It's "No Person's Liturgy Is Safe" Time Again

I'm going to start by saying that I have little interest in opining on the various calendar additions, subtactions, divisions and multiplications. It was one thing back in the day when there was a proposal to include a bunch of non-Christians, but thankfully that urge seems to have passed, and the rest is extreme inside baseball in a church where for the past few years my options for attending an Ascension Day eucharist have been severely limited. If you care to consider them, Scott Gunn goes though the lot, but I have other things to deal with.

And one of those things, I'm afraid, is the ongoing drive towards bowdlerization in the name of inclusion. Let me start with the depressing observation that it doesn't work anyway. And even if it did, the current reductionism of people to identities is (a) not loving, and (b) not coherent and likely to change considerably over the decades.

Let me start with gender/sex/sexuality. Here I am met with the stark contradiction that it is supposed to not matter, and that it is all-important. No amount of earnest 'splaining is getting me past that, and I say that as part of a household in which our adherence to Traditional Gender Roles is laughably poor. But we still can't get free of the urge to edit the Father out of the trinity, and this urge is wedded to some of the worst gender stereotyping around. All of this was evident poorly thought-through neutered versions of the Rite II liturgies, which by the way we have a resolution to apply this to Prayer C this time. It still stinks of "Moms are loving and nurturing and dads are cruel disciplinarians" thinking, but it's going to pass and it will give me one more thing I will have to check when I go church-visiting, because I do care about the theology being put in my mouth.

And now it has been decided that we have to fret about ableist language. Now we are getting into matters where I have skin in the game: over the last year I have had to deal with a knee injury which pevents me from walking normally, and I have had terrible nearsightedness since I was in kindergarten. If the devil showed up today with promises to fix both, I would at least have to read the terms and conditions. I'm sorry, but this sound as though it comes from people who have never read the gospels, as there are just too, too many episodes of Jesus healing for anyone to accept being blind, being crippled, having to live with birth defects and with injuries as identities. And to be blunt, the resolution reads as having been written by someone who never had to really suffer these handicaps. I do not authorize them to take offense on my behalf, and that is what they are daring to do.

The bigger issue, howeve, comes with the move to tamper with the Good Friday passion text. I will be blunt: we have no business making up our own version of the gospel passage which is not what the Greek actually says. In my parish, I am literally the person who reads this in our parish, year after year, and I say the whole exercise baldly ignores how our liturgical practices determinedly cast us as the Jews. Year after year we sing,

Who was the guilty? Who was it denied thee? Alas my treason, Jesus, hath undone thee. Twas I, Lord Jesus, I it was denied thee; I crucified thee.

And must I point out that the really "problematic" passage isn't in this gospel? It's in Matthew: "His blood be on us and on our children!" And yet one can readily explain the irony of the passage, in that Jesus' blood is upon them and us and every person who has lived or will ever live. Have we so little faith in our preaching? It's the same issue that shows up with EoW's bad institution narrative: we can't say the wods of scripture, so we rewite it to make it more palatable to us. For of course, this would/will not move the world one iota away from antisemitism. No does any Jew I know actually care, as long as we personally do not burn their homes and drive them away.

So once again, the effect is to exclude those who aren't signed on to this version of an ineffectual gesture at a problem over which we don't have much influence. Only this is far worse than passing resolutions about politics, because this hits people in the place where they do care about their church. Look, we don't cae about actual inclusion; all we care about is mouthing the right words about inclusion so our secular peers don't take offense. I can go down the road to Our Savior Hillandale (Maryland) and step into a parish which is actually inclusive, being a motley agglomeration of African and othe immigrants who do a very formal, serious, by-the-book liturgy. My only problem with inclusion there is that they want me to stay for their lavish, delicious potluck lunch, which I tend not to have time for.

Meanwhile, we have a resolution which makes the whole revision process even more vague. Yes, I agree: we do need to do a revision. But not this way. The very avoidance of revision suggests quite stongly that most people don't want it, and I personally don't want it not so much because I think the present book is ideal, but because, as I've said for decades now, the main force fo change is obtaining the approval of a secular subcultue which actually doesn't care.

Why General Convention is So Wearying If You Pay Attention

It shouldn't be hard to come up with an answer to the question of "what is the #1 issue facing The Episcopal Church?" It's the numbers. I haven't dealt with the stats since COVID upended them, but if we're doing better than the average 3% decline per year of the past, I would be quite surprised. In almost every diocese the decline and closure of parishes is ongoing and is (or ought to be) a major concern; in the more rural dioceses it's more like an existential threat.

Therefore you should not be surprised to learn that very little of business slated for the upcoming General Convention addresses this issue. Indeed, as you can also guess, most of it has to do with the pet issues of the American progressive upper middle class. I am not going to go over every proposed resolution as Scott Gunn is doing, if only because I do not have the time nor the stomach to read through fourteen resolutions on the Palestine/Israel conflict. I'm going to have to deal with things in broader terms.

Those Middle Eastern political positions are a good place to start, though, for all of the usual reasons. First, hopefully nobody who wasn't at GC will care how they play out. It's hard to imagine anyone outside the church will care except for right wing loudmouths who want to tar us as hopeless leftists. Nobody, anywhere, is going to say, "well, now that TEC has spoken, I must reconsider my views." We have no moral authority left. And I do not think we can get it back by taking sides in what is a very old, fraught, and complex struggle, especially considering that, if we aren't as immediately culpable as a body as we are with American slavery, we are historically hardly free from the taint of antisemitism.

But beyond that, I don't agreewith the answers given in these resolutions. It would be for the good of everyone if Netanahu were out of power as quickly as legally possible, but it seems to me that a realistic resolution has to accept that Israelis face an existential threat. I am quite repulsed by various progressive voices playing down the savagery of the attack that set the whole thing off. And so, OK, maybe they will be rejected on that basis; but the large and constantly presenting issue here is that the content of these resolutions comes from outside the church. We put a little TEC color on the language, but the fact is that these are the views of one subculture, and they are being put in the church's mouth.

This comes up all over the place. Just the fact of which committees exist is telling. For example, we have a Environmental stewardship and care of creation, which is OK except that there are four resolutions toward carbon neutrality. On one level I have no issue with that, and as I've said many times, if we're taking this seriously we have to go beyond that and re-bind the carbon that's already up there. The issue again is that we have no authority other than to place demands upon ourselves; not only that, but it's hard to imagine that a church convention brings sufficient technical expertise to the issue to be credible. And looking over our shoulders at all those rural parishes that have to worry more about having a roof at all than caring whether it gets solar panels placed on it, again, this is the project of a certain upper class group, particularly those who can set aside the issue that making all those solar panels is sure to involve a great deal of environmentally destructive mining in third world countries whose people have no power to complain.

We also have committees on Social justice and United States policy, Stewardship and socially responsible investing, Safety, wellness and mental health, Accessibility and inclusion.... And this is not to say that none of these should be concerns brought before the convention, but that the very names of the committees bespeak a certain mindset. And indeed, looking inside, we find, besides the usual self-affirming "commend" resolutions that neither I nor Gunn has much use for, we find for instance a resolution to urge those in prison ministries to urge their fellows from other churches to hold the same views on various sexuality etc. topics if they are to work together. Personally I suspect this is completely divorced from the realities of such ministries, not the least of which is that those fellows are likely to be Roman Catholics or Baptists whose church policies are less enlightened than ours. And I cannot imagine any chaplain worth his or her salt paying the least attention to this directive. But it makes people of a certain subculture feel good to have urged it.

Meanwhile, there are two resolutions on mission, and here the problem isn't so much the lack of resolution, as it were, as it is that church planting isn't so much a matter of Directives From 815 as it is a diocesan response to a myriad of local conditions. The big issue I see from my examination of the statistics some years back was that the character/quality of the rector was nearly all-important. The ideal priest is a serious celebrant, a gifted preacher, and a caring pastor; but since Rev. Mary Poppinses are uncommon, just getting one of these characteristics goes a long ways towards making a vital parish; and conversely, a priest is aggressively off-putting in one of these areas can hut a parish very badly. And this isn't something that is addressed well through resolutions; it has to be part of church and especially clerical culture.

This brushes up agqinst another issue which I want to hold off on until I deal with things liturgical, but for now, consider all this positioning from the perspective of someone outside that certain upper middle class progressive viewpoint. Some of us who are outside this worldview are just stubborn and dismiss all this, and bully for us. But the church's adoption of this outside worldview, which is out-of-step with so very much of the population, is intrinsically exclusive. We focus too much on obvious differences like race and sexuality and ignore the far stronger (in this age) divisions of wealth and especially of class and politics. And when we enthrone the values and opinions of one class/subculture, it is alienating to outsiders. And it comes to look like a control issue, which makes the exlusion more real.