The conversation at Lambeth has been focused on Covenant. I am concerned that covenant is how we legislate when we don’t have the desire for constancy and faithfulness. We have decided that prescribing a written remedy is better than finding a way to be constant in our love and care for one another. We maybe haven’t fed each other enough, we haven’t depended upon each other enough, we haven’t wanted the companionship enough to evoke constancy and faithfulness. Have we spent enough time listening to each other, both in demands and in purring, in light and in darkness? Have we held each other close as the world closed in around us? Constancy and faithfulness don’t need a covenant, they need a loving desire for the presence of others. I want this day to be imbued with the desire for the companionship of others – no matter how we disagree. I pray that God will infuse me with love so deep that I want to follow other bishops and Anglicans around, sit in their office and enjoy their presence in my life. I pray that we all might have a persistent, insistent love for one another, so that we might move beyond legislation to community. Beyond contract to family. Jesus reminds us that love -constancy and faithfulness- are the signs of our discipleship, not a covenant. Just love. “I give you a new commandment that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you should also love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”
(John 13:34-35) May love take hold where contract cannot.
Well, let’s just trade John quotes:
Love is more that getting along. It is OBEDIENCE to God and His Word as revealed in the Scriptures.
And if love is all there is, why do we have canons, creeds, and rules of behavior/ Even the great commandment is list of two rules.
“purring” ? Did she really say that?
While reading her blog entry, it suddenly struck me why the feminization of the church has been so pernicious. This bishop defines all our existence in terms of relationship without boundaries. If we just talk enough and snuggle, eventually everything will be O.K. Or as she might put it, “we are all purrfect if we just relate to each other enough.â€
The first thing God did after putting Adam in the garden of Eden was to tell him what the rules are; establishing a covenant, if you will. Men function this way. At the extreme it can cause them to be overly judgmental. When exercised well it helps them properly order things in life. Women are primarily relational in nature. They help bring men into relationship and aid them in seeing that rules without any relationships bring a sterile, rigid life. When unchecked, this relational orientation sees rules as little more than restrictions; if everything can just be talked out and “good†relationships established, everybody will feel better and get along. When you apply this to a church you get a touchy/feely, “you can’t judge someone else†kind of “anything goes†institution. Oh, wait a minute, that is the description of TEC.
God knew exactly what He was doing when He set humanity up the way He did. Men and women exist to complement each other and fulfill God’s desire for them to be in right relationship with Him and each other, based on the boundaries established in the Bible.
What banal drivel. So typical of the TEC apparatchiks when they have nothing to say but want to sound deep and soothing.
The current presenting issue in the Anglican Communion is, I believe, an indication of the final gasp of the Woodstock generation’s influence on culture. For them, Christ is reduced to their loving cherub – earth shoes, et al – strewing flowers, love, and yummy goodness to all. No sin. No judgment. No cross. No redemption. No covenant. Belief is reduced to an esthetic.
Sadly, there has been insufficient dialogue about the issue of homosexuals as members of the Christian community. The vast middle is unable to communicate to the two extremes in this debate that their unyieldingness is unhelpful. The view that homosexuality is the worst sin is just as offensive as the view that refuses to recognize that humankind was created to unite sexually as male and female. We are all sinful in many ways and fall short of the creational ideal.
The ABC has failed to bring the necessary clarity and consistency along the way. There are no valid reasons to allow so many clergy to go undisciplined, either in their teaching or their conduct. How can the Church move forward when so many of the clergy are so overly-self-righteous whatever their view on the Gospels?
“I pray that God will infuse me with love so deep that I want to follow bishops and Anglicans around, sit in their office and enjoy their presence in my life.” Soothing? This is creepy!
The first openly stalker-bishop!
I think the behavior of ECUSA/TEC/GCC/EO-PAC since pre-2003 has clearly demonstrated exactly how this caring will be done: first at home then in the whole AC. This fiff on NOT HAVING DONE should be directed at the proper not-doers. But honesty is a bit much to ask, I suppose.
#7 — That IS creepy. It sounds hippy-dippy and drug-induced, frankly. Why would she want to follow people around and sit in their offices? Doesn’t she have enough to do? Bizarre.
Why does faithfulness always mean, “love me and let me do my own thing even if it costs you?” Why is it only unfaithfulness when you don’t let me do my own thing or when you criticize me? I thought faithfulness was about giving up the self’s desires for something higher? But then again, I’m not a TEC Bishop.
We maybe haven’t fed each other enough, we haven’t depended upon each other enough, we haven’t wanted the companionship enough to evoke constancy and faithfulness. Have we spent enough time listening to each other, both in demands and in purring, in light and in darkness? Have we held each other close as the world closed in around us?[b]Have we sued each other enough, and issued enough depositions and inhibitions to show those who disagree with us who is the real authority in our church?[/b]
(comments in bold added by me, not in original speech, but should have been — JE)
Oh dear. I frequently find the responses of people on here to things they don’t like to be a little harsh … but my goodness, this really deserves it. (even a Rowan fan like me can see that…) And speaking of verses the bishop seems to have forgotten, what about ‘this is my blood of the new covenant…’ Love and covenant are never placed in opposition in Scripture: Love and Law maybe (maybe!), but that is not quite the same thing.
One thing that strikes me is that in all the stuff about covenant that is flying around at the moment – and I admit I haven’t kept up with the snowstorm – I haven’t read much about how covenant informs the idea of marriage, and therefore about how our understanding of marriage might inform our understanding of covenant. I love my wife, of course, I remain entirely free as I do so – but that freedom and love isn’t compromised by the fact that we are bound together. I give up the freedom to act unilaterally and without her, but I do that for the sake of the bigger freedom, joy, communion we enjoy together. Isn’t that exactly what an Anglican Covenant would ask churches to do? If so, why don’t its advocates articulate it in terms of marriage – it might help them to show why it isn’t a legalistic, grace-denying, freedom-stealing contract.
Its been a long working day and I probably haven’t put that clearly – but is anyone else struck by this missing analogy?
Oh, my, but this is really NOT good. I like your thoughts, peter w. Nothing is lost if i “give up freedom” for disciplined, covenanted love. As someone else said, why have any legislation at all if love is the only directive? Do away with everything and let’s purr on down the road.
This is quite bad indeed. Covenant has come to mean laws, has come to mean legalism, and therefore is no good. This free love bit is just bad.
What about God’s covenant with Moses? Love was at the root of that one, I believe. God’s unbelievable love for us and desire to be our God even though we royally screw things up and sin.
I just can’t stop shaking my head. This one is really bad.
Maybe “covenant” is so upsetting to so many because of these words (among others) from our the 1979 Prayer Book:
“The bond and COVENANT of MARRIAGE was established by God in creation, and our Lord Jesus Christ adorned this manner of life by his presence and first miracle at a wedding in Cana of Galilee.”
Purring? Give me a break.
This seems to be the triumph of sentiment over substance. Love and covenant are not two diametrically opposed realities. Just as Love and Judgement are but two sides of the same coin — one without the other is fundamentally ill — so covenant and love are deeply wedded concepts in the Faith. Where is this person’s awareness of Hebrew, or the NT, or Christian thinking over the millennia, or even the whole “baptismal covenant” business in the the ’79 BCP? I can understand some very real hesitations to a form of Anglican Covenant that moves us closer to a Confessional Church model, but the reasoning employed here shows a failure to understand the concept of covenant, generally. I think she might mean “contract.” But, we don’t have time, attention-spans being what they are today….
This article demonstrates to this reader (once again) that we have essentially ceased to have standards of intellectual discourse and theological formation in TEC. That such “Reader’s Digest-level theology” can actually be allowed a public airing by a bishop of the Church, let alone be taken seriously by anyone… it borders on the tragic. One would have to go back to the worst of High Victorian Sentiment to find something so undisturbed by intellect and simultaneously so rich in complacent self-satisfaction.
I sha’n’t even go into the “purring” business. Some things simply shouldn’t be commented on by those who are not professionals in one of the “helping professions.”
“Listen” is a word of holy and noble lineage. It opens the Rule of St. Benedict, for example. People of Bp. Gallagher’s stamp devalue its currency so that it means listening to each other purr?!
Too bad she didn’t practice this while in the Diocese of Southern Virginia
I’ve read a few of her blog postings after I found out she was going to be helping in South Dakota. Her comments above are consistent. I would say she has developed this line of thinking in order to describe the kind of rapport between people who SHOULD have such a rapport of kindness, goodness, and respect. And certainly, too often the opposite is true, that is, there are plenty of bishops most of us would have no desire to follow, indeed there is a repulsion resulting from wayward actions, etc., etc.
Okay. That’s the only defense she’s going to get from me.
Now, if this bishop is going to talk this way, and only talk this way (for God’s sake, this is Lambeth afterall), then I’d like to challenge her to talk about her relationship with the authority and foundation of the Bible and make it articulate enough to present such thoughts in her indaba group for all to understand.
“mamabishop”??!!
And this is what I meant about the language of affect.
God’s love is Law, not a fluffernutter. What is to be done with creatures like this? Can any church endure whose leaders are hot tubs?
Larry
[blockquote][i]We maybe haven’t fed each other enough, we haven’t depended upon each other enough, we haven’t wanted the companionship enough to evoke constancy and faithfulness. Have we spent enough time listening to each other, both in demands and in purring, in light and in darkness?[/i][/blockquote]
Quite right – we haven’t wanted the companionship enough to listen to the Primate’s Meeting, the ABC, the ACC, the prior Lambeth statement and the other provinces to not move forward with our “new thing”, choosing instead to “tear the fabric of the Communion at the deepest level”. We haven’t wanted it enough to subsequently listen to and implement the Windsor Report, the Dar es Salaam Communique, etc. She’s quite right here. TEC hasn’t wanted that. Good on her to admit it!