Bishop speaking at Grace Cathedral.  The Most Rev. Katharine Jefferts Schori, the first Presiding Bishop ever elected in the Episcopal Church (at a time when the most recent prior schism is still recent memory—Episcopalians who have never gotten over the ordination of women!), came out in full support of same–sex unions in the church.

The solemnization of the love between two people of the same sex is one of the two major hot-button issues for the entire world Anglican communion, along side the consecration of the Rt. Rev. V. Gene Robinson as Bishop of New Hampshire.

According to Kuruvila’s synopsis of events, “Anglican Communion leaders issued a communique in February for the U.S. Episcopal Church’s bishops to state by September 30 that the church would not authorize rites for same-sex unions or approve gay clergy as bishops. Conservatives viewed it as an ultimatum.”

Above, Jefferts Schori and Robinson 

And apparently Jefferts Schori is willing to call the conservatives’ bluff.

Of course, no one wants to see a worldwide church fellowship disintegrate on his/her our own watch. The reasons why right wing fundamentalist theology still holds such power in the third world while progressive theology is in full force in the United States is a long and complicated story.  It is made especially problematic when Christian thinking wants to say that e are all in this together, that we’re united in spirit, and that we earnestly desire our unity in Christ.  I have said as much previously in this blog.

But one of the forces which dis-integrates such unity is not willful or strident disobedience but the simple fact that we all have different experience.  Entire national expressions of spirituality take on different natures because their corporate experience may differ tremendously from another nation’s Christian experience.  Perhaps experience is to subjective a term.  Think: path, pilgrimage, history.  It is not that the Episcopal Church in the U.S.—or any other denomination in the U.S.—wants to willfully blow off the sensitivities of younger church bodies in Africa or elsewhere.  But we are at different points on our paths in following the word of Christ.

While Jesus prayed for unity and gave the new commandment to love one another, he also relentlessly questioned strident ultimatums and hard-hearted religiosity that condemned people or rejected people.  As Jefferts Schori has said, Jesus “hung with” the people on the margins.  He was fully aware that his perspective brought disunity to Judaism.

Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams

What will Archbishop Rowan Williams, or the rest of the Provinces around the world, do in reaction to the U.S. church’s refusal to walk away from its gay and lesbian members?  One idea keeps popping up. Kuruvila, the Chronicle reporter says, “Some have suggested that the Episcopal Church’s price for noncompliance might be lesser status within the 77 million-member Anglican Communion, the body of churches whose roots are in the Church of England.” [emphasis added]

Lesser status? Go ahead and try, people.  But none of us has any lesser status than anyone else in the church of Jesus Christ.  In Christ “there is neither Jew nor greek, slave nor free, male and female,” wrote St. Paul.  Do the conservatives want chapter and verse from the Bible itself to substantiate that?

We have recently seen a cluster of [1] excommunications of individuals and even communities for not obeying the larger church. But you can’t excommunicate, or put on probation, an entire national church without making the disciplinary process itself look entirely foolish.

The African Anglican backlash is another “culture war” akin to Islamic fundamentalism trying to hold back Coca-Cola or keep their women hidden.  I may partly understand their fear of the loss of their culture, but all I can say is “good luck” to those who angrily resist all change.  I say this not to be flip but because I truly and deeply believe that Jesus was fully engaged in the profound change in the culture of his generation and he would advise us to be fully engaged now. Especially if that engagement means to broaden the reach of grace and the capacity for love and understanding, rather than rejection and fear.

— Pastor Dan Hooper