Standing with Friends

A sermon delivered by the Rev. Michael Athey, ETSS '97, during the Diocese of Oklahoma's Convention Evensong at Trinity Episcopal Church in Tulsa on November 6, 2003

Wisdom 5.1

Many of you know me. I was baptized as an infant at St. Matthew's Church in Enid. My earliest memories bring back the taste of Sunday School kool-aid, cheap cookies, the feel of my grandmother's muskrat coat on the hard wooden pews. The smell of candle wax and wood polish -- faces of familiar and friendly people. Cigarette smoke, coffee, laughter. There was that comfortable assurance that as long as Father Barney was doing whatever it was that priests did at church, then the universe was in some sort of order. (It seems like the sort of feeling religion is supposed to give an eight year old).

I have been an acolyte, an acolyte master, a vestry person, a pledge chair, a committee head, a delegate to convention. I participated in the election of our bishop, Robert Moody nearly seventeen years ago. (I actually voted for one of the other guys, but I was there) and Bob, I am glad you are my bishop. I have been a diocesan commission chair, an aspirant, postulant, candidate, and priest. I have enjoyed a banking career, seminary, endured prayer book revision, experienced the ongoing evolution of women's roles, struggled to balance church budgets, attended and staffed Cursillo, St. Crispin's, the Royal School of Church Music and Education For Ministry.

I have known and loved many of you personally. And I have fallen in and out of love with the church many times. In retrospect, I would say many of you raised me. My adult identity, my sense of vocation, my ethical foundations, my relationship with God -- all have been fashioned and nurtured with you -- in this Episcopal community over the past 40 years. Words alone will never express the gratitude I have toward God -- and toward you -- for having been shaped in your midst.

This last summer, I had the opportunity to make it to West Ankole, Uganda. Together with nine others from this diocese we spent about a month meeting folks, worshipping, praying, learning from one another. Eating things -- like goat -- which was, as any of my travel mates will tell you, the most difficult part of the trip as far as I'm concerned. (The relationship we enjoy with Uganda has so much potential to enliven our faith as a diocese!)

One of my privileges was to travel to numerous villages in the diocese where medical clinics are being developed. The first couple of visits were great. We were treated like royalty. The template for our visits was the same everywhere we went. First, there would be a welcome by the elders of the community. We would retire to the pastor's house for tea -- which included cakes and cookies and bread and eggs and soda and chicken. And goat. Then we would proceed to the church for a community meeting. There, we met church members, children (if they weren't in school) retired folks, widows. This was basically a time for questions and dialogue.

During our initial visits, the questions were like: "What kind of foods do you eat in America?" or "What do your children do when they get to be 12 years old? Do they go to work?" or "How can you help us put a roof on our church?" Then, after the dialogue, some prayers and a couple of songs, we would go back to the pastors' house for lunch -- where there would be tea, soda, cakes, cookies, bread, eggs, rice, beans, fruit, vegetables, chicken, beef.

And goat.

It was like this for the first two days. Then we went to Muzira, a tiny farming village at the top of a perilous road on the side of a mountain. We were received as usual. We enjoyed our tea. But at the community meeting, after we had exchanged polite greetings and assured our mutual communities that they were in each others' prayers … something unexpected happened. It was question time. I got ready to answer an easy question about how farms are run, or what was my favorite food and how often did I get to enjoy it. Just then, a woman stood up in the midst of them. She looked sixty (she was probably thirty-five). She stood confidently. Her eyes seemed to pierce the distance between us. And she pointed her finger and said with much rage:

"What are you leaders in the church going to do about our husbands who go to sleep with other women, and bring AIDS back to our beds and DEMAND that we sleep with them? What will the church do to get us away from this killing?"

Her finger was pointed right at me.

Now, raised in the ways of gentility, a notion of stoicism, a desire for self-respect, distaste for public airing of relational tribulations and an immediate desire to crawl under the chair behind me…I struggled for a moment. And then something said to me: "Be who you really are. Answer the question the way you would answer it at home. Let's see where this will go."

I stood up and said, "To me, marriage means a bond of dignity and respect between two people that reminds others of the way God treats us. I would say, in the relationship you describe, there is no dignity and there is no respect and therefore the foundations of marriage do not exist. The job of the church should be to find a way to liberate you from your suffering and abuse."

That is when the African priest sitting next to me stood up.

"Thank you for your opinions," he said. "But in our culture, when a man and a woman are married, they are married for life. It is our spiritual duty to endure whatever suffering comes to us and to keep Jesus Christ as our hope and joy."

The confident woman sat down. He sat down. I sat down. It was the end of the conversation. The questions that followed were about cars and American farming practices and about what kind of foods we liked to eat. Then we went to lunch.

The image of that woman -- who knows, maybe she'd been on the threshold of hope -- but the image of her (and of her shrinking back into her seat) continues to disturb my prayers and my sense of what is just. It may shed some light on the social context from which the Anglican Church in Africa has engaged the recent dialogue regarding human sexuality.

It seems easy to me, to call suffering holy when the torment belongs to somebody else. It seems simpler to stand behind tradition than it is to cultivate new and just social expectations. It's trouble-free to point toward what's conventional and call it the embodiment of truth. But it's quite a difficult thing to stand for a higher truth, and to demand that religion change for the sake of it.

There's no tradition, no doctrine, no biblical teaching or social principal -- if kept at the expense of human dignity -- that should not be reinvented! And I wonder if the church will ever stand with that woman.

I believe we are standing at the threshold of something new and wonderful in this Episcopal Community. It does feel like -- for the first time in my life -- that some of us will not be crossing together.

I'm personally less concerned with what some call "schism" in the church than I am people losing their humanity and their compassion over these issues of doctrine. The thought of another Christian sitting down and writing some of the venomous and hateful things that have been written to our bishop and to others over the last few months -- we should be careful not to lose God in our zeal to defend the faith.

I'd bet every congregation represented here has had people leave in frustration over the issue of Gene Robinson's consecration and the way our diocesan delegation and our bishop voted. But since when did the Anglican notion of orthodoxy require people of faith to act in ways that contradict their own understanding about how God is working in their lives? Would we rather demand that, for the sake of orthodoxy, our spiritual leaders ignore the leading of the Spirit and merely stick to tradition? That sort of thinking will keep that woman in Muzira seated and silent in the midst of her suffering, forever.

And it will keep my gay and lesbian friends tight in the closet, un-empowered, only partially included in Christ's body … with limited access to the sacraments and to influence within the structures of the church.

I really wanted this time to encourage us, as a convention, to rise to our potential as friends, Anglicans and faithful Christians. I wanted to demonstrate the power of the gospel to usher in the good of God even when we feel like the foundations of our faith are shaking beneath our feet. It was my intention to persuade you to conduct our business at this convention with mutual respect -- to celebrate our friendships -- to love one another. I still hope we can do all these things. I know we can do these things. But I thought I could do it without showing my hand. And I just couldn't do it.

I have friends to stand beside. Some of them want to be ordained. The ironic thing is, they could be if they lied about who they really are. Others are in rich and beautiful relationship that have and continue to remind me about how God loves us. All of them want to be treated like humans … like full members of this Body … and they are more real to me than any sort of tradition or interpretation of orthodoxy that says they deserve less than that.

It's funny, how when we grow up and we have to make hard decisions about faith and church and God, we lose that comfortable and peaceful feeling that we had as an eight year old child. I know now, that feeling will never come back. As an adult, I must be content that I have at least desired to follow God. And that I have had the good company of friends like you along the way.