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 20th 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.
