Address: Diocese of Los Angeles, Bishops' Dinner [November 2, 2019] St. John's Cathedral

            Thank you, Canon McCarthy for that somewhat over the top introduction. I want to begin with the self-evident observation that I am not Kelly Brown Douglas. Kelly is a trim, buff African American woman who is also a world class theologian. I am a retired priest who grew up in the Valley. As Kelly’s former colleague at Washington National Cathedral and the person who recruited her to be dean of Episcopal Divinity School at Union, I do from time to time bask in her reflected glory. As her stand-in tonight I will do my best to channel her values if not her brilliance.

            Kelly and I are really good friends. When Bishop Taylor asked me to speak tonight in her stead, Kelly and I had the following text exchange.

Me: They’ve asked me to speak in your place. You owe me.

Kelly: LOL. God is so good. This is your comeuppance!

Me: Please send standard jokes and talking points.

Kelly: All my jokes are about old white guys, so the joke would be on you, LOLOL

            We’re gathered tonight in a cathedral church. The name “cathedral” derives from the Greek word, cathedra, for “bishop’s chair”. A cathedral is a church with a bishop’s chair. Because St. John’s now boasts two bishop’s chairs (one for the suffragan, one for the diocesan) it must be, in the spirit of Animal House, a “double secret” cathedral.

            A cathedral is not only a bishop’s church. It is a church which enacts a bishop’s ministry, and a bishop’s ministry has always been by its nature a public ministry. What I want to say tonight has to do with the nature of the public ministry that I believe all Episcopal congregations, not only cathedrals, share. In doing so I draw on my experience at Washington National Cathedral, an institution created in the early 20^th century to have a dual vocation—a local one as cathedral for the diocese of Washington, a national one as what the founders called a “Westminster Abbey for America”.  Though they seem different, Washington and Los Angeles have many things in common. When I first moved to DC, everyone there was fascinated with my show business background—both my parents worked in movies and television, and I had a brief flirtation with show business before going to seminary. “How are you adjusting to life in Washington after having grown up in Hollywood?” they would ask. “No problem,” I would reply. “They’re both exactly the same culture.” If you doubt that, just remember the phrase, “What have you done for me lately?”

            I was attracted to Washington National Cathedral by the opportunity to explore there the relation of theology and public policy. We live in a highly contentious and polarized moment in America, and I was intrigued with the idea of how the faith community could bring its values to bear in a way that might enable both sides to talk with each other. Having worked for many years at All Saints, Pasadena, I was familiar with the church’s role as an issue advocate. But Washington offered something different, the chance to represent the gospel’s values not as a partisan but as a partner in the places where policy was being made. Early on in my time there I got the chance to talk to Bill Moyers about this idea, and he said something really interesting: “Imagine how different the health care debate would be if the faith community had weighed in early about health care as a human right before it got to the legislative arena.” Don’t get me wrong: there are times when the church needs to take to the streets in defense of gospel values. But might there also be a way for us to be involved with public life in more collaborative ways? I decided that the nexus of theology and public policy would be my focus during my years in the nation’s capital.

            It didn’t start off too well. My wife Kathy will tell you that I harbor some bizarre pet peeves, the strangest of which is a kind of righteous anger provoked every time the Postal Service raises the cost of a stamp by just one cent. In the 1990s and early 2000s there was a streak of one cent stamp raises, and (in those days before we all paid bills electronically) year after year I would have to stand in line at the post office and buy a sheet of one cent stamps. Why didn’t they just raise postage a nickel at a time and leave us alone for a few years? This whole thing really rotted my socks. I would come home from my 90 minutes at the post office muttering expletives questioning the parentage and legitimacy of the US government in general and the postal service staff in particular.

            As luck would have it, my first public appearance at Washington National Cathedral was for the unveiling of that year’s Christmas stamp. They set up a press event downstairs in Bethlehem Chapel, and the two speakers were the US Postmaster General (the Honorable Patrick R. Donahoe, you can look him up) and me. As the Postmaster General and I waited in the slype (the cathedral’s vesting room) for the event to begin, I realized that I had been given a once in a lifetime opportunity to press my case. It was time to speak truth to power! So after a bit of chitchat, I turned to Mr. Donahoe and said, “I’d like to speak to you, sir, about these one cent postage raises. They’re really inconvenient. Every year I have to go to the post office and wait in line for over an hour. Can’t you raise them less frequently, a few more cents at a time?”

            I wish I had a video of the way the Postmaster General’s face changed. The light suddenly went out in his eyes. You could see from the look on his face that I had gone in his estimation from ecclesiastical dignitary to dangerous weirdo. The conversation suddenly ended when he remembered there was a phone call he needed to make. It was probably to security or his therapist.

            So buttonholing a cabinet member about your goofy pet peeve is probably not the best way to go about having an impact on public policy. And remember what the great Noam Chomsky once said: “You don’t have to speak truth to power, because they know it already. You don’t speak truth to anybody. Join with people and try to find the truth.” After that interchange I had my friend, Brother Roy Parker of OHC do Chomsky’s saying up in calligraphy and hung it on the wall above my desk, and it became my mantra during my years in Washington. The church has its most profound and lasting impact when it talks with and not to people.

            Let’s dispense with the old canard about religion and politics. The church has an absolute right—indeed a duty—to be an active participant in the public square. If you read the scriptures carefully, you’ll see that the Bible’s ethics are overwhelmingly concerned with social, not personal, morality. The prophets chastise Israel for its shared public faithlessness, and they call Israel to a collective righteousness. In our culture, we experience Christianity filtered through American individualism, and so we tend to think that God cares most about our private morality. But it just isn’t so.

            And as if the Bible weren’t enough, we Episcopalians have an additional warrant for public engagement. We are Anglicans, descendants of the Church of England, an established church. Our greatest theologian, Richard Hooker, wrote extensively about the church’s role and responsibility in promoting the common good, or what he called “commonwealth”. As followers of Jesus in this Anglican mode, you and I are, together, custodians of the common good. We are as responsible for our common life as we are for our personal lives. Unlike our evangelical brethren, we are not trying to stay pure until God destroys the hated world. We are trying to convert and transform God’s beloved world into the new heaven and new earth envisioned by Jesus and promised in the book of Revelation.

            A faithful church must be involved in the making of public policy. But too often, the faith community is absent when those decisions are made. The government is there. The private sector is there. The nonprofit sector is there. But we as church are not usually at the table. We find ourselves excluded or we step back because of mistaken ideas about mixing religion and politics. But, like it or not, politics is the way human beings make collective decisions, and as those collective decisions are made we Anglican Christians have a warrant for participating. A new heaven and a new earth will not come about by us meekly staying home, worrying about our private problems.

            Now I want to be clear that church participation in making public policy is not precisely the same thing as issue advocacy, but the line is often blurry and sometimes we have difficulty drawing it. During my time as dean, Washington National Cathedral started to perform same sex weddings when they became legal in both DC and Maryland in 2013. The cathedral organized the first, large-scale response to gun violence after the Newtown shootings in 2012. In collaboration with Senator Sheldon Whitehouse we hosted a conference and began an initiative on environmental theology and justice in 2014. And from my earliest days in Washington we began ongoing work to repair the church’s involvement in systemic racism in the city and diocese of Washington, an effort that led, finally, to the removal of two stained glass windows honoring Confederate generals and displaying the Confederate battle flag.

Washington National Cathedral jumped into social engagement only partially because I was dean and not because we were all left wing Democrats—indeed, most of us weren’t. We worked with the White House, the Congress, and local DC government because of the social dimension of Christian faith and practice. The Episcopal Church approved liturgies for same sex blessings, and weddings where legal, in 2012. Our church has supported gun control since 1976. Environmental theology has become central to our understanding of God and in world since the 1970s. And racial justice is not only a modern value: it lies at the heart of the biblical prophets’ vision of a horizon of universal peace, justice, and salvation.

The point is that being a public church means taking public stands on issues that are important to us for theological reasons. It then means building relationships with people in government, business, the academy, and the media to help us both articulate and broadcast our positions. And then it means doing the hard, unsexy work of showing up, not just in the pulpit, but in city council meetings, school board meetings, congressional hearings, chamber of commerce and service club meetings. The days are over when we can just get up in a pulpit, say something dramatic, and think doing so will make any difference. When I was in seminary in the 1970s, the Monday New York Times still ran a digest of what had been said in Manhattan pulpits on Sunday. Not anymore. If we want to have an impact on the public square, we need to be active both visibly and behind the scenes in public life. And we need to speak with, not to, each other.

And I’m not talking only or even primarily about our leaders doing all this. Our church communities—our dioceses, our congregations, and our diocesan institutions—need to weigh in as well. Congregations through their vestries and bishop’s committees need to let their communities know where they stand. It’s one thing for the rector or vicar to talk about an issue. We clergy shoot our mouths off all the time. It’s altogether another for a congregation as a whole to say where it is on a matter of local importance. Institutions have power, at least reputational power, and when they use it the results can be dramatic. Look for example at the impact Hillsides, whose leader Joe Costa we honor tonight, has had over the years. Hillsides is not only a first-class service provider. It is also a vocal advocate for children and youth across the spectrum of Southern California government and media outlets. Its impact both on lives and on the community has been dramatic and profound.

We expect our bishops to speak to national, state, and wider community issues like immigration and housing and racial justice. But what difference would it make to our common life if congregations—beginning with our cathedral and extending to all the places where Episcopalians gather--spoke to county supervisors, city councils, and school boards about the gospel’s values in the real-life day-to-day decisions they make that impact so many people? As my old friend and personal hero William Sloane Coffin once said to me, “Anyone can preach. Blessed are those who can organize.” He meant it as a compliment.

Although I am honored to be here tonight, I am deeply sorry you did not get to hear directly from Dean Kelly Brown Douglas, a woman who can both preach and organize. In her two years as dean of EDS@UTS, Kelly has both articulated and enacted a vision of theological engagement in the public square. It is a vision deeply rooted in scripture, tradition, and a profound openness to the pain and beauty of the world.  I am proud to be involved in the building and expression of that vision, just as I am proud after a lifetime of serving around the country to be back in the Diocese of Los Angeles, a diocese where the leadership of John, Diane, and Melissa is continuing a long, deep tradition of living out a transformational vision of the gospel in the real world we all inhabit together. Think about any real issue that impacts people in this region—housing, education, immigration, sexual and gender identity, the celebration of a plurality of cultural, racial, and ethnic identities—and our diocese and its institutions are there. And we are there because Anglicanism is devoted not only to personal salvation but to the promotion of the common good. In our common life, the Diocese of Los Angeles is showing the rest of the church how to be the people of God creatively and faithfully in a specific place and time. We are working together to make this place in this moment in the image of the heavenly city toward which we all strive. That is what it means to be the church in the public arena. It’s not only about taking positions. It’s more deeply about building and maintaining the relationships that can turn those positions into reality for real people in the here and now.

            And here is where I get a bit embarrassed when I think about my pet peeves. I wish I had those 20 minutes with the Postmaster General to do over again. Instead of pressing him about a small personal issue, I should have engaged him about the lives and working conditions of letter carriers or the rural customers who depend on the Post Office to stay connected. Real advocacy is less about expressing my opinion than it is about empathizing with those who are up against it. As the great French philosopher and mystic Simone Weil once said, the real question each of us Christians needs to ask another is, “What are you going through?” If we engage each other by repeatedly asking that question and seeking solutions, we cannot help but change the world.

            I guess what it all means is that if we’re going to have an impact on our public life, we have got to approach that life not only with open minds but with open hearts. Yes, we need to build relationships across the governmental-media spectrum, but before we do that we have to listen with what St. Benedict calls “the ear of our hearts” to the pain and joy of the world. Being the church in the public square is not only or even primarily about spouting sound bites on television. It is about standing with and for people and working to make it possible for them to become the people God intends them to be. It is about living and striving for the common good.

Together, you and I are called to be a public church for the five counties we serve. That calling starts here in the cathedral and extends to the farthest flung outposts of the diocese. If we ever begin to forget that calling, we now have these two big honking double secret bishop’s chairs up here to remind us. And remember: every church has, or should have, a chair for the bishop—a chair which reminds us of the apostolic ministry which the bishop symbolizes and to which all of us are called. I am grateful to be part of a diocesan community that gets that. And I’m honored to have the privilege of working together with all of you not only to glimpse that heavenly city on Sundays, but to work and pray to help bring about its realization in our real communities during the rest of the week. We walk, together, toward that vision. Together we can help God make real the hope and grace and blessing for which we all so deeply long.

Homily: The Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost [August 25, 2019] All Saints, Pasadena

            For those of you younger than 80 who don’t know me, I’m Gary Hall. I worked on the staff here from 1990 to 2001, the last five years of George’s time as rector and the first six of Ed’s. Working at All Saints was always, shall we say, an adventure. One day early on in my time here I was at my desk and received a call from the rector’s office. Now in George’s day the rector’s office didn’t call you to say, “Hey, how’s it going?” In George’s time, as in Ed’s, the rector’s office called you either because a) you had messed up, or b) they had a Mission Impossible task for you. The latter was the case this time.

            I was told that an older parishioner named Paul (first names only, please) was at Huntington Hospital and wanted to talk to a priest right now. He had been diagnosed with a virulent form of leukemia, and he had to make the decision today whether or not to start a very harsh form to chemotherapy. I dropped whatever other urgent thing I was doing and sped over to Huntington.

            Now my generation of clergy were trained in what we used to call “non-directive” counseling: that is, we strove to help the patient or client come to his or her own mind, not just take our advice. So I sat there with Paul, who couldn’t make up his mind, trying non-directively to lead him to some kind of decision. It was for both of us, frankly, torture. “So Paul, I hear you saying you don’t know what you want to do.” “That’s right Gary, I can’t make up my mind.” “Undecided, eh?” “That’s right.” It went on like this for a seeming eternity, a kind of mobius strip feedback loop of endless indecision.

            Suddenly, like a bolt from above, George Regas himself entered the hospital room. He put his hand on my shoulder and remained standing.

            “Stay seated, Gary. What’s the matter Paul?”

            “George, I can’t decide whether or not to do chemotherapy. If I don’t take it, I’ll die. If I do, it might kill me.”

            George didn’t miss a beat. “Oh, you’ve got to do it, Paul. Got to do it.”

            “Really, George?”

            “Absolutely. Got to do it. I have to go now. You keep at it Gary. See you back at the office.”

            George said a prayer and left. I sat there with Paul for another 20 minutes trying to process what just happened.

            Paul did do the chemotherapy. He lived another 20 years.

            I decided to change my counseling technique.

            People who were not around in the Regas years may not know that before George was known as a peace and justice leader he had the reputation as a priest with the gift of healing. In fact, I believe it was George’s commitment to healing that drew him into justice issues in the first place. I think about George’s healing-justice combo whenever I read Gospel stories about Jesus. We over-educated Protestants tend to think that Jesus was famous for his parables and sayings, a kind of first century professor in sandals. But when you read the Gospels closely you see that the crowds came out to see him primarily because he was a healer. And it was his work as a healer that brought Jesus increasingly into conflict with the forces that oppress and diminish human beings.

            Today’s Gospel [Luke 13: 10-17] is a case in point. A woman comes to Jesus, in the words of our translation, “bent double, quite incapable of standing up straight”. Luke uses a rare Greek word here, συνκύπτουσα, suggesting that her legs are bowed together and that she is bent over—literally tied up in knots. He calls her over and says, “Woman, you are free of your infirmity.” He lays his hands on her, she stands up straight, and immediately begins thanking God. The story then goes on to focus how the synagogue authorities get all bent out of shape because Jesus dared to heal someone on the sabbath.

Luke is making an analogy here. This woman is tied up in knots the way Israel itself is tied up in knots. She suffers a literal, physical twisting and brokenness in the same way Israel is twisted and broken by hypocrisy. Luke the Gospel writer wants us to see more than one person’s problem here. He wants us to see ourselves. Jesus heals a woman who is tied up in knots. Jesus means to liberate an establishment that is tied up in hypocrisy. That is true for first century Jewish Palestine. It’s doubly true for 21^st century America.

            I guess I’m drawn to the image of the woman doubled over with legs bowed together because these days I feel that way myself. Who do you know right now who isn’t tied up in knots because of the hypocrisy, racism, and vitriol of our current national life? As New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg tweeted last week, “The front page of the NYT right now looks like one of those pre-election parodies about what [this current] administration would be like.” And she’s right: there were stories on one single front page about new immigration rules allowing the indefinite detention of families; the NRA turning the president against universal background checks; the president accusing Jewish Democrats of “disloyalty” and then canceling a trip to Denmark because they won’t sell him Greenland. What sentient, breathing person can take in this stuff on a daily basis and not find herself all tied up in knots?

            Luke’s bent over bow-legged woman is twisted because her community is twisted. You and I are all tied up because our country is sick with the sins of racism, xenophobia, and hate. Social sickness has personal consequences. You can’t live in this current moment and not somehow feel how sick and ugly it really is. As Mark Twain said, in parody of Rudyard Kipling’s poem, “If”, “If you can keep your head while those about you are losing theirs, you are not aware of the situation.”

            Jesus healed this woman because he felt her pain and knew its cause. Jesus comes to heal us, and he does so by making us agents of healing and liberation ourselves.

            In today’s reading from the Hebrew Bible [Jeremiah 1: 4-10] God calls Jeremiah to speak both personally and publicly: “This day I appoint you over nations and territories, to uproot and to tear down, to destroy and to overthrow, to build and to plant.” I wish there were a national George Regas who could walk into our rooms, put his hand on our shoulders, and tell us that it will all work out. But the truth is that, as the living hands of Jesus on earth, you and I will have to do this healing work ourselves. Like Jeremiah, you and I are appointed to uproot and tear down, to build and to plant. We are sick with the social sins that surround and infect us. But it’s not hopeless. Jesus offers us both personal and social liberation. We have, in the church and in all justice communities, the opportunity to work not only for the healing of the nation but the healing of ourselves. The healing stories of Jesus are a sign of God’s intention for us. This is not first century Bible land. God wants us to take up our bed and walk. God wants us to straighten ourselves and give thanks. God wants us to face into all the destructive, dehumanizing forces that tie us in knots and turn and liberate ourselves and each other. But we can only free ourselves when we acknowledge we’re sick. We can only repent when we have admitted our implication in sin.

            Today marks the 400^th anniversary of the arrival of enslaved Africans on the American continent. Frederick Douglass noted in his Narrative long ago that slavery proved as injurious to the owners as it did to the slaves, turning them into fierce, stone-hearted oppressors. If you are a white person in America and think that slavery has nothing to do with you, you are kidding yourself. You are, like Israel’s religious authorities and the woman they crippled, tied up in moral and intellectual knots. All of us bear the sin and pain of slavery and its consequences. Slavery is the root evil behind all our nation’s sickness. For a modern that could make its peace with slavery, it was a short step to denying the full humanity of women, LGBT folks, all people of color, and poor people. Until we face into, repent, and work to heal racism, we all will feel crazy and sick.

What George knew then and I did not was that our friend Paul didn’t have the luxury of not taking chemotherapy. What I do know now is that you and I don’t have the luxury of falling into political despair. We will heal ourselves and our world by holding on to and making real our shared vision of justice, love, and above all, hope.

Today at noon Episcopal churches across America, including this one, will ring their bells for one minute not only to remember the arrival of enslaved Africans at Port Comfort, Virginia 400 years ago. We’ll ring the bells also to ask forgiveness and to commit ourselves to reconciliation with each other and God. Let’s take that minute as an invitation from Jesus to straighten ourselves, stand up, and be healed. I know, from my own experience here and elsewhere, that doing this work together is actually in itself joyful and will help us all feel both healthy and sane. There is no cheap, easy path to serenity. Only in promoting our community welfare will we find personal wholeness and peace.

            Jesus worked for justice because he was a healer. We can’t say we follow Jesus and continue to benefit from white privilege. America will never be—we will never be—the nation and people we hope to be until we take responsibility for slavery and all of its consequences which even now infect our lives. For our sake, and the sake of our nation, we need a reckoning. We are bent over and tied in knots. Like my friend Paul facing leukemia, we need to take our medicine.

“Oh, you’ve got to do it, Paul. Got to do it.” “Really, George?” Yes really, George. We’ve all just got to do it. Amen.

Homily: The Sixth Sunday after Pentecost [July 21, 2019] St. Michael’s, Studio City

Gary Hall
St. Michael and All Angels, Studio City
July 21, 2019 [6 Pentecost]


It seems like a lifetime ago now, but for several years I taught American literature first at UCLA (on that side of the hill) and then at Oakwood School (on this side of the hill). I was already ordained before I went to graduate school, and I left parish ministry for a time because I so loved both the subject matter and working with kids on a daily basis. Eventually I went back to full time work in the church, but I have always carried with me the delight of engaging others in discussion over novels and poems.
Mark Twain is probably the most fun American writer to teach. His 1894 novel Pudd’nhead Wilson is one of my favorites, not so much for its story as for the epigrams that begin each chapter. The character David “Puddn’head” Wilson publishes a calendar, each month featuring one of his characteristic sayings. For example:
“Nothing so needs reforming as other people’s habits.”
“Few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example.”
“In the first place, God made idiots. This was for practice. Then He made school boards.”
And my favorite, a parody of Rudyard Kipling’s inspirational poem, “If”: “If you can keep your head when those around you are losing theirs, you are not aware of the situation.”
Now Mark Twain was not much of a Bible reader, and that’s a shame, because if he were he might have made up a Pudd’nhead Wilson calendar entry that would help us understand our reaction to challenging scripture passages. Last week we heard the parable of the Good Samaritan, a story from Jesus that tells us that the respectable people leave a man in the road to die. Today’s gospel has Jesus seemingly praising a layabout and chastising a hard worker. If Mark Twain had been in the Bible business, he might have had Pudd’nhead Wilson say something like this: “You don’t get Jesus’s teaching unless it makes you really mad.” Not hilarious, I admit. But pretty accurate.
“You don’t get Jesus’s teaching unless it makes you really mad.” Think about it. There’s the parable of the prodigal son, where the loser brother gets the fatted calf and the hardworking brother gets chastised. There’s the teaching about rich people entering the kingdom of God being like camels trying to get through the eyes of needles. Years of preaching on and listening to these stories have effectively put stained glass around them, and we treat them as holy objects too delicate actually to engage. But let’s be honest. Jesus’s stories are often insulting to our basic ideas of fairness and common sense. He does not make these statements to prettify the status quo. He makes them to shake us up. And so, my Pudd’nhead Wilson-esque suggestion for today: “You don’t get Jesus’s teaching unless it makes you really mad.”
Today’s gospel [Luke 10: 38-42] gives us a perfect example.  Jesus goes to the house of Martha and Mary. Martha welcomes Jesus. Her sister Mary sits at Jesus’s feet and listens to his teaching. Martha bustles around the house with all the tasks attendant on Near Eastern hospitality. When Martha can no longer stand the inequality, she snaps, "Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me to do all the work by myself? Tell her then to help me." But instead of siding with an aggrieved woman, Jesus admonishes her: "Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted by many things; there is need of only one thing. Mary has chosen the better part, which will not be taken away from her."
Now, admit it. Doesn’t this make you mad? If it doesn’t, shouldn’t it?
I have heard more bad sermons on this gospel reading than perhaps on any other. I’ve even delivered a few myself. We preachers tie ourselves in knots by trying to make Jesus sound more plausible than he does. We make it sound like he isn’t really saying what we patently know to be the case. Usually, the preacher will say something about the difference between the active (Martha) and contemplative (Mary) spiritual life. But that neat distinction never really works. Anyone can tell that things are askew here. Something about Jesus’s response to Martha outrages my innate sense of fairness. Admittedly, Martha’s initial complaint to Jesus is hard to warm up to. Nobody likes a fink. Yet still we see the justice of her cause. Her sister is leaving her to do all the work.
Or is she? Let’s begin with the best case for Martha. She has a guest in her home, and she is performing all the duties attendant on hospitality, a prime virtue in the ancient Near East. Hospitality to travelers was in those days and remains today a moral obligation in many cultures around the world. Martha is not just being a busybody. In making Jesus feel welcome she is doing important work.
And then there is Mary. She is not just lying on the sofa watching Jerry Springer and eating Cheetos. She is “sitting at the Lord’s feet” (παρακαθεσθεῖσα πρὸς τοὺς πόδας) and “listening to what he is saying” (ἤκουεν τὸν λόγον αὐτοῦ). These are not just chance descriptors. They are technical terms from the world of both Jewish and classical teaching. Whether in the Temple or the marketplace, you “sit at someone’s feet” as their student. You “listen to what they are saying” because you are in training to do what they do. You are planning to be a rabbi or philosopher yourself. And planning to be a rabbi or philosopher is something women were not supposed to do.
Mary’s conduct outrages her sister only secondarily because it leaves her with all the housework. Martha becomes unsettled and disturbed because her sister Mary has suddenly upended all her culture’s gender distinctions. In the ancient Near East, women and men inhabited different social spheres in the world and different rooms in the household. Mary has crossed the boundary from the kitchen to the living room. She is sitting at Jesus’s feet and listening to what he is saying. She is behaving like a man.
Mary’s behavior is indeed startling on its own terms, and Jesus’s praise of it could easily make one mad. Gender roles go deep in a culture. Perhaps that is why so many people my age seem to have difficulty with both transgender and non-binary ways of self-identification. But the gender bending here says more about Jesus and his community than it does about personal identity. The household over which Jesus presides is one that knows no boundaries. The love and justice incarnate in Jesus transcends any arbitrary way we may have of defining ourselves. When you enter the Jesus zone, all previous bets are off. You are free to be who you are, free to pursue your deepest drives and passions, because in Jesus’s world you are accepted and blessed as you are. In sitting at Jesus’s feet and listening to his words, Mary is acting out of her truest self. And that is not only OK. It is good.
Over the years, I have been fortunate to spend a good deal of time in monasteries. Many years ago I was staying at Holy Cross Monastery in West Park, New York, the headquarters of the Order of the Holy Cross, of which I am an Associate. I vividly remember attending a festival service there celebrating the order’s anniversary. The presiding bishop celebrated and the superior, the head brother in the order, preached. Everyone was dressed up in ecclesiastical finery. When the service ended, we all adjourned to a festive lunch. After lunch, I saw the superior—the same head guy who had just preached at the festival service and chatted amiably with church dignitaries—get up from the table, go to the kitchen, put on an apron, and begin busing dishes, scraping and then rinsing our plates.
What I loved about that is that I saw someone I greatly respected inhabiting both Martha and Mary modes in the same moment. With Mary, he had sat at their feet and listened to what they were saying. With Martha he had performed the essential acts of hospitality. Both aspects seemed to coexist authentically within him. He did not fall for a false choice.
In refusing to chastise Mary, Jesus does not denigrate Martha. He understands that the gender and power roles our culture assigns us to be fluid and not fixed. He allows for the possibility that people will find fulfillment in culturally surprising ways. And he creates a community in which it is OK for you and me to try on new and alternative ways of being. The point of this story is neither that we should all give up grunt work and contemplate our navels, nor that we should assault the roles we have learned to inhabit over a lifetime. The point is that, in the presence of Jesus and each other, we can be free both to be who we really are and to follow the logic of God’s promptings in our lives. And that creative freedom allows us both to find peace in self-acceptance and to find courage to change and bless the world.
Pudd’nhead Wilson never got around to writing a Bible calendar, and perhaps that’s just as well. Following Jesus is a lifetime of self-discovery, and the truths we find there don’t always boil down neatly into aphorisms. It may well be that, “You don’t get Jesus’s teaching unless it makes you really mad;” but after that flash of anger might come the realization that there are new ways of doing things, and living into them might just be the start of a new and purposeful life. Amen.

Homily: The Sixth Sunday of Easter [May 26, 2019] St. Michael and All Angels, Studio City

            I used to live and work in Washington, D.C., and about a year after we moved there I bought a new Apple laptop computer. (When I brought in the one I had bought only five years earlier for servicing they told me that it was now considered a “vintage” model, a Silicon Valley phrase meaning they no longer serviced it.) The new computer worked great, but it developed a couple of persistent glitches, so I found myself a couple times a year visiting the bright, shiny Apple Store in Georgetown.

            If you’re a white-haired sexagenarian like me, the Apple Store is quite a treat. Where else can you get a reliably regular dose of Millennial scorn? There’s nothing quite like getting sneered at by a 24 year-old guy in a watch cap as you try haltingly to explain what’s wrong with a machine you clearly do not understand and he does. In much the same way you do when having blood drawn, I would try to distract myself by looking away toward the displays on the wall. And after a while I began to find them ultimately more depressing than the spectacle of the tattooed hipster running a clinic on my laptop.

            The walls of an Apple Store provide a kind of life lesson in the attractions of technological culture. You will find blown up far beyond actual size the most alluring screen displays from high-resolution computer screens: beautiful nature scenes, sporting events, smiling faces of children. As depicted on the walls of an Apple Store, the technological world seems to offer such endless possibilities for fulfillment that you can hardly imagine ever wanting anything else. “Please, God, just give me an iPad, and I swear I’ll be happy.”

            Why, you may ask, did I choose to find this display of technological beauty depressing rather than, say, inspiring? I think it’s because I had spent so many years of my professional life in the church working with congregations to try to reverse the steep membership and attendance decline we’re experiencing these days. One look at the walls of an Apple Store and you realize what the church is up against. With our prayer books and hymnals, how can we compete with all the attractions of the secular world? It doesn’t seem like a fair fight. And remember, I was living and working in Washington, a city filled with monuments and images that are pretty spectacular in themselves.

            If you’ve been in Washington National Cathedral, where I was working at the time, you know it is a beautiful and transcendent space. Yet even that emblem of Christianity has to compete for attention with the Lincoln and Jefferson Memorials, the Washington Monument, the White House, and all the collected monuments to American history and power. Even though our cathedral sits on the highest point in the District, it is visually overwhelmed by the imagery of the nation state. Try as we might, religious communities are no match for imperial spectacle. They’ve got us beat from the get-go.

            I thought of the cathedral, the images on the walls of the Georgetown Apple Store, and Washington’s array of national monuments when I read the passage from Revelation we heard this morning. I have to begin by saying I have never been a big fan of Revelation. On the surface, it seems like a vengeful, apocalyptic book, and it is filled with what often seem like drug-induced visions. Consider this morning’s passage [Revelation 21:10, 22-22:5]: the speaker tells of a vision of the heavenly city, Jerusalem, the “new heaven and new earth” predicted in last week’s reading. The city is illuminated by the light God and the Lamb. The river of the water of life flows from God’s throne. The tree of life blooms alongside the river and produces twelve kinds of fruit. And God’s name is written on everyone’s foreheads. At first pass, this sounds like something written by Timothy Leary: hallucinogenic imagery, seemingly produced by an extended moment of expanded consciousness. This book and its pageantry have never much appealed to me. I’m much more at home with the homespun images of Jesus and his companions walking and talking on the dusty roads of Galilee.

            On this occasion, though, I’m much more minded to give Revelation’s author, St. John the Divine, a break. In Easter season we follow the earliest Christians from their experience of Jesus’s resurrection as they make their way out into the world. And one thing you realize the more you read the New Testament is exactly what the early church was up against: imperial Rome in all its military and public relations power. It wasn’t only that Rome’s occupying armies dominated the Mediterranean world. It was also that they used all the symbols of imperial power (amphitheaters, coliseums, aqueducts, monuments, and impressive military displays) to remind people of just who was really in charge. The implication: who needs Yahweh or Jesus or any religious leader when Caesar has so much to offer?

            And this, I think, is where Revelation becomes more than just a psychedelic trip. Sure, it depicts God’s new heaven and new earth in gaudy and sometimes over-the-top imagery. But I now believe it does so not just to be outrageous but to give Jesus’s followers a kind of internal corrective to Rome’s imperial display. Early Christians could now walk among the Roman visual spectacles and contemplate an alternative, inner reality. Instead of feeling defeated by Caesar’s pretensions to authentic power, they could meditatively remind themselves of how things will finally turn out. In day to day imperial Rome it may look like Caesar will be in charge forever. But a new world is coming, and in the new heaven and new earth we believe God is making, the Lamb will be the one by whose light all of us will walk. Revelation is not a stunt. It is a gift, a set of vibrant images that keep us centered on the reality of the Christian hope.

            We are now entering the last part of the Easter season, the time when Jesus begins to prepare his companions for life in the world without him. In today’s Gospel [John 14: 23-29] we hear Jesus say,

Do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not let them be afraid. You heard me say to you, “I am going away, and I am coming to you.” If you loved me, you would rejoice that I am going to the Father, because the Father is greater than I. And now I have told you this before it occurs, so that when it does occur, you may believe.

Jesus IS going away, but he is not leaving his friends alone or helpless: “But the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you everything, and remind you of all that I have said to you.” Those of us who follow Jesus will always struggle to hold on to the reality of what he promises in the face of seemingly overwhelming competition. But we will be given heavenly resources with which to withstand that competition. The attractions and blandishments of Western, imperialistic, late Capitalism are real, and they are almost hopelessly enticing. But the love and compassion and grace of what Jesus and his movement have to offer are finally both deeper and more lasting than any military parade or retinal display in an Apple Store. In the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, and in the community that gathers in his name, God has given us a story and a household in which to nourish ourselves and each other with the truth that deflates both imperial and commercial pretensions to power. Love is stronger that death. Weakness outlasts strength. Compassion and forgiveness are all that finally matters.

            One of the reasons I come to church is to remind myself of what is real and what is false. There are so many claims made on us in our daily lives, so many attempts to get our attention. Everyone seems to want our allegiance. As followers of Jesus, you and I  need, both individually and together, to find ways to turn our attention to the things that finally matter. The collect for today, the Sixth Sunday of Easter, has long been one of my favorite prayers in the Prayer Book, and I use it regularly to help refocus myself on how, regardless of how it looks now, things will finally be. Listen to it again:

O God, you have prepared for those who love you such good things as surpass our understanding: Pour into our hearts such love towards you, that we, loving you in all things and above all things, may obtain your promises, which exceed all that we can desire; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.

God is making a new heaven and a new earth, a new creation that will surpass our ability to imagine or understand it. You and I and all people are invited into that world- and life-changing work. The images and symbols on offer through all our screens only pretend to be the real deal. Jesus and his faithful values of love, compassion, and justice will outlast them all. Our job, as his followers, is to turn our attention toward the things that last and matter, and then to help God build that new heaven and new earth together by making love, compassion, and justice real around us in the here and now. Amen.

Homily: The Fifth Sunday of Easter [May 19,2019] St. Michael and All Angels, Studio City

            As everyone probably knows by now, tonight marks the final episode in the eight-season television series, Game of Thrones. As a long-time preacher, I know that beginning a sermon by referring to this program is probably not the best strategy for getting listeners on your side. Half of the audience can think of nothing else today, while the other half cannot wait for this whole thing to be over. But Game of Thrones has become such a pervasive cultural reality that thinking about it just might help us make sense of our common life and find our way together through the thicket of this morning’s scripture readings on the Fifth Sunday of Easter.

            I am a local boy, a native of the Valley. I served parishes and schools here in L.A. for the earliest part of my ministry, then spent the last years in other parts of the country, retiring in Washington, D.C. three years ago and moving back here. I started watching Game of Thrones when it began in 2011 and faithfully followed the first four seasons. And then I got tired of it.

            If you live and work in the nation’s capital, you are surrounded on a daily basis by conflict, intrigue, enmity, skullduggery, and overall, all-around double-dealing and bad faith. One night while watching the season four finale of Game of Thrones, I asked myself, “Why do I need to watch this? It’s exactly like my daily life.” And it was true. Watching the Lannisters, Starks, Targeryans, Baratheons, and Greyjoys plot against each other in pursuit of power was exactly like leafing through the morning pages of the Washington Post. Why should I watch Game of Thrones? In D.C., it’s a busman’s holiday.

            So I put Game of Thrones aside in 2014 and started bingeing Friday Night Lights instead. That turned out to be what my junior high health teacher might have called a “good wellness decision”, although frankly I could give another sermon about how the Dillon Panthers took over my emotional life for a while. Anyway, I lived happily without the Game of Thrones for five years until around last Ash Wednesday. There was simply so much cultural hype around Game of Thrones this spring that I decided to devote my Lent no to Bible reading , but to catching up in time for the series finale. (Hey, I’m retired!) You might say I gave up sanity for Lent. I may have done this because I want to be current on all the latest buzz. I probably did it because in retirement there really isn’t enough conflict in my life. Who knows?

            Now at this point you are probably asking yourself, “Why  on earth is this man we don’t know going on about Game of Thrones? What can it have in common with the New Testament, the part of the Bible from which our three readings are taken this morning? Don’t worry: there actually is a connection, and it centers around the interrelated questions our scriptures pose about conflict and identity.

            You may have noticed that the thread that ties our weekly scripture readings together in Easter season is our passages from the book of Acts. Instead of Old Testament readings, in Easter we read the narrative of how the earliest followers of Jesus responded to his resurrection in their common life. Week by week we learn that, at least in the author Luke’s estimation, the early Christian community became the Body of Christ in the world. Now that Jesus is gone they have his power to bless and heal. They also encounter the same enmity and scorn that Jesus faced in his lifetime. As Acts has it, we, the church, are continuing the life and ministry of Jesus in the here and now.

            But as you’ll also notice in today’s reading, this earliest group of Christians was marked from the beginning by conflict. They simply couldn’t agree on how to do anything. There were many disagreements in the early church. The first, seen in several gospel passages, was between the itinerants and householders. Since Jesus and his followers went from place to place, the early question arose, “Can a settled person with a house, job, and family be a Christian, or does one need to drop everything and get on the road?” There are always people in any movement who want to make the rules tougher and more exclusionary than others do.

Acceptance of householders was settled on the principle of inclusiveness, and it was followed by another, more persistent question: can a Gentile be a Christian, or must all church members be Jewish? If you listen to the New Testament reading in church on a weekly basis, you’ll notice that almost all of Paul’s writing is taken up with this question. In some way, it’s a version of the itinerant/householder problem: do we make the rules strict, or do we make them loose? Is this an open society, or do you need a secret handshake? You’ve probably seen this issue play out in any group you’ve ever been part of.

In today’s reading from Acts [Acts 11: 1-18], we hear Peter recount a dream he had. He tells the dream because he is being criticized by the strict rule-abiders about his eating with the goyim, the pagans, the Gentiles, who do not observe the Jewish food laws. In the dream he sees a vision of all the creatures of the earth: “four-footed animals, beasts of prey, reptiles, and birds of the air.” And then a voice says to him, “Get up, Peter; kill and eat.” Here is Peter, an observant Jew who probably followed the Torah’s distinctions between kosher and treyf hearing a divine voice announce that it’s now OK to eat bacon and lobster. “What God has made clean, you must not call profane.” Translation: every food is now kosher.

If every food is kosher, the same must be true of the people who eat it.  The distinction between clean and unclean didn’t just apply to foodstuffs. It also applied to human beings. If the Gentiles eat it, you can eat it too. And you can invite them in to your party. If you are clean, they are clean. So the simple act of declaring all foods to be clean leads to the understanding that the church must turn outward now and embrace all people regardless of their ethnic or racial or religious identity. The Acts passage we heard this morning is important because it established the principle we have forever tried to live by in the Christian community: when put to the choice between exclusion and inclusion, we always eventually side with an expansive, not a narrowing, vision of the gospel.

While it may be entertaining to watch Game of Thrones combatants try to box each other out, in the church’s life and witness, we are always called not only to practice inclusion but to advocate for it in the wider world. This is why our arguments over race, gender, and sexual identity have always been so important, and it’s why our witness usually goes against the prevailing culture. Christians always stand for inclusion. “What God has made clean, you must not call profane.”

And that raises the related question of identity. If everyone is kosher, why do we make such a big deal about the categories into which we divide ourselves? The earliest Christians were obsessed by the difference between itinerant and householder, Jew and Gentile. Modern Americans can’t stop thinking about our own ethnic, racial, religious, and sexual/gender identities. Yet the same principle spoken to Peter should obtain for us all: “What God has made clean, you must not call profane.” In Game of Thrones the clan or family you belong to determines everything about you. That’s fine for a pseudo-Medieval TV show, but it’s no way for a multicultural society to live. In 2040 there will be no majority racial or ethnic group in America. We are all, together, in this.

The good news of Easter is about the way Jesus’s resurrection has power to heal and transform our lives. The world of conflict and contention, the one we see acted out on daily cable news and in bloody fantasies like Game of Thrones is not the way things finally are. From Revelation this morning we hear, “I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away.” God is making us and our world a new creation. We are no longer defined by the categories into which we would separate ourselves. We are free to give up the bad ideas that set us against each other, that limit and confine us.

On this Fifth Sunday of Easter, let us be bold enough to accept God’s invitation to step in to the risen life shown us by Jesus and lived out by the earliest Christians, who dared to redefine ancient notions of purity and cleanliness in order to open up their household to the world. What God has made clean you must not call profane. That goes not only for others. It goes for you too. It’s time to give up all false, judgmental notions about everyone, even ourselves. We can all live new and hopeful and risen lives now, opening our arms not only to the world but to each other. In the words of Jesus from this morning’s gospel, “I give you a new commandment, that you love one another.” That may sound funny in Westeros and Washington, but it’s the only way to live for those of us who follow Jesus. So let’s start this process together and let God’s loving risen inclusive justice heal and bless us as we walk together to that new heaven and new earth we so deeply long for. Amen.

“And Who Is Amy Neighbor? Thoughts on 21st Century Identity and Solidarity “ Madres y Padres, April 23, 2019

"And Who Is My Neighbor? Thoughts on 21st Century Identity and Solidarity."

I don’t preach much anymore, so when offered the opportunity to reflect publicly on anything I tend to blurt out pretty much everything I’ve been thinking about recently. Mary June Nestler once said rather ruefully that, in her experience, most sermons were merely “home movies of the preacher’s mind.” To switch metaphors, I invite you to think of what follows as an expanded version of some Facebook posts.

When I told Susan Klein last week that I was working on this paper, she asked only that I not talk about Game of Thrones. Having spent Lent catching up on seasons 5 through 7 of the series, I must admit that the temptation is powerful. I quit watching Game of Thrones in 2014 during season 4 when I was working at the National Cathedral. Frankly, the conflict and intrigue between the Starks, Lannisters, and Targeryans seemed too much like my daily life in Washington and the inner workings of the cathedral’s staff and chapter. So I put the show aside. But as someone who always wants to be in sync with the cultural zeitgeist, I dove back in this year and am proud to say that I am now entirely current with the state of things in Westeros as of Season 8, Episode 2. And I think I even know who most ofthe players are.

Given last week’s release of the Mueller Report, I also flirted with the idea of laying out the moral case for Trump’s impeachment. When I was in high school I became obsessed with the Kennedy assassination and read not only the whole Warren Report but also the 26 volumes of evidence that came with it. Now that I am really retired, I had the leisure to give over most of the Triduum to reading the 448 pages of Mueller’s opus, and, especially in the second half, the picture it paints of the interior workings of Trump’s White House is at once revolting and fascinating. I know the Democratic leadership is loath to begin impeachment proceedings in the House, but honestly, I don’t see how after what we have learned from the report, we cannot try to impeach this man. As Maxine Waters said, 

At this point, Congress’s failure to impeach is complacency in the face of the erosion of our democracy and constitutional norms. Congress’s failure to impeach would set a dangerous precedent and imperil the nation as it would vest too much power in the executive branch and embolden future officeholders to further debase the U.S. presidency, if that’s even possible.

While a death march through Trump’s enormities seemed beguiling, I decided that we’re all so saturated in his awfulness by now that a further rehashing of his offenses would do none of us any good. So after overcoming the powerful temptations to expatiate on high crimes and misdemeanors in Washington and King’s Landing, I decided to turn to a subject that has long intrigued me and actually has some bearing on all our ministries: the twofold questions of how we identify (by generation or social location) and with and for whom we stand in solidarity.

I vividly remember coming home on a weekday early in January of 1967, my senior year of high school. Sitting in our mailbox was the Time magazine issue of the week. The cover featured a painting of four young Americans—a white man and woman, an African American and a vaguely Asian male. These four people had been chosen to represent Time’s Man of the Year for 1967: “Twenty-five and Under”. Imagine that: at the tender age of 17, I had been chosen as Time Magazine’s “Man of the Year”, clearly getting an early jump on Donald Trump.

I could hardly wait to read about myself and my cohort. So imagine my pleasure as I thrilled to the deathless prose that only news magazines like Time can dish out:

In the closing third of the 20th century, that generation looms larger than all the exponential promises of science or technology: it will soon be the majority in charge. In the U.S., citizens of 25 and under in 1966 nearly outnumbered their elders; by 1970, there will be 100 million Americans in that age bracket. In other big, highly industrialized nations, notably Russia and Canada, the young also constitute half the population. If the statistics imply change, the credentials of the younger generation guarantee it. Never have the young been so assertive or so articulate, so well educated or so worldly. Predictably, they are a highly independent breed, and—to adult eyes—their independence has made them highly unpredictable. This is not just a new generation, but a new kind of generation. [Time Magazine, January 6, 1967 “Man of the Year”]

Here I was, a second semester high school senior, already anointed as a member not only of a new generation but of a new KIND of generation. I was too young and naive in 1967 to recognize this for the kind of tripe it was. (Years later, my son Oliver would label utterances of this kind, “Newsweek sociology”.) Amazingly, Newsmagazines then and now seem to be able to identify a society-changing trendline with only one data point. I put that issue of Timedown convinced that I was a different kind of person from my parents and the generations before me. It’s taken me years of living and working in the church—an institution unfortunately prone to falling for sociological fads—to understand that easy generational distinctions are at once beguiling, comprehensible, attractive, and wrong.

Were those born between 1946 and 1964 “a new kind of generation?” Or, for that matter, were the people Tom Brokaw labeled “the greatest generation” demonstrably more courageous than any who have come before or after? Based on the evidence, it’s hard to support either claim. For all our late teen flirtings with the counter-culture, many of my generation in their thirties settled into conventional lives. And once their own children had benefited from massive public expense on elementary, secondary, and higher education, the generation that fought World War II passed California’s Proposition 13 to lessen their own property taxes and thereby cripple public education, hardly a courageous or public-spirited act from the “greatest generation”. Sad to say, people in their teens, thirties, sixties, and nineties tend to behave like people in their teens, thirties, sixties, and nineties whatever “generational” labels we might attach to them.

I’ve been a priest now for just over 42 years, and I have seen generational sociology take hold of almost all of our thinking about congregational development, mission strategy, and even the ordination process. We look at our declining numbers and aging population and think, “We’ve got to do something to get those Baby Boomers or GenXersor Millennials into church.” And to my mind almost every generationally-based strategy we have employed has failed spectacularly. When I worked at All Saints Pasadena in the 1990s, I used regularly to run into people around town who would say, “Oh, I used to attend your rock mass in the 1960s and 70s.” “Great. Did you ever join?” “No, but I really liked it. Do you still do it?” 

When I was dean of Seabury-Western in the early 2000s, both the Seabury and Garrett seminary communities were swept with a wave of enthusiasm for the “U2charist”, which seems to have been reborn as today’s Beyoncé mass.I used to try to imagine my parents swinging and swaying to a Glenn Miller Eucharist in the early 1940s, but somehow the image never quite took hold. And there was a period in the early 2000s when we were so worried about the age of people coming through the ordination process that dioceses seemed universally to be saying no absolutely to women in their 50s and yes uncritically to men in their 20s. I remember one deans’ council meeting in those years where we all complained about our greatest community problem: young men who had not been vetted by their dioceses. The bishops were so smitten by the tattoos and piercings that they couldn’t see the characterological flaws right in front of them.

Now I want to be clear: I’m not arguing at all against worshiping in the prevailing idioms of the culture or against broadening the cultural models for ministry. (I’ll come back to this issue later on.) I am merely arguing against treating people born in one generational cohort as somehow ontologically different from those born in another.  If you want to use a Bono sursum corda or a Beyoncé agnus dei, fine with me. Just don’t think you’re necessarily going to attract a bunch of GenXers or Millennials in the process. They can get that stuff on their phones without leaving the house.

Our reflexive adoption of generational sociology has also been accompanied by some unthinking immersion in notions of identity and culture. Again, I want to be clear. I completely accept the idea that my own social location is contingent and not normative, that I am the lifelong beneficiary of white privilege—especially in regard to all the free public education I received in California before the advent of Proposition 13. The questions of identity—gender, sexuality, culture, and (especially in America) race are centrally important to all of us, especially in the church.

But I saw a tweet last week that made me pause. A priest I know complained about all the “Christian Seders” that would be performed in Holy Week, and he labeled them “appropriationistic”. Now, I have never liked the “Christian Seders”. At best they are hokey, at worst they are anti-Semitic. Indeed, I think Christians shouldn’t even try to pull off a “Jewish Seder”.  Frankly, we should all just make friends with the local temple or synagogue and attend when they invite us, as they invariably do. But I began to wonder: what really is wrong with “cultural appropriation”? Isn’t the Hebrew Bible itself “culturally appropriationistic”? They took all those Psalm genres from the Canaanites! And Christianity? Isn’t our whole religion “appropriationistic”? We took our scriptures and even our liturgy from the Jews. Really, if it weren’t for plagiarism and rebranding, those of us who are not Jewish by birth would still be worshiping Artemis and Thor.

Since I identify as a straight, white male, and since I was born near the start of the postwar baby boom, am I consigned to a cultural and worship life within the bounds of my own cultural and generational confines? Must I eat white bread and listen to the Beatles forever? Or, understanding the contingency and particularity of my social location, is there a way for me to be in solidarity with a wider group of people?

Those are the questions I want to address in the remainder of this paper—the questions of identity and solidarity. With whom do I identify, and with whom do I stand? In order to get at those things, I need to say a word first about the origins of generational sociology and then about the prospect of a different way to think about acculturation.

What we now call “generational sociology” was first posited by a German academic named Karl Mannheim in a 1928 essay, “Das Problem der Generationen” and translated into English as “The Problem of Generations”. According to Mannheim,

people are significantly influenced by the socio-historical environment (in particular, notable events that involve them actively) of their youth; giving rise, on the basis of shared experience, to social cohorts that in their turn influence events that shape future generations. [Wikipedia article, “Theory of Generations”.

You can see how a German sociologist writing in the 1920s could think this way: he and his generation had experienced the horrors of the first World War together. And the subsequent march of history (through the Great Depression, World War II, the Nuclear Age, Civil Rights, Vietnam, etc.) seemed to confirm Mannheim’s insight. Advertisers were drawn to employ generational sociology in their campaigns—I still remember Joanie Sommers singing the theme song of my own Pepsi generation in the 1960s:

When you say “Pepsi, please”

You’re putting yourself among

People who like their leisure,

With Pepsi the drink that’s young.

And who among us has not thrilled to all of the car advertisements aimed at men and women over 60 using rock music from our youth? Generational sociology has proven to be an effective commercial marketing tool. But is it a just or even reliable argument for a mission strategy?

You don’t have to read Mannheim very deeply or long to realize that there is an unseen antagonist in his writing: his fellow countryman and bugbear, Karl Marx. We all know that Marx argued not for generational but for class cohorts. Marxism is based on the idea that our primary identity is a class identity. Indeed, I once had the opportunity to meet the great Tillie Olsen, one of my real heroes. Tillie Olsen was a great writer (Tell Me a Riddleand others) and she was also a Marxist. She began the talk by saying, “If you receive your income not from investments but from your salary, you are a member of the working class. Many Americans seem to be confused about that.”

It is Mannheim’s work that has led to some of that confusion. Generational sociology wants to convince me that I have more in common with those who went to Woodstock than I do with those who are yet to be paid a living wage. The triumph of the Republican party since Reagan has been to make many people believe that they have interests in common not with the Service Employees International Union but with the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. Generational sociology is great for selling cars and Pepsi, but it’s a pernicious way of doing public policy. So why are we in the church so in love with it?

I think we fall for generational sociology for a couple of reasons. First, because we are alarmed by the aging of the church and the increasing identification by younger people of themselves as “Nones”—people with no religion. From what I’ve seen in my travels around the church, most of us in this room would qualify for the Youth Group in many congregations. We do seem to be at a crisis point in our ability to attract younger people, and so out of desperation we grasp at any theory that purports to explain our problem and suggest a remedy. “Are you fresh out of Millennials? Here’s how to attract them! Get clergy who can rap! Hip hop music at all services! Yoga and smoothiesin the parish hall!”

The second reason generational sociology appeals so much to us is, frankly, that we don’t think very well or critically in the church, especially when we’re under stress. We’re driven to a kind of desperation niche marketing not only in our generational thinking but also in our outreach to the many cultures coexisting in the United States. Since the 1970s we have been establishing congregations built on ethnic or cultural identity. Since the turn of this century we have established faith communities based on the loose notion of an “emerging church”. So far, neither strategy has seemed to work very well. Not only are our “traditional” congregations shrinking; the ethnic and emerging congregations aren’t doing that well either. I have a thought about this I’ll come back to at the end.

So I see one of our problems as a kind of loose, lazy habit of generational thinking. The second is more complicated, and it has to do with the larger questions of how each of us identifies in terms of our other cultural markers. It’s hard to talk about this stuff without seeming either “politically correct” or hopelessly retrograde. Happily we have a guide through this cultural swamp in the person of George Hutchinson, whose new book, Facing the Abyss: American Literature and Culture in the 1940sdescribes not only our problem but the outline of a solution.

George Hutchinson is a professor of English at Cornell University. I am reading his book now, thanks to a provocative review by Edward Mendelson in the March 7, 2019 issue of the New York Review of Books. [“Reading in an Age of Catastrophe”] In Facing the Abyss, Hutchinson examines the literary culture of the 1940s, the last decade in American life when literature and reading were actually important. In reviewer Mendelson’s words,

His first chapter, “When Literature Mattered,” summarizes a brief era unlike any other, when Americans of all classes and backgrounds turned hungrily to novels, plays, and poems, provoked by a “need to recapture the meaning of personal experience.” Soldiers who had never picked up a book now read free Armed Services Editions paperbacks—more than a hundred million came off the presses from 1943 to 1947—first for relief from wartime tedium, then because the books offered them new ways to understand their relationships and inner lives.

​Reading declined in the 1950s, as Hutchinson says, when “other media drew leisure-time attention”. So, for the 1940s, mass interest in literature resulted from a combination of accidental historical circumstances. But Hutchinson has another, bigger point, one more relevant to you and me. The 1940s were a decade of war and suffering on a gigantic scale. People read not only because books were freely available. They read to make sense of their own experience. Again, in Edward Mendelson’s words:

Hutchinson’s central theme is that literature mattered in the 1940s because it focused on experiences that happened to everyone and because it made sense of them, not by abstracting or generalizing, but by recognizing that those common experiences came to everyone in a unique way:

When Richard Wright narrates episodes of his youth in Black Boy (1945), he doesn’t mean to say that the fear, shame, and hatred that haunted his childhood can only be true for him, nor are they only relevant to other African Americans. He writes as an embodied human being to other human beings—who also are afraid, shamed, and hateful for their own reasons—with a faith in the possibility that they will listen and come to a “human” (his term) understanding of his experience and also of themselves, whoever and wherever they are—and that they will be changed by that understanding as he was.

​Hutchinson then proceeds to argue that writers in the 1940s aspired to universality, “an inclusive sense of what it means to be human”, and he moves to examine works by black, Jewish, LGBT, and women writers who use the particularity of their own situations to explore the universal dimension of their problems:

Hutchinson’s moral point throughout is the difference between a sympathetic sense of another person’s inner life and an objectifying sense of another person as a member of a category. Ethnic, sexual, and racial hatreds are always directed collectively against categories of persons, but anyone who is the object of such hatred experiences it subjectively and uniquely, as a direct assault on that person’s self.

​I went to college in the 1960s, seminary in the 1970s, and graduate school in the 1980s, and then taught off and on (both literature and theology) in the subsequent decades. Over the course of my schooling and then professional life, we have moved from any sense of universal values and aspirations to a kind of categorizing by identity—racial, gender, sexual, ethnic, and generational. We have come to assume that human beings are primarily defined by their categories, and we treat their cultural products as at once proprietary to their own location and appropriate only to those within the category. As a result, we both misread and misunderstand them, mistakes that ensue when, as Hutchinson says, “categorization precedes interpretation”. Moreover, as Edward Mendelson notes, 

Cultures incline either toward virtue or penitence: either toward declaring their own virtue by shaming others for lacking it, or, as in Hutchinson’s portrayal of the 1940s, by seeking inwardly to correct their own faults and failures.

Paradoxically, the earlier imperialistic impulse to shame geographically distant so-called “primitive” cultures is matched by the present-day desire to shame historical eras removed from us in time. 

​In arguing for a return to striving for universal human aspirations and values, I am aware that such a call will be construed as a tacit, colonialist appeal to impose white straight male developed world values on others and call them universal. I mean nothing of the sort. I believe it is possible—no, necessary--that in a multicultural interfaith post-colonial world we work together to build a vision that could be in fact truly universal and not an imperialistic fantasy. In the liberation struggles of the last 60 years there has been good reason to assert the integrity and value of what we have come to call “target” (race, culture, gender, sexuality, age, ability) identities. But the looming challenges of the disruption brought about by climate change along with sectarian violence demand that we develop a new sense of cross-cultural, cross-identity solidarity. We need to learn to construct that solidarity together. We need to find ways to speak with and to and not at and for each other.

The point of George Hutchinson’s book is not to exalt the 1940s—as he admits, a decade rife with racism, sexism, homophobia, genocide, and nuclear violence. The point is to observe how people like you and me, under enormous personal and collective stress, once upon a time negotiated those conditions and looked for meaning. They did so according to what now seem like reactionary principles—the idea that people, regardless of social location, share a universal kind of subjectivity, and the notion that our categories are a secondary, not primary, aspect of our human identity. As Hutchinson notes, in the 1940s, the main proponents of identity politics were fascists, anti-Semites, homophobes, white supremacists, and segregationists. The real progressives then were on the side of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a document now regarded by academics as both imperialistic and naive.

What does all this mean for us in the church? If you’ve given up listening—and who can blame you?--let me restate my primary arguments. By buying into generational sociology, we are making enormous (and I believe flawed) assumptions about human identity and solidarity. And by adopting the current academic tendency to categorize before we engage, we are in fact profiling and stereotyping not only others but ourselves. I do not believe in false choices. I don’t think our only options are either to invite everyone into the primarily white, male, Anglo experience of ’79 Prayer Book and ’82 Hymnal worship or to keep founding congregations with a particular ethnic or generational identity. To my mind, we need to find a way to evangelize across generational and cultural lines. And I think there is a pretty obvious (though difficult to pull off) solution.

In the fall of 2015, shortly before I retired in Washington and moved back here, I attended a workshop at Virginia Seminary about acculturation and evangelism in the Episcopal Church. One of the speakers was VTS professor Robert Prichard, who gave a fascinating talk on the way our church reached out to German immigrants at the turn of the last century.

According to Prichard, in the late 19th and early 20thcentury, German immigrants were an enormous (and largely unchurched) population in the U.S. To address this challenge, for the 1896 and 1916 Hymnals, the General Convention decided to add a substantial number of German hymn tunes and texts. One of the reasons we sing “A Mighty Fortress”, “Silent Night”, and “Glorious things of thee are spoken” is that our forebears wisely understood that, though second and third generation German immigrants had made their way into the English-speaking mainstream they still wanted to see their own culture reflected in Sunday morning worship. The result, according to Prichard, was an unprecedented success in incorporating a large number of German Americans into the Episcopal Church in the early decades of the 20th century.

Prichard’s analysis confirms my own anecdotal parish experience. At All Saints Pasadena, the 1 p.m. Spanish language service is rapidly dying, while more and more Latino/Latina parishioners attend the Sunday morning services. All Saints is one of the few congregations I know smart enough to include music from many cultures (including Latino/Latina) in its principal liturgies. As earlier Episcopalians understood, the solution to the problem of broadening our cultural reach is not to balkanize our liturgies—“Come to our 8 a.m. old-timers, 10 a.m. white guy, 1 p.m. Hispanic, 5 p.m. Millennial services!” The solution is to find a way to incorporate a wide variety of cultural, racial, and generational traditions in our principal services.

We tend to teach congregational development by advocating an ongoing strategy of “parallel development”: keep the old thing going as it is and build the new thing alongside it. (At least we did in the Seabury congregational development D.Min. when I was there.) And there are still good reasons to build new services, say at non-Sunday morning times more attractive to new constituencies. But I think we fall into parallel development because it feels easier and less conflictual than doing the hard work of opening our people to different modes of liturgical expression. I’m sure our WASP forebears grumbled when asked to sing German hymn tunes. They got over it. Sowill we learn to love not only Spanish and Korean and Filipino music. We might even find ourselves loving Bono and Beyoncé, too.

It’s important that we remember what we are really living and working for. Easter was two days ago, and the hope and promise of resurrection point us toward a universal, not a categorized or particular, horizon. The Hebrew prophets remind us that God is gathering us in an expansive and inclusive community that recognizes both the particularity of the givens of our identity and the universality of our nature and destiny. As Isaiah proclaims (Isaiah 40:5),

Then the glory of the Lord shall be revealed,
   ​and all flesh shall see it together,
   ​for the mouth of the Lord has spoken. 

He doesn’t say “White” flesh. He doesn’t say “Black, Latino, or Asian” flesh. He doesn’t say “Baby Boomer, GenX, or Millennial” flesh. He says ALL flesh. As Christians we believe that the story of one particular Palestinian Jewish carpenter has transformative implications for all of us, regardless of how we identify. Let us continue to celebrate and embrace the particularities of our own identities and experience. But let us turn away from defining them in ways that are hard and fast. Speaking as a member of the Man of the Year class ofthe Pepsi Generation, please do not consign me to eternity in straight white guy Boomer limbo. The one who rose for all of us on Sunday calls us all forward to a new and deeper and shared humanity, one in which we need the fullness of each other in order to become who we really and fully are. 

How do we identify? As ourselves and with each other. With whom do we stand? The human community. As sentimental and naïve as this may sound, it seems like the gospel truth, at least today in this latest home