From the Curate's Desk: "On Many and More Controversies"

Robert Hendrickson addresses the "justice" connection between communing the unbaptized and various other issues presented to the church in my lifetime. And I think he is right in saying that this is not really a justice issue; it is not unjust to say that some people are in the church, and some are not. That said, there is a definite progression to the thinking about the issues in question. Let's start with racism. Here the justice issue was as far to the fore as possible: it quickly became impossible to say that a black man was, simply by virtue of race, incapable of acting in every way as a white man could, and particularly so within the church. But they knew that already, Absalom Jones having been ordained over a century earlier. And note that there was never any question of blacks or any other race being outside the church; it was a question of office, not membership. Then we moved on to women. And here we started to hit the first real resistance, because it could not be said that in every way women and men could be substituted for each other. However the position that prevailed (and which I accept) was that in the matter of the ordained ministry, they could so serve for each other. And again, women were always a part of the church; office, and therefore power, were at the center of the dispute.

Next, we turned to homosexuality, and the character of the discussion was transformed again: for now, it was not only the office of presbyter which was at stake, but the church's approval for the sexual relations between homosexuals. The church could not, after all, seriously disapprove of blacks being black, or women being women; and it could not disapprove of women doing what women by nature do (e.g., getting pregnant and producing babies). But with sexuality there was always the tension between what people are (or at least see themselves to be), and how people act it out. If the bishop of Massachusetts, who is a monastic and thus celibate, identified himself as homosexual, well, it was difficult to object to him failing to act it out. And here scripture also began to interfere in a more complex way. If it was possible to turn against Paul's injunction against women speaking in church by invoking his own words, it was also easy to turn against the passage in Leviticus and Paul's words against male homosexuality. The words of Genesis, however, require a lot more exegesis to get past. And increasingly, people were uninterested in exegesis. But beyond that, there was a spirit of theological adventurism dating at least back into the 1950s, but which was greatly amplified in the late 1960s. The theological discussion of homosexuality was swept together with a parallel line of theological deviancy arising out of the academy, so that one gained points automatically by casting an orthodox position in a political light. This is how "inclusion" got to be such a problem word. As various people have noted, it started out as a code word for a parish in which homosexuals were socially accepted. But inclusion inevitably got coupled to access to power, and access to power inevitably led to using power against the uninclusive enemy. Inclusion meant exclusion, because the troglodytes had to be excluded from power in order that inclusion of homosexuals might prevail. At this juncture, inclusion in the larger sense and justice couldn't really live together.

Where it really fell apart, though was in that adventurism. There was a notorious incident, some years back, in which the Office of Women's Ministry was caught hosting a pagan ritual on its website; and furthermore, it was discovered that the authors of the rite were in fact Episcopal priests by day, and pagan ministers by moonlight, as it were. Some time later, the same office promulgated, "for study", a Eucharistic rite which among its various oddities incorporated the catchphrases of neopagan ceremony. Meanwhile, we had Jack Spong, who, far from defending the faith, used his bishopric in the end to attack it. All of this stuff was at the urging of, to be blunt about it, the church's enemies. So while we got (in the Righter trial) the notion that we do have a core theology, in practice, it does not as yet contain anything. Which is to say, there's no significant penalty to contradicting it, if one takes the prayer book as a guide to its contents. Therefore communing the unbaptized is conscionable because it's a discipline problem, and in lots of dioceses, there's no discipline. We were incredibly lucky that the dual Muslim/Episcopal priest was canonically resident in Rhode Island, or the contradiction might never have been resolved. The theology of salvation has dissipated into a universalism under which we might as well commune everyone, because everyone will be brought to Christ in the end; and never mind that everything we have written down, from the BCP to the last chapters of the Revelation, is vehement in its contradiction to this notion. Justice brought us to inclusion, but inclusion brought us to the lack of nerve to turn those we really have no use for Christianity, and therefore cannot truly be included anyway.

Somewhere along the line, we have to grit out teeth and start doing some real theology; and I'm afraid that means not only committing the church (that is, our organization) to particular positions, but also relieving clergy who refuse to sign up for it of their positions. And especially bishops.

Bathing and Sainthood

Derek Olsen has a new post (primarily in reference to his Living Church article) which makes a connection I missed. There has been a great deal of complaint about Holy Women, Holy Men the replacement for Lesser Feasts and Fasts and particularly over the observance of days for non-Christians. Or as AKMA says in the comments, "here you have identified the simplest problem with the book: despite its title, it shows little attention to whether the figures commemorated therein are, in fact, particularly holy."

I also have to agree with with John-Julian's remarks: the parishes that would be most interested in celebrating the whole round of proposed feasts are also those which would have the most problem with the proposed observations. But I think it has a very good chance of being passed, because the theological problems don't have traction in a church where giving communion to the unbaptized is being seriously considered. Increasingly it seems that the church is directed by men and women for whom the religious functions of the church are unimportant; what matters is the church as a platform for carrying out a social program.

Of course, this will eventually destroy us. People don't need to go to church to feel good about their environmentalism (John Muir) or their patronage of the arts (Bach, Durer) or their resistance to racism or sexism or anti-homosexuality (here I stopped keeping track); even the heathen do as much. Maybe it's too bloody obvious to be said, but the only way we are going to continue to have an Episcopal Church is to convey to potential members a reason to become Episcopalians! Instead, the additions to the calendar and communing the unbaptized send the message that there's no need to join the church; we give up having any sort of sacramental or communal reason for being. Eventually people catch on, and they don't join us.

I would tend to agree with Tobias Haller that communing the unbaptized will fail to be approved. But I would be willing to be that the number of episcopal and clerical votes for it will be greater than zero, perhaps greater than ten. Maybe as much as a quarter will vote for it. And even if it go down to defeat, I would assume that the practice will continue; discipline, after all, is only to keep the traditionalists in line when the object to innovations, but innovators are empowered to break the rules. In 2015, it will come up again. And unless things change, the number of people who take their religion (as opposed to their politics) seriously will decline. Who knows? By 2018 they might succeed in passing it. But at 3% loss a year, by 2018 the church will have lost another 20% of its membership.

815 Bleak House

Via Episcopal Café we have this highly cogent analysis of the proposed budget by the Rev. Susan B. Snook of Nativity, Phoenix. Public reaction to the proposed budget has often been negative due to the elimination of any funds for churchwide christian formation. Snook makes a run at an overall budget that is less plainly suicidal, and while I have not looked over her proposal at any length, at least she hasn't come up with something that is as automatically dismissible.

Far more to the fore, however, is how she associates 815's approach to this with the legendary probate case of "Jarndyce vs. Jarndyce" of Bleak House infamy. Snook points out how the case ends: not with resolution, but with an inability to continue because the estate in question has been exhausted in litigation costs. But that's quite consistent with the relentless prosecution of cases against schismatic parishes over the properties, is it not? The liberal clerisy's obsession with its right to the inheritance of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the Unites States of America (to give the full, now never-used name of the body) really is right out of the book. And spending the inheritance away, they have: banking on our now-vanished prestige and authority, looking at properties and endowments as "fiduciary responsibilities", expecting theological loyalty when they have betrayed their responsibility to their own tradition.

And it's destroying the institution. The hardcore conservatives are largely gone, having been deliberately unhorsed when they couldn't be pried off the reins. Other people are trickling away, and there is now a large clump in the middle, whose unity transcends political alignment, dismayed at the continuing push for heterodox positions. But the administration doesn't seem to be concerned about that; indeed, the presiding bishop herself seems to incapable of maintaining at least a front of orthodox belief, if her Easter message is any indication. No, it all seems to be about keeping their hands on the power and the money, while both dribble away with the losses in membership and attendance. Eventually the legacies will be gone, the buildings all sold to developers and other churches or religions, unless they repent. Our institutions can grow, and our inheritance maintained and increased; but only if we return to the religion we also inherited, and work towards that faith's transmission to the next generation.

Oolon, Call Your Office

Bryan Owen has put himself through the torment of reading the drivel coming out of another Jesus Seminar event. I personally can't bring myself to do it any more; the smugness and the intellectual bankruptcy of it all got to me years ago. But then Douglas Adams did the heavy lifting in the ridicule department years ago:

Now [the babelfish] is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mindbogglingly useful could evolve purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as a final and clinching proof of the non-existence of God. The argument goes something like this:

"I refuse to prove that I exist," says God, "for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing".
"But," says man, "the Babel fish is a dead giveaway, isn't it? It proves you exist and so therefore you don't. QED."
"Oh dear," says God, "I hadn't thought of that," and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.
"Oh, that was easy," says man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white, and gets killed on the next zebra crossing.

Most leading theologians claim that this argument is a load of dingo's kidneys. But this did not stop Oolon Colluphid making a small fortune when he used it as the central theme for his best selling book, Well That About Wraps It Up for God.

Robert Munday's characterization of it as "an intellectual Ponzi scheme" is more or less on the mark as well. In that regard it's a testament to the gullibility of journalists who write about it as if it were something novel and challenging, when in fact it has been grinding along for over twenty-five years. I suppose there could be some point to this sort of critical study, but the conspicuous biases of this group and the manner in which it has sold the souls of its members to publicity make it mostly useful as an object example of what not to do. If this is the alternative to traditional faith, then it makes traditional faith easy to swallow.

Days of Anamnesis

It struck me first during the Old Testament reading. So many years before I had heard those words spoken, the account of the first Passover, and then during the epistle, and finally during the gospel, which I recall James Salango declaiming in his operatic preaching, forty years ago or more in my Presbyterian days: "and say ye well, for so I am!"

Of all the days in the church year, the days of the Triduum are the most concerned with the remembrance, not only of who we are, but of where we began. So we hear the same readings, year after year, or at least we did until the RCL got into the act and we are now doing a different psalm on Maundy Thursday and a different passion section on Friday. But the hymns are largely fixed too, though again 1982 has mucked with the harmony of "Ah, Holy Jesus" and we have a new hymn, set to the Third Mode Melody, whose words I am not too keen on. But "Pange Lingua" is still given 1940's accompaniment, and as ever we sing C. W. D.'s beautiful setting of "Were You There". And the lessons: after years of repetition (and helping to sing the passion on six occasions) I have nearly memorized them. The story of the Passover, the communion narrative, the footwashing and new commandment: I repeat the words in my mind, more or less. Having been raised on the RSV I still haven't gotten used to the NRSV text. But it is close enough.

And it will soon be sundown, and there will be fire. "Rejoice now; this is the night." I can sing the first section of the Exultet from memory. Then will come the lessons, not so many, this year, I would imagine, for fear that the service might offend for its length. If I were in an Orthodox church, even the sermon would be the same, and indeed for two years Barbara Seras read for us Chrysostom's incomparable sermon.

This is the season in which recall the reason for the church, which is not inclusion, but incorporation. Christ established his feast, and was killed for us, and rose as the first fruits of those who have fallen asleep, as the apostle says. And we are made part of his body, the church, through the baptism which he commanded us to take to all the world, and to recollect, to remember, to feed that body's members through the new paschal feast of his body and blood. Welcoming people is good, feeding people is good, but there are two great commandments, not one. We are first, to love God, and to love God, we must do as his son commanded. And to do that, we must worship him by and through recollection of our story as those baptized into his death and resurrection. This is why giving communion to the unbaptized is wrong, and even spiritually harmful: it is out of season. The Eucharist is not the sacrament of inclusion; it is the sacrament of the included. Those who partake, but are not baptized, are not really included; they remain outside the body. It is only baptism that incorporates.

And that is why it is important to repeat our story, year after year. We must remember that our savior's story is not just a myth, to symbolize or epitomize a salvation which he did not really enact. Possibly the second lowest point of the past few days was when I found myself reading the BCP rites largely to see where they would be deviated from. If I come to an Episcopal Church, and they do not do the liturgy in the book, then they do not recall for me the church into which I was confirmed, but some other construct of theological adventurism.

So I commend all of those who join with us, throughout the church, in reaffirming their baptismal vows. Let us say it together:

Christ is risen from the dead, trampling death by death, and restoring life to those in the tomb!

Alleluia, Christ is risen! The Lord is risen indeed! Alleluia!

Amnesiac Church

Robert Hendrickson's thoughts on General Seminary's changes as the epitome of the loss of church identity struck a chord with me, as they did with many other people. Some years back I wrote of how my first parish was lost to me, but as with Fr. Hendrickson there is an earlier, a scholastic loss. Many, many people have seen the chapel in which I was made an Anglican, for it figured as a prominent set in a well-known movie. It looked then much as it did in my day, although far more brightly lit. Built in the extremely stylized Gothic of the midcentury, it lies buried at the heart of the main school building, dark and perhaps oppressively silent when not in use. Like many Anglican churches of the era it abounds in symbolism, most especially the wooden altarpiece which closes in stages, to be entirely shuttered on Good Friday.

In my day, it was arranged as a classic tripartite church, and between that and my old parish (before its remodelling), I came to understand how the 1979 BCP was tuned to such a space. And because I was interested in art I understood how that form echoed western church forms back into the dark ages. Oh, there were signs even back then of a certain weakness, but by and large Sunday services were conducted with high-and-wide panoply.

But it is all changed. I was a high school student in the mid-1970s, when there was still a certain hesitancy about that money stuff; the only significant building while I was there was the girls dorm, completed just before my arrival. Shortly after I left the 8th and 9th grade boys dorms were torn out and replaced by individual rooms, of which I heartily approved. Then the capital poured in, and now there is no building left untouched, and several altogether new besides. Ironically, the last I was there the only unchanged space were the upper grade student rooms, which seemed to have changed not since my day but for the light bulbs. And much of this I could appreciate too: the gyms, for instance, were quite problematic in the winter; the old boathouse was kept erect by cables. But the chapel.... It suffered improvement too. Anyone can guess what was done: the altar was pulled far forward, and the choir arranged around and behind it. The altarpiece was left, irrelevant, on the back wall. Architecturally this arrangement is less than satisfactory simply because the space overall, massive and immobile, is relentlessly longitudinal and resists being made to accommodate a centralized plan. But more to the point, it signals a change in the way the liturgy is viewed, and with that, a change to the way we look to God...

... because, in the new plan, we do not look to God at all. We look to ourselves, and turn away from transcendence. Communion itself is the most immanent of all rites, for what could be more immanent than holding Jesus' flesh in one's hand, and drinking his blood from the common cup? Jesus looks down upon the performance, over the shoulders of the sopranos, hoc est corpus, hocus-pocus, see how the miracle is performed once again, pay no attention to that Son of God over there, reigning from the cross.

But it isn't just there, and it isn't just the trendy vandalism of sacred space. I was confirmed along with the new prayer book, and my personal volume says "Proposed" in big letters on the title page, because it's a 1976 BCP. I've never in my entire life experienced a 1928 service, and I wasn't exposed to Rite I until I was over 25. Rite II was the service I grew up with in the church. And for years, I would go elsewhere, and Rite II it usually was, except for the occasional Rite I (and missal services a couple of times at Ascension & St. Agnes). And, for all the "mays" and "shoulds" in the prayer book, there was a way that nearly everyone did it. But now, I step into an Episcopal service with the full expectation that liberties will be taken. Commonly if there is a leaflet it will avoid referring to God as "he", which I ignore and say the right words (and if any man quibble with that, the words in the BCP are by definition the Right Words). But now I brace myself for other changes, so that this element or that may be omitted. Leaving out the confession is commonplace now and hardly to be remarked upon, but I've been at Sunday services where the creed or even the Lord's Prayer were not said. And there may be strange readings from non-Christian religious writings, or strange prayers of unsound theology and regrettable English. I have yet to hear the anaphora messed with, but that must be a matter of time and judicious screening of the parish website on my part. Furthermore, stories reach my ear of parishes in which, contrary to canons, homosexual marriage rites are performed sub rosa; communion is offered to pagans and the irreligious so often now, again in violation not only of mere canon but of the plain teaching of St. Paul, that if and when General Convention votes down Eastern Oregon's heretical proposal, one has to doubt that they can take the next step and apply any discipline at all to those who continue to flout the canons. But after all, even being an unbeliever isn't cause for defrocking; only finally losing patience and looking elsewhere for an orthodox bishop is cause for revocation of orders.

Traditionalists once liked to condemn the 1979 book as a diluted, pale version of the 1928. I never found this that convincing, and on some points the 1979 takes a more catholic and dogmatic line (such as in the inclusion of a catechism). But all that is far, far behind us, because however weakened it may be, the rites of 1979 have proven to be far too regressive to see continued use. It is stupid that I should have to be nostalgic for the 1985 and the new hymnal (which has its own egregious emasculations of many texts), but there it is: these days I feel I have to check ahead of time to make sure that I'll get a prayer book service with music from the hymnal.

And then there's the preaching, and the theology of Inclusion, which really means accepting all the sexual quirks of the upper middle class and saying all manner of self-serving pablum about overcoming racism and classism and sexism and a whole lot of other -isms. There are altogether too many Episcopal sermons and incidental writings that might as well start out with the following: "God (remember, you can't say 'Lord' anymore: imperialism, don't you know), I thank you that we are not like other people: traditionalists, patriots, corporate executives, or like this Republican over here." Liberal politics has become a parasite on the church, driving actual religion from the body. The only hard doctrine that matters is fealty to 815 (and to nowhere else: heaven help you if you suggest that Canterbury is owed some more final allegiance, much less the greater tradition of the church.

We can't go on like this, and if we keep trying to have a church that stands for nothing in its theological past, we will end up with no church at all. We pick saints who are not Christian, say prayers which omit the most basic claims taught from the beginning, and join the Body in communion to those who are more likely to follow Bacchus or even Moloch than Jesus. Our "leaders" hate our buildings, our words, our music, and even a lot of their own members. And there's no hope that the more orthodox liberals will act to rein this in, because they sold themselves to the high church Unitarians because they thought the latter would be needed as allies against the troglodytes, as though the Unitarian crowd would ever have done anything else. The worst of it all is that the old liberal notion of the church as a force for social good is completely bankrupt. Nobody takes our moral voice seriously, and nobody should. We are too obviously in hock to the mores of our class.

Is there hope? Well, perhaps, but only if priests who cannot get through the creed without crossing their fingers are defrocked, and bishops who cannot do so are deposed. The prayer book should be left alone for another thirty years, and priests who cannot resist tampering with it should be kept out of parish ministry. Preaching social justice needs to give some ground to preaching basic doctrine and personal virtue. We need to recover the old Anglican virtues of common sense, simple orthodoxy, and sensible solemnity (meaning, we do still need to remember how to laugh at ourselves). If we cannot do these, we will continue to fade away, and we will deserve to do so.

The Great (but late) Commission

When a blog post collects two hundred comments in the matter of a couple of days, it's hard to keep up, and I miss things. And mostly that's OK, because with that kind of outpouring there's bound to be a lot of repetitious exchanges which are largely skippable. Thus I missed this off-hand assertion when it went flying by in the big CWoB thread in the Episcopal Cafe:

I will note that 'The Great Commission' a poorly attested addition and arguably late addition to Matthew's Gospel[.]

I'm not a textual scholar, so I'm not equipped to refute this the hard/scholarly way. Fortunately, however, one of the nice things about having an internet is that there are always plenty of them lying around, ready for citation. And in this case, Derek Olsen, who is such a scholar, saw this passage first. And he doesn't think much of this assertion:

On the strength of the actual evidence, then, we’ve got to conclude that, contra the starting claim, the Great Commission in its familiar form is very well attested textually and there is only one hint read through a particular philosophical construct to the contrary.

Well, I'm not surprised to hear that. There are a very few big disputed passages, such as the Comma Johanneum, the Pericope of the Adultress, and the endings of Mark, and there are a host of shorter passages of some variation, including the doxology of the Lord's Prayer. One hears about the major ones right off if one looks at the subject at all, and in any case if one uses a modern bible the footnotes are going to tell you about the problems. In my RSV Common Bible, the last page of Matthew is utterly bare of textual notes, and the last such note in my NEB New Testament is back at the beginning of chapter 27.

But the whole form of the argument should tell you all you need to know anyway. "It's a late addition" is Protestant/Enlightenment- speak for "this passage is a problem, so I'm going to dismiss it by implying that there is an earlier, more authentic version that leaves it out." It's the Thomas Jefferson approach to theological argument, and the average layman is well-advised to dismiss such arguments out of hand.

I note Derek's comment towards the end about the pattern of trying to cast Trinitarian doctrine as late and therefore an innovation. Unitarianism has been an occupational hazard of Anglican clerics for a quarter millennium, but really in the interest of institutional knowledge, priests and deacons who are going to set aside the creed need to turn in their orders and go find some other job. Restorationism is the road to theological solipsism, and combining it with modern rationalism is the highway to the altar of the Spirit of the Age.

That Not Meddlesome Enough Archbishop

Reading and analyzing the same sex blessings proto-rite took away the time I would have needed to write the apparently obligatory postmortem of Rowan Williams's tenure as Archbishop of Canterbury. But really, on the level that most people felt moved to write those things, I didn't want to do so. Much of what was written was predictably partisan: the StandFirmites all attacked him for not stopping the advance of liberalism, the anti-Covenant crowd attacked him for being its chief advocate, and a small crowd of radicals attacked him for not pushing the homosexualist agenda. A bunch of moderates of various persuasions said laudatory things.

I find it very hard to participate in any of this, with one exception. Much of the commentary is based upon the juxtaposition of Williams's publicly expressed viewpoint on homosexuality, before his enthronement, and his failure to advance those positions once he became archbishop. This was widely attacked as either a lack of conviction, or a deceit; but I continue to hold it to be a noble expression of the largely forsaken principle that the president of a body is first responsible to it, and not to his own party within it.

As to how he managed that responsibility: I do not feel I am competent to express much of an opinion on this, and I think most of those who are expressing such opinions are as unqualified as I am to offer them. But the possibility of anyone succeeding as Cantuar, on any terms other than the most progressive radicalist, seems to me to be extremely small. Consider the last Lambeth conference, which was pretty much of a wash (and therefore, given the need for action, a failure). The disinvite of Robinson was, I think, entirely justified, but the program of talking everything to death in small groups was surely doomed to produce nothing of merit. At the same time, the global south conservatives, on the advice of their American advisors, sabotaged the conference anyway, thus granting a moral victory to the very people they oppose the most.

People keep saying that the communion needs a "strong leader". The American progressives are adamant that Cantuar is going to lead nothing, as far as they are concerned, and GAFCON is a institutionalization of the same position from the other side. At this point, the communion cannot be led, and I'm rather doubtful that the Church of England can be led either. The only people who can win through "leadership" within the current structures, it seems to me, are the radical latitudinarians who can use the still lingering Anglican urge towards adiaphora and canonical mechanisms of the churches to drive off the traditionalists and conservative evangelicals and thus win the denominations over to their views by default. In other words, we can have the kind of destructive leadership epitomized by our presiding bishop and her compatriots at 815, or we can have ineffectuality. People are starting to say that nobody wants to be Archbishop of Canterbury. Well, I suspect that there are various radicals who would love the position, but I think most anyone else would be mad (or at least relentlessly driven by a sense of obligation) to take it. A strong conservative would face open rebellion.

Meanwhile, the institutions are becoming increasingly problematic. Matt Kennedy and I don't tend to agree on a lot, but his analysis of how the revisionists work does pick up one note: among the progressives there is a strong sense of church institutions as tools to be used to advance their positions. His conservative faction cannot do the same because the machinery won't push in that direction: the crucial people in the middle are not going to turn into theological authoritarians. At the same time simple disobedience is becoming a pervasive feature of church "administration", so that the most depressing aspect of the Communion Without Baptism push is the very large number of parishes that flagrantly disobey the existing canons. Same-sex blessings/marriages are widely permitted by bishops who also wink at many other big canonical violations. Many of these same bishops expect obedience from their conservatives which they do not demand from their liberals. Increasingly what passes for leadership is conservative rebellion and schism, or progressivist litigation. This church cannot be led in any positive sense, at least until the bishops start acting in some sort of concert and take their vows seriously as defenders of what they have received.

I have no idea whether things have progressed so badly in England. If one takes Jeffrey Johns as an exemplar there are surely those who wish it so.

Blessing for Study Only: The Conclusion

Let me start this summary post by saying that I have doubts that this rite will be approved as such. Its existence is something of an act of appeasement, but the only ones who are likely to satisfied by such a rite are "moderates" who are uncomfortable with homosexual marriages but who acknowledge that the church needs to do something towards homosexual families (for in the end, isn't that where is is all headed?). Those moderates are going to have trouble as more and more state governments find themselves conducting homosexual weddings; the pressure of social justice will trump theology, and the homosexual activists will put them on the spot and make their position politically untenable. The heteronormative side (and for all it's a faux-clinical sociologism, it's an accurate enough nutshell description that I'm going stick with it here) isn't going to find these blessings even slightly acceptable, and of course the homosexual activists want marriage, period, except for a small contingent who want to argue that there is something special about same-sex relationships that frees them from the commitments of marriage. This last group, I think, cannot prevail either; the argument about homosexuality that can win has to argue for exact equivalence.

And that's where we start running into trouble in this rite. There has been a running theme in these posts that this liturgy is trying to both be and not be a marriage. I see four different inputs, in fact:

• The baptismal rite, which has contributed mostly structure


• Enriching Our Worship, which is the source of a lot of dubiously orthodox variation in the common elements of the rite


• The marriage rite, which contributes the core elements and language


• Novel lessons and rewrites which attempt to make this not the marriage rite

I personally don't see the reason for taking on the baptismal rite structure, but though it is a very prominent change it has the least impact to the significance of the rite. The EoW revisionism is utterly unacceptable to me, but it's potentially an independent issue: the rite could be made to use orthodox language (though I suspect that the anti-dominical crowd is entirely subsumed within the supporters of same-unions/marriages, and that the two issues are locked together through common participation in a modernist theological worldview; but they could be addressed as separate issues.) It is the mixture of novel and marital material that presents the central issue.

The rite is obviously trying very hard to NOT be a marriage rite, and anything that can be explicitly linked to marriage is conspicuous in its exclusion. Conversely, for all the appeal to baptism, and for all that the rite is reordered like baptism, marriage is plainly the starting point. As I said at the beginning, nearly every element of the marriage rite appears. OK, so what is this rite actually doing? Well, that's a very good question. Our theology admits that marriages have a reality outside of what we do in church, as reflected in the considerable difference between the celebration of a marriage (which is to say, a wedding as something done in church) and the blessing of an existing civil marriage. I have to presume that, on some level, this same-sex blessing rite reflects the same connection to a civil unions, which is why there's that rubric allowing the bishop to change the wording of the pronouncement so as to reflect the laws of the state. So what's going with those unions? Well, from a legal POV they are supposed to force everyone to recognize the couple as a family; and I would assume that they are intended to have the social/moral effect of authorizing sexual relations (and by extension, prohibiting other relations).

Or to put it more baldly, they are weddings-in-everything-but-the-name. So here's Sarah Breuer's explanation of the blessing she had after she was married in Canada:

That was the clearest way we could think of to satisfy our bishop's direction that it be very clear that the service in our parish was NOT the performance of a marriage or blessing of a marriage contract.

But it's quite difficult, if same-sex couples may be blessed at all, to figure out what, if anything, ought to be radically different in the liturgy. One priest friend objected that the vows we used were too close to those of marriage. When I asked her what we should promise to do differently -- eliminate a commitment to fidelity? say we can call the whole thing off if the "richer/poorer" or "sickness/health" thing makes it difficult? -- she couldn't think of what to change.

Breuer took a different liturgical starting point, but in the end that question of what to promise differently hangs over the the matter, and in the end, the answer given seems to be, "we will always say 'covenant' instead of vows, and never say 'marry', 'husband', or 'wife'." And ontologically, well, she had a same-sex marriage: the government in Canada said so, and I don't think that blessing it as if it were something else changes that; nor do I think that she had any intention of reinterpreting her state of connubiality to fit what her bishop would or would not allow.

And that's where I expect this to be headed: I think this is going to be set aside in favor of approving same-sex marriages, and that therefore this material is going to be used to "update" the marital rite instead.

And right away, in the readings, a problem appears: most of the OT lessons are fighting against this. Three of the readings specifically establish the ancient understanding based on the complimentarity of the sexes. Well, if same-sex marriage is the same thing, then those readings don't really tell us anything about marriage, it appears. So what does? Well, that is a very good question. Back in the discussion of the readings I noted that the readings abandoned any material about marriage per se in favor of readings about the Christian life in general or (in the case of the OT readings) a couple of passages extremely problematic even in the context of homosexual relationships. Those latter surely do not inform heterosexual marriages, and if we have to exclude the most traditional passages as opposing homosexuality, then we have virtually nothing left except for one passage from the Song of Songs, which may be Solomon's, but which is devoted to romance, not the life of the household.

And that's the core of the theological difficulty. Back at the beginning, I referred to one position as the "heteronormative side", which is to say, those who hold to the ancient pattern of marriages between men and women as a norm, a moral rule. But beside the norm stands the normal. That, more than anything else is what drives everything about this issue: "treat us like normal people" is the homosexual cry. Well, OK: on some levels I don't think this is even vaguely arguable. The notion that two people need to have some sort of ceremony to put legal force behind the permission of one to visit the other in the hospital and otherwise see to their care is absurd on its face. But this has nothing to do with sex, and it has a great deal to do with the way hospitals are run. Invoking normality here is going to lead directly to the statistical normality of marriage as the union of a man and a woman into a household, a family, out of which children proceed. The fact that in general such marriages do not begin with children, and that they are expected to continue after said children are grown, or that the marriage may be infertile either through physical defect or age of the couple or contrivance: all of these are nonetheless edge conditions, through the edges be rather broad as these go. If homosexual marriages are "just like" the ordinary kind, they nonetheless fall into the edges as well, being infertile and uncommon. This doesn't imply that there is "really" something wrong with them, but rather that they don't have a claim to dictating the nature of the ordinary, male-and-female, child-bearing variety.

That's one of the two big risks here (the other being that the anti-dominionist heresies will gain entrance to the marriage rite). If you read what Wikipedia has to say about marriage, you will find that they (at the moment, at least) define it as "a social union or legal contract between people that creates kinship." Well, no, not really: that would be adoption. Why is the definition so, well, wimpy? Because (as you can see from the thirteen pages of archived discussion) in an attempt to cover everything they've basically taken out any character, because there is always some edge case somewhere which contradicts any definite character the state of matrimony is commonly said to have. The temptation is going to be to cut down what we now say about normal marriage so as to fit homosexuality into the same pattern. Marriage may thus be pried free of scripture because too much of what scripture says states that the normal pattern is a man and a woman. Trying to find marriage simply in agape leads to its dilution into all interpersonal relationships. Where does one find the requirements for chastity, fidelity, and permanence, for instance? The challenge of theological justification for homosexual marriage is to find it in theology which does not disrupt the teaching we already have about marriage between men and women. This rite, and its justification, doesn't provide a road map for that.

No to Communion Without Baptism

My parents did not do bumper stickers. Ever. Except for one case: Around 1970, Marriott wanted to build a theme park a few miles from our house, a prospect which was widely loathed among our neighbors. Therefore they affixed a bumper sticker to the our station wagon reading "No to Marriott Proposal".

And I must similarly and relentlessly object to a proposal from Eastern Oregon to eliminate baptism as a requirement for communion. Atlanta, you may recall, tested the waters with a local proposal for "a year for theological and catechetical reflection, dialogue, discussion, conversation and listening among parishes of this diocese on 'Communion of the Unbaptized'", which was defeated there. Now it's going straight to GC, and intends to change of the C&C right away.

I've been over the intellectual climate of this before. As to the theology, it's hard to top Tobias Haller's succinct rejoinder:

The church is radically inclusive and baptism is the means by which people are included. Communion is the celebration of that inclusion, not its means.

It is supremely ironic that a church that spends so much energy (rightly) celebrating the baptismal covenant could then turn its back on its significance in what seems a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of these two sacraments, and their interrelationship.

To this I can only add that abandoning baptism as the standard of membership represents a failure of our religious nerve so profound as to tip the balance against our institutional continuance. What's the point of a church that by implication admits that being a part of it is of no real consequence?

Communion Without Baptism is anathema; this is not negotiable.

Blessing for Study Only IV

Now we are headed into the core of the same sex blessing rite. I pick up where I left off, at the beginning of the prayers for the couple about to be united. This is another place where the structure of baptism is most plainly imposed on this service, as prayers said by the minister after the wedding have been changed into a litany said by all before the exchange of vows. In 1928 there are three prayers before the proclamation: a prayer for keeping the covenant, a prayer for children, and a prayer for the married life; these, preceded by the Lord's Prayer, fall between the proclamation and the blessing. In 1979 the covenant prayer has been recast as the collect (an element missing from older rites) and the prayer for the married life now appears as one of the alternatives for the blessing prayer. The Lord's Prayer still begins the prayers, but they are divided into two sections, the second being put with the blessing. The first section is a much longer series of short petitions, with the prayer for children appearing in the midst of these. As I said in the first part, the style of this section is more like that of older books, with responses limited to "Amen". In the SSB rite, however, this entire chunk is moved to precede the vows. And it is now cast as a litany, albeit of an odd form that attempts to fuse Form IV and Form VI of the Prayers of the People, a conjunction that is not to my mind felicitous. Form IV uses a "grant/that" form with silence and a refrain; Form VI uses a V&R structure. The fusion is therefore rather abrupt and choppy, because the "that" portion of the petition is missing. Also, yet again we have another novel alternative: instead of praying to God in his mercy, we may now prayer to Him in his goodness. What exactly is wrong with the usual response?

The marriage prayers are arranged as an introduction, a collect, and sevenfold petitions in the middle, asking for wisdom, a common will, a spirit of forgiveness, a sign to the world, children, concern for others, and strengthening of the bond of all those now married who witness the marriage. The SSB petitions roughly parallel these, but there is also an option to add to this a very short version of the Prayers of the People, with each of the required elements of the latter addressed. This is yet another thing that has no precedent: the PotP is one of the two elements that are inevitably lost for any kind of special liturgy (the other being the confession, but surely you didn't expect to see that). I have twice been at weddings which took place during one of the Sunday morning service, a practice which is explicitly authorized for this rite; and if so, the Sunday readings preempt those given here, which is not rubricated for marriage.

The collect provided is a bit peculiar. For one thing, it isn't addressed to the deity in any particular way. Every one of the collects in the BCP is addressed explicitly either to God, or the Father, or the Lord or Jesus Christ. Here the minister prays to the "[g]iver of every gift, source of all goodness," whom I presume is supposed to be God; but if we were following the normal pattern this would be worded "O God, the giver of every gift and source of all goodness". Later it refers to "the saving work of Jesus," omitting the nearly invariable title of "Christ"; and the form of the conclusion is rather odd. It's of a form usually reserved for prayers which address the Father, and this section ordinarily would invoke the Spirit; but it mentions the reign of Jesus alone, and there is mention neither of the Father nor of the Spirit. I find it disturbing that the material here is so adverse to normal, Anglican, trinitarian language; is it too much to ask that SCLM follow the traditional forms, with all the creedal endorsement implied?

And now we have the Lord's Prayer, the only part of the whole rite in which there is no deviation from the BCP language. I note in passing that the SSB rite changes the introduction to the standard "now say/bold to say" form used almost everywhere except in the marriage rite. I have no idea why marriage is different, but this change at least makes sense.

Finally, we reach the vows. As I mentioned before, there is no transition into this at all in the marriage rite, which is generally found wanting. Here we have what I can only call overcompensation. 1979's transition sentences are almost always quite short and to the point; here the blunt invitation is padded out by stating that the couple are "illumined by the Word of God and strengthened by the prayer of this community". Well, one hopes so, and generally pre-1979 (and most of that book as well) prefers to express the hope that God has chosen to bless us. But there's a certain presumption in claiming that listening and prayer have achieved such a state, and in any case it's unnecessary to say so.

Be that as it may, the vows are then exchanged. And here we come upon a curiosity: while roughly half of the wording comes form the marriage rite, a great deal of that comes not from the marriage vows, but from the promises, recalling that almost none of the latter appears in the SSB promises. To that end I have formatted the vow text as follows: italics indicate material from the promises, bold from the marriage vows (with bold italics for one passage which parallels a marital passage but is reworded), and plain text for the material which is entirely new.

In the name of God,
I, N., give myself to you, N.,
I will support and care for you by the grace of God:
enduring all things, bearing all things.
I will hold and cherish you in the love of Christ:
in times of plenty, in times of want.
I will honor and keep you with the Spirit's help:
forsaking all others,
as long as we both shall live.
This is my solemn vow.

By way of contrast, I've bolded the passages here of the marriage vows which were not retained (noting that the third excision is replaced by a similar passage from the promises):

In the Name of God,
I, N., take you, N., to be my wife, to
have and to hold from this day forward, for better for worse,
for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to
cherish, until we are parted by death. This is my solemn vow.

It is no surprise that the first clause is not retained; the inversion from "taking" to "giving", however, leads to the central difference, because I am moved to ask, "give how, and for what?" Looking at the content of the vows, other than the words "husband" and "wife", they are not strikingly different; the omissions seem more inclined to reduce the obvious similarity rather than to suggest that sickness or "worse" are cause for abandonment of the union. The additions, the appeals to the "grace of God", the "love of Christ", and the "Spirit's help" (and here again, where is the Father?) don't substantially change what the participants are promising to do, except for that husband and wife thing.

And oddly, the blessing of the ring is almost identical to that of the wedding (substituting "covenant" for "vow"), but the actual giving is utterly different, and there is a provision for blessing rings already being worn, which suggests a custom I am not aware of. (Update: Toni points out that part of this comes from the 1979 blessing of a civil marriage. The first sentence, however, is completely new.) And speaking of difference: the proclamation which follows is accompanied by a rubric which essentially allows the bishop to rewrite it in any way deemed desirable to conform to the law, so presumably this could be used as a marriage rite if that's all that the law of the state allows for. And I don't understand why, but one of the most famous lines of the marriage rite has been dropped: "Those whom God has joined together let no one put asunder." Why? I cannot tell. (Update: Bill Dilworth reminds me that this is a direct quote of Jesus talking about marriage.)

We're in the home stretch, now, because the only element left is the blessing, and it takes the two step form seen in the 1979 BCP of a prayer preceding the blessing proper, though there is no amen between them. I would say the latter is a mistake, as the addressee of the text switches from God to the couple between the sections. But both options in the BCP end with a "lives and reigns" conclusion which is absent here; one gathers that perhaps the authors thought of this all as one prayer, which it really isn't. Now, as far as I can tell there is nothing in the 1979 blessing proper that would prevent it being used in this context. But after "God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit, bless, preserve, and keep you," the text diverges rapidly. One senses the intent to produce something noticeably different, but the intent to produce something good is not as well-manifested. Structurally, the whole thing is rather awkward, lacking parallelism and availing itself of odd turns of expression (e.g. "Jesus the Christ": why?).

And last of all, we have an alternative preface and post-communion prayer. It's a lead-pipe cinch that the marital preface is unusable, jumping straight into the church-as-bride-of-Christ image. So instead we have love between persons as a reflection of the unity of the godhead. Well, sort of: maybe we can make that work with agape, but with eros? And the post-communion prayer is just awkward. These special-purpose prayers generally do not reflect the best writing of the 1979, but that for marriage is at least serviceable if short on rhetorical flourish: it moves from the union of communion to the union of husband and wife, and from there into a hope for their life and for the new life at the end. The SSB prayer reverses those elements, and more or less shoves the union aside to pray for our mission. That mission is a good thing to pray for, but it seems out of context here.

And then we are done with the words. I have one final post to sum it all up.

Blessing for Study Only III

OK, intrepid liturgists, this is where it gets ugly, because I here take up the wording of the proposed same sex blessing rite. Recall from the first installment that it is possible to get through this liturgy without saying anything in common with the marriage rite other than the Lord's Prayer. This is enabled in very large part by the provision for non-dominical versions of much of the conventional dialog of the liturgy, so that there alternatives for each of the following liturgical tropes:

• Opening sentences: Except during Easter the BCP version isn't offered at all (because we cannot say "his kingdom"), and the Easter acclamation allows substituting "Christ" for "Lord" in the response. Ordinary time allows use of a non-trinitarian version, and there is no provision made for Lent.
  
• At the collect: The presider may say "God be with you" instead of "The Lord be with you."
  
• After the readings: The reader is given two alternatives to "The Word of the Lord".
  
• At the Gospel: The deacon may say "The Holy Gospel of our Savior Jesus Christ" instead of "our Lord Jesus Christ". Note though that the closing versicle and all the responses retain "Lord".
  
• At the Peace: The presider may say "The Peace of Christ" instead of "the Peace of the Lord".

All of this represents an independent theological innovation, and one for which I see no real need. In the case of the neutering of the God-language I have a particular problem, because if taken seriously, it prevents us from using the language of scripture. It reminds me of the passage in 3001: The Final Odyssey where Frank Poole, having been revived, hears the expurgated version of Dave Bowman's final words. He knows that his crewmate didn't say "By Deus", and I know that scripture, and thus our old liturgy, refers God as "he" in every case. And that's before I get to the issue of whether the masculine language is even significant (which is way too big an argument to bite off here). Of course, eliding the trinitarian address and refusing to say that Jesus is Lord and God are complete non-starters for the vast majority of Christians across time and space. The rite itself is enough of a violation of that unity without increasing the division at every turn of phrase.

But leaving that aside, we have now exhausted, excepting again the Lord's Prayer, any common language with any other rite. Everything else here is new. Now, classically the language of prayer book rites is taken either from that of older Anglican books, or is adapted from scripture. To some degree that remains true here. For instance, the V&R section that follows the opening sentences in baptism is taken from Ephesians 4:4-6; the corresponding exchange here is taken from 1 John 4:7-8,11. After that, though, the greeting is a strange composite. In the marriage rite, this is composed (as I mentioned in the first part) of three parts: the greeting proper, the sign, and the statement of purpose. The last two elements are omitted here. No analogy is made between this union and anything sacramental, though the readings tend to imply a connection to the life of the members in love and harmony with each other. And the statement of purpose is also dropped. In their place, a bit of the old marital promises is adapted (I note for instance the phrases "forsaking all others" and "as long as they live"). This is followed by a bit of, well, barely-mitigated glurge:

Ahead of them is a life of joy and sorrow,
of blessing and struggle,
of gain and loss,
demanding of them the kind of self-giving love
made manifest to us in the life of Jesus.
Christ stands among us today,
calling these two people always to witness in their life together
to the generosity of his life for the sake of the world,
a life in which Christ calls us all to share.

Ah, the heroic battles over who gets up first and makes the coffee; at least they are likely to be spared the titanic contest over the position of the toilet seat. This is the kind of puffery that really gets to me in recent liturgical texts. Older texts may be florid; 1979 may be terse to the point of being abrupt; but this is neither vigorous like the old, nor forthright like the new, but is empty padding: the high fructose corn syrup of liturgy. Well, having gotten that out of the way, we next have an unnecessary transitional paragraph to get us to the collect, which of course begins with the Pavlovian exchange to which all Anglicans respond with prayer.

There are four collects offered, the last specifically for those who bring children to the relationship. I begin by noting that only the third uses the classic "you/who/do/through" collect form. (The marriage rite has the frequent 1979 quirk of saying "you have created us male and female" instead of "who has created us", which is less than felicitous.) This third option, though, is cast as a thanksgiving rather than as a petition: it's constructed like a postcommunion prayer. It also has an odd theological deviancy, in that it expresses an eschatological hope towards us being granted "a dwelling place eternal in the heavens," whereas 1979 and earlier books consistently prefer "heavenly kingdom". Returning to the first, this is the parallel to the marital collect, substituting "covenant" for "vows". however, it is also the non-dominical option, because they prayer is "through through Jesus Christ our Savior," not "our Lord". The second option makes a different alteration, substituting "to the ages of ages" in place of "for ever and ever". It would be, admittedly, a more accurate translation of the Latin-- or the Greek, since this is the common Orthodox phrase in translation. But it isn't the way we normally translate it. In any case the text of the prayer is quite vague about why anyone would happen to be there, outside of mentioning "their life together".

The fourth option is interesting in that it tries to address the issue of blended families. I'm not sure the collect is the place to do this, but a prayer for the larger family being formed is, I think, a welcome addition. That said, this prayer steps way outside the conventional form of a collect. These prayers are always addressed to the Father, through the Son, with the Spirit; this prayer, however, addresses the Godhead as a unity. Indeed, it is trinitarian to a degree that would gladden Athanasius, but it is far outside the normal structure for these prayers; and like the second and third options, there's no specific mention of the covenant which is at the heart of the rite. One could just as well use these prayers for people simply sharing an apartment. I'm not sure whether the intent here is to offer variations from which the student is expected to pick one, or whether the choice is intended to be incorporated into the final rite; if the latter, we also see the tendency towards variable rites which has expanded since its inception in the 1979 Eucharist.

We then skip over all the readings which I went over in the last installment. Noting that the sermon is not optional, we then move on to the main section of the rite. The elements in this section appear to be ordered after and modelled on those of baptism, at least until we get to the vows. Therefore the presentation is the opening act. Here I need to go back a version. In 1928 we have the familiar "Who giveth this Woman to be married to this Man?", and it is not optional; nor is a response specified. This part goes all the way back to 1662, and it appears in the additional directions of 1979, updated grammatically and with a verbal response. A plural version is also supplied, equally optional. This archaicism is still technically optional in the SSB rite, but it is incorporated into the body of the rite, and in addition to the presentation question itself, a promise to uphold question is added. This is redundant because essentially the same question is about to be asked of everyone in the assembly, following the couple's consent as in the marriage rite. It fits into an overall pattern of multiplication of responses. The consents of the couple, for instance, are broken in two. The husband's promise is one of the most conservative sections of the marriage rite, suffering only minor changes in wording due to modernization of the language; the wife's part is nearly as conservative, having lost the promise to "obey" in the American books. (For some reason, the 1979 rite reverses the traditional order and has the woman consent first, not that this will be relevant to the rite discussed.) In the marriage rite, each spouse promises to engage in the covenant of marriage and to love, comfort, honor and keep the other; and there is also a pledge to be faithful and to forsake all others. The SSB consent also includes the pledge to fidelity, but bereft of the "forsake all others" clause, and none of the other marital promises explicitly appear. Instead one member "freely and unreservedly offer[s] [themselves]" to the other, and promises to live "in faithfulness and holiness". That's pretty vague, and I don't see any reason why any word of the marital version ought to be excluded, save those specifically mentioning marriage.

The consent concludes, as in the marriage rite, with a promise by the witnesses. Here again we have a considerable change where there isn't any obvious reason for it. Marriage and baptism both have a very short and direct promise of support asked at this point; the wording is very similar. It's not very similar to what we have in this rite. First, a second question has been added, asking the witnesses to "pray for them in times of trouble and celebrate with them in times of joy". A bit cutesy, to my taste. What's more interesting is the wording of the first question, which asks the witnesses to "respect the covenant [the couple makes]". It is decidedly strange to insert what is essentially a plea to take the union seriously.

Here we have a rather awkward rubric. In marriage the congregation stands during three chunks: at the beginning up to the first reading, at the gospel, and finally during the prayers and the blessing. Or to put it the other way around, they sit during the readings, the homily, and the vows. People who haven't looked at the baptismal rite recently may be surprised to learn that there are no posture rubrics after the gospel. What typically happens is that the congregation remains seated up to the recitation of the creed, and then sits after the thanksgiving over the water. In the SSB rite, the congregation is to stand at their responses to the consent, and then stands until the end of the Lord's Prayer. Then they sit for the vows, but there are no posture rubrics for the congregation after that. If they followed the pattern for marriage, the congregation would then stand, making for one very short period of sitting; but more likely what will happen, sans direction from the celebrant, is that people will end up sitting through the blessing.

And that brings us to the prayers. In the interest of making this more digestible, I will continue from there in the next post.

Blessing for Study Only II

In this installment I will consider the scripture lessons proposed of the same-sex blessing rite. Recall that one of the innovations of the 1979 marriage rite was the inclusion of a lesson section; the 1928 rite had no provision for this, and the 1662 had a rather tacked-on section at the end which was constructed more along the lines of a homily.

One thing is evident immediately: there are a lot of options. Six OT, eight epistle, and five gospel lessons are offered, and no less than ten psalms may be chosen from. Further investigation shows that there is a degree of overlap with the lessons prescribed for marriage. By contrast, through the SSB rite (as we said in part I) is strongly influenced by the baptismal rite, there is almost nothing shared in the scriptural material; a single epistle reading is shared, and that is all.

I'll begin by considering the psalms. Marriage suggests the use of Psalm 67, 127, or 128. All three of these have some reference to fertility, with 127 and 128 both talking about the having of children as a blessing; it's quite safe to say, however, that verse 3a-- "Your wife shall be like a fruitful vine within your house"-- is why 128 was not suggested for same-sex blessings. Psalm 65 is rather like 67, except longer and less felicitous; it's not obvious why it was added as a selection. Psalms 98, 100, 148 and 149 are generic in their thanksgiving and praise, and again it's not that clear why they should be suggested. They give an air of not being able to come up with something suitable. The excerpt from Psalm 85 perhaps has been chosen for verse 10 ("Mercy and truth have met together;/ righteousness and peace have kissed each other.") It is Psalm 133, however, which seems the most obvious choice:

Oh, how good and pleasant it is,* when brethren live together in unity!
It is like fine oil upon the head* that runs down the beard,
Upon the beard of Aaron,* and runs down the collar of his robe.
It is like the dew of Hermon* that falls upon the hills of Zion.
For there the LORD has ordained the blessing:* life for evermore.

Though perhaps it is less than apt at the union of two women.

Anyway...

I'm afraid the issue of what is appropriate or tasteful or unintentionally humorous is going to keep popping out. For example, the only common OT lesson is that from the Song of Songs, which conjoins two passages, the second of which is the very familiar "Set me as a seal upon thine heart" verses which are most likely the most popular readings at Episcopal weddings. The first, however, is love poetry, pure and simple, emphasizing that this is a sexual relationship we're contemplating. It's abundantly clear why the two Genesis passages didn't make the cut, as they are the foundational scripture for Judaeo-Christian marriage, and they firmly set forth the complementarity of the sexes as marriage's basis. The passage from Tobit is just as problematic, as it cites the Genesis passages to that end. So what do we get to replace these? Well, for starters we have the most famous couplet from Ruth. And it sounds good until you remember that Ruth is saying this to her mother-in-law, which is not exactly what you want in a sexual union. So then we have two versions of readings from 1 Samuel concerning the covenant between David and Jonathan. Here again we have this tension over sexuality. John Boswell was not the only person to impose a homoerotic interpretation on this friendship, but he was the one who really pushed interpreting that into a rite. I'll bravely say, however, that this is all an insertion into the text. The passage from Ecclesiastes is interesting, with its rather neutral "two is better than one" message; the threefold cord of the last line, however, lends itself to unintended mirth. Finally, there is a passage from Micah that makes no sense whatsoever: beating swords into plowshares is all very noble, but I can see nothing in the passage that has anything specific to do with the matter at hand.

When we turn to the epistles, we see that a fair number of the lessons are shared between marriage and SSBs. Yet here we observe a different oddity: nearly all the shared lessons are extended for SSBs. One of the marriage lessons didn't make the cut, and after reading the latter part of Ephesians 5, with its disquisition about wives submitting to husbands, it's easy to see why it went unused; and for that matter, one suspects it is seldom used for Episcopal weddings. The only lesson that was kept without alteration is a passage from Colossians 3, which even in the marriage rite stops short of another "submission" passage; that excised, it's a fairly generic passage about how Christians must live in agape.

As to the other three retained lessons: The reading from 1 Corinthians is the famous "Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels" paean to life in agape, for some reason they have felt the need to prefix this with the end of 12:31: "And I will show you a still more excellent way." This does not strike me as a meaningful improvement, much less one necessitated by the change of context. Another reading from Ephesians, this time in chapter 3, was extended to include the doxology which ends the chapter; again, this does not seems necessary to the sense of the thing. The last of our retained lessons comes from 1 John, in the fourth chapter; in this case they have skipped from verse 16, where the marital lesson ends, to verse 21: "And this commandment have we from him, That he who loveth God love his brother also." (KJV: I note that this passage in the NRSV neuters the Greek by translating adelphon as "brothers and sisters"). But this verse is pulled out of context, for it is the answer to the rhetorical question posed in verse 20: "If a man say, I love God, and hateth his brother, he is a liar: for he that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God whom he hath not seen?"

Moving on to the new lessons: the Romans passage is sort of a Desiderata of the faith; it's generic but at least manages to fit in philadelphia. The Galatians passage is a puzzle because surely verse 24 is wont to prompt snickers: "And they that are Christ's have crucified the flesh with the affections and lusts." The other 1 John reading is sort of the little brother to the first: nothing bad about it, but there would seem to be no reason to prefer it over one of the other readings. And finally, we have the reading from 2 Corinthians, which is shared with the baptismal readings. Honestly I have no idea why they included this, as it is plainly most relevant to baptism.

So then we move on to the five gospel readings. The first lesson, from Matthew, is the Beatitudes, and it conflates two of the marital readings. The first marriage passage stops at verse 10 ("Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness' sake: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven"), and the second resumes at verse 13 and continues to verse 16, but SSB stops at verse 14 ("Ye are the light of the world. A city that is set on an hill cannot be hid"). Neither of these commends itself as a natural stopping point, because verses 11 and 12 continue the thought of verse 10, and the passage that begins at verse 14 has its conclusion at verse 16: "Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven." The other point is that this passage is a prophecy of the kingdom, not so much an instruction of how to live; it's not that clear why it's an option for marriage, much less SSBs. On the other hand, as a marital passage which doesn't mention matrimony, it is I suppose an obvious candidate to be retained.

Marriage offers a third Matthew reading, one that is a bit puzzling and which SSBs chose not to use: the parable of the house built on rock. I suppose the analogy is of the house to the marriage, but it's a bit thin. Other than that there's no obvious reason why this reading couldn't have been retained.

It's obvious, though, why the passage from Mark wasn't retained: it refers directly back into Genesis 2. But it is far from clear why a section of the sermon of the plain from Luke 6 was added.

Moving on to John: the reading from the final discourse is retained and, once again, lengthened. In the marriage rite it ends at verse 12: "This is my commandment, that ye love one another, as I have loved you." But now it continues on for five more verses, including Jesus telling the disciples that he now calls the not servants, but friends. Once again I do not see the added value of the longer reading, nor do I see in being somehow more relevant to this context than to marriage.

A second reading from John is taken from the final prayer, particularly the section in which Jesus prays for the unity of the disciples in love. Now it think most people would read this as a prayer for the unity of the church, for it speaks of love within and encompassing the whole.

So if you've made it this far, you may have noticed a threefold pattern. Any passage that explicitly refers to marriage has been scrupulously avoided, because all of them set marriage in the context of the Genesis complementarity of the sexes. In the epistles and the gospels, this has meant use of passages which talk about love in a general way, or even talk about Christian life in very general terms. In the Old Testament, certain passages on specific friendship or kinship relationships are appealed to, but the interpretation needed to make these passages relevant is either a distortion of the text (Ruth, and to a lesser degree, the Song of Songs and Ecclesiastes) or hotly contested (1 Samuel). The liturgists have run up against a very real problem: not only is there no scriptural warrant for what they want to do, but every passage that justifies a sexual relationship presupposes a marriage between a man and a woman.

Blessing for Study Only I

Our friends at the SCLM have put out some same sex blessing materials, including a sample/proposed rite. I'm not really interested in discussing the supporting material here, if for no other reasons than (a) it's too big a chunk to bite off at once, and (b) I'm not up to moderating a comments-based discussion of whatever I may have to say. The sample rite, however, cries out for analysis. This I intend to carry out in three parts: the first, which you read here, will talk about the structure of the rite, while the second will discuss the scripture selections and the third the detailed wording of some passages.

I begin with some overall observations. It is possible to perform this rite without saying anything in common with the marriage rite, save the Lord's Prayer. Every single other passage either differs from its marital parallel, or provides for an alternative which the 1979 rites do not countenance. The latter is largely accounted for by the continuance of the anti-dominical heresies found in almost every new liturgy promulgated in the past decade or so: in every case where the word "Lord" would ordinarily be used, an alternative is provided which omits it, the only exception being in the litany. The converse of this is that nearly every element of the marriage rite is included, with one telling exception which I will discuss at the end.

While most elements of the marital rite are included, the order of those elements is quite different. Comparison of the 1662, 1928, and 1979 rites discloses a common structure which anyone who has watched a movie marriage scene will recognize. The core rite begins with a greeting which connects the rite of marriage with the union between Christ and the church. Then follows a charge to disclose impediments, the making of promises, the presentation of the bride (optional in 1979), the vows and the exchange of rings. The final part of the rite consists of a prayer in the form of a blessing, the proclamation of the wedding, and the blessing proper; this section varies somewhat in order. The 1928 version contains these elements alone; the 1662 and 1979 rites append a statement of the purposes of marriage to the greeting, and 1662 has a series of readings following the core rite as a kind of scriptural homily. All of these rites provide for following the rite with communion, though as is common with older books the exact way this is to be done is not spelled out.

The 1979 version incorporates two innovations. The first is the inclusion of a series of prayers between the proclamation and the blessing, preceding the old blessing prayer. This is constructed in the style of older books but in fact lacks any precedent. The other innovation is a restoration of the lessons dropped in the 1928 version. The 1979 addition is in the absolutely stereotyped form common to all modern ECUSA sacramental rites: it begins with a collect and is followed by a series of readings, separated by psalms and anthems, and ending with a homily (made optional). Also per 1979 practice the lectionary provides for an OT lesson, an epistle, and a gospel reading, the latter presented as if for a eucharistic rite. This is all inserted after the promises and presentation, so that the core rite resumes with the vows; again as is standard for 1979, the rite ends with the peace, which is the suture line for joining this to the communion rite. This overall pattern is also found to a degree in the ordinal rites: the entrance rites for the latter also incorporate the section of promises and such before the collect.

The SSB rite, however, is constructed on the basis of the baptismal rite, not the marital rite; the elements of the latter are rearranged to match the corresponding element of baptism. Therefore the SSB rite begins with the conventional seasonal opening sentences, followed by a versicle and response section and the greeting. It then proceeds directly to the collect, skipping all the charge and promise section which in the marital rites precedes the collect. The next section follows the ECUSA lesson/psalm/gospel/sermon stereotyped plan, and then the rite proper resumes. Again, the order of the elements reflects that of baptism, beginning with the (optional) presentation, followed by the promises. The prayers are in the form of a litany, and they precede the vows; the Lord's Prayer is dropped in after the litany. The rings follow the vows immediately, per convention, and then the proclamation; then the rite continues with the blessing prayer and blessing proper, and as with everything ECUSAn, ends at the peace. This mirrors the baptismal order, in which the litany precedes the sacramental act.

And indeed, the references to the baptismal rite are constant in the theological discussion preceding the sample rite. I do not want to step up to discussing how well-founded this connection is; the fact remains that this is really the matrimonial rite recast in the shape of the baptismal rite. But that brings us to the two omissions from the 1979 marriage rite. Recall that the it begins with the greeting, a statement of the purposes of marriage, a charge to take marriage seriously and to reveal impediments, and the promises and presentation. Well, the SSB rite skips directly from the greeting to the collect, with the promises and presentation, as I said earlier, moved to follow the sermon and swapped in order. The other elements are simply dropped: there is no statement of purpose for the relationship blessed by this rite, and the charge is also entirely eliminated. I have no idea why the latter is missing, and the omission is odd considering that the vows contain the "forsaking all others" pledge on which the charge is predicated. the omission of the purpose statement is more telling. Perhaps one can construct an analogy of baptism with marriage, which is the consequence of their argument; but the fact remains that one can construct from scripture a rationale for marriage that makes no reference to baptism. Marriage indeed precedes and perhaps can be said to prefigure every other rite save the offering of sacrifice. This leaves the SSB rite in something of a paradox: it's constructed out of the parts of marriage, but in the way that it specifically appeals to anything else except marriage for a justification, the fact that it doesn't have the explicit warrant afforded to marriage is emphasized.

The Covenant: is it dead yet?

This bishop wants all of us to sign on to the proposed Anglican Covenant:



One really doesn't want to discourage him, but things aren't going too well for it. As usual, the folks at the Episcopal Cafe are all lining up to denounce it, and while they are at it, Rowan Williams for daring to suggest the thing in the first place. They even have a special guest appearance from Louie Crew, while Tobias Haller has devoted seven out of his last nine blog posts to discussing/denouncing it.

It doesn't get that much more support from the other end of the church-political spectrum (though anyone calling Williams "the Archdruid" has utterly squandered their moral credibility, at least as far as I'm concerned). The only people who seem to support it are a group of stubborn moderates-to-conservatives.

What dooms the covenant is that the sin has already been committed. The Americans press upon the communion as a whole their internal solution to these theological disputes: the progressives present a fait accompli, and everyone else is put in the position of having to either welcome the repudiation of the past, try to live with the unacceptable, or make some sort of break, the latter then being characterized as the only real sin in the matter. But simply as a reaction, I would not call it sin at all. In a sense all the covenant does is put the organization in the position of supporting the resisters instead of the radicals. And that's not going to fly because (a) the Church of England has lots of bishoprics who want to be numbered among the welcomers to the various innovations, (b) everyone in ECUSA understands that the existing pressure we exert on the communion is gong to be the first target of the "disciplinary" provisions in section 4, and (c) nobody in ECUSA cares about keeping the conservative provinces in the communion.

ECUSA's leadership is hopelessly disfunctional anyway. Here we are, looking at a proposed budget which is almost impossible to amend at GC, and even the liberals can see that defunding youth ministry in favor of the central offices is dumb. Meanwhile the state of Virginia is giving the separatist buildings back to the ECUSA diocese, which I am reasonably sure will not be able to keep them all open. And presumably GC will approve same sex marriages this summer, so as not to embarrass the bishops of Maryland and Washington when they permit those rites to go forward in January at the behest of the state.

After that, what is there left to do? Assuming that the Occupy movement lasts that long, no doubt there will be many in the hierarchy urging us to speed it on, and never mind that our church depends on all those upper middle incomes not just for money, but for our social milieu. They will urge us on in the battle against climate change, thought really there isn't a lot the church can do in this. And that is fortunate for it, as again in this one we are mostly the enemy whom we are to combat. Increasingly there is little reason to stay Anglican except as Anglicanism is defended from, well, itself; my church increasingly offers little in the way of religion, and as for the rest, the heathen do as much.

Our Goals for Lent

So the presiding bishop wants us to think about the Millennium Development Goals for Lent:

I invite you to use the Millennium Development Goals as your focus for Lenten study and discipline and prayer and fasting this year. I’m going to remind you that the Millennium Development Goals are about healing the worst of the world’s hunger. They’re about seeing that all children get access to primary education. They’re about empowering women. They’re about attending to issues of maternal health and child mortality. They’re about attending to issues of communicable disease like AIDS and malaria and tuberculosis. They’re about environmentally sustainable development, seeing that people have access to clean water and sanitation and that the conditions in slums are alleviated. And finally, they are about aid, foreign aid. They’re about trade relationships, and they’re about building partnerships for sustainable development in this world.

But they are also about obsessing about the sins of others, rather than our own sins. Look, I can give two reasons for leaving the MDGs to fend for themselves for a while, and neither of them is concerned with whether, as political points, they are even good ideas. The first reason is that old Mary/Martha thing. Much as my sympathies have always been with Martha, the Episcopal Church now has a serious problem with taking the Mary side for granted. As a church, we need to give people religious reasons for coming to us, and by and large, we haven't bothered with that; instead we have tended to take religion for granted, and spent all our effort on this work in the world stuff at a time when the powers that be are more resistant to us than ever. It's really about time we actually spent some effort trying to make more people into believers and getting more people baptized and into communion with us. That 3% a year loss needs to be the first focus of church action.

But beyond that problem in priorities, the emphasis on contemplation of social action, specifically action which we cannot carry out, means that we sit around for weeks congratulating ourselves on what right-thinking people we are. It is, in other words, an invitation to self-righteousness. That's not the way to keep a holy Lent.

Support the Right to Bear Armed Coffee

I've never spent much time at Starbuck's because I've never acquired the coffee habit. Therefore I couldn't really effectively boycott them, because the difference between the five or so cups of tea I've gotten from there and the sixth cup wouldn't exactly make a meaningful mark on their bottom line, though of course it wouldn't hurt my Daily Sanctimony Expression Requirement at all. But never fear: there's always some Episcopal organization ready to take up the cause for me:

Buttressing its commitment to non-violence, the Episcopal Peace Fellowship (EPF) is joining with gun victim groups both faith-based and secular to launch a boycott of Starbucks coffee shops on Valentine’s Day.

“While states have rightfully forbidden weapons inside taverns for decades, Starbucks is alone among major retail outlets in allowing customers to bring their gun(s) – open or concealed – into its coffee shops,” said the Rev. Jackie Lynn, EPF executive director. “We know guns and alcohol don’t mix. Why allow guns and caffeine?”

I hate to say this, but I can't really bring myself to care. There was a murder around these parts some years back in a coffee shop, and I think it was even a Starbucks. But you know, I don't think a sign on the door forbidding carrying a piece would have deterred them. Peace is a good thing; we should all work for peace, don't get me wrong. But our parody image as representatives of right- er, left-thinking upper middle class liberals is bad enough as it is. There aren't enough Episcopalians left to make such a boycott mean anything more than to confirm how out of touch we are with anything but our own sense of righteous self-worth.

Not That Kind of Relationship Either

Our buddies at the Standing Committee of Liturgy and Music, aka the Foxes Guarding the Henhouse, have a blog. And today we have, filed under the heading of "Resources for Same-Sex Blessings", we have a little discourse on being Called into Relationship. Long-time readers will know that I have a particular loathing for the word "relationship" when applied to sexuality. It tends to a sort of spineless, precious vacuity. For me, living in relationship means, in practice, working out who cleans up youngest's child's potty accidents and other moments of deeper intimacy still. It lacks the rosy sociological hues that adorn the word in isolation. But here we are, and the first phrase in the referenced post is "falling in love", and at the end of the first paragraph we find talk of "deciding to enter into a lifelong commitment with someone".

It is all so very indefinite. Younger folk may not realize that the 1979 BCP spells out in fair detail just exactly the covenant of marriage entails, in contrast to previous books: husband and wife are united into a family for mutual joy, for mutual aid and comfort, and for the procreation and raising of the next generation. People in the past, of course, had lots of other reasons for marriage beyond falling in love, or indeed fulfilling any of these three purposes. And people these days, falling love, are often wont to keep the escape hatch from Relationship wide open by avoiding or minimizing commitment.

But the reality of marriage for the Episcopal classes is a lot more complex. Well-educated people are, in fact, getting married at close to traditional rates. Which is to say, more of them are in marriages at any given time: the divorce rate, on a per-marriage basis, is still very high, though it has dropped from its early 1980s peak. People in the lower, uneducated classes are the ones avoiding marriage: over 60% of mothers who have not graduated from high school are unmarried, and graduating from high school only pushes that rate down to 40%. Marriage is conspicuously delayed: the age at which 60% of the population is married has risen from 25 to 30, and there is no age at which the ratio reaches the historic peak of 80%. (One should keep in mind that the proportion of religious celibates was once much higher as well.)

And yet we are told that "a lifelong committed relationship with another person is a vocation", with the implication that it isn't for everyone. Well, OK, except that it would appear, what with the getting pregnant and all, that it is the vocation for the majority. It may not be normative, but it is normal. I would guess that it is still the case that over 80% of the population has children, in which case that same 80% should either be committed to abstinence, or be committed to life with the other parent, modulo various family-breaking and wrecking facts such as death, abuse, or gross infidelity. Conversely, the statement that "culturally, marriage has instead become a rite of passage into adulthood" is flatly and utterly wrong. That may have been true in 1960, when 80% of the population was married before age 25; it isn't even vaguely true now. Maybe sex is that rite of passage, or perhaps drinking, or having a child; getting married, though, is something which these days which these days tends to wait until people have been adults for some time.

And of course, the background of all of this is same-sex "relationships". OK, well, let's call the same sex marriages, in the interest of full equality. So, do we have any statistics on the unions that are now being performed in a few states? Well, Canada has some data, and among other info they report that the age upon first marriage is 13% higher for same sex than for heterosexual marriages, with the average age for lesbian marriages was 41.6 (it was higher for gay males). One can safely say that the need to marry in order to have children is not a factor; nor, one dares to suggest, do they first sample the joys of sex and companionship at such an age. No, forty is the traditional age at which the wear of time begins to make itself felt. Now this number is no doubt elevated because many elderly couples have not heretofore been able to avail themselves of the facilities of the law, but still, the age difference is striking.

The use of vocation as a category here, therefore, is suspect. One gathers that perhaps people increasingly see marriage as a sort of social tool: a means of creating the expectation of approval for a sexual state, or a way to pry benefits out of employers and the state. But they do not couple (so to speak) sex with marriage. On the contrary, they are still "guided" by the church's injunction to keep sex within the boundary of marriage; and on the one hand, they rebel against this as a burden, and on the other, they brandish marriage as a demand for societal approval of the sex they are having. If the choices are marriage or continence, well, people are not choosing the latter. And the church is having a very hard time telling them that they need to choose the latter.

Indeed, the sense I get is that, with all the panic about how this church is aging into irrelevancy, the obvious answer-- that Episcopalians needs to get married, have kids, and raise them in the church-- simply isn't on the table. If we're going to talk about this in terms of vocation, then we need to talk about that vocation the way the Roman Catholics do: that people should think first in terms of finding a mate and producing offspring. The continued obsession with homosexuality is an irrelevant sideshow to this, yet we keep getting musings such as that which I've quoted in which the childless union is, by omission, made the norm, and having children is treated (again by omission) as an unusual opinion instead of as the core case. There is so much talk of "covenantal life" in the passage that one might think that discussion concerns whether one should own a house under the sway of a homeowner's association (which is indeed not for everyone). People don't get married for so abstract a reason, and life in marriage is anything but that abstract. Talk of same sex unions and marriages needs to step up to the same level of anti-abstraction.

Statistical Day of Reckoning

The statistics nerds among us look forward with a mixture of longing and dread to the days when Kirk Hadaway and his crew release the annual numbers. Longing, because he gives us a lot of material to work with; dread, because of the inevitably bad news those numbers deliver. Well, for the latest Executive council meeting, they delivered a presentation which pulls together the usual summary numbers, plus other data not routinely released. Some lowlights:

• Every church statistic is in the negative over the past decade: "we do not have a measure that is moving in a positive direction."


• Membership has fallen since the mid-sixties, when we had over three million members. Now we have less than two thirds that.


• Membership losses have accelerated since the early years of this century, and since 2004 shrinking congregations have outnumbered those showing growth by a considerable margin. Only 25% of congregations grew in 2010.


• Attendance has fallen steadily since 2000 after being rock steady through the 1990s (ASA data doesn't go back further than that, unfortunately). In 2010 only 17% of congregations recorded growth in attendance.


• Trends in other denominations are also bad. The UMC and other mainline Prots have been in decline for 25 years; in the past three years the SBC has also slipped into the red.


• "For every parish that has opened in the past 10 years, 2.5 parishes have closed." Most new churches have been planted in the south.


• We are old. Only 10% of our membership is young adults, compared with 20% of the US population; conversely, the oldest cohort holds 30% of our membership, as compared with 13% of the population at large.


• Our clergy are old too. The average age at ordination is 46. Over the past three years we have not ordained enough people to keep pace with retirements.


• Plate and pledge, adjusted for inflation, have steadily declined since the beginning of the century.


• 72% of ECUSA congregations are in financial distress, far worse than the 58% of US congregations as a whole.

The reader will not be surprised to learn that this report has been met with consternation, not to mention a certain panicky urge to do something about it. The question, of course, is where the decline is coming from. Some possibilities:

• Not enough kids. Hadaway's older analysis identified the drop in the white birth rate as a major source. However, this report is now a decade old, and it precedes the pattern of acceleration seen in the decade since. Also, this is a factor we will just have to live with.


• People leave. This is not a negligible contributor. My analyses in the past seem to show this as perhaps the dominant factor; in any case, losses in the four departing dioceses account for 19% of the drop in domestic membership since 2007.


• People don't join us. In our heyday it was commonly claimed that 50% of adult Episcopalians were converts. It's hard to pry that out of the data because of the many converts who don't show up in the offices, particularly as the expectation to be confirmed has just about disappeared.


• We are not retaining our kids. This is everyone's favorite reason, but if adult conversions were what sustained us before, it follows that this was never one of our strong points.


• Society is becoming more irreligious, and people these days don't join institutions. These are perhaps contributors, but again we don't have a way to track them.

I'm going to save my opinions on what to do for a later post. However I hope in any case that some of the complacency has been shaken off.