Michaelmas 
Sept. 28, 2008
The Rev. Brian C. Taylor

Every year when Michaelmas rolls around, part of me wishes that we had a different patron saint. Perhaps Francis, who preached to the birds and kissed the leper. Our patron saint Michael leads God’s army, destroying and excommunicating the enemies of God. He fights a holy war against evil, and we all know what horrors have been wrought out of that myth. 

But then I think of those sacred battles here on earth that seem to pit angels against demons, where God’s purposes seem to be at stake. There are those who have to fight in order to protect God’s green earth, or to bring about basic human rights for all of God’s children. I think about how so many of us on both sides of the aisle feel that in this election cycle and economic crisis, we are in a fight for the soul of our nation, a potential turning point that cannot be made without great struggle to bring it into being. I also know, as we all do, that inner spiritual and emotional healing and growth can be a sacred wrestling match. 

But how shall we enter into these battles, and what kind of victory do we hope for? 

Recently I’ve been doing some reading in Hinduism, which has its share of holy wars. In the Bhagavad Gita, one of their holiest scriptures, Krishna gives advice to the warrior Arjuna on the eve of battle. When I went to the Asian Art museum in San Francisco recently, I saw statue after statue of Hindu gods with flaming swords, menacing eyes, and necklaces made out of human skulls. 

But the interesting thing is that Hindu holy wars seem to be more about integration of light and dark than domination of good over evil. One member of the Hindu trinity is Shiva, the god of both creation and destruction. Both elements are honored as integral to the cycles of life. Devotion is made to the powers of light and dark, chaos and order, life and death. 

I suppose the closest thing we have to this is our devotion to the cross and the resurrection, but we usually treat Good Friday as an evil over which Easter emerges triumphant. We sing I want to walk as a child of the light, I want to follow Jesus. In him there is no darkness at all. Really? 

Seven of your clergy and one lay person have just returned from diocesan clergy conference, where a kind of sacred struggle is taking place. After 20 years of exhausting polarization in this diocese, we are trying another way, under a new commission for healing and reconciliation. We told stories from our different histories, and just listened, without correction or comment. We identified those areas where we differ and those where we agree, and we started to articulate a path forward that we could all live with. All of us deeply desired - and really struggled to create -  a safe place where our differences could be acknowledged and respected, and also where our essential unity in Christ could be celebrated. 

Now I really don’t agree with about half of the others, and I will work to prevent them from doing some of the things they would like to do, but I don’t want to demonize and dominate them, to cast them out. I want to be in relationship with them, and hope that through this relationship, we will give each other space to be. This is the kind of victory I hope for in the current battle in our church: that we can stand firm in our convictions and fight for what we believe in, and as we do so, live together in respectful and loving relationship. It is will be a struggle to get there. 

Internally, in the holy war within, I have learned that it doesn’t do much good to try to defeat and cast out our so-called “negative” emotions and habits. Splitting off our anger, fear, and compulsions, they eventually rear their heads again in a new form, just when we thought they’d been put to rest. Instead, we might learn to channel our anger into action for good, embrace our fear and realize our dependence upon God, and see the passion and love for life that is the gift within our compulsions. 

Many years ago, through the practice of meditation and contemplative prayer, I shifted from a spirituality where I tried to walk as a child of the light, with no darkness at all, to a spirituality of light and dark. Sitting in silence, as my own inner demons revealed their faces again and again, I let them be: feeling them, seeing them as they are, without any effort to judge or rid myself of them. 

As I befriended these demons, they came into the open, and they lost some of their power. Because the problem with splitting off things we don’t like about ourselves is that these things only grow more powerful when they’re forced into hiding. Out in the open, they can be put in perspective, and we can even find a gift in each one of them, something that contributes to our becoming whole. 

The victory of this kind of spiritual battle is not the purity of self-perfection, which is a dangerous illusion. It is the victory of a fuller humanity, one that will always seek continuing growth, but at the same time is also able to enjoy the imperfection of what is, today. 

I think that we can apply this kind of spiritual battle to our current culture wars, the conflict between worldviews that is becoming so apparent in this election cycle. Polarized into opposite camps that demonize one another, neither can even comprehend how the other could possibly think the way they do. We want to split off the other party, dominating it once and for all. 

But no matter who wins, the other side is not going away. So we need to learn something that we are beginning to try in this diocese, and what my meditation practice taught me. Guarding our lips, even our thoughts, we refrain from making sarcastic and demeaning comments about one another, and we try to be in respectful relationship. We might befriend those that we think of as demons, and look for some gift in their presence. If you’re a Democrat, what gift might Republicans be trying to offer you? If you’re a Republican, what gift might Democrats have for you? 

Yes, we should stand firm in our convictions and fight for what we think is right. But we are one nation, one big and very diverse family, and we’re all in it together. The victory that might come out of this kind of attitude is not the triumphalism of winner-take-all, but a world where opposites live in creative tension until a new and surprising third ways emerge.

We say that God is ultimately victorious, and this is the message of the story of Michael’s war in heaven. Good wins out in the end. Or as Martin Luther King Jr. was fond of saying, “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” 

What this means is that even as we struggle to move our church forward into an authentically modern expression of ancient Christianity, even as we fight our spiritual battles with inner demons, even as we contend with the culture wars and economic crises of our day, we already have a safe place in which these struggles take place. We live in God. 

Our security does not therefore have to fearfully depend upon how much fragile progress we can temporarily make in our church, in our nation, in our souls. Our security is rooted in the eternal goodness of God, who is always present, always powerful, always true. As Thomas Merton said, at any moment we can break through to the underlying unity that is God’s gift to us in Christ. At any moment we can abide in the fullness of life that the Spirit offers. 

That is our safe place in which to do battle. That is the only thing we can truly depend upon - not a new economic plan, a new president, a perfected self, or an enlightened church. Our only place of ultimate safety is in God.

So, as Krishna said to Arjuna, as Michael said to his angels, go into battle. But know that the outcome of the war has already been won, and it takes place in heaven itself, here and now, like a play within a theatre. Take your battles seriously, but not too seriously. For we live in God, and all shall be well. 

St. Michael and All Angels Episcopal Church   
Albuquerque, New Mexico 
Sunday Sept.21, 2008 Proper 20A 
Text Matthew 20: 1-18 Parable of the Laborers in the Vineyard 
Preacher: Christopher McLaren

If you find today’s parable of Jesus a bit hard to swallow you are in good company.  Somehow the idea of a business-person who pays everyone the same no matter how hard or long they worked is difficult to comprehend.  It goes in the category with other parables that have at there center such radical love or forgiveness or generosity that they offend our hard-working-muscle-your-way-to-the-front-of-the-line-arrive-early-stay-late-competitive-work-ethic.  Why does Jesus insist upon turning things on their head?  Why do his stories constantly mix up the order of things, messing with our sense of fairness, and just plain offending us into active thought about how the world is supposed to be?  Well I guess that is what the parables are all about, they intend to puzzle and perplex you enough, even irritate or enrage you just enough to make you think, to make you pay attention, to shatter your hardness of heart. 

When my wife Maren and I lived in Austin, Texas there was a area of the city not far from the Congress Street bridge where workers gathered early in the morning waiting for work.  They were predominately immigrants from south of the US border but all kinds of workers could be found there.  They waited it seemed in lines that had a kind of understood order for a contractor, or carpenter or in some cases home-owner to pull up looking for workers. The area was packed in the early morning hours and thinned out as the day progressed until by late afternoon only a few laborers were left waiting for job or those whose job had turned out to be short had returned in the hope of a second opportunity.  I passed by this area of the city often and witnessed the scene but I had never really connected this phenomenon to the parable of the laborers in the vineyard.  

But one day sitting in a class on biblical exegesis, that’s exegesis, not extra Jesus, we were learning ways of interpreting texts and our instructor Pablo Jimenez challenged us to think about this parable from the perspective of those workers down near the Congress Street bridge waiting for a day labor.  I realized that indeed this parable or the situation that Jesus is describing as an image of the kingdom of God happens every day in major cities and town squares all over the world. Hard as it is to believe for those of us fortunate enough to have consistent jobs to go to, there are many for whom daily work is a question mark, a waiting game, a hope and a desperate need each day.  

All of a sudden this parable began to come to life, it had real import.  What would it mean to begin to think about this parable from the perspective of the waiting workers?  One can imagine the hungry eyes of the workers watching as cars and trucks pass-by. One can feel the excitement and apprehension of a laborer as a contractor’s truck comes to a stop in front of you, is this work you can do? Will it last all day? Can you understand each other?  Will this person be fair?  Will it be safe work? What will it pay? Will it last for more than a day, could it work into something lasting?  I began to understand the anxiety at the heart of this parable. It was an anxiety that many in Jesus’ audience understood.  Many had themselves waited for work or had family members who daily went to the square looking for daily wages.  

Attempting to understand this parable through the hungry oft-times desperate eyes of the laborers, opens up this text in a new way.  One begins to feel the need inherent in the situation.  People don’t wait for work in the public square for fun or just to get some spending money.  Daily work is work for what one needs that day. It is daily work for daily pay, so that there is daily bread and daily shelter.  No one in this situation is looking to get rich, no one is about to hit the jackpot. Everyone there is hoping to meet basic needs.  

Encountering this parable from below one begins to understand it in a very practical way.  This is a parable about justice.  It is already clear that this parable is not about fairness.  We know what fairness means. Equal pay for equal work, that’s fair. Rewarding people who do the most work is fair; rewarding those who do the least is not fair. You are supposed to get what you deserve. The smartest, the hardest working, the best-looking, and those who have one the genetic lottery get the most, the best, the biggest.  They are at the front of the line and they are there because they deserve it right?  Well, according to Jesus that is not the way it is supposed to be in the kingdom of heaven.  In the kingdom of heaven things get scrambled, discombobulated.  The divine payroll service starts at the back of the line and doesn’t seem to think it is ok to pay people less than they need to live for the day, so everyone gets a day’s wages.  Divine justice has a healthy dose of divine compassion mixed in. To those who are used to getting the gooey end of the stick divine justice appears wildly generous in this story, but to those of us who like to keep score, and believe that fair is fair the land-owner seems capricious and indiscriminate in his generosity.  

It is not hard to understand the outrage of those who have worked all day in the scorching sun and been paid the same as those who were slumming about in the public square until late in the afternoon and only invited to work one hour.  “These last worked only one hour, and you have made them equal to us,” say the first one’s hired through their exhaustion and sweat and wounded sense of fairness.  

The owner of the vineyard reminds them that he has kept his end of the deal. He has paid them a fair wage for a days work.  What is it to them if he decides to be generous to the others? The vineyard belongs to him, the resources are his to distribute as he desires.  Isn’t he free to be generous?  Do they honestly begrudge him his generosity? 

Evidently the landowner’s generosity is an offense to them.  We all know that life is not always fair.  But why do they find it so distasteful that the landowner is more than fair with some?  In thinking about this parable, one wonders why these laborers who know the anxiousness and hopefulness that goes along with waiting for a job for the day, who know how desperately everyone needs these daily wages would begrudge their fellow-laborers getting a full days pay when that is exactly what they all need.  Would they have rather waited around the square in desperation most of the day instead of working happily?  Would they in fact have stayed there the whole day or would they have given up and gone home?  

The fertile ground of this parable is the place where our worldview, the way we think the world is, and the worldview of the kingdom of God collide.  Jesus is in essence saying, you think that things are the way they are supposed to be, but I’m telling you that if you saw them the way God wants you to see them, if your heart was storied by God’s desires, storied by this parable, you would not be offended in the least, you would be laughing for joy that everyone got paid for the day.  You’d be toasting the landowner’s generosity at the pub that night with your fellow-workers who needed those wages just as desperately as you did.  One wonders what it would be like at the square the following day when the land-owner comes again to collect workers.  Who will want to sign-up for the full day and who will choose to take their chances and wait around? 

Each week, as we gather, we say the Lord’s Prayer at a very tender and numinous moment in the Eucharist.  With great reverence and intensity we say “Thy kingdom come, they will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”  We are saying that we want earth to be like the kingdom of heaven and Jesus’ parable is trying to tell us the kingdom of heaven is like. When we pray that prayer we are saying that we want this parable to come true.  Do we really want it to be true that everyone who is looking for a full day of work gets paid for a full day of work? Do we really want those who are at the back of the line, or who arrive late to be treated like they’ve been there all along? Do we really want this kind of radical generosity, this radical hospitality to be characteristic of our community here at St. Michael’s?

In many ways this parable asks more questions than it answers and that is another mark of parables.  One of the questions that intrigues me is where each of us might locate ourselves in line. Most of us probably tend to hear this parable from the front of the line. As one commentator said, “We are the ones who have gotten the short end of the stick: we are the ones who have been cheated. We are the ones who have gotten up early and worked hard and stayed late and all for what?  So that some backward householder can come along and start at the wrong end of the line, treating us just like the ne’er-do-wells who do not even get dressed until noon!” 

This might be how we hear the parable, but what if we are mistaken about our placement in the cosmic line of laborer’s?  Have you ever considered the possibility that perhaps you are not at the front of the line? That there may be many faithful people who are in front of you with more gold stars on their church attendance charts and more gem stones in their heavenly crowns? Perhaps there are all sorts of people ahead of us in line, people who are far more deserving of God’s love than we are, people who have done more good and been far better examples than we could have hoped to be. 

So they are in the front of the line and you and I are a ways back, in fact the line is snaking around the block or blocks and come to think of it, we’re not sure we can see the front at all.  It is not so hard to understand is it? There are so many reasons we might find ourselves at the back of the line.  No one told us there was a line in the first place, in fact we found this whole spirituality and religion thing late in life. And besides even if we’d known there was a line earlier we probably wouldn’t have done much about it anyway, procrastination is a fine art in our world.  But there are highly motivated people at the back of the line with us too.  Sometimes even when you want to be first in line, things get in the way. People get sick, businesses fail, relationships implode, we do something incredibly stupid, or our years growing up were a disaster.  There are lots of reasons people end up at the end of the line and we hope to heaven that God can sort it all out because we know we can’t. 

In the end this troublesome little parable gives us a gem of insight. God is not fair.  God doesn’t seem to care about all our score keeping and our wounded sense of order.  God loves us. God loves and loves and loves without a lot of supporting evidence, sometimes in spite of the evidence.  God seems to enjoy messing with the rules, reversing the order, and challenging our notions of who deserves what. As the scriptures says, God’s ways are not our ways and that if we want to get into the divine state of mind we might need to actually revisit our notions of what is fair or what is just or what is truly at the center of God’s compassionate ways. 

So, God is not fair. Wow does scripture really say that? Yep!  And depending where you are in line that can be some powerfully good news!  You might just get paid more than you are worth. You might find that the end of the line is now the beginning, not because of who you are but who God is. 

God is not fair; God is generous to a fault.  And we are all called to be like God in this way, because that is the way of the kingdom. If you have lost sight of the radical generosity of God it is most likely because you have forgotten where you are in line. You have forgotten what is feels like to be loitering around the public square waiting for a day of work at 3 in the afternoon when you desperately need it.  The first shall be last and the last shall be first is not some kind of divine threat, it is God’s playful sense of humor soaked in a generosity that should have us all laughing and trying to outdo one another in generosity ourselves.  Let grace abound more and more the scriptures say. Quit keeping score, because evidently God has lost track long ago. 


Note: The notion a reading this text from the below is rooted in the work of theologians like William Herzog and there attention to socio-economic realities seen in the subversive speech of the parables of Jesus.  The concept of where one is in line is borrowed and adapted  from Barbara Brown Taylor’s sermon Beginning at the End.  

September 14, 2008
Forgiveness and letting go Matthew 18:21-35
The Rev. Brian C. Taylor 

Last week’s gospel gave some practical advice about how to handle conflict within the church, starting by talking directly to the one who has offended you, then including a widening circle of others in the community, if needed. 

Today’s gospel continues with the next verses in Matthew chapter 18, with more advice about conflict in the church. It deals with forgiveness, which is a natural follow-up. Because after we’ve dealt with the immediacy of conflict – whether or not it has had a positive outcome – there is, for people of faith, this call to go further, to forgive from the heart. 

We also heard one of the Old Testament’s greatest stories about forgiveness. Joseph, one of the patriarchs of Israel, was in Egypt, because years earlier his brothers had stuffed him down a well in the desert, then sold him to some Bedouins as a slave. The brothers now came begging for help during a famine in Israel. In a remarkably forgiving response, Joseph assures his brothers that he is in no position to judge them, and gives them plenty of food and money for the people back home. 

Then in the gospel, Jesus tells Peter to forgive his brother not just 7 times, but 77 times, and illustrates this with the parable that convicts us all. A slave is forgiven a huge amount of money by his master, and then turns around and refuses to forgive another slave a very small amount. He ends up in prison, in debt, tortured. 

I think this parable is not really about God punishing us for not forgiving. It’s about what happens when we hold on to resentment. We end up imprisoned by hurt and anger, deeply in debt and unable to pay the price, tortured by what we cannot forgive. 

Perhaps more than any other religion, we stress the importance of forgiveness. We pray it in the Lord’s Prayer, Jesus grants it in countless gospel stories, we regularly confess and receive absolution from God, and it is proclaimed by our most central symbol, the cross. But as we all know, forgiveness is not easy, and we often find that we’re blocked from moving into it. 

Now I could say many things about forgiveness today, about how first we need to do our best to right what has been done wrong, how we need to fully experience our anger and hurt as long as necessary, or how we need to try to understand the other person and also our own part in the conflict between us. All of this is in the background – it’s the necessary homework we do before we can really forgive, and it can take a very long time. But what I want to speak about today are the grace-filled moments of letting go. 

One of my favorite stories from the Desert Fathers, that collection of eccentric wisdom from the Christian monks of 4th-century North Africa, goes like this. Two monks were walking through the desert, approaching a river. A woman stood by the banks, afraid of crossing. Now the celibate monks in that day were forbidden to touch a woman. But one of the monks, seeing her dilemma, offered to carry her across to the other side. He hoisted her up, waded across, and set her down on dry land. 

The monks continued to walk along in silence. After an hour, the other monk spoke angrily to the one who had carried the woman, saying “What kind of monk do you think you are, touching that woman? Don’t you remember your vows?” His brother turned to him and said “I set that woman down an hour ago. You are still carrying her.” 

When we hold on to resentment and refuse to forgive, we keep ourselves locked inside a 
spiritual and emotional prison. It eats us up. We might feel temporarily better once in awhile when we vent about the other person, but this doesn’t do any good. Because every time we see that person, every time we hear their name, every time we think of them, a dark cloud passes over our soul, and our mind begins to race, thinking about why they’re wrong and we’re right. It eats away at us. We’re locked up, tortured, until we forgive. 

But what does it take to forgive our brother or sister from our heart? 

Someone I know wrote in a book of hers, Forgiveness is giving up on having had a different past. I would add to that Forgiveness is giving up on someone being different than they are. 

Many years ago I had a dramatic experience of this giving-up. I keep going back to it as a touchstone, because it is where I learned to forgive. It was in a time when our church was filled with nasty division, and I often stood in for everything that some people thought was reprehensible about the modern church. And I was also tortured by my own resentment and sense of having been wronged. Over several years, I had dealt with this in spiritual direction and other means. Then one night after a particularly ugly session at a clergy conference, I tossed and turned, until finally I got up and began to pray and meditate. 

In the course of that hour before dawn, something shifted inside. I let go of the whole silly conflict; or, perhaps to put it more accurately, it just dropped away, by the grace of God. The division and bitterness just didn’t seem to matter anymore. It became only so much noise in the wind. I walked out of my prison that morning, back into the gathering, able to let others be who they were, free of the grip of resentment and fear. I had given up on them being different than they were. They hadn’t changed a bit. The conflict was still there. We didn’t become buddies, or even start trusting one another. But I had forgiven them, and I was never the same. I was free, and I could be kind again. 

Just the other day I was talking with my mother about how she managed to forgive someone in her life from whom she was temporarily estranged. She said that after doing a lot of work around it, she got to the point where she stopped expecting the other person to understand her, to appreciate and respect her point of view. She even stopped expecting to be close to the other person, to be able to share in an intimate way. She accepted the limitations of the relationship, and surprisingly, it opened up in new ways. They share what they can, and they’re free of the burden of constantly unfulfilled expectations.

Another way of saying this is that we can get to the point where we don’t judge the other any more. For what is judgment but the demand that another person should be different than they are? When we are able to let go of this, we leave the judging to God. 

This was what Joseph realized, probably after many years of bitter resentment towards his brothers who had sold him into slavery, when he was finally able to say to them Do not be afraid! Am I in the place of God, to judge what you have done [to me]? Paul asked the same thing to the church in Rome, in our second reading today: Why do you pass judgment on your brother or sister? For we will all stand before the judgment seat of God. This is what the 1st-century Philo of Alexandria put so compassionately: Be kind. For everyone you meet is fighting a great battle.

When we are able to finally let go of having had a different past, when we let go of someone being different than they are, we stop judging them. We are able to be kind, knowing that they, like us, are fighting some great, unseen battle. Judgment is left to God, and replaced with understanding. 

I think this is key to the process of forgiveness. But it doesn’t happen quickly, or right when we want it to. We have to go through a journey of trying to change the way things are so that justice might be served, letting our emotions out for as long as necessary, working to understand our own part in the conflict, trying to make ourselves feel forgiving and failing miserably at that, and finally falling back on the grace of God to do what we cannot do. 

Once we are able to do this, something shifts. It just doesn’t matter anymore, because God has taken back from us something we never had any business assuming in the first place: the judgment of another person. We gently put down on the riverbank the woman we’ve been carrying, and move on. We step out of our self-imposed prison, our torture-chamber, and find ourselves free of debt. No one owes us anything, and we owe nothing to another.  We forgive our brother and our sister from the heart. 

Sunday Sept. 7, 2008
Polarization or Harmony
The Rev. Brian C. Taylor

We’ve just had the national conventions of our two main political parties. While there were some inspiring moments, there were times when the speakers acted like immature kids, taunting their opponents with distorted accusations and sarcastic punch-lines. The crowd cheered in self-righteous conformity “Yeah, that’s showin’ ‘em!” Is this how a great and dignified civilization behaves? Are we still the nation of Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln or have we become some kind of Saturday morning cartoon? 

Polarization has a grip on this country, not only in politics, but also in religion, in our church. Instead of having a reasoned debate, we fight for 51% of the vote, winner take all. It’s a culture war, with neither side able to even comprehend the world-view of the other. I heard one commentator say that it was the greatest divide since the Civil War. 

Who among us has not done this on a personal level? Who among us has not complained about other people without trying to talk to them? “Oh, there’s no use,” we say, “they won’t listen to me.”  We’d rather carry around our precious indignation than risk the conflict and the possibility that we might have to look at ourselves when we actually communicate. It’s more comfortable, and self-justifying to stand at a distance and complain. At its worst, we become fixed in our opinions about people, blindly self-righteous and contemptuous. And we contribute to the destructive polarization of our world. 

This danger is what our gospel for today addresses. This is a passage probably written by the early church long after Jesus’ death and resurrection, about the regulation of conflict between members of the growing faith community. A specific method is given. First, we are supposed to go and speak directly, one-on-one, with the person whom we feel has sinned against us. If that doesn’t work, bring along two or three witnesses who might help resolve the conflict. Then, if needed, take it to the whole community of faith. If that still doesn’t work, remove the destructive influence from the group before it does any more damage. According to the gospel, polarization should be a last resort after every effort has been made, not a first impulse. 

These are principles of healthy communication in any group. As many of you know, when there is a conflict between members of our parish and a complaint is made to me, the first question I always ask is “have you talked directly to the other person about this?” If that has taken place and it can’t be resolved, I might come up with a small group of appropriate people to sit down and talk about it together. If necessary, I might then gather the whole ministry group that is being affected, or the Vestry. If that still doesn’t work and there is a real danger of great harm being done to the community, on rare occasions I’ve asked someone to step down from their ministry. There is also a canon that does allow for excommunication, as this gospel passage suggests, but I’ve never had to use it, thank God. 


This gospel advice about healthy communication is grounded in something much deeper, in a spiritual truth of life-and-death proportions. We are one body, as St. Paul said. Jesus taught us to see that in him, we are one, just as he and the Father are one. All of creation is infused with God’s Spirit, and we are made to seek harmony with one another and with our environment. Jesus gathered collaborators with Rome and zealots, low-class prostitutes and members of the elite Pharisees, in order to model the fact that everyone and everything is bound together in God. 

Because we are one body, it won’t work to go off into our corner and point the finger from a distance. There is no corner to go off into. That’s an illusion. We’re in this together. Because of this, we can’t let polarization widen the distance between us. It is spiritually unnatural; it upsets the harmony of creation, because it does violence to our unity in God, and it is the source of all sin and destruction. 

This is why it is so important to do what the gospel asks of us, to deal with our conflicts directly and respectfully, as if we really are brothers and sisters in one family, bound to one another in the Spirit. This is why it is important, as the gospel asks of us, to call upon the wisdom of the group when it is needed. 

One place we’ve seen this work politically is with environmental conflicts. Surprisingly, when ecologists, ranchers, energy producers, politicians, community activists, and land management professionals sit down together, they sometimes discover that they have more in common than they thought, and they find a way forward that comes out of the legitimate needs and collective wisdom of the group. 

This approach is what is necessary in the immigration debate. We need to bring together the people who are concerned about the integrity of our borders and the strain on our social services together with those who actually work with immigrants and know the human cost of the terrible bind we have helped place them in, and then bring in the employers who rely on their labor. Together they might find a way forward. 

This approach is what just might be beginning to happen in the polarized atmosphere of our church. The Episcopal Church is trying to shift the balance from our incessant arguing over sexuality to a renewed mission of alleviating extreme poverty. We’re redoubling our efforts to cooperate with third-world Anglicans around the Millennium Development Goals. Thankfully, this is what the bishops at the recent Lambeth Conference spent most of their time talking about. 

Last weekend we practiced, on a miniature scale, what we are trying to do nationally and internationally in our church. In the Matthew 25 Conference, we gathered together amazingly diverse people of this diocese, evangelicals and social activists, and we talked about how we might more effectively alleviate poverty and suffering in the world around us. For the first time in years, I wasn’t on guard against others in the diocese. We were all there as one body, working on something we all cared deeply about. We need a lot more of this kind of thing. It is what will bring us back together, in the church and in our world.

Polarization is a luxury we can’t afford any longer. There’s been too much violence done to God’s intended harmony. The time is getting late. The world urgently needs a more united church that is doing its very best to be a healing presence in this broken world. The world urgently needs a united America, using our tremendous resources to work with other nations towards peace, health, and prosperity for all God’s children on this planet. 

You and I can’t bring together a divided church or country all on our own. But we can, as the gospels asks us to, go directly to our brother or sister when we feel alienated from them and try to talk. If this fails, we can bring in 2 or 3 others who might help us shed light on the situation. We can bring together people in our family, in our parish and diocese, in our workplace, looking for wisdom to emerge out of the group. 

When we do so, we not only create a practical, concrete harmony between us. We also help build spiritual harmony that ripples out into all humanity, into creation, into heaven itself. Our small, concrete situation and the vast spiritual world are one. As Jesus said, what we bind and loose here on earth is bound and loosed in heaven.

As we deeply understand this spiritual truth, we can approach our brother or sister in humility and mutual respect, listening for the voice of God in the wisdom that sometimes emerges between us. For as Jesus said, when we are gathered together, he will be there among us. We can trust in this promise. We can trust that God will show us the way forward, and that we will be given the privilege of participating in God’s reconciliation of the world.