Yesterday in Presiding Bishop Katharine Jeffert's Schori's opening statement
she described General Convention as “this Church’s regular opportunity
to strengthen that incarnate heart for its work in the coming years.
We’re here for a tune-up – to breathe deep, clear our vision, focus the
muscles, and synchronize our heartbeat with God’s.”
The heartbeat of God is beating for
justice. I am here because I see justice as the central call of the
Gospel. The idea that justice as part of God's heartbeat is a
new-fangled, non-bibilical view is plainly and simply wrong. God has
been calling people into just relationship with each other and creation
since the creation of the people. Over and over again we get distracted
by other objectives by the importance of our own lives. The presiding
spoke to this today in her opening sermon during worship:
“We have opportunities here in abundance to forswear those evils, to
lay down our various weapons of division, and to work together for the
commonwealth of God’s created world. Is our faith lively enough to do
works toward that kind of abundant life? In everything we do here,
remember those whom we serve, that we may do unto them as we would have
done to us – for this is the law and the prophets, and indeed, this is
the good news of the reign of God.”
Is our faith strong enough and flexible
enough for us to determine what course of action needs to be taken both
during this sacred time during Convention and in the following
triennium? I testified today on two resolutions that are at the very
heart of our Church's commitment to do justice. The first resolution I
spoke to will commit the Church to nine more years of anti-racism
training around the country. (A125) The second resolution I spoke to
will allow the Church to advocate for just economic and development
policies (A012). There appeared to be general support for passage for
both of these resolutions within the committee. However, this was only
the first step to becoming a funded resolution.
In 2006 the Episcopal Church resolved
that all future General Conventions would be held in hotels that were
Unionized, or barring that, paid a living wage to their employees. This
year we are in Indianapolis where no hotels are unionized and the
hotels that we are staying at do not pay their employees a living wage.
In fact, many of them are undergoing a class action law suit claiming that they pay their employees less than minimum wage.
When we are gathered here at General
Convention we pass pretty resolutions and talk about the need for
justice for all. Yet we do not act on these principles when we are
given the clear choice. We chose to come to a city with no union
hotels. We could have chosen a different location. The resolution
that was passed at the 75th General Convention has become meaningless. What will happen to the resolutions that get through the 77th
General Convention. We are failing to take collective responsibility
for our Church. We are instead passing resolutions with no way to
enforce them if there is no will within the Church politics.
Part of this failure is because we are
failing, in some ways, to understand the true nature of the Gospel and
of God. In her sermon this morning the Presiding Bishop spoke about a
new Saint, Walter Rauschenbusch. He believed that: “a historical
tendency to substitute personal salvation for the kingdom of God meant
that people “seek to save their own souls and are selfishly indifferent
to the evangelization of the world.” The good news to the world, in his
eyes, was about the reign of God on this earth.
The Episcopal Church has the opportunity
and the will to bring about God's reign, but the only question is will
we, as a collective whole, overcome our fears of failure and irrelevance
in order to align our hearts with the heart beat of God.
-Maryann Philbrook
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