Last Weekend: Climate Revival in Copley Square with the Presiding Bishop

Photo: Bishop Knisely and the Presiding Bishop
By Heidi Shott, Diocese of ME

Boston's Copley Square is back open to the public, post-marathon bombings, and on Saturday April 27th Bishop Knisely and Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori gathered with many local & national religious leaders to liven the spirit of the place up, creating a new positive stir with an ecumenical "Climate Revival".

The Climate Revival began at Old South Church (UCC) on Boylston street where there was worship, prayer, and preaching. Afterwards the whole party processed up the street through the busy sidewalks of Copley Square, to Trinity Church for more worship, prayers and a sermon by Presiding Bishop Katharine (see sermon below).

At Trinity Church, the day's events culminated in a round table where religious leaders signed a climate change statement titled “Lazarus, come out: A shared statement of hope in the face of climate change." For more pictures from the day visit the Diocese of Maine's flickr album.

Climate Revival Sermon 

by The Most Rev. Katharine Jefferts Schori
Presiding Bishop and Primate, The Episcopal Church

Alleluia! We’re here today to breathe new life into a dying body – the body of God’s creation.  It’s going to take the breath we have in us, and the breath of many, many others.  Breathe in the breath of God, of life, and give it back – now, breathe!  We’re going to need all the confidence we have that the act of breathing in and breathing out will continue – and we’re going to have to use as much hot air and vehemence as we can muster.  Are you ready?

Jesus’ raising of Lazarus begins with several kinds of breathing – the calls for Jesus’ attention, then the sighs and sobs of the grieving, and hot words of reprimand:  ‘if you’d only been here and paid attention…’!  And then many more words trying to understand, more tears, and the charge to take away the stone.

The stone blocks the tomb, it keeps the dead dead and separate from the living.  Never the twain shall meet, if the stone is doing its death-defying job.  It’s not the stone’s fault, but it’s in the wrong place if we want to raise the dead.  And there are far too many stones in the way.

There are stones in our shoes that cripple those who would run to heal.  There is stone in the hearts of those who won’t hear the cries of fellow creatures, or see the growing chaos of a warming earth, or learn that stony hearts are killing the whole living system.  There are little stones in our tear ducts that keep us from weeping, and specks in our eyes, and misplaced otoliths in our ears that block our hearing.  Take away all the stones, O Lord, and give us hearts of flesh and organs of compassion, for your creation is suffering.

Let’s give thanks that the stones are beginning to be removed.  That is still a work for divine breath – as Jesus acknowledges at the tomb, “thank you, God, for listening!”  We know that God is always listening and breathing a response over the chaos around us.  Resurrection and creative innovation are continually engaging the stuff of earth, bringing forth new life in spite of the tombs within us and around us.  This city knows something about that, as so many hearts opened to strangers in recent days – may we all learn to listen and see and hope for healing and new liveliness in human communities and other parts of God’s creation.  God is always delivering the dead from the tomb.

The body in the tomb is still called Lazarus.  It means “God has helped.”  God has always helped.  We grieve the illness of the body of God’s creation, yet if we look at the long history of this body, we can see healing of the body in ages past, long before human beings were more than a dim glimmer in the DNA of creatures without backbones.  The great extinction events caused by asteroids, shifts in planetary oxygen levels, or vast quantities of atmospheric dust give evidence of enormous and wide-ranging death, yet each time God’s creativity eventually brought forth new life.  It was not immediate or sudden, but in God’s good time, the earth again knew riotous and flourishing diversity.  The difference today is that we’re causing massive death through our own greed.

Creative breath has been displaced by a giant sucking sound, the vacuuming maw of our own emptiness.  We seek to feed that desperate, gasping and grasping hunger with SUVs and more coal-fired power plants, and the latest imports of gadgets and gewgaws (and the 500 year history of that word is a reminder that this craving is not new).  We feed ourselves out of season foods from far away, forgetting the delightful surprise of the first asparagus of spring or the first corn of summer.  We crave houses so large they shut out the neighbors – with stones that block the sun from back yard gardens.  The protection and prediction we insist on and strive for in all that accumulating frenzy ends in friendlessness, for we have no time to spend cultivating the earthy companionship for which we were created.  That dying body is further burdened by our useless treatment of our own bodies – not just excessive food intake, but vain attempts to mold and remake the clay in others’ images, and remove every microbe from every surface and crevice.  We are made in the image of God, uniquely gifted, beautiful, beloved, and profoundly social.  What we think is human in ourselves is only a tenth of the cells in this communal organism – and the microscopic life within us feeds and nourishes and regulates our lives, until we meddle with its healthy balance.  And then, quite literally, all hell breaks loose as one part of the whole exceeds its place and we find our guts revolting against us.  That sick body, community that it is meant to be, is an apt reflection of the larger body of creation today.

If the stone is removed, and the way of life unblocked, what sort of Lazarus will emerge?  Given what has already been done to that body, it will not be the same one that went in.  Like gut microbes subjected to unrelenting courses of antibiotics, this will be a different community and system.  The organ may still function, but it will do so in different ways.

The dead Lazarus may emerge, yet there will still be work to do in unbinding and turning the body loose to function creatively once more.  The set points and equilibria have already moved, and it will take God’s time and divine creativity to establish new ones.  Species have disappeared; others will emerge, over millennia, to take their places in the society of creation.  The atmosphere has absorbed vast quantities of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping molecules.  Some will be removed to ocean waters and plant tissues, but the whole system will be warmer than before, probably for geological lengths of time.  The ocean creatures that live with carbonate shells and supports – like corals and some kinds of plankton – are already struggling to lay down those structures.  They, too, may disappear into the fossil record, and the bigger creatures that feed on them – fish, shrimp, whales, birds – may not survive either.  Something will undoubtedly evolve to replace them, but it will take more than the three or four days of Lazarus’ entombment.  It will take something on the time scale of the days of the first Genesis creation story.  God’s time is not our time, nor God’s ways our ways.

The gaping maw of our greed is already making life harder for our human sisters and brothers, as weather patterns shift and food crops repeatedly fail in traditional growing places.  Deserts are expanding, water is evaporating, and there is less health and healing power in parts of this body.  Disease organisms that have been in reasonable equilibrium will emerge with new virulence, as will pests afflicting our food crops.  The results will cause suffering, want, anxiety insecurity.  We know what will almost inevitably follow:  conflict, violence, and war.

The stones are being moved away, the body is emerging, and it is time to unbind the body, and set it loose.  For we have met that body and it is us.  We, too, are Lazarus.  The medieval word was lazar, and it referred to the figure in Luke 16:20, the poor man covered with sores, the leper on the sidewalk outside the rich man’s house.  Samuel Johnson’s definition of a lazar is apt:  “one deformed and nauseous with filthy and pestilential diseases.”[1]  The disease which afflicts lazars, the rich house-holder, and the body of this earth all has a common source – the stones that block awareness, compassion, sharing, mutuality, and love of neighbor – all our neighbors.  The old word for those stones is skandaloi, stumbling blocks.

The mess we’re making of the body of creation is indeed a scandal, born of the temptation to put our individual selves in the place that belongs to the one who is beyond all of us.  The good news is that we know something about the cure.
We are made in the image of God, creative and social beings meant for community.  We routinely stumble over two kinds of scandalous stones – we forget that we were not created to be solitary individuals and we get stuck in understandings of community that are always too small.  Jesus’ presence among us is incarnate evidence of our never-aloneness, and his ministry and death are about serving the whole of humanity and all creation.  That’s why he feeds multitudes, and eats with anybody, even with germy hands, and that’s why he heals outcastes – including lepers and lazars!
Well, friends – friends of Jesus and of one another – we like to profess that we are his hands in this world.  There is abundant healing work to do.  It begins in discovering that our neighbors are far more numerous and diverse than we have heretofore imagined.  From the microbes on our skin and in our guts to the yet-undescribed insects of tropical forests to the denizens of undersea thermal vents and the bacteria of Antarctic subglacial lakes, we are one body of creation.  The health of the human part of God’s body of creation depends on all the members – we are created as a society, and we are created for productive and creative relationship with one another.  We are meant to be friends.  Unbinding Lazarus, and setting all the lazars free, is about restoring each to community and the possibility of redeeming friendship.
All of that takes some vulnerability – and a willingness to understand ourselves as less than omnipotent or omnicompetent.  If we are social creatures, then it is only in community that we will be truly capable of breathing new life into dead and dying bodies.  This body of humanity called the church has often been compared to a ship.  Most ships have a compartment called alazarette.  The word probably comes from the ships that brought lepers to Italian hospitals in the middle ages, but in nautical terms a lazarette is a storage locker near the steering gear.  That part of the ship is always vulnerable, close to the water, in a well near where the rudder or steering gear pierces the outer surface of the ship.  A lazarette is where the emergency gear is stored – sort of a first aid kit for healing, repairing, and saving the ship and the people on it.  In a very real sense, our task of unbinding is to be exposed, to be vulnerable to the force of the storm, and to be equipped and ready to heal and repair.

Friends – lazars!  All hands to the lazarette!  The storm is upon us, and the body may be threatened, yet we know there is also abundant possibility of new life.  Let the wind of life blow in us, remove every stone, and call forth the dead and dying body.  Open us to God breathing new life in us and every part of creation.  Now!  Breathe!  Blow, bellow for Lazarus, bless and unbind that body, that it may be set free to renew the face of the earth.

Bishop Knisely Thanks RI Senate for Passing Marriage Equality Bill

I applaud the Rhode Island Senate for a courageous vote yesterday evening to pass the bill legalizing same-sex marriage, giving all Rhode Islanders equal right to the civil benefits of Marriage.  

I thank the Senate for passing a well balanced bill that I believe will protect the religious freedom of differing faiths with vastly different theological understandings of marriage. The constitution itself provides churches the right to decide who they will and will not marry within their denomination's conscience. 

Here in the Episcopal Church, a majority have come to believe that same-sex couples can live covenanted, faithful lives together in service to God, just as people in traditional marriages do.  Not all Episcopalians agree, but I thank the Senate for passing a bill that provides clergy who wish it the opportunity to minister in this way to the families and people in their congregations.

Friday 4/19 Evening Prayer with Bishop Knisely, for Boston Marathon Tragedy

The tragedy and heroism at the Boston Marathon on Monday held up to the people of New England the fragility of our common life, but also commended our spirit of resilience.

In the wake of this event, The Right Rev. W. Nicholas Knisely, Bishop of Rhode Island will be officiating Evening Prayer using the Book of Common Prayer's "An Order of Worship for the Evening" tomorrow, Friday April 19th at 7:00pm at St. Michael's Church in Bristol Rhode Island.

We welcome all to join us as we address the feelings, emotions, and thoughts that have been brought home at this time, and explore our response to the needs of the people of Boston.

We chose this service to allow prayer and reflection to be the centerpiece of that response, so that the Holy Spirit had room to guide us.

Come reflect, remember, mourn, and process the way to understanding, as well as our actions as the people of God.

The Death of The Rev. Hébert Winslow Bolles

The Rev. Hébert Winslow Bolles, 88, of 45 DeArruda Terrace, Portsmouth, RI, died peacefully at home, after a long illness, on April 6, 2013.  He was the husband of Elizabeth (Bambi) Sands Elliot. Hébert served as curate of St. Stephen’s Providence, then Chaplain to Brown and RISD students before he became rector of Ascension Wakefield, RI 1953-57.   He was called to be the Canon Pastor of Christ Church Cathedral in Indianapolis from 1957-62.  In 1962, Hébert returned to active duty as a Chaplain for the destroyer Squadron DESDIV 122 in Newport, RI, he served as Battalion Chaplain of the 2/26 Marines in Vietnam, 1966-67 and in 1968, he was stationed at NAS Norfolk, VA then at Argentia, Newfoundland, and finally served as the Senior Chaplain at NETC Newport, RI.  He retired from the Navy as a Captain in 1979. Hébert was a member of the RI Diocesan Standing Committee.  He was the Ecumenical Officer from 1984-89, and an instructor at the School for Deacons 1982-91, a ministry to which he was deeply committed.  Hébert served as interim of St. Paul's Portsmouth, St. Michael's Bristol and, later, was Vicar of St. Andrew's Little Compton (1989-94).  He was the Chaplain to Retired Clergy & Widows. 

Calling hours will be held at St. Columba’s Chapel, 55 Vaucluse Avenue, Middletown, RI on Friday, April 19, 2013 from 4-8 p.m.  His funeral will be held on Saturday, April 20, 2013 at 10 a.m. at Trinity Church, One Queen Anne Square, Newport, RI.  Burial will be private in St. Columba’s Churchyard.  In lieu of flowers, contributions may be made in his memory to Saint Columba’s Chapel, 55 Vaucluse Ave. Middletown, RI 02842 or to the Wounded Warriors Project, PO BOX 758517, Topeka, KS 66675. 

Email at Diocesan House is Restored

Verizon has restored DSL internet service to the North Main Street area, so we are now fully back online!

Verizon Outage: Office Internet & Email is Down!

Verizon DSL service is down for 24-48 hours in Providence's North Main Street area, where our diocesan offices are located.  If you need to reach someone at the diocesan house please call us instead of emailing us, our number is 401-274-4500. Our email server cannot receive or send email until Verizon restores internet service.

We're not entirely offline though, a few of us will be working from smartphones, G4 iPads, or home offices until internet is restored. We can still be reached via our facebook or twitter accounts. Isn't technology wonderful (when it works)?

We're sorry for the difficulties! Verizon assures us they will have service back up as soon as possible. In the mean time thank you for bearing with us.

-Ruth Meteer, Communications Director

New Brown/RISD Campus Minister Announced

This week in a letter to parishioners, S. Stephen's, Providence announced the appointment of the Rev’d Blake A. Sawicky as their new Curate. This is also exciting news for the diocese as Fr. Sawicky will serve as the Diocesan Episcopal Campus Minister to Brown University and RISD as well.

Since June 2011, Fr. Sawicky has served as Curate at the Episcopal Cathedral of Saint John in Denver, Colorado. He is a graduate of Yale Divinity School [M.Div., 2011] with a Diploma in Anglican Studies from the Berkeley Divinity School at Yale. He also holds degrees from University College, London, in Maritime Archeology [M.A., 2007], and Wheaton College, Illinois, in History and Ancient Near Eastern Archeology [B.A., 2006].

Fr. Sawicky writes: “I sing and play the piano, and enjoy fly fishing, hiking, SCUBA diving, art, music, literature. I enjoy volunteering with various service organizations, which have included the Red Cross, World Relief, Habitat for Humanity, and others. I am also a member of the Guild of All Souls, and I currently sit on the Colorado State Board of Medical Examiners.”

Ft. John Alexander, rector of S. Stephens writes "Fr. Sawicky’s appointment is very good news for S. Stephen’s and the Episcopal community at Brown and RISD. I know you will all join me in doing everything possible to make him welcome."

Fr. Sawicky will begin his new ministry at S. Stephen’s on June 1, 2013.

Lenten Bible Study, Easter Day; Acts 28

Acts, Chapter 28 (NRSV)

If this morning was a bit warmer, I would be sitting here, watching the sunrise over the water of Wickford harbor with my windows open. And if the wind were just right, I believe I would be able to hear the hymns of Easter praise carried from the sunrise service at Old St. Paul's church. We have been journeying together for the forty days of Lent and the seven days of Holy Week. And today we have arrived at the shore.

In the final chapter of the Book of Acts, Paul too arrives at his final destination. He arrives on the shore of Malta, coming out of the waters of the surf, just as God had promised him. He finds help among the people of that island and eventually makes his way aboard another ship, makes for the coast of Italy and sails north along it. After a few more ports he arrives in Rome. The whole action of the latter part of Acts has found its conclusion in these verses. When Luke abruptly ends the story, Paul has spent two years (which is six months longer than the statue of limitations on his arrest) preaching and teaching about the Way in the City.

The greek language does a much more efficient job of communicating the nature of action than English does. There are more tenses of verbs used in Greek than in modern English and this allows a single word to communicate with more nuance than we are used to reading. Luke does just this sort of thing when he writes in verse 14 "so we came to Rome" and then again in verse 16 essentially the same. This difference is that in the 14th verse Luke uses the imperfect tense, which indicates an action that is ongoing but not completed. In the 16th verse Luke uses the aorist, which signals the full past tense. If you like reading detailed textual studies of manuscripts you can see that the scribes who copied these manuscripts down through history were a little bothered by the strange use of the imperfect in verse 14. Even modern translators aren't quite sure what to do about it. The best scholars think that Luke means to say by the use of that odd tense that he, Paul and the others had arrived in the districts that were under Rome's administrative control. The Forum of Appius and the Three Taverns is still about 34 miles from what we today would call Rome. They arrived in the Roman countryside, but not yet the City itself. And that understanding makes sense to me, at least as we read the text in a historical way.

But I'm rather taken this Easter morning by the two part of arrival at the final destination as a symbol of our own voyage. We too have arrived this morning at Easter, but we do so imperfectly. We are here, but we are not finished with our journey. We are baptized, but we are still wandering in the wilderness. We are proclaiming the Resurrection and the end of the power of death, but we still watch our loved ones die. The Kingdom is breaking in upon us, but it has not yet fully been revealed. Today is Easter Day in the imperfect tense.

We have truly arrived, but we have not completed our journey. There are a few more verses and perhaps, like for Paul, a few more years yet to go for all of us. This yearly pilgrimage through Lent toward Easter is a symbol that we are still travelers on the Way. We have arrived at the outskirts, but there is still more to come.

If you ever have had the chance to read C.S. Lewis' book "The Final Battle", the last of the Narnia books, you might recognize this idea. In Lewis' book, even after the world of Narnia has come to its judgement and end, the people of God are not yet done with their journey to the promised places. They must still go higher up and deeper into the new land they have found.

Those two verses in the final chapter of Acts, with the odd grammatical construction, seem to me the most fitting focus for our thoughts this Easter morn.

I pray God's fullest and richest blessing on you and those you love as you journey onward from this place. Go well!

 

+Nicholas

Easter Day 2013

Lenten Bible Study, Holy Saturday; Acts 27

Acts, Chapter 27 (NRSV)

Sitting here at my desk, watching the sun rise over Narragansett bay, I find myself struggling to not get caught up in the eyewitness details of Paul's final sea voyage. The language and images are very familiar. A ship, caught in the teeth of a winter nor'easter, begins to break apart in the heavy waves. Cargo and tackle are thrown overboard, sea anchors are dropped and soundings taken. All details that anyone here in the Ocean State would recognize. But this is more than a sea adventure. This is an allegory about the Church and a proof of God's power that is particularly resonant on this Holy Saturday morning.

To the ancient Israelites the sea represented the forces of chaos. The sea's protean surface recalled the state of the cosmos before God began to order Creation and the story of God's people began. The psalms sing of God's power in setting the sea within bounds that it could not escape. The people of Israel were desert people and as such they had little interest in sailing and treated all water with respect, awe and a little fear. (We hear echoes of this in the language of early Church that describes baptism as a drowning and a death in the waters of chaos.) To the gentile nations along the Mediterranean coasts the sea was their highway, but it was mercurial and could turn in an instant on anyone - particularly on anyone who angered the gods.

Sea voyages were fraught with the interference of the gods. It was customary to sacrifice to the gods before the voyage began and during the voyage the crew and passengers were all very intentional in avoiding an behavior that might anger a god. At best it was hoped the gods would not notice the people pushing out into deep water because if they did they might unleash the winds and send a great storm to destroy the boat that represented the traveler's island of safety. Just as we read in the story of Jonah, when sailors discovered that a particular person on board a ship had angered a god, they felt no remorse in heaving that person overboard to suffer the god's wrath directly.

In the early church the symbol of the Church was the boat. The story of Noah and his safe passage in the ark while the created order was being destroyed by the rising force of the waters of chaos was read as an allegory of the Church that brought the faithful safely to the new Creation that God inaugurated on Easter Day. Isn't it striking that we still call the main hall of a church building the "nave", a word which comes the latin word from ship "navis"?

When you read the details of this sea voyage in that light, there's much more here than just a grain ship, carrying prisoners to Rome, being destroyed by an winter gale. Paul proclaims that this particular storm represents no judgement on the part of God, just a poor judgment on the part of the ship's owner. And the God who Paul proclaims is going to intervene to save all the people on board the ship. It's proof that this God has power over chaos, is greater than the pagan lord of the sea, and is actively protecting Paul and his companions. To the pagan cultures of Paul's time, this would have spoken volumes.

But look also at the how God uses the ship in the story. The ship carries the whole company through the storm though it is scoured by the wind and the waves, loses much of its cargo and tackle and in the very end breaks apart just before they find a safe shore. I'm rather taken by the image of the jettisoning of anything superfluous as the ship tries to hold together in the nor'easter. There doesn't seem to be much reluctance on the part of the ship's crew to get rid of anything that wasn't helping. Paul spoke to them all in the midst of the storm with a promise from God that no one would be lost. But the ship would not be saved. Yet it played its appointed role in bringing people to safety.

What parallels are there for us in this tale and our present experience of the Church this Holy Saturday morning? I expect that you are recognizing many. God has promised that we all would be saved, and we try to trust in that promise in the midst of great storms. We too are being asked what we need to lose to be able to keep moving forward toward our goal. We too are being told we must eat the food that gives us strength to see our voyage through to the end. We too have heard an angelic message. And there are so many more…

On Good Friday the church naves were stripped and bare. The storm broke upon us. This morning we awake to gray skies and silence. We are reduced to the essentials needed for our journey. But the shore is in sight. We need to make our way through the surf, through the water to reach the goal.

Keep all this in your mind tonight if you attend an Easter Vigil. Listen and remember the role the water plays in the stories. Watch the light come into the darkness. And find the shore underneath your feet even as you are dripping from the holy water of baptism.

Lenten Bible Study, Good Friday; Acts 26

Acts, Chapter 26 (NRSV)

In this, the final of Paul's defenses of his ministry, there are some additional details added to his recounting of the events on the road to Damascus where he had his vision of Jesus. In a few places in this account, Paul intensifies the language he uses to tell what happened. The light he saw for instance is "brighter than the sun". "We all fell to the ground" is a slightly different version than what we read in the first account back in chapter 9 of this book where it is reported that the companions hear the voice but it is not mentioned that they fall to the ground or see the light. The main story is not changed, but it is more dramatically told.

But the most interesting addition to the account is Paul's inclusion of the phrase that he hears Jesus using, "Why do you kick against the goads?" That phrase, commonly found in classical literature (Aeschylus and Pindar for example), was how one described what it was like to resist the will of the gods. Paul's use of it, which was probably intentional, resonated with the audience before whom he was speaking. Prior to this vision Paul had been an observant Pharisee and had persecuted the Christian believers. Having heard the voice of God from heaven, he changed his beliefs and his direction. It's exactly how the Hellenistic world would expect a man to respond to the urging of his god. And Paul's experiences preaching the Gospel of Jesus served to verify to his hearers that this was an authentic encounter with the divine.

It is interesting that Paul uses this classical phrase to describe his experience of conversion. He was pushing against the will of God and was experiencing pain as a result. But notice that the pain is not caused by God directly, it's caused by Paul refusing to embrace the purpose for which he was created. Because he would not be true to God's purpose for him, he was cutting himself off from the Truth and from the profound Joy which we experience when we follow the Truth. God's response to this stubborn refusal is not to smite Paul or to curse him in anyway. Actually it's rather the contrary isn't it? Paul is free and has the approval of all while he is actively persecuting the Church. It's only when he seeks to serve Christ that he experiences opposition and personal persecution from his community. It's because he has turned to follow Christ that his is standing in court bound in chains. But Paul understands the difference between the appearance of freedom and true freedom. And it is the true freedom, even while bound that he is attempting to explain to Agrippa and to Festus. And it is this freedom that will take him to Rome and to his death.

Today, Good Friday, we hear how Jesus was bound and taken to his death just outside the gates of Jerusalem. We, like Paul, in rejecting the Messiah, cause God not to smite us, but instead to suffer. God's response to our rejection, like to Paul's, is an intensification of God's love toward us. Jesus, in way no one else ever has, embraces God's will completely in the moment of Good Friday, as hard and mysterious a thing it is for us to understand what that means.

How are we feeling pain in our own lives right now? What is the cause of that pain? Are we too kicking against the goads? Are we resisting God's purpose for our lives? Thanks be to God that very few of us are ultimately called to suffer the same fate that befell Paul or Jesus, and we don't have to fear that sort of end. But how willing are we to rethink where we are in our lives and return to God's purpose for us? Are we willing to find our own unique vocation?