 Bishop Michael Curry |
Hear the words of a hymn that I pray will become part of our life:
Let us build a house where love can dwellI have a hope, a dream, and a prayer for us, the Episcopal Diocese of North Carolina. It is that when we mark our 200th anniversary in the year 2017 – just eight years from now -- the face of the Episcopal Church here will reflect the face of the peoples of North Carolina in all of our variety and God-given diversity. And that it will be known of us far and wide that, “All are welcome in this place.”
and all can safely live,
a place where saints and children
tell how hearts learn to forgive;
built of hopes and dreams and visions,
rock of faith and vault of grace;
here the love of Christ shall end divisions:
All are welcome, all are welcome,
all are welcome in this place.1
“Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you.”2
All are welcome!
The Heritage of the Diocese of North Carolina
This vision of the Church, suggested in the words “All are welcome,” is not alien to us as a diocese. Bishop Thomas Atkinson, our third Bishop, issued a similar call in 1855, just ten years before the Civil War. At that time he called for the end of pew rents as a concrete way to open the Church to people of all estates and social classes. The historiographer of the diocese, the Reverend Dr. N. Brooks Graebner, tells me that vision inspired Episcopalians to found St. Paul’s Church in Wilmington to be a free church and a biracial congregation. That was the case until after the war, when the church was reorganized. Even so, the original vision embodied that Gospel hope. All are welcome!
 Manteo and Virginia Dare |
But long before Bishop Atkinson’s time, the earliest antecedents of what would become the Episcopal Diocese of North Carolina reflected the radical welcome and hospitality of God and the glorious diversity and variety of the humanity God has created.
In August of the year 1587, a man of the Algonquin nation named Manteo, and an infant daughter of English settlers named Virginia Dare, were baptized on Roanoke Island at a settlement established under the auspices of Sir Walter Raleigh that would later become known as “The Lost Colony.” Theirs were the first recorded baptisms by the Church of England in North America. The Rt. Rev. Clifton Daniels and the good people of the Diocese of East Carolina are asking our General Convention this summer to commemorate their baptisms in the liturgical calendar of the Episcopal Church. I hope that this diocesan convention will join in supporting that commemoration.
That the first Anglican baptisms in America, on the shores of North Carolina, should be those of a Native American adult and the infant child of English settlers is, as they might have said in those days, an intimation of Divine Providence. God’s trying to tell us something!
The Anglican/Episcopal Tradition of Christianity
This heritage of a discipleship that embodies the radical welcome and hospitality of Jesus is, also, not alien to our heritage as followers of Jesus in the broader Episcopal/Anglican tradition of Christianity. You can see it in the writings of John Donne, the 17th century Dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral, London. He is the author of the oft-quoted words, “No man is an island, entire of itself.” The elegant and hopeful vision suggested in those words – of a human family, inter-related, inter-connected, inter-woven, inter-dependent -- did not grow out of a secular humanistic vision. It grew out of Donne’s vision of the Church as the body of Christ, where none is diminished, all are cherished, and all are welcome.3 Here are his words:
“The church is catholic, universal, so are all her actions; all that she does belongs to all. When she baptizes a child, that action concerns me; for that child is thereby connected to … the body whereof I am a member. And when she buries a man, that action concerns me: all mankind is of one author…. No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less…. Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”4
No man, no woman, no child -- not one is an island. All are welcome.
The Teaching and Example of Jesus: Imitation leads to Inclusion
The foundation of this vision is deeper still. It is deeply rooted in the teachings and the example of our Lord Jesus Christ. And it is therefore ultimately grounded in the very heart of God. For in Jesus, “all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell.”5
It was Jesus who said, “Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest.”6 Jesus said, “My house shall be called a house of prayer for all the nations.”7 Jesus said, “I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.” “Go therefore, make disciples of all nations.”8 All really means all. There is no footnote qualifying it, no parenthesis circumscribing it, no appendix mitigating it. All really means all. All are welcome!
In February of last year, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Rowan Williams, asked the bishops invited to attend the upcoming Lambeth Conference to prepare for it by reading a commentary on the Gospel of John written by New Testament scholar Richard Burridge. Professor Burridge is a priest of the Church of England and professor of New Testament and Dean of King’s College, London.
Since I had not heard of him, I decided to do a little research. I figured I ought to pay attention, since the Archbishop was commending his work and he was scheduled to be a workshop leader at the conference. So, I did what one does in modern research. I Googled him. I found out about his publications and decided to read a few. The last one I read was his most recent, a book titled Imitating Jesus: An Inclusive Approach to New Testament Ethics. It was long -- nearly 500 pages -- but well worth the time.
In his study Professor Burridge argues, quite rightly I believe, that the imitation of Christ, by which he means living out Jesus’ teachings and emulating his example, is the essence of what it means to be a disciple, a follower of the Lord Jesus Christ in the community of the baptized. Discipleship is about following Jesus until his footprints and ours become indistinguishable. It is about loving as Jesus loves; giving as Jesus gives; forgiving as Jesus forgives; inviting, welcoming, including and embracing; doing justice, loving kindness and walking humbly with God -- like Jesus does. In Jesus’ words recorded in Matthew’s Gospel: “A disciple is not above the teacher, nor a slave above the master, it is enough for the disciple to be like the teacher, and the slave like the master.”9
Professor Burridge goes on to say that where and when a group of people, baptized and living into the reality of God, truly strive to imitate Jesus of Nazareth, by living his teachings and following his example, then an inclusive and diverse missionary community arises and takes form because people of all kinds will come to follow Jesus.10
It is here that I think it important to note that, “All are welcome” does not mean, “anything goes.” On the contrary, this mission community, of which I speak, is a community of disciples, baptized into the reality of the Triune God and committed to living the teachings of Jesus, living the way of Jesus, living the Gospel, following in his footsteps, as a biblical people, committed to making a difference in the world. No, “all our welcome” doesn’t mean “anything goes,” it means, “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you.” And when that happens people of all kinds with be gathered and a diverse and inclusive mission community arises.
Join hands disciples of the faith, what e‘er your race may be!Prince of Peace Ministry of Galloway Memorial Church, Elkin
Who serves my Father as his child is surely kin to me.
In Christ there is no East or West, in him no South or North,
but one great fellowship of love throughout the whole wide earth”11
I saw the truth of this a few weeks ago while making my Sunday visitation to the good people of Galloway Memorial Church in Elkin. In 2007, several members of Galloway Church were looking for a way to be faithful to the teachings of Jesus in a time of war. They decided to begin with worship and prayer. So they began to hold a Liturgy for Peace at the church. The first time they held it, twelve people came. They had hoped for a bigger crowd, but someone pointed out, “Jesus started with twelve, and he did pretty well.” So they kept on.
In time, they were joined by other church folk in Elkin who had the same yearning. The group now meets monthly for prayer, study and action. They hold a weekly outdoor prayer vigil. They’ve written government leaders and the media advocating for peace. They’ve met with representatives of former Senator Elizabeth Dole to discuss peace issues with her staff.
The congregation of Galloway Church set aside a table to honor those serving our country in the armed forces. Visitors can see medals from different wars, placed there by local veterans, and can view photos of young men from the parish now serving in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The group wrote a discussion guide for adult study groups titled, “The Prince of Peace: A Christian View of War.” Now the Baptist Peace Fellowship has posted it on their web site. The group includes Roman Catholics, Baptists, Presbyterians and Episcopalians. It includes Veterans from the Second World War, the Korean War and the Vietnam War. It includes Democrats, Republicans, Independents, liberals, moderates, and conservatives. This is the Church. All are welcome!
E Pluribus Unum
Last May, the Board of Directors of the Episcopal Church Foundation met in Raleigh. I had an opportunity to address them and engage in some conversation. Among the many things we discussed, one question has stayed in my mind: “What do you see as the greatest challenge before the Diocese of North Carolina?”
I answered without hesitation: E Pluribus Unum -- out of many, one. It is the same challenge before us as the Episcopal Church and before us as the Anglican Communion. It is the same challenge before us as local communities, as a national community, as a global community. E Pluribus Unum. Can E Pluribus Unum be realized? Is it possible?
John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin proposed that phrase be included on the Great Seal of the United States in 1776. At the time, they were dealing with how to fashion one nation out of 13 independent, distinct and diverse states. Little did they know that E Pluribus Unum would remain the great challenge -- and the great hope -- of the American experiment. Can we, from many, become one?
We can chart the movement of much of American history with that question. Is it possible for us to find a deeper unity that can embrace genuine diversity? Whether it has been the question of the relationship between the states and the union, the question of slavery and the Civil War, the question of women and suffrage, the question of civil and human rights – regarding race, gender, sexual orientation, and immigration – E Pluribus Unum has posed the great, often troubling, challenge.
That is the challenge before us as a Church, before us as a country, before us as a world. Dr. King was right: “Together we must learn to live together as brothers and sisters, or together we will be forced to perish as fools.” The choice is ours, chaos or community.
That is why it is crucial that 20 congregations answered the call of Bishop Marble and the Committee on Racial Justice and Reconciliation to be companions in mission with other faith communities of different ethnicity, denomination or religion. We need more.
That is why it is important for Episcopalians to be involved in ecumenical and interfaith groups like Winston-Salem CHANGE, Durham CAN, and Charlotte HELP -- all working in non-partisan ways for the common good.
That is why your Bishops are active in and committed to being a part of a group of ecumenical and interfaith leaders in North Carolina called North Carolina Power. That is why we are active in and committed to the North Carolina Council of Churches and other ecumenical partnerships. That is why it is vitally important for Episcopalians to join with other people of faith and good will to work together for the proper stewardship and care of the air we all breath, the water we all drink and the earth on which we all live. All are welcome means creating a world where all can live. As the late Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm often said, “We all came here on different ships, but we’re all in the same boat now.”
St. Mark’s and Iglesia de La Guadalupana, Wilson
I’m coming to see that incredible, even miraculous, things become possible when we leave our own insular world and reach out, cross a bridge, to touch someone in another world. Michelangelo sensed that in his depiction of the Creation, with the hand of God stretching beyond eternity into time, reaching for the hand of Adam. And, unless I am grievously mistaken, that’s what is going on in the Incarnation of God in Jesus. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God…. And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.”12
When we open our very selves to another, something wonderful, something incredible, something miraculous becomes possible. For this reason, I have decided to give the Bishop’s Award this year to the Reverend Philip Byrum and the good people of St. Mark’s Church and Iglesia de La Guadalupana of Wilson. Each congregation --one Latino, one historically African American-- has, in remarkable ways, reached beyond its known and comfortable world and stretched toward the other. There you will find a community that includes people of many languages, many colors, many kinds. There you will see a vision of the body of Christ in all its wondrous humanity, variety and diversity, not just on Sunday but during the days of the week.
With a grant from the United Thank Offering, and the backing of friends and volunteers, these congregations have a new and attractive parish house where God is worshipped, children do homework, meals are served, AA groups meet three times a week, and life is lived. And when fire burned the St. Mark’s building, they, along with the people of St. Timothy’s, Wilson, and so many of you in the wider family of this diocese, came together and helped out in countless ways. When we leave our own worlds and cross bridges and reach out our hands to another, there is risk, but there is also reward. Something beautiful for God becomes possible.
All Are Welcome
I opened this address with the words of the song, “All are welcome, all are welcome, all are welcome in this place.” I heard that hymn for the first time at the Lambeth Conference of Bishops this past summer. We were in Canterbury Cathedral, the Mother Church of the Anglican world, for the opening Eucharist of the conference. Canterbury, where the throne of St. Augustine of Canterbury, the first Archbishop of Canterbury, is located. Canterbury, the holy destination of Chaucer’s Canterbury pilgrims. Canterbury, within whose walls Thomas Becket was martyred. As the Cathedral choir of men and boys chanted from the Psalms of David, 700 bishops in red and white rochet and chimere, representing every color and culture and continent on the globe, processed slowly and silently down the center aisle of the nave, up the great steps, through the screen, into the choir. That procession was an intimation of the dream of the Church -- catholic, universal, inclusive, embracing, welcoming.
During communion we sang the words of the hymn, “All are welcome.” As I sang, my heart was lifted up, “to Mount Pisgah’s lofty heights,” as the old hymn says. But as that hope-filled message sank into my soul, my heart sank at the same time. As we sang, “All are welcome,” I was struck that, even as we sang of the ideal and the dream of God, the actual reality of our condition as a Church is a long way from that ideal, and far short of the dream. I thought of some of my brother bishops and friends from the Church in Uganda, Nigeria and Kenya who were not there, and I thought of my brother bishop and friend, Gene Robinson, the Bishop of New Hampshire, who was not there. And my heart sank.
We are not all the way there. And we’re not completely sure how to get there. As Verna Dozier often observed, “We fall short of God’s dream for us,” both as the Church and as a human family. But that’s all right. The first disciples of Jesus fell short, too. And in spite of their shortcomings, the Day of Pentecost happened.13
We may not be there yet, but that’s all right. The Master taught us to pray, “Thy Kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”14 We may not be there yet, but that’s all right. St. Paul reminds us, “We walk by faith, not by sight.”15 It’s all right. The Book of Ecclesiastes says, “The race is not to the swift,” but to those who persevere.16 It’s all right, Jesus himself said. “By your endurance, you will gain your souls.”17 So we press on toward the mark of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.18
As your Bishop I have a hope, a dream, and a prayer, that when we mark our 200th anniversary in the year 2017, the face of the Episcopal Church here will reflect the face of the peoples of North Carolina in all of our variety and God-given diversity.
It will not happen overnight. It will not happen easily. But it will happen. For as Desmond Tutu often says, quoting the words of St. Augustine of Hippo, “By ourselves, we can’t; by himself, God won’t; but together with God, we can.”
Let us build a house where love can dwell
and all can safely live,
a place where saints and children
tell how hearts learn to forgive;
built of hopes and dreams and visions,
rock of faith and vault of grace;
here the love of Christ shall end divisions:
All are welcome, all are welcome, all are welcome in this place.
Footnotes
1. Words: Marty Haugen (b.1950); Music: TWO OAKS
2. Matthew 28:19-20
3. See John Stubbs, John Donne: The Reformed Soul: A Biography, New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2006, pgs xix, xxv and 447: “Paradoxically, the true Catholic Church for Donne was the one he served as Dean of St. Paul’s, the established Protestant Church with the English monarch at its head. Donne’s interpretation of the English Reformation is simultaneously a defense of his personal Reformation, his ongoing conversion to Protestantism. By becoming a Protestant, he did not betray his Catholic origins but remained true to them. By the time Donne reached adulthood, the Roman Catholic Church in England was no longer catholic in the basic sense: it was not universal any more, not a national Church that could include everyone, but a religious splinter group, a sect that in Donne’s opinion wasted lives for a lost cause and threatened the security of the kingdom. The true Catholic Church of England had moved on, and Donne followed it; though not blithely, and not without misgivings” (p. xxv).
4. John Donne, Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions and Death’s Duel, Meditation XVII, p. 102-103.
5. Colossians 1:19-20
6. Matthew 11:28
7. Mark 11:17; Isaiah 56:7
8. John 12:32
9. Matthew 10:24-25
10. See Richard Burridge, Imitating Jesus: An Inclusive Approach to New Testament Ethics, Grand Rapids/Cambridge: William B. Eerdmans Publishing, 2007, pg. 182 where he writes: “So Jesus’ disciples may struggle to follow, but follow they do – and what a mixed bunch they are. The list of the apostles contains names redolent of the great Jewish leaders from the period of the Maccabees, James and John and Matthew (3:13-19). Yet we also have Greek names like Andrew and Philip. Simon ‘the Cananaean’ does not mean he came from Canaan, but is a Greek transliteration of the Aramaic qan’ana’, meaning ‘the Zealot’ (as translated in Luke 6:15), a freedom fighter or a terrorist depending on one’s viewpoint, who must have sat uneasily alongside tax collectors like Levi son of Alphaeus (2:14) ….Add to this Jesus’ habit of ‘eating and drinking with tax collectors and sinners’, it is not surprising that he comes in for criticism about the company he kept.”
Vanderbilt Biblical Studies Professor Renita Reems made the point even more starkly in the recent Beecher Lectures delivered at Yale University Divinity School. The most recent issue of the Alumni magazine reports on her lecture as follows: “Arguing forcefully for a model of the church that follows the example set by Jesus in choosing disciples from a wide range of backgrounds, Weems said, ‘These two disciples, Matthew the tax collector and Simon the Zealot, represented both ends of the political spectrum of the day….Yes, eleven o’clock [Sunday morning] remains the most segregated hour in America…But how different would the church look today if we realized that Jesus called the modern equivalent of the the most right wing Republican and the most left-wing Democrat to come together and be his disciples.” Yale Alumni Magazine, Jan/Feb 2009, p. 65
11. Hymnal 1982, #529 John Oxenham (1852-1941)
12. John 1:1, 14
13. Acts 2:9-11
14. Matthew 6:10 RSV
15. 2 Corinthians 5:7
16. Ecclesiastes 9:11
17. Luke 21:19
18. Paraphrase of Philippians 3:13-14
Some Helpful Resources
For Adult Study and Discussion Groups
Gibson, Robert B., A Companion Guide To Radical Hospitality, Brewster, MA: Paraclete Press, 2005.
Homan, Daniel, O.S.B., and Pratt, Lonni Collins. Radical Hospitality: Benedict’s Way of Love, Brewster, MA: Paraclete Press, 2005.
Kujawa-Holbrook, Sheryl A., A House of Prayer For All Peoples: Congregations Building Multiracial Community, Bethesda, MD: The Alban Institute, 2002.
Oden, Amy G., God’s Welcome: Hospitality For A Gospel-Hungry World, Cleveland: Pilgrim Press, 2008.
Spellers, Stephanie, Radical Welcome: Embracing God, the Other, and the Spirit of Transformation, New York: Church Publishing, 2006.
Other Biblical/Theological Resources
Burridge, Richard A., Imitating Jesus: An Inclusive Approach To New Testament Ethics, Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2007.
Law, Eric H.F., Inclusion: Making Room for Grace, St. Louis: Chalice Press, 2000.
McLaren, Brian D., Everything Must Change: Jesus, Global Crises, and a Revolution of Hope, Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2007.
Sacks, Jonathan, Dignity of Difference: How To Avoid The Clash of Civilizations, London: Continuum, 2003.
Volf, Miroslav, Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation, Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1996.
These and other resources can be ordered from:
Education/Liturgy Resources: The Reverend Harrison Simons, Manager
Email: edlit@gloryroad.net
Phone (919) 693-5547
Fax: (919) 693-3376