General Convention 2006 #1
Journal from General Convention #1
June 13, 2006
The Rev. Brian C. Taylor
In the exhibit hall, 260 booths say it all: Anglican Rosaries, Church Mutual Insurance, Integrity, American Anglican Council, African Team Ministries, Far East Handicrafts, Episcopalians for Life, Episcopalians for Reproductive Choice, Union of Black Episcopalians, Colores del Pueblo, Historians and Archivists, Recovering Alcoholic Clergy, Visual Arts, Heifer International, Institute on Religion and Democracy, and Networks for Disability, Stewardship, and Animal Rights. This temporary city of 10,000 is an effusive explosion of creation and humanity.
I started this long day at 7:30am with a hearing on the Millennium Development Goals (MDG) hearing. This is a growing movement championed by the Bill Gates Foundation, the singer Bono of the rock band U2, Bill Clinton and many others. 148 countries (including the USA) have signed on to its principles. By giving 0.7% of every country’s GNP, it seeks to eliminate poverty, hunger, AIDS, illiteracy, child mortality, gender inequality, and environmental destruction.
They’re everywhere here. The Presiding Bishop will host an evening devoted to it, the Africans are pushing it, everyone has buttons and bracelets and stickers proclaiming it. Against all odds, we’ve forgiven world debt; now all we need to do is to find the will and the cooperation to give less than 1% of national, church, and personal resources, and the world will be a much less miserable place.
I ended the day at 10pm after an amazing two-hour MDG liturgy of some 700 people. It was a “U2ucharist,” with all of the music being a sing-along with videos of U2. In our church, I’ve never seen such energy and passion and hope about alleviating suffering as in this Eucharist tonight: LOTS of young clergy and laity, but a healthy mix of middle-aged and older folks, too. The bishop of North Carolina, Michael Battle, gave a VERY rousing African-American sermon filled with call and response, laughter, and deep emotion.
This may well be the surprise center of what really happens here: leaving behind our fight over sex and remembering our deepest call. If Bono can get Jesse Jackson and Jesse Helms together over this, surely we can get all our people behind the mission of the gospel to feed the hungry, heal the sick, and lift up the hopeless.
Perhaps the Spirit is twisting through our seemingly intractable and ugly deadlock over sexuality to bring this surprising thing about. For this is how it has gone and may continue to go:
1. We ordained Gene Robinson and blessed gay relationships.
2. Many in the undeveloped countries of the southern hemisphere said “You didn’t take our strong feelings about this seriously; you obviously don’t care about your relationship with us and the rest of the Anglican world.”
3. We woke up and realized that we really don’t want to lose our relationship with poor Anglicans around the globe, knowing that we need them as much as they need us. We began to recommit to them, despite our cultural differences about sexuality.
4. So now we gently put our arguments about sex on a shelf (at least for a moment), so that we can cooperate with our poor Anglican sisters and brothers on survival issues that we all care about passionately: poverty, AIDS, women, children, disease, clean drinking water, education, the environment, and partnerships for economic development.
5. And next? We will go ahead quietly blessing gay and lesbian relationships and ordaining homosexual clergy; the sex-obsessed conservatives (a small minority) will leave us in disgust; and the rest of us (the great majority world-wide) will find a dynamic new partnership between the privileged rich and the disadvantaged poor.
And before too many years, we’ll authorize public rites of blessing for same-sex couples. But in the meantime, because of our recommitment to help the global south survive, they will have ceased to care about that. Or, as the Episcopalians for Global Reconciliation put it, these are the real “Instruments of Unity” instead of those in the Windsor Report.
Love conquers all. At least that’s my faith. The Episcopalians for Global Reconciliation may save us all.
Go to www.e4gr.org and find out what this is all about.
One love, one blood, one life,
you got to do what you should.
One life with each other: sisters, brothers.
One life, but we’re not the same.
We get to carry each other, carry each other.
One, one.
U2, One