Sanctuary Earth – A Creation in Peril

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Altar Stained Glass Trinity 2020

East Wall Stained Glass Over High Altar – Trinity Episcopal Church, Everett WA

Over a period of five months in the spring and summer of 1892 [April to August], Trinity Episcopal Church grew from an idea in the minds of a few business owners into an incorporated parish with its own lumber-built church on the corner of Wetmore and California Avenues in what is now downtown Everett.

In 1911, the Trinity Vestry called The Rev. Edgar M. Rogers, who lead the Vestry in purchasing the current property at 23rd and Hoyt, breaking ground on the (former) parish hall on March 25, 1912. However, the work on building the church itself was halted as the working men of Snohomish County and many of its clergy went off to join the armed forces in support of the Great War. After Armistice was declared on November 11, 1918, survivors returned home picking up the remnants of old lives and building new ones as best they could.

Work resumed on building the church sanctuary, and the first mass was held in it the Sunday after Easter of 1920 – 100 years ago today. The final dedication of the new building was held the following year, presided over by Bishop Keater on Trinity Sunday, May 22, 1921. On that occasion a plaque was placed in the original entry dedicating the sanctuary as a Victory Memorial to those who died in the Great War.

At the time when the old church property at Wetmore and California was sold, the funds helped to support the work of the architect of the new building, E. T. Osborne. Meanwhile, the stained glass windows were designed and executed by Charles J. Connock, who designed the stained glass windows overlooking our high altar. Connock designed the windows with the theme of Resurrection in mind.

The risen Christ is depicted on the center panel, with Mary his mother to the left and Mary Magdalene and Mary mother of James on the outside left panel. To the right of Christ is Peter and to the far right is Joseph.  The middle panel – depicting the resurrected Christ – was given by the children of the parish in honor of mothers. Surrounded by doves and angels, with Roman soldiers giving up arms at his feet, the resurrected Christ raises a hand in blessing – etched in glass, immortalized in color and light. This blessing reminds us every time we behold it that there is no challenge so great that together we cannot overcome it.

The ancestors of this place dedicated (and gave) their lives to challenging global injustice and to upholding values of international peace and unity. During the years of WWI, Trinity’s parish hall had served as an active hub for community organizing in response to the war efforts – hosting Red Cross meetings, adopting war orphans, selling Liberty Bonds, and hosting an array of guest war time speakers and faith leadership dignitaries from all over the world, including Belgium, France, Greece and Russia. We have multiple photos of rows of scowling clergy to prove it.

Over the years that followed Fr. Roger’s time, the pursuit of justice took different forms in each generation. In the 1960’s issues challenging The Episcopal Church reflected the changing times. The movement for women’s rights, social justice concerns related to in human sexuality, and women’s birth control were foremost issues in international and domestic church meetings.

Voices were also being raised in the streets and in the pews calling for the formulation of environmental laws and policies that would address the then unregulated pollution of the air and water ways – including  the use of chemicals developed during wars being  used commercially as insecticides and herbicides that were poisoning ecosystems and towns. The early environmental movement in The Episcopal Church was in part informed by the Scriptural tradition of the Genesis – a story we heard just last Saturday evening during the Easter Vigil service. In the Genesis story of Creation, God created the heavens and the earth, as well as everything in them, each bit of Creation concluding with the refrain, And God saw that it was good. When finally all things in the heavens and the earth and their multitudes were finished, we hear that, “God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good.”

From the perspective of many faiths, philosophies, and sciences, Earth Day was a unified response to an environment in crisis — oil spills, smog, rivers and lakes so polluted they literally caught fire.

On April 22, 1970, 20 million Americans — 10% of the U.S. population at the time — took to the streets, college campuses and hundreds of cities to protest environmental injustices and demand a collective new way forward. It is still recognized as the largest civic event on our planet.

This year, this Wednesday on April 22nd, marks the 50th anniversary of Earth Day. The theme for Earth Day 2020 is climate action. Every thinking person with feet firmly planted in scientific reality, comprehends that climate change represents the biggest challenge to the future of humanity and all life on Earth.

The Clean Air, Clean Water and Endangered Species Acts were created in response to the first Earth Day in 1970, as well as the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Many countries soon adopted similar laws. Earth Day continues to hold major international significance: In 2016, the United Nations chose Earth Day as the day when the historic Paris Agreement on climate change was signed into force. At the end of this year, nations will be expected to increase their national commitments to the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change.

The Paris Agreement entered into force on 4 November 2016.

However, the Creation that God judges as good, very good, has throughout the course of human history been subjected to much human action that is bad –  very, very bad.

On November 8, 2016, four days after the Paris Agreement entered into force in the United States, a new President was elected President of the United States. Only seven months later, on June 1, 2017, the new President announced that the U.S. would cease all participation in the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change mitigation.

In accordance with Article 28 of the Paris Agreement, a country cannot give notice of withdrawal from the agreement before three years of its start date. So, on November 4, 2019, the new administration gave formal notification of intention to withdraw, which takes 12 months to take effect. So, the earliest possible effective withdrawal date by the United States cannot be before November 4, 2020. [The election for the next president of the United States is to be held the day before, on November 3rd. ]

When the President made his preliminary announcement on June 1, 2017, that afternoon the governors of several U.S. states formed the United States Climate Alliance to continue to advance the objectives of the Paris Agreement at the state level despite the federal withdrawal. The formation of the Alliance was announced by three state governors: Jay Inslee of Washington, Andrew Cuomo of New York, and Jerry Brown of California. The founding statement noted that: “New York, California and Washington, representing over one-fifth of U.S. Gross Domestic Product, are committed to achieving the U.S. goal of reducing emissions 26–28 percent from 2005 levels and meeting or exceeding the targets of the federal Clean Power Plan.”

To date 24 governors both democrat and republican have signed onto the statement, including Michigan, Wisconsin, Puerto Rico, Minnesota, Maryland, and Massachusetts among others. Several mayors and businesses have also signed onto the agreement.

Beginning with federal withdrawal from the Paris Agreement, the current administration has since rolled back 95 environmental regulations that effectively remove oversight of oil, natural gas, and methane and power production. All previous targets for standards set to reduce greenhouse gas emissions have been abandoned by the administration in its gutting of the environmental policies and the Environmental Protection Agency itself.

On January 9th of this year, the administration announced its proposal to obliterate the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA. NEPA is the nation’s first major environmental law, signed by President Richard Nixon in 1970. That law requires that our government consider the environmental consequences of its major actions, including those that impact our climate.

The current administration wants to ease up on fuel efficiency regulations and has subsequently increased the amount of permitted poisonous nitrogen oxides in the air. As air quality is goes down, respiratory illnesses go up. If the Earth is not healthy, life upon it doesn’t have a chance.

With regard to protected public lands, the current administration is responsible for the largest reduction in the boundaries of protected land in US history, including shrinking protected land at the Grand-Staircase Escalante National Monument and Bears Ears National Monument, both significant sites in Utah. The changes open up both areas to mining and oil and gas development. Additionally, the administration is expanding more than 180,000 acres of the Tongess National Forest in Alaska, the country’s largest national forest, known as America’s Amazon, for logging and fossil fuel exploration and mineral extraction. The administration is actively seeking to open oil and gas lease sales in the environmentally sensitive Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The administration seeks to change the Forest Service’s Roadless Area Conservation Act to allow logging in our country’s largest and most pristine old growth forest and to allow the massive proposed Pebble Mine to move forward with catastrophic effects on the world’s largest fishery of wild sockeye salmon.

The federal administration currently managing the EPA announced that it will additionally rescind Clean Water Act protections from critical streams and wetlands. This follows on last year’s announcement by the Interior Department that significant changes are being made to the Endangered Species Act to allow for more oil and gas drilling, placing a cap on how much regulators consider the impacts of the climate crisis.

The administration has made changes to the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, which has severely limited any penalties for bird deaths across the United States, allowing the destruction of millions of birds and marking a radical departure from decades of federal policy that protected more than 1,000 migratory species.

The administration has increased the allowable levels of the herbicide Atrazine, which is used commercially to kill weeds on crops and lawns and which has the proven added effect of contributing to the loss of pollinators, bird populations, and contaminating water supplies and that has been linked to reproductive abnormalities including premature birth.

While our nation reels from the coronavirus pandemic, the current administration is accelerating an agenda that is extraordinarily harmful to all life on the planet — rollbacks that dismantle critical health and environmental protections, and that will inevitably deepen the climate crisis. The lives of American citizens are being impacted right now by a vindictive leadership that seems intent on taking vengeance on the governors and citizens of the states that dared to contradict the President on June 1, 2017 by supporting the Paris Agreement in the face of federal withdrawal. I believe the administration’s actions have been and are now intentional and malicious, constituting not only crimes against humanity but crimes against all life on Earth now and for generations to come.

The sanctuary of our church is 100 years old on its anniversary today. The stained glass windows of Christ’s resurrection are also 100 years old but carry the same message for our community today as they did for those who lived through the Great War and built a new world afterwards – there is no challenge so great that together we cannot overcome it.

Though we are not able to gather to celebrate in our church sanctuary today, we yet share the greater sanctuary of God’s Creation that shelters us all. Just as we few are tasked with caring for the heritage of our church building in memory of the sacrifices of those who have gone before for principles of liberty, fellowship, and peace, so we are bound as God’s stewards to protect the sanctuary of Creation on behalf of the liberty, fellowship, and peace of all the Earth. The national struggle in which we find ourselves today is not a matter of party affiliation or religious affiliation, it is not confined to our national boarders or even to our species – what we are called to confront in this present moment is a matter of life and death – whether the Earth as we know it can survive the impact of humankind or not.

I believe this Earth is the only one we have, I do not believe in the myth of a new Earth or new Creation that is anything other than made manifest in how we live together on this one. This. Is. It. And in the one mortal life we have upon the Earth, we must chose every day whether we stand with her or against her, whether we work with God as stewards of all that God has made or whether we turn our backs on God and let the sacred earth burn with human greed, with corruption, with the unrelieved fever of human illness in so many forms that must be challenged by every generation.

This church sanctuary is very beautiful, and we care for it as those entrusted with its care. How much more should we then care for the greater sanctuary of Creation where the God that unites us by the Spirit that rejoices in all that God has made, this sacred and glorious Creation where the Spirit of God entrusted to us truly lives  –  still.

The Measure of a Priest: Racial Bias and White Privilege in The Episcopal Church

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Church Mould

The yard was the original standard adopted by the early English sovereigns as a basis of calculation. Under the historical influence of the British Empire, the term “yardstick” became associated as the ideal standard for making critical judgments about a person. Consequently, “taking the measure of a man” gained more meaning than simply assessing the amount of cloth required for making him a suit.

In many ways, the yardstick by which The Episcopal Church evaluates the suitability of would-be clergy is inextricably linked to the ideology of British colonialism. The standard for measuring candidates for ordination is subsequently biased towards Euro-centric models of education, formation, and proficiency/fluency in navigating dominant culture. As a product of colonialism and dominant culture, The Episcopal Church in the United States evaluates for whiteness in its people of color.

Several years ago, when I took the General Ordination Exams, the test writers included a question that asked for candidates to reflect on how The Episcopal Church was doing with regard to racism within the Church. I heard later from a member of the examining board how surprised they were by the scathing critiques that answered that question. Nothing has changed since then, because the way the Church prepares and evaluates for pastoral competencies is gravely culturally biased. It has been my personal experience that every single person of color and white ally intending to work in ministry with communities of color is at some point asked by evaluators if they believe they are “sufficiently Anglican.”

For example, anything other than a prayer life centralizing the Book of Common Prayer is suspect.  In my case, all it took for a Commission on Ministry to be concerned was when I shared that I incorporate my indigenous practices of burning sacred herbs and indigenous traditions of interacting with nature as important aspects of my spiritual practice and formation.  Within a diocese with a history of Native missions, this may not have been such a concern since such a context is generally more cross cultural, with education and information flowing in both directions. However, I am an “urban Native,” and my Commission on Ministry was primarily driven by white liberalism rather than by any real knowledge of or interest in my Native culture.  I was well aware that it was my burden to measure up and not their burden to alter their standard of measure.

Most recently, there has been a growing trend in The Episcopal Church in the United States to use the curriculum of the Iona Center as a standard of education as an option for local training for postulants seeking ordination. The local adaptation of the Iona material used in the Diocese of Olympia has taken the form of  “The Iona Olympia School” which is self-described as “a three-year program with a rigorous, curriculum (comprised of textbooks, videos, discussion and activities, and field study) provided by the Iona Institute of the Seminary of the Southwest.” It follows “a traditional school calendar year, beginning in September” and expects paid tuition as well as participation in large blocks of time away from home, work, and family.

None of these expectations is realistic for the majority of people of color, particularly Native people. Course content is not adapted for the indigenous context or context of the communities of color with regard to types of learning and the application of experience. Ultimately, those who undertake local option training are not expected to be paid much if at all once they are ordained – being mostly either deacons or people of color who may become priests.

The argument may be that (by setting “rigorous curriculum” that includes the Euro-centric history of the Church and its subsequent traditions of worship and governance) those who graduate from local training will not be considered second-class clergy. What standard has established that concern in the first place and who yet holds that standard of expectation? White people? Western academics? Bishops? General Convention? People in the pews? All of the above?

The General Board of Examining Chaplains in The Episcopal Church is charged with creating ordination exams that test for the seven canonical areas of study as ascribed by Canons of the Church. These areas of desired proficiency include: 1) The Holy Scriptures, 2) Church History, 3) Christian Theology, 4) Christian Ethics and Moral Theology, 5) Studies in contemporary society (i.e. familiarity with minority groups), 6) Liturgics and Church Music, and 7) the Theory and Practice of Ministry.

Informing each of these canonical areas of study is a massive amount of dominant culture history, perspective, and assumption that yardstick people into seemingly “standard” units of measure. The current ordination process is not benign, and its colonial nature is nowhere more apparent than in how it forms its people of color as leaders for the church. Any training program that does not address the academic areas from a dominant culture perspective towards overlaying a dominant culture identity is deemed little more than finger painting. The “Anglican” in Anglican identity is at its core white history and white identity.

The pedagogy of the dominant culture Church seems to need to shape the foreign into the friendly and familiar, rather than taking the risk of losing a Euro-centric identity. A genuine adult learner approach to leadership formation assumes diversity in experience, perspective, and practice. Therefore, evaluators must be tasked with their own formation before becoming evaluators – they must care about postulants and candidates as people and not as potential interchangeable widgets within the machinations of the institution. Candidates should not be in the position of trying to fulfill the evaluator’s own unexamined cultural biases and assumptions.

How the Church delivers spiritual care and organizational development will depend on genuinely collaborative efforts, not just patronizing gestures of tolerance. Barriers between levels of the diocesan structure need to be replaced with semi-permeable organizational membranes through which education, formation, and cultural influence can flow in both directions. Our candidates for ordination are not empty vessels to be filled with colonized history and identity; they are unique peers, partners, colleagues, and friends who should be joining a community already committed to learning new perspectives and willing to adapt structures and expectations to reflect new and emerging truths. Traditions are not immutable and timeless or universal things – rather, tradition is best understood as the adaptive mechanism within culture that provides the basis for creative change.

There is more than one way to form a leader, just as there is more than one way to be a church within the Church. Our Church faces many challenges, and I believe that our people of color hold adaptive strategies worthy of our collective attention – they are, after all, experts in having to adapt to ways and methods not their own. It is beyond time for the dominant culture Church to learn to do the same.

Diversity & Inclusion: The Holy Covenant of Faithful Community

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Capernaum - Many Rooms

House Ruins in Capernaum, Israel – in the foreground is an example of a home with added rooms (Photo taken by the author in 2017)

 John 14:1-6 
‘Do not let your hearts be troubled. Believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father’s house there are many dwelling-places. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, so that where I am, there you may be also. And you know the way to the place where I am going.’ Thomas said to him, ‘Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?’ Jesus said to him, ‘I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.

The Gospel of John came into its current form between 90 AD and 110 AD. The historical context of time and place in which this gospel emerged helped shape the discourses and themes contained within it. Understanding the socio-cultural environment can help translate the use of symbols and metaphors employed by the gospel’s author in order to communicate the intended messages and teachings. This holistic approach underscores that it is not possible to understand any one passage from John’s gospel without a consideration of the way everything contained within the gospel is interrelated, internally consistent, and intentionally dialogical in construct.

The author whom Christian tradition names as “John” (although there is evidence indicating several contributors over time) is intimately familiar with the scriptures and symbol system of the Jewish faith, culture, and history. John is also familiar with non-Jewish sources of Greek philosophers and Greco-Roman mystery cults. By weaving together themes that were influential among the diverse populations of the Mediterranean, John presents an interpretation of Jesus that communicates common themes that would have been comprehensible and attractive to a wide-range of cultures and belief systems extant in the author’s time and place.

John is writing for a diverse Christian community experiencing a significant shift in communal identity as related to but independent of Jewish community and identity. The symbols and imagery evoked in the gospel open up the early Christian worldview to thoughts and influences beyond the Hebrew lexicon of stories and symbols representing the Israelite understanding of the Messiah. For John, the Messiah invites spiritual union between Christ and the individual that is unmediated and free-of-charge. This spiritual union is contrasted to the communal covenant with God requiring the fee-based mediation of Jewish priests and interpretation by Jewish teachers who have the exclusive cultural authority to do so. Liberating one’s relationship with the Messiah from Jewish mediation and interpretation is why John contrasts Christian belief from Judaism as it was identified in Judah, even utilizing messianic concepts from the Samaritan Jewish tradition.

For John, the importance of the innovation of a personal relationship with Christ is why the passage of John 14:1-6 is significantly illuminated when it is viewed in light of John 2:1-11, the wedding at Cana. I believe that that the symbolic language employed in the depiction of the wedding at Cana is a storyline that is completed in the symbolic language of Christ going to prepare a place in his Father’s house for those he will bring to where he is going.

Firstly, in the marriage traditions of the ancient Israelites, the father of the groom often selected a bride (kallah) for his son, as did Abraham for his son Isaac (Genesis 24:1-4). The consent of the bride-to-be is important. For example, Rebecca was asked if she agreed to go back with Abraham’s servant to marry Abraham’s son, Isaac, and she went willingly (Genesis 24:57–59). Mutual agreement was required for a valid marriage contract.

John’s gospel uses the image of marriage at the wedding of Cana as the central image of the nature of the believer’s relationship with Christ – namely, a spiritual, intimate, and mutual union. Further, the illustration of water turned to wine at the wedding feast encodes the early Christian teaching coupled frequently in John’s gospel, linking baptism to the pascal feast – both are celebrations and occasions of our spiritual union with Christ. The symbol of wine employed in the joyful experience of a wedding is linked to the wine used in the Last Supper, specifically the cup of wine reserved for after the meal which is traditionally associated with the joyful expectation of the arrival of the Messiah.

The link between the waters of baptism and the wine representing Christ’s sacrifice can be found in the traditional preparation for the Jewish betrothal ceremony. Namely, the bride (kallah) and groom (chatan) are separately immersed in water in a ritual of mikvah, which is symbolic of spiritual cleansing. For John, Jesus has already been immersed (baptized) by John the Baptist in the waters of mikvah at the Jordan River, in preparation for Christ’s union with his Beloved, which is each of us. From John’s use of symbols, the community is to understand that baptism serves a similar purpose.

After the immersion in the mikvah, the betrothed couple enters the huppah (marriage canopy)—symbolic of a new household being planned, to establish a binding contract. Within the symbol of home, the groom would give the bride a valuable object such as a ring, and lastly a cup of wine was customarily shared to seal their covenant vows.

After the betrothal ceremony, the bride returned to her mother’s house, while the groom departed to his father’s house. This period of separation lasted about a year, providing time for the groom to add additional rooms to his patrilineal household in order for him to prepare for welcoming his bride into the household of his father. Although the bride knew to expect her groom after about a year, she did not know the exact day or hour. He could come earlier or later than was expected. For this reason, the bride kept her oil lamps ready at all times, just in case the groom came in the night (Matthew 25:1-13). It was the father of the groom who gave final approval for the time for him to return to collect his bride.

When the time came, the bridal procession was led by the sounding of the shofar to the home he had prepared for her. The final step of the wedding tradition is called nissuin (to take), a word that comes from naso, which means to lift up. At this time, the groom, with much noise, fanfare and romance, carried the bride onto the property of his father’s home. Once again, the bride and groom would enter a huppah, recite a blessing over the wine (a symbol of joy), and finalize their vows. Now in their home, the bride and groom lived out their covenant of marriage – the traditional Jewish version of “and they lived happily ever after.”

In her book, “Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas,” Elaine Pagels suggests that John’s gospel is a direct response to the emerging Christology of the community that gathered around Thomas, which is why John portrays Thomas as having a theologically challenged Christology. Now as then, different Christian communities have different
understandings of Jesus and can hold conflicting beliefs of how to interpret Jesus and the stories that are our collective legacy about him.

While both the Gospel of John and the Gospel of Thomas value the individual’s relationship with Christ, The Gospel of John and its basic tenets seem to be in direct opposition to Thomas. John says that he writes “so that you may believe, and believing may have life in [Jesus’] name.” Thomas’s gospel, however, encourages us not so much to believe in Jesus, as John says, as to seek to know God through one’s own, divinely given capacity, since all are created in the image of God. The Gospel of John speaks from a multivalent symbol system in which there are “rooms” for each person to have a unique relationship with Christ but which are also an interconnected part of the common household of the Father. The Gospel of John, therefore, provides a foundation for a unified church, which the Gospel of Thomas, with its emphasis on each person’s search for God, did/does not.

For the author of the Gospel of John, the belief that Jesus is the Messiah is sufficient common ground for unity. Each believer is a bride to Jesus the groom, expressed and experienced through Baptism and communion. The house of Christ’s Father has many rooms, because Christ has prepared a place for each person that the Father has approved or “given to him.” When John reports Thomas asking, “How do we know where you are going?” the question represents the emphasis John perceives in the Thomasine community regarding the path of gnosis, which appears to focus on secret knowledge held by the few over belief that makes God readily accessible to all. The response given by Jesus, “I am the way and the truth and the life,” emphasizes John’s teaching on the primacy of belief. In the Gospel of John, a community of believers is bonded together through a shared belief that Jesus is the Messiah, while also making room for the validity of individual relationship with God through a shared and public belief.

For the author of the Gospel of John, the Christian community for whom the author is writing is diverse, informed by mystery traditions and covenant traditions, populated with peoples drawn from multiple faith traditions, histories, and cultures indicative of the Roman Empire. What they hold in common is a desire for liberation from tenants of the belief systems influential in their time (Jewish and Roman) that restrained them from practicing social and spiritual equality before God and with one another. Every individual in the community of the faithful has free and equal access to God, and the way to that access is by agreeing to enter a spiritual union with Christ that while mystical is not at all mysterious, and while binding is not legalistic in nature but rather a mutual commitment to love one another. Personal love for God is expressed in one’s commitment to live together in community, as represented by the many rooms in the Father’s unified house.

Throughout the generations of the church, ideas of how to achieve unity amidst our Christian diversity has been often elusive. We identify instruments or statements with which we are expected to agree, but such relationships seem always to be conditional. Alternatively, in the Gospel of John, we are all of us brides in love with the same groom, and if we are truly in love with God, then our hearts ought not to be troubled – for truthfully, in our Father’s house, there are many rooms. Within an incarnational theology of the Body of Christ — the church — the rooms are ours to build for one another. For John, the concluding line, “No one comes to the Father except through me,” is not exclusionary. Rather, the symbols used throughout the gospel convey that everyone can have access to God, if they simply believe in the love that Christ has for them and live by the wide embrace of that covenant for all people.

Life On Earth vs. Death by Patriarchy

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Singing Bird

Top Song Birds in America – Song Sparrow photographed by Bill Leman

In the mid-1940s, environmentalist Rachel Carson became concerned about the broad use of synthetic pesticides in the United States. Many synthetic pesticides had been developed through the military funding of science following World War II, and Carson’s friends living on Long Island noticed that while the local application of DDT was killing insects, it was also killing birds.

Because of the impact on bird populations, the Audubon Naturalist Society actively opposed chemical spraying programs and recruited Carson to help publicize the U.S. government’s spraying practices and related research. Carson then began a four-year project gathering examples of environmental damage attributed to DDT. By the end of her research, she had investigated hundreds of individual incidents of pesticide exposure and the resulting human sickness and ecological damage. Her conclusions were published in 1962 as the book entitled “Silent Spring,” a metaphorical title suggesting a bleak future for the entirety of the natural world, not only the literal predicted absence of birdsong.

The development of chemical and herbicidal warfare gave rise to the domestic application of the same chemicals by the corporations that developed them. On September 20, 2016, top executives from Bayer, Monsanto, DuPont, Dow Chemical, and Syngenta testified before the US Senate Judiciary Committee in Washington D.C. asking federal regulators to approve mega-mergers between the corporations, which have today fundamentally reorganized global agriculture. (Executives from the sixth company involved in the consolidation, China National Chemical Corp., declined an invitation to appear at the hearing.)

The worldview that allows for and supports the exploitation of natural resources is linked with patriarchal socio-cultural systems of Christian/Western Civilization that are characterized in part by competition for land and resources, control of women and children, domination over competing empires, and subjugation peoples from other cultures considered to be threatening to nationalistic concepts of spiritual, racial and biological purity. Social goals within patriarchal systems is all about self-interested power over people, resources, economies, leaderships, and over nature itself. The patriarchal system is preoccupied with structures of dominance and submission, a dynamic that has put both human societies and Earth’s ecosystems in peril. Environmental degradation is emblematic of the patriarchal influence of Western Civilization and the imperial version of Christianity providing its justification.

Carolyn Merchant is an American ecofeminist philosopher and historian of science. She is most famous for her theory presented in her book, “The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution” (1980), in which she identifies the Enlightenment as the period when science began to objectify nature as an inert resource for exploitation that needed to be forcibly dissected in order to be made to give up its riches and power. Her book and theory continue to be relevant in today’s Anthropocene era of globalization and global climate change. I highly recommend Merchant’s book, and she is currently Professor of Environmental History, Philosophy, and Ethics at UC Berkeley.

Just a few days ago, I read an article by Catwhipple in “The Circle” (an online magazine for Native American news and arts).  The article, Sex, Fossil Fuels, and Matriarchal Economics, connects the dots between exploitation of the environment by the oil industry with the phenomenon of missing and murdered indigenous women plaguing the United States and Canada.

Catwhipple writes:

The man camps and the consistent violence against Native women which occurs at the hands of the fossil fuels industry is a huge issue, and it’s also the metaphor. “Let me shove this pipeline down your throat”. That’s basically what the MN PUC [Minnesota Public Utilities Commission] just said to Native people, with the approval of the permits for Enbridge’s Line 3. That’s what $11 million worth of lobbying will buy you in Minnesota. The rape of the north and the rape of Native women. How much more graphic than “let me shove this down your throat…” do I have to be?  Consent is consent. Consent is about sex and consent is about pipelines and megaprojects. In the old days, the company men and their governments used to just rape and pillage. That was how it went. It’s not supposed to be those days now.

Sadly, most people realize that the social forces of colonialism, racism, and patriarchy are not relegated to world history but remain a powerful influences in our time. However, I believe that the current national and global struggles indicate the last stand of a system that perceives its imminent demise.  The truth revealed by climate change is that our current dominant/patriarchal socio-cultural system must be radically transformed or this planet will die by our collective hand.

Affecting many nations, men and women who identify with the toxic system of patriarchal authority and privilege have girded their collective loins today for what seems to be a 12th hour stand against those who don’t see nature or women as ultimately expendable.  Women and nature are inextricably linked within the patriarchal worldview, which long has been the dominant system informing resource exploitation and the oppression of peoples. What once may have contributed to the aggressive survival of our species is now condemning all other species to death, along with our own.

The origin of the term ecofeminism is attributed the French writer Françoise d’Eaubonne in her book “Le Féminisme ou la Mort” (1974). Ecofeminist theory posits that a feminist perspective of ecology does not place women in the dominant position of power, but rather calls for an egalitarian society in which there is no one dominant group.

As d’Eaubonne defines the approach, ecofeminism relates to the oppression and domination of all marginalized groups (women, people of color, children, the poor) to the oppression and domination of nature (animals, land, water, air, etc.). The author argues that oppression, domination, exploitation, and colonization from the Western patriarchal society has directly caused irreversible environmental damage.  With the rate of species extinction growing exponentially with each successive generation of humans, the impact of human habitation has had a catastrophic impact on every habitat. As ecofeminism makes clear, any positive change of course requires an accompanying change of the basic socio-cultural structures and economic practices informed by the patriarchal influences in many developed nations.

Socially conservative and militant expressions of the Abrahamic faiths in particular need to be challenged. The development of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam each substantively arose within patriarchal societies as ideologies under-girding and legitimating the subjugation of women that accompanied the conquering of lands, including the habitats with all the species and resources therein.

Progressive Christian theologians and writers have long championed a rediscovery or socio-cultural archaeology of early Christian belief and context. We frame an understanding of the ministry and teaching of Jesus that emphasizes the transformational nature of love for one’s neighbor, care of community, and liberation from systems of oppression. The resistance to forces of empire calls for the social movement away from patriarchal structures and norms to those that emphasizes human equality, care of creation as a vital imperative, equitable economy, and governing principles that assure the same.

Recently, the current United States administration’s opposition to abortion has led to the watering-down of a United Nations Security Council resolution condemning rape as a weapon of war and reaffirming the UN’s opposition to sexual violence. However, the US – along with China and Russia – insisted on removing all references to women’s sexual and reproductive health or else the three countries would veto the resolution.

The US administration opposed all mentions of reproductive health on the grounds that health services for women victimized by rape during times of war implied support for abortion. The administration has taken measures to avoid supporting efforts and organizations that provide abortion services to women, including victims of rape.

CNN reported that the US move against the UN resolution is “just another expression of the contempt that this administration has for women’s rights and reproductive health and rights,” said Stacie Murphy, Director of Congressional Relations at Population Connection Action Fund. “It’s certainly typical of this administration when it comes to anything having to do with reproductive rights, sexual assault,” Murphy said.

The presidential administration of the United States from 2017 to 2021 is a casebook example of how the patriarchal worldview – supported in this instance by a conservative Christian belief system – is operating at this moment and in our generation to obliterate those voices, lives, and landscapes most affected by its consequences. Violence against women is not only aided and abetted, it is sanctioned through our current federal legislative and legal systems. Our once-upon-a-time eras of social progress in Civil Rights, Women’s’ Rights,  and Environmental Protection are intimately linked within our current period of social regression.

Those people whom patriarchal cultural norms would classify as female are not the only ones negatively impacted and subjugated within patriarchal systems. Patriarchal norms place men at risk in terms of their physical, mental, and spiritual health. Emerging literature on toxic masculinity illuminates our country’s current struggles with gun violence, the prison industry, violence towards women, and racism – just to name a few examples. Those people who are transgender, bisexual, asexual and known by any other non-binary nomenclature are considered anathema when viewed through the patriarchal lens. The non-binary literally no place within a binary cultural values system. Non-binary gender is not sanctioned within a religious system based in a so-called natural law invented to support the divine mandate of men to procreate and to promote the enslavement of female bodies.

An article in the New York Times by Wil S. Hylton describes how as a young man he was influenced by the behavioral modelling of a male cousin. The author was drawn to cousin’s strength, his bravado, his violence until his cousin physically assaulted him, placing his life in jeopardy. As Hylton shares his story, we learn how the episode forced him to come to terms with how that idea of masculinity poisoned his cousin’s life and his own. Reading Hylton’s story is like watching someone, with their last breath after a harrowing climb, plant a flag in the top of an unfathomable cultural iceberg. It’s chilling, and no man should have to endure it, but Hylton makes us have to look.

Jared Yates Sexton has written about the challenges that men have to “detoxify their masculinity” in his newly released book, “The Man They Wanted Me to Be: Toxic Masculinity and the Crisis of Our Own Making.” Sexton addresses toxic masculinity as, “An especially potent and toxic system of power and control that has subjugated women and minorities for generations via methodical and organized actions powered by misogyny and racism, a unique brand of maleness that has held sway over the United States of America since before its founding.”

Perhaps, the results of our 2016 national election and the resulting societal destruction over the subsequent years have helped to illuminate the psychology behind patriarchy. Additional social factors such as the unrelenting phenomenon of mass shootings in schools and in places of worship are social symptoms of a common cause affecting our entire national life and role on the world stage.

Our previous presidential administration made legislative incursion into our national parks, lands previously set aside as wilderness areas, and treaty lands held by Native American communities.  The language of climate change was deleted from government websites and reports, while traditional energy corporations continue dangerous resource extraction methods and alternative energy resources are resisted.  Incursions have been made into legislating control over women’s bodies, depriving LGBTQ persons of basic benefits and employment, consolidating control over natural resources, jeopardizing long-standing peace negotiations and historical alliances, criminalizing refugees, and protecting gun rights ownership over the rights of children.

The voices of scientists, physicians, ecologists, progressive theologians, journalists, park rangers, Native leaders, human rights advocates, international representatives working for peace and social justice – all of these voices are being vilified by those invested in preserving the worldview that is now killing all of us and all of life on earth. We must keep speaking, writing, resisting, and insisting on justice and equity for all and for Nature herself.

The ongoing patriarchal culture of conquer and divide must be replaced with the loving movement of resist and unite. We are in the midst of a critical historical moment of social transformation, and we must be willing to take the reins of our social direction and not accept the bit being forced upon us by those who claim that life is sacred when all their actions speak otherwise. We must strive beside one another for the change that brings greater justice to all people as well as to our waterways, lands, and air.

The desperate ultimate landscape presented in Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring” has haunted my fears since I was a child and first encountered her prophetic work. I need the birds to sing, which is why I pledge to them every morning – as they greet the rising sun –  that I will do all that I can so that their song will not be lost, that every spring will hold their voices of hope, endurance, and perseverance. If they can speak with such resolve, so must I –  and so must we all.

“There Was a Little Girl”

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Longfellow & Daughter

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and his daughter, Edith, ca. 1868 / G. P. A. (George Peter Alexander) Healy, photographer

 

Much quality ink has been spilled in multiple academic fields concerning gender studies.

Research in the areas of world history, anthropology, literature, ecology, human sexuality, business leadership, religious studies, neurological sciences, and so many more have explored the millennia-long phenomenon of the oppression of the feminine and the suppression of women’s experience.

There are always the notable exceptions of examples of women’s empowerment in certain minority cultures or within societal moments in time. In the same way, there is always the revealed truth that women are frequently enculturated participants in enabling the patriarchal torture and abuse of their own daughters and sisters.

Additionally, there are those men in various places and times who are faithful allies in the struggle for women’s equality, who somehow – in spite of being subjected to the forces of patriarchal formation inflicted upon them –believe that women are people and that “man” is not the default for societal preferment or even the best moniker for the human species.

The most recent cultural manifestation of our continuing gender dialog has emerged in the conceptual language of “toxic masculinity” and “fragile masculinity.”  The former refers to unhealthy male empowerment that manifest as violence, including violence towards women (or patriarchal conceptions of the feminine), while the latter refers to unhealthy emotional responses to societal challenges to and critique of toxic masculinity.

The newest television advertisement for Gillette products depicted a series of instances in which men are seen intervening in the sexual abuse, bullying, or marginalization of others. [The ad can be viewed here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=koPmuEyP3a0%5D  Newly released during the recent Super Bowl, the ad campaign caused men informed by toxic masculinity to enter into the arena of social media commentary as though they were contestants in a communication version of WrestleMania.

Myriad comment strings foamed profusely with written hyper masculine spittle and smack. Their emotionally violent response – bullying, alienating, sexualizing Gillette’s ad and message – proved the point that Gillette was making. As the commercial stated, for men to be their best, men need to do more to be better people. A close facial shave is insufficient.

I would add that it’s vital to society and to men’s wellbeing that men need to be emotionally healthier in general.  Sadly, the concepts of masculinity and femininity within traditional patriarchal expectations of men and women don’t make it easy for anyone living within patriarchal culture (the current dominant culture) to become personally and socially healthy.  It’s an uphill, cold, muddy slog for all of us.

Various cutting edge corporate models and psychological profiles of leadership categorize me as an alpha female with a shared leadership style and commitment to empowering every voice, encouraging the contribution of diverse experience and perspectives. Evaluations conclude that I am a leader with multiple and broad leadership strengths that include competence, confidence, resilience, and grit. None of those qualities are associated with the feminine within patriarchal societal gender expectations. All of those qualities are required for leading organizations through the current global and national changes our world is currently experiencing.

The very premise of how we understand the role of what has constituted our social institutions for multiple generations is undergoing radical and rapid change. The tectonic plates of former international alliances, former tenets of religious belief, and former economic structures are all heaving under the socio-cultural pressures to shift from a global patriarchal worldview to one in which all playing fields are made level.

Throughout this global shift, the world that is passing away will recognize its demise in the rising influence of what it is not: of what is not traditionally masculine, what is not male, what is not white, what is not heterosexual, and in what is not resource wealthy.  The dying patriarchal culture will respond with what it has always relied upon to keep both men and women of all types in thrall – violence. That violence must not be tolerated, and it must not be met with the same.

Every society has the key within it to ending its own violence. In the case of a democratic society, that key is the vote. However, the key can only be turned by harnessing the anger (unrealized hope) of its citizens. Right now in the United States, influencers both within and outside of our borders are trying to direct and influence our anger by bending it towards one another, shifting our focus away from our national government –  a leadership that embodies traditional patriarchal tenets at every possible level.

Psychological warfare is an old game, but with the rise of social media it has become easier to influence large portions of the population within short amounts of time. Toxic masculinity is at the global controls of this mind game, and we all must be “woke” to its influence and impact, as well as its goal of self preservation.

I had a recent experience in my professional life that reminded me anew that I am an alpha female leader helping to shift the global tectonic plates within the patriarchal institution in which I work. Once again, I had the experience of the reality that women in leadership are not rewarded for the same attributes that are rewarded in men, which is an ongoing frustration for me.

Since the most recent reminder, I have been struggling with my feelings of anger (unrealized hope) as well as the subsequent guilt of how my anger has slipped out sideways to cause harm in my personal relationships and work over the past few days. For a man, this is simply considered to be career stress. For a woman, it is a personal failing. An angry woman plays into the pejorative judgment of patriarchy, even though anger in men is considered normative when their expectations, needs or hopes are not met.

Yesterday, I remembered a couplet from a poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882), “When she was good, She was very, very good, And when she was bad she was horrid.”

You see, within the gender norms of patriarchal culture, women and girls are not permitted to be angry and are expected to sublimate their anger (sit on it), which can cause as many problems as when men are permitted to be as angry as they feel by expressing that feeling through violent action. Neither extreme is personally or socially healthy.

Longfellow’s poem is entitled, “There Was a Little Girl.“ Longfellow’s son, Earnest, recalled that his father composed and sang the poem while pacing back and forth with Edith [his daughter], then a baby, in his arms. Here is the full version of the poem:

There was a little girl,
And she had a little curl
Right in the middle of her forehead.
When she was good
She was very, very good,
And when she was bad she was horrid.

One day she went upstairs,
When her parents, unawares,
In the kitchen were occupied with meals,
And she stood upon her head
In her little trundle-bed,
And then began hooraying with her heels.

Her mother heard the noise,
And she thought it was the boys
A-playing at a combat in the attic;
But when she climbed the stair,
And found Jemima* there,
She took and she did spank her most emphatic.

Yes, that’s right. The little girl is punished by her mother for expressing her frustration at her needs being ignored, while her brothers are expected to play war. That’s patriarchal culture in a nutshell.

The fact that the poem is composed during a moment in which Longfellow is apparently engaged in a nurturing act towards his daughter is rather akin to the gas lighting indicative of patriarchal behavior towards women – indoctrinating girls from an early age to perceive and receive oppressive and abusive messaging as loving action from a male. And gosh-golly, who could ever dare to judge Longfellow harshly – he was and is known as a great man and artist. Therein lies the trouble of the past and current age.

Men and women of every culture, nation, and generation are not passive products of their time and circumstance. Longfellow doesn’t get a pass in 1853 when Edith was born and neither does the President of the United States in 2019 when I’m an American citizen. People make choices in every generation. Resistance and persistence are not newly invented cries against the injustice and illness of patriarchy. These words of psychological and social wellness have been rediscovered and unearthed for our time. They should be uttered like a charm against disease, as a mantra of societal healing and global transformation.

My own promise is that I will continue to make noise no matter what the punishment, to work to change structures, and to give voice to my experiences so that they do not live harmfully within me or arise to cause harm in the very relationships that are dearest to me. I can be better, and sharing all this in a constructive way helps me achieve the health that I want for myself and to encourage for all.

To be better as a society and within a dramatically shifting world is something we can only achieve through healthy communication and commitment to being in relationship with one another, within our nation, and within our international alliances. At this epoch in the life of the world, it’s not about a having a close shave. It’s about whether we live or die. We cannot allow anyone to keep us from one another (domestic or foreign) in order to achieve greater mutual human understanding.

We are all people. We must not neglect one another’s needs. We must not allow violence to go without intervention. We must be awake to the changing world around us and find courage in one another so that in our day we can realize the hope that has been longed for by many peoples throughout many cultures, disciplines, and centuries – to be the best we can be – together.

 

*[Note: The pseudonym reference of “Jemima” in Longfellow’s poem refers to one of the daughters of the biblical patriarch, Job; Jemima was valued for her beauty].

.

A Letter from John the Baptist to the Government Administration in Washington DC

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John the Baptist 3

Advent III – Sunday, December 16, 2018

Dear Brood of Vipers,

What do you think you’re doing? Are you ready to reap what you have sewn? It would be better for you if you had rather grown non-GMO fruits than made your money by investing in environmentally hazardous chemicals and toxic methods of mineral extraction and fossil fuels.  If you think that you are safe from the wrath of future generations, you should probably be aware that your care in your old age is entirely in their hands. If you do not invest in them, they will owe you nothing.  They will name their ancestors as only those who truly cared for them. The arrogant and self-centered are a dime a dozen and are easy to fire, while those who truly serve the people know that they nurture those who are not yet born and whom they may never meet but by so doing will themselves be honored forever.

Those who belong to the 1% are those who must learn to live with less, not those whom they would seek to deprive. Stop stealing what belongs to the people for all generations – clean water, national park land, entire species of animals, sustainable employment, just wages, healthcare, and even good health itself. You tax those who bear the greatest economic burden of your inflated prices – stop it! You give tax money to those who have far more than they need – stop it!  You build and populate prisons with minorities whom you have provided no viable alternative or route to human dignity – stop it! When they raise their voices and not weapons, you threaten the people with the same weapons you have created for fighting in foreign wars – these are your citizens – stop it!  You claim divine blessing and flaunt your so-called piety, dressing up your misdeeds within the robes of a corrupted belief – stop it!

As children are taught when they are very young, you must learn to share. You must be taught anew and learn well that you belong to a common God, a singular Spirit that binds you into one family called humanity. You must change your ways from fighting for an empire to cultivating common ground.

Well you may wonder, “Who does this person think they are who presumes to teach us and tell us what to do?” Your actions have already told me that you think that I am worth nothing. And you are right – not because I have no value, but because there is One who exists that is of greater worth than any of us. Neither you or I are worthy of his notice, yet he notices everything and forgets nothing and no one. I can’t harm you, nor would I want to do so even if I could.  No. Violence is your way, not mine and not his.

Do you know what Baptism is?  A little water, a dab of sacred oil?  These are only small signs, human gestures pointing only faintly to an immense reality far more powerful than anything you can do from your vantage point of human authority. Compared to one who was and is and is to be, you are as chaff that will be blown away on the winds of change. Baptism is a heritage of revolution from generation to generation. For, my friends, change is coming, and it will swallow you up whole. The people who are even now rising will be as a resurrection of hope to the world.  The fire of their love for one another and for all Creation will consume your petty greed and will set right all your common thievery and will till under the ground of your wars to plant a New Earth and new ways of being together that will bring life to all people.

So, prepare for your end, you Vipers. The poison of your work has met its healer, and only those whose action is illness and whose intent is death will know fear. Love is coming and is already here, dwelling as the flame of the Spirit within the hearts of those who champion the poor, the stranger, the victims of injustice. These are the truly Baptized, those who bring a revolution of Peace for all Creation.  If you do not change your hearts, you will not have the ability to enter into a better world – and that is your choice and your responsibility, not God’s.

Love,

John

Families Belong Together

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I was invited to be a keynote speaker at the “Families Belong Together” rally and march at the Snohomish County Courthouse in Everett, WA. This gathering was one of 750 similar gatherings held around our nation today, protesting recent actions taken by the current administration separating children from their parents upon crossing the border and the reality that there are no mechanisms in place for reuniting them.

This is the text of the speech that I gave.

Families Belong Together, Everett, June 20, 2018

Wherever you are on your faith journey, whatever your philosophy, or your approach to life, those who represent organized religion are duty bound to our societies to speak out and speak up when the values of our faith are misrepresented; when our values are manipulated to justify crimes against humanity; or when our values are used to abuse adults and children. The sacred texts of our faith – of the Abrahamic faiths – should not be used as a cudgel with which to beat down God’s gift of the glorious and free human spirit.

Jeff Sessions does not speak for us.

You need to hear from faith leaders like me that for more than a century The Episcopal Church (along with many other traditions of Christian faith) has been engaged in the ministry of welcoming immigrants, walking with them as they begin their new lives in our communities and advocating for immigration policies that protect families from separation, offer meaningful access to citizenship, and by our Baptismal Covenant serve to respect the dignity of every human being.

Our Presiding Bishop, The Most Reverend Michael Curry, preached of the socially transformative power of Love during his sermon at the Royal Wedding of Harry and Megan in Windsor, England in May. He didn’t speak of love just because it was a wedding – he preaches of love every single time he preaches. Love has the power to unite people across any divide of history or society. In so doing, love make societies stronger and turns strangers into neighbors who care about one another. Love can also make diverse peoples into family. As it our priests say after uniting two people in marriage, “What God has joined together, let no one put asunder.”

We believe that the same principle applies to the incarnation of love in the diverse expression of families – whether bound by blood, by vows of commitment, by adoption or by the recognition of kindred spirits.

We affirm the family as a foundational societal structure to support human community, and we understand the household as an estate blessed by God. The security of the family provides critical mental, physical and emotional support to the development and wellbeing of children. Our congregations and immigration and refugee agencies serve many migrant families that have recently arrived in the United States. Leaving their communities is often the only option they have to provide safety for their children and protect them from harm.

Tearing children away from parents, who have made a dangerous journey out of circumstances of certain death in order to provide a safe and sufficient life for them is morally and ethically reprehensible. It is unnecessarily bullying, cruel and detrimental to the well-being of parents and children.

As people of faith, our obligation is first and foremost to the vulnerable, especially to children. In this moment of history, I believe that we are called by God to protect them from being punished by forces of discrimination and racism in our country and inculcated in the policies of the current administration.

Therefore, informed by our faith, we call on our nation to live up to its highest ideals and most deeply held values, and we call on Congress to take action to protect families and children and to formulate a comprehensive immigration policy that is moral and consistent and that allows immigrants who want to contribute to this country the chance to do so.

This nation was founded upon the principle of liberty for all, it has been forged by the hands, hearts and minds of diverse peoples. Our diversity is our greatest strength; we must rise up to insist from our government and from ourselves a shared commitment to honoring the dignity and value of all people.

For those of us who adhere to the principles of radical equality and the unconditional love of God taught through the healing ministry Jesus Christ, our Christian values are at stake. Humane and loving care for the stranger, the alien, and the foreigner is considered a sacred duty and moral value for those who would follow the way of God. In his parable of the last judgment, Jesus commended those who welcomed the stranger and condemned those who did not (Matthew 25:35 & 25:43). This teaching of Jesus was based on the law of Moses that tells the people of God: “The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God.” (Leviticus 19:33-35).

Just as Christ and the first century Christians stood against the violent forces of Empire that separated peoples into the wealthy, by virtue of injustice, or into the oppressed, by virtue of moral violence, we in our time are also called to stand against the cultural currencies of hatred, racism and greed. We will do so not by returning violence with violence – but rather by incarnating into this world what the alternative can and should be and what we dream together that we will create.

The Kingdom of Heaven – or however you conceive a just and ethical society – is not intended to be a comforting myth of some far off time or place. Rather, it is ours to create in every place and time, and in every generation, through actions of challenging injustice, healing the wounded and the broken hearted, feeding the hungry, and rejoicing in the beauty and strength of the diversity that God has made on this good Earth. We must – each of us – extend to one another the inestimable gift of human love that can truly create peace on Earth for all peoples.

We must today stand with those fleeing from violence and must not quietly abide the cruelty of children being separated from their parents, whose lives will be impacted forever by such action. There is no version of Christianity that can truly be called a Christian faith that permits or advocates the physical, psychological, emotional and spiritual harm against God’s children.

To those who would dare quote Scripture to justify hatred, violence and rejection of the stranger, we say, “Separate Church from State, not children from their families!”

We who are willing to follow Christ to the service of love in the face of an oppressive and unjust Empire must bring the ministries of healing and justice into our time and place for building up the kingdom of peace on Earth, as a place for all peoples. We must insist on a nation and a government that truly reflects the best of our spiritual and moral values as people of diverse faiths and as citizens of these United States, a country of liberty for all who come to these blessed shores.

Patriarchy and the National Struggle to Embody Christ

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Jesus Teaching at Galilee 3

Prelude: I don’t normally post my sermons to my blog site, but for me personally, the sermon I shared on June 10th was one the most important sermons that I’ve ever given. It’s about my identity and yours, and the struggle for everyone’s identity within the patriarchal tradition of  faith and of society, of Christianity and of The Episcopal Church as we have it today.  

This sermon is also one of my longest, and I am grateful to those who gave me their forbearance that day, those who have continued to view it on YouTube [a link is at the end of this column], and to anyone who now gives of their time to read it here.

Thank you, most especially, to the Sons of the Church who are thereby also my Sons, many of whom are also fathers of one kind or another. Your struggle is my struggle. Christ models for all of us a way to make freedom and peace truly real for one another.

Sermon: Pentecost 3 – June 10, 2018

The history of the rise of monotheism and the system of belief in the God of Israel emerges from a socio-cultural history of patriarchal social systems and belief systems within the context of greater ancient Mesopotamia. Western history and Christianity and the forces of colonialism stem from the advent of patriarchy and governance by men as social and religious leaders within patriarchal structures. What I have just said is evidentially true. The World has been both enriched and enslaved within this model over successive generations, in part due to the struggle inherent to patriarchy – the essential question of what male leadership is to look like. This struggle is as much with us today in our context as it was in First Century Jerusalem, during the time in which Jesus lived.

There are two basic models within patriarchal paradigms which struggle together to inform the underlying value system – the “stern father” vs. “nurturant parent.” In this duel understanding, the Nurturant Parenting contrasts with Stern Father parenting as two distinct metaphors each used as icons of contrasting value and political systems, i.e. Regressive (Stern Father, authoritarian) and Progressive (Nurturant Parent, small “d” democratic).

Within patriarchal society, there are men and women who are enculturated in or identify with the Stern Father cultiral cosmology, and there are men and women who are enculturated in or identify with the Nurturant Parent cultural cosmology. The struggle is not between men and women, but between two essentially different ways of conceptualizing authority and it’s exercise.

The struggle of patriarchy to identify its primary model of leadership continues to inform and impact the nations and communities of our world today. As a female leader within the patriarchially informed church, I can tell you that I love and care about God’s sons.  If I did not, I would not be here before you, and I would not have dedicated the service of my life to the church. That said, as a woman who is called to nurture the people of God’s kingdom, in my role as a spiritual mother in the church, the time has come for me to speak to my sons and to share something vitally important about their history and about the challenges they must rise to meet in the current time of world events.

Let us begin with our Old Testament reading – Samuel’s parents give him to Eli, the high priest, to raise as a nazarite dedicated to God. Samuel plays a key role in the transition from the period of the biblical judges to the institution of a kingdom under Saul, and again in the transition from Saul to David. Samuel initially appointed his two sons as his successors; however, just like Eli’s sons, Samuel’s proved unworthy. The Israelites rejected them. Because of the external threat from other tribes, such as the Philistines, the tribal leaders decided that there was a need for a more unified, central government, and demanded Samuel appoint a king so that they could be like other nations. Samuel interpreted this as a personal rejection, and at first was reluctant to oblige, until reassured by a divine revelation.

Within the discourse between Samuel and God, two types of kings are identified, “He will take your sons and appoint them to his chariots and to be his horsemen, and to run before his chariots; and he will appoint for himself commanders of thousands and commanders of fifties, and some to plow his ground and to reap his harvest, and to make his implements of war and the equipment of his chariots. He will take your daughters to be perfumers and cooks and bakers. He will take the best of your fields and vineyards and olive orchards and give them to his courtiers. He will take one-tenth of your grain and of your vineyards and give it to his officers and his courtiers. He will take your male and female slaves, and the best of your cattle and donkeys, and put them to his work. He will take one-tenth of your flocks, and you shall be his slaves.”

Alexander Hamilton had a similar concern about the nature of kings. In his Federalist Papers, Hamilton outlined the premises of a republic that favored an office of the President in contrast to a king. In paper #69, Hamilton points to the fact that the president is elected, whereas the king of England inherits his position. The president furthermore has only a qualified negative on legislative acts—i.e. his veto can be overturned—whereas the king has an absolute negative. Both the president and the king serve as commander in chief, but the king also has the power to raise and maintain armies—a power reserved for the legislature in America. The president can only make treaties with the approval of the Senate. The king can make binding treaties as he sees fit. Similarly, the president can only appoint officers with the approval of the Senate, whereas the king can grant whatever titles he likes. The powers of the president in terms of commerce and currency are severely limited, whereas the king is “in several respects the arbiter of commerce.” In many respects, the president would have less powers over his constituents than the governor of New York has over his.

As the first president of the United States, George Washington served from 1789 to 1797.  Though he was born into Colonial Virginia gentry to a family of wealthy planters, he was a modest man when it came to claiming the boundaries of his authority as president. He believed quite clearly that the new nation that he helped established should be governed by the people.

In the 32 handwritten pages of his farewell address, Washington gave much advise to both the governed and those who would govern. He recognized the pitfalls of a party system, writing, “The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism. But this leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism. The disorders and miseries which result gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual; and sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction, more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation, on the ruins of public liberty.”

He added, “It is important, likewise, that the habits of thinking in a free country should inspire caution in those entrusted with its administration, to confine themselves within their respective constitutional spheres, avoiding in the exercise of the powers of one department to encroach upon another. The spirit of encroachment tends to consolidate the powers of all the departments in one, and thus to create, whatever the form of government, a real despotism. A just estimate of that love of power, and proneness to abuse it, which predominates in the human heart, is sufficient to satisfy us of the truth of this position.”

Having endured the intrigues of several foreign powers during the Revolutionary War, Washington was cautious about international relationship. He advised, “Against the insidious wiles of foreign influence (I conjure you to believe me, fellow-citizens) the jealousy of a free people ought to be constantly awake, since history and experience prove that foreign influence is one of the most baneful foes of republican government…. Excessive partiality for one foreign nation and excessive dislike of another cause those whom they actuate to see danger only on one side, and serve to veil and even second the arts of influence on the other. Real patriots who may resist the intrigues of the favorite are liable to become suspected and odious, while its tools and dupes usurp the applause and confidence of the people, to surrender their interests.”

Human beings – and let’s be honest, we are speaking of the history of men – have struggled with forms of governance over the millennia since the time of Samuel. WWI was a global war originating in Europe that lasted from 28 July 1914 to 11 November 1918. The trigger for the war was the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary, by Yugoslav nationalist Gavrilo Princip in Sarajevo on 28 June 1914. The war drew in all the world’s economic great powers, assembled in two opposing alliances: the Allies (the Russian Empire, the French Third Republic, and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland) versus the Central Powers of Germany and Austria-Hungary. Italy, Japan and the United States joined the Allies, while the Ottoman Empire and Bulgaria joined the Central Powers.

At the outbreak of the war, the United States pursued a policy of non-intervention, avoiding conflict while trying to broker a peace. When the German U-boat U-20 sank the British liner RMS Lusitania on 7 May 1915 with 128 Americans among the dead, President Woodrow Wilson demanded an end to attacks on passenger ships, and Germany complied. However, after the sinking of seven US merchant ships by submarines and a revelation that Germany intended to support a Mexican war against the United States, Wilson called for war on Germany on 2 April 1917, which the US Congress declared 4 days later.

Over nine million combatants and seven million civilians died as a result of the war (including the victims of a number of genocides). In the aftermath of the war, four empires disappeared: the German, Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman, and Russian. Numerous nations regained their former independence, and new ones were created. The end of the war was formally effected with the Treaty of Versailles with Germany on 28 June 1919.

The League of Nations was an intergovernmental organization founded on 10 January 1920 as a result of the Paris Peace Conference that ended the First World War. The diplomatic philosophy behind the League represented a fundamental shift from the preceding hundred years. The League ultimately proved incapable of preventing aggression by the Axis powers in the 1930’s. The credibility of the organization was weakened by the fact that the United States never officially joined the League and the Soviet Union joined late and only briefly.

The onset of the Second World War showed that the League had failed its primary purpose, which was to prevent any future world war. However, the League lasted for 26 years. After WWII, the United Nations (UN) replaced it.

The UN Charter was drafted at a conference between April–June 1945 in San Francisco, and was signed on 26 June 1945 at the conclusion of the conference; this charter took effect on 24 October 1945, and the UN began operation. At its founding, the UN had 51 member states; there are now 193. The headquarters of the UN is in Manhattan, New York City, and is subject to extraterritoriality. Further main offices are situated in Geneva, Nairobi, and Vienna. The organization is financed by assessed and voluntary contributions from its member states. Its objectives include maintaining international peace and security, promoting human rights, fostering social and economic development, protecting the environment, and providing humanitarian aid in cases of famine, natural disaster, and armed conflict. The UN is the largest, most familiar, most internationally represented and most powerful intergovernmental organization in the world. The UN’s mission to preserve world peace was complicated in its early decades by the Cold War between the United States and Soviet Union and their respective allies.

Global economic relations have emerged that include a forum for the world’s major industrialized countries. The Group of Seven (also known as the G7) emerged before the 1973 oil crisis. On Sunday, 25 March 1973, the U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, George Shultz, convened an informal gathering of finance ministers from West Germany, France, and the United Kingdom before an upcoming meeting in Washington, D.C. The meeting was subsequently held in the White House library on the ground floor.

Today the G7 is a group consisting of Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States. These countries, with the seven largest advanced economies in the world, represent more than 62% of the global net wealth ($280 trillion). The G7 countries also represent more than 46% of the global gross domestic product (GDP) based on nominal values, and more than 32% of the global GDP based on purchasing power parity. The European Union is also represented at the G7 summit.

On 2 March 2014, the G7 condemned the “Russian Federation’s violation of the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine.” On 4 June 2014 leaders at the G7 summit in Brussels, condemned Moscow for its “continuing violation” of Ukraine’s sovereignty, in their joint statement and stated they were prepared to impose further sanctions on Russia. This meeting was the first since Russia was expelled from the G8 following its annexation of Crimea in March.

At the G7 meeting this past week, the President of the United States has made some stunning comments that have furthered an alienation of our country from our historic allies by condemning the G7 group as irrelevant and insisting on the return of Russia to the group. It is known to us that Russia has egregiously interfered in our democratic processes, and the President’s choices reflect an increasingly disturbing position against both the ideals of western democracy and the interests of the American people.

The most revealing comment the President made was when he indicated that he would remove America from participation in the G7. He said, “Do what you want, we have a world to run.”  I am not sure who “we” is, but I’m fairly certain that he doesn’t mean you and me, but rather the “strong men,” with whom he personally identifies – world leaders that tend towards autocracy and fascist dictatorship.

Make no mistake, the masculine imagery and patriarchal governance structures of history continue to inform our world order. European leaders attending the G7 were horrified. Several commented that they felt as though the formerly nurturing father role of America had become like that of an authoritarian and abusive father, one that rejected the sons previously claimed and supported.

The societal “king” described by Samuel and about which we are cautioned by George Washington is a man who does not value peace; it is a man who holds women and children and foreigners as subservient, it is a man who alienates the weak (the ill, the poor, the powerless); it is a man who values himself more than others, who sees in the world only what he can get from it and not what the world has to give to all; it is a man who believes that power is found in violence and threat of violence and the beating down of all those who would challenge him.

Christ offers a different model of what it is to be a man of power. Firstly, he was not threatened by women and children – they were included at his table along with phrases and Sadducees, royalty and homeless.  He modeled himself after his own Father, the second version of a king that Samuel and God had discussed – a father who leads by the ultimate strength – the power to bring diverse peoples together, the power to heal grievous personal and social woundedness, the power to reconcile.

Jesus uses the language of a loving father, as coming from a place of nurture and love and encouragement, of forgiveness, forbearance and unconditional love. He models a different style of male leadership that is one of the Nurturant Parent, not the Stern Father – he came into the world to forgive sinners and love all of God’s children, not to condemn them to eternal damnation and judgement.

He did not come to create a position of power for himself on earth, or he would have made friends with Herod Antipas and Caiaphas.  He would have been a friend of Empire. In point of fact, he quite intentionally presented a diametrically opposed version of God than the image of God of Israel had been until that point. He had only one law – Love your God with all your heart and mind and being and love your neighbor as yourself.

The image of radical inclusion that Jesus lived by was through the use of the table. He invites everyone to have a meal with him, none are excluded – he eats and talks with the wealthy, with Pharisees and Sadducees as readily as he eats with the poor and with women or the homeless or the ill and the marginalized.  He includes everyone and is willing to teach anyone with hearts to listen and to “eat” and “drink” of the bread and wine he offers – all who hunger for God.

The transformative and eternal power he shared of the omnipotent God of all things was Love.

The king of heaven creates a new world based on love, founded in a mutual commitment to peace, existing for the good of the people and of Creation.

In a contemporary commentary on our current President of the United States, artist Tim O’Brien created this week’s cover of Time magazine. The cover art depicts the President wearing a business suit, as he looks into the mirror and sees himself enrobed and crowned as a king.  This image is akin to Samuel’s fearful king who subjugates and extorts the people.

When Christ looks into the divine mirror of the Holy Spirit, he sees us –  we are reflected in his sight as the image of God, the children of God. We the People of our God recognize in Christ the model of our true and loving father.

Christ lived his life showing his followers and his country and for all future generations that love is by far the greatest strength in a man.  It is a power that goes beyond men, because it dwells as the holy spirit in the hearts of every man, woman and child of every community and nation and faith.

I believe, in the midst of all worldly trials, that love will rule. For Christ did not come into the world to run the world but to save it.

As a Mother of the Church, I say to you, to all men and women, to elders and to children, to the marginalized and the privileged – love one other and thereby, go out and save the world – in Christ’s name and for all peoples.  We can and we will make a New Creation, through the ultimate power of Love.

 

NOTE: This sermon can be found as delivered on YouTube at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qAjkhuUgaik   As I was giving the sermon, I edited out some of the content of the written version for the sake of time. So, the full content is included in this blog post.

Presidents Day: Reminders from George Washington

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George Washington 

When calculated by the Gregorian calendar, George Washington was born on February 22, 1731.  A federal holiday honoring Washington was originally implemented by an Act of Congress in 1879, though at the time the holiday applied only to government offices in Washington.  In 1885, the act expanded to include all federal offices. Finally, in 1971, the celebration of Washington’s birthday was shifted to the third Monday in February

While serving as the Commander-in-Chief of the Continental Army during the American Revolutionary War, George Washington created the first military badge of merit for the common soldier. Revived on Washington’s 200th birthday in 1932, the Purple Heart medal (which bears Washington’s image) is awarded to soldiers who are injured in combat. As with Memorial Day and Veterans Day, Washington’s birthday subsequently offers an additional opportunity to honor our country’s veterans.

Although Lincoln’s birthday, February 12, was never a federal holiday, nearly half of the state governments have officially renamed their Washington’s Birthday observances as Presidents’ Day.  However, the latter has neverbecome the official national designation for the former in either government records or through Acts of Congress.

Within the country, some states recognize a variety of presidents on the holiday, but Washington’s Birthday (locally adopted as Presidents’ Day) was actually not intended as a day to honor the general office of the presidency – that idea arose from a newspaper article intended as a spoof during the Nixon era. Presidential records indicate that Nixon merely issued an Executive Order (11582) on 11 February 1971 defining the third Monday of February as a holiday.  The announcement of that Executive Order identified the day as “Washington’s Birthday.”

Celebrated for his leadership in the founding of our nation, George Washington was the Electoral College’s unanimous choice to become the first President. He was seen as a unifying force for the new republic and set an example for future holders of the office.

Since 1862 there has been an oft-forgotten tradition in the United States Senate that George Washington’s Farewell Address should be read on his birthday. It is my hope that in our time, the leaders of our government – and all fellow citizens — might take time to review at least the following sampling of advice Washington proffered to his new nation, contained within his Farewell Address of 1796….

On his hopes for our national life –

[May heaven] continue to [give] you the choicest tokens of its beneficence; that your union and brotherly affection may be perpetual; that the free Constitution, which is the work of your hands, may be sacredly maintained; that its administration in every department may be stamped with wisdom and virtue; that, in time, the happiness of the people of these States, under the auspices of liberty, may be made complete by so careful a preservation and so prudent a use of this blessing as will acquire to them the glory of recommending it to the applause, the affection, and adoption of every nation which is yet a stranger to it.

On preserving our national unity –

While, then, every part of our country thus feels an immediate and particular interest in union…will avoid the necessity of those overgrown military establishments which, under any form of government, are inauspicious to liberty, and which are to be regarded as particularly hostile to republican liberty. In this sense it is that your union ought to be considered as a main prop of your liberty, and that the love of the one ought to endear to you the preservation of the other.

On the pitfalls of party politics —

…to put, in the place of the delegated will of the nation the will of a party, often a small but artful and enterprising minority of the community… are likely, in the course of time and things, to become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion.

The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism. But this leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism. The disorders and miseries which result gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual; and sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction, more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation, on the ruins of public liberty.

Without looking forward to an extremity of this kind (which nevertheless ought not to be entirely out of sight), the common and continual mischiefs of the spirit of party are sufficient to make it the interest and duty of a wise people to discourage and restrain it.

It serves always to distract the public councils and enfeeble the public administration. It agitates the community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms, kindles the animosity of one part against another, foments occasionally riot and insurrection. It opens the door to foreign influence and corruption, which finds a facilitated access to the government itself through the channels of party passions. Thus the policy and the will of one country are subjected to the policy and will of another.

On preserving the separation of governing powers —

It is important, likewise, that the habits of thinking in a free country should inspire caution in those entrusted with its administration, to confine themselves within their respective constitutional spheres, avoiding in the exercise of the powers of one department to encroach upon another. The spirit of encroachment tends to consolidate the powers of all the departments in one, and thus to create, whatever the form of government, a real despotism. A just estimate of that love of power, and proneness to abuse it, which predominates in the human heart, is sufficient to satisfy us of the truth of this position. The necessity of reciprocal checks in the exercise of political power, by dividing and distributing it into different depositaries, and constituting each the guardian of the public weal against invasions by the others, has been evinced by experiments ancient and modern; some of them in our country and under our own eyes. To preserve them must be as necessary as to institute them.

On truth in education —

…Promote then, as an object of primary importance, institutions for the general diffusion of knowledge. In proportion as the structure of a government gives force to public opinion, it is essential that public opinion should be enlightened.

On national debt –

As a very important source of strength and security, cherish public credit. One method of preserving it is to use it as sparingly as possible, avoiding occasions of expense by cultivating peace, but remembering also that timely disbursements to prepare for danger frequently prevent much greater disbursements to repel it, avoiding likewise the accumulation of debt, not only by shunning occasions of expense, but by vigorous exertion in time of peace to discharge the debts which unavoidable wars may have occasioned, not ungenerously throwing upon posterity the burden which we ourselves ought to bear. 

On international relations –

The nation which indulges towards another a habitual hatred or a habitual fondness is in some degree a slave. It is a slave to its animosity or to its affection, either of which is sufficient to lead it astray from its duty and its interest. 

On the undue influence of foreign powers –

Against the insidious wiles of foreign influence (I conjure you to believe me, fellow-citizens) the jealousy of a free people ought to be constantly awake, since history and experience prove that foreign influence is one of the most baneful foes of republican government…. Excessive partiality for one foreign nation and excessive dislike of another cause those whom they actuate to see danger only on one side, and serve to veil and even second the arts of influence on the other. Real patriots who may resist the intrigues of the favorite are liable to become suspected and odious, while its tools and dupes usurp the applause and confidence of the people, to surrender their interests.

In light of George Washington’s hard-won national liberty and hard-won personal wisdom, it is my prayer that the district that is home to our nation’s capital will take heed of the far sighted advice of our chief founder, for whom it is named.

In Christ’s Peace – Amen.