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Sermon preached by the Most Reverend Katharine Jefferts Schori
Presiding
Bishop of The Episcopal Church
at the 175th Convention of the Diocese
of Vermont
3 November 2007, 8:30 am
Observing the feast day of Richard
Hooker
So what is this thing called the Diocese of Vermont? How would you explain it to people who know nothing about the church? It's more than 48 congregations; it's more than this body gathered. What's the connection with those who first gathered here in 1832? What allows us to still call this by the same name?
Richard Hooker would ask us whether we think this is a religious society or an assembly. Is this the church just because church people have come together? Is it the church because we're here to do something? What happens when we leave?
This is certainly a society—it's part of our name—the Domestic and Foreign Missionary Society; it's the legal name of the Episcopal Church. The society Hooker was talking about is the society of the church, something whose identity continues even when the assembly goes home. When this assembly of people gathered for worship disbands, the church continues. When the Diocesan Convention adjourns later today, the church goes on, and this body will have some continuity with the body that gathers in many places on Sunday and 1000 Sundays from now.
Richard Hooker asked questions like these in the late 1500s, questions that still challenge us today. He wrote one of the foundational books that have guided the Anglican experiment for the last 400 years. His opus is called, Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, but that high-falutin' title could just as well be expressed as "Principles of Church Governance" or maybe today we might say, "how Anglicans and Episcopalians follow Jesus." An awful lot of what he thought and said and wrote underlies the self-understanding of this church. The three-legged stool image about the authority of scripture and reason and tradition comes from him. So does that wonderful passage in the collect for today, "grant that we may maintain that middle way, not as compromise for the sake of peace, but comprehension for the sake of truth." He helped to make that idea of the middle way, and the concept of comprehensiveness, absolutely foundational for Anglicans.
Hooker is a remarkable example of what wisdom in the flesh looks like—which is probably why he made it onto our list of saints. He wrote his most famous work in response to controversy with another wing of the church. And you don't have to look much beyond the first page to see the connections with current controversies in this church.
Richard Hooker was appointed Master, or Rector, of the Temple Church in London in the late 1500s. He had an assistant there, from the Puritan wing of the church, named Walter Travers. Hooker's duty was to preach in the morning. Travers followed him in the afternoon, and he took the opportunity one day to refute what the rector had said in the morning, when he preached about salvation and the possibility that all of us will be saved. The Puritan position, along with Calvin, believed that some may be damned even before they can do anything. Hooker insisted that that understanding took away the possibility of God's grace.
Hooker's focus on reason and tolerance and inclusion is foundational to that broad stream of Anglican thought. This isn't just academic theologizing. It has to do with the basic identity of our tradition—that we can be comprehensive and inclusive as we search for a larger truth. And that rather than being a cop-out, that focus on comprehension is a sign of the spirit at work.
That focus on comprehension lies underneath the challenging and uncomfortable place we are trying to stand in as a church today—affirming that gay and lesbian, bisexual and transgendered Christians are deserving of the best ministry of this church, AND that there is a place for those who take a different theological position. We say that we are willing to live in that uncomfortable and unsettling place because we believe that only God has truth in its fullness.
Wisdom, and the search for it, is one of the gifts and vocations that the body of Christ always needs. None of us ever has it all, and it is only in the wisdom of the body gathered that we can even begin to think that we might have the mind of Christ.
That is one of the essential reasons why we continue to govern our church through assemblies like this one. Even after 175 years, Vermont does not have the fullness of God's truth. And somehow, I think you'd be too modest to announce the fact even if you did. Yet you recognize that there is more chance of it when you gather like this for counsel.
There is a remarkable sentence buried in the middle of that passage from Corinthians: "'What no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the human heart conceived, what God has prepared for those who love him'—these things God has revealed to us through the Spirit; for the Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God." We trust that the Spirit is present here, and at work, in the midst of this assembly. We trust that the spirit continues to be at work in the society called the church. And we trust that the spirit continues to search everything, even the depths of God.
Somehow that seems to say that everything is grist for the mill, that every aspect of existence is potentially instructive—that we can learn something from the people we think most wrong, as well as from studying the created order. Both the sacred and the secular may be useful study sites. It also seems to say that the spirit continues to search the depths of God—i.e., that we may not know everything quite yet, because God hasn't revealed everything yet.
An example. In this country, and in Canada, in the 1800s, the respective governments made a deal with several different churches. The different denominations were asked to evangelize the various native American tribes. In exchange, the government gave the churches exclusive rights to do their work in different parts of the territories. Later on those churches would enter similar agreements to educate the children of those tribes. It seemed to good and faithful Christian people that this was a wise and a just thing to do. It turned out rather otherwise, as nobody asked about the wisdom of the native peoples themselves. Human wisdom, even as the product of prayer and searching, can be wrong—sometimes horrendously wrong.
One of the gifts of which Hooker reminded us is the sense that keeping the question open may be the wisest and most faithful thing to do. That can be a wretchedly uncomfortable place to live, but only if we insist that God speaks in black and white, either/or ways. The spirit is still searching, my friends. That understanding is a characteristic of the society called the Episcopal Church. The assembly that is this gathering, and this diocesan convention, are meant to do something, they are meant for public action. The question for us is how to live in that tension between the call to act and the awareness that the spirit hasn't finished just yet. Hold that tension between confidence that this society has the mind of Christ, and be willing to act boldly, yet also firmly believe that the spirit is still at work, searching, searching, searching, even in the places and people we would least expect. If we can hold that tension lightly, aware in all humility that we do bold things only by the grace of God, then we can be messengers of grace to generations yet to come. As the Scots are fond of saying, as messengers angels can fly only because they take themselves lightly.
