While serving this summer as chaplain for Camp Gailor-Maxon, the lyrics of Rich Mullins song became stuck in my mind: “Faith without hope is like a song you can’t sing. It’s about as useless as a screen door on a submarine.” While the lyrics are catchy, it is that relationship between faith and works that I can’t get out of my thoughts. As I used to teach in Inquirers’ Classes, faith is about letting go, and belief is about holding on. Both are needed. Some vague letting go into an “I am a spiritual person” isn’t the same as the holding on that is implicit in being a Christian. And even this “holding on” is not the same as being an Episcopal Christian.
An Episcopal Christian: It is this theological lyric that I want my life to sing. It is this particular way of being a Christian that we as Episcopalians are both invited and expected to live out in the world. To make our faith “incarnational” requires that the holding on and letting go be done at the same time. One is about trust in God who has acted in Jesus and continues to act through the Holy Spirit “to lead and guide us into all truth.” The other is about the way we work out in the daily living of our lives the walk we make with God’s guidance in the world.
Is that what they call heresy these days?
“Read it all”
Do I have to?
So the bishop of West Tennessee wants to teach me to breath underwater? And if I understand him, he intends to teach me to do this without a scuba tank, and that is what it means to be an Episcopal Christian.
Well, with the HoB meeting coming up, I am thankful that I am not the lifeguard at the hotel the bishops stay at, because he is going to have a very busy night.
NOW, now. No one is making you breathe underwater. You have the option of not breathing at all. There’s room for diversity of all sorts in the Episcopal organization. (wink, wink, nudge, nudge)