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Bishop's Column

Posted Tuesday, April 03, 2007

Baptism at Boksburg

April 2007

Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death … so we too might walk in newness of life (Romans 6:3-4)

Amidst tensions between the Episcopal Church and the majority of the 38 autonomous churches of the Anglican Communion, and while many prepare during Lent to present themselves this Easter for baptism, it is important to recognize that the major difference between most of the others in the Communion and us is that they do not have in their Prayer Books the Baptismal Covenant as we do.

To learn this surprising fact at the TEAM (Towards Effective Anglican Mission) Conference, convened last month at the 2001 initiative of the Primates of the Anglican Communion by Njongonkulu Ndungane, the Archbishop of Cape Town, at Boksburg, South Africa, was for me a kind of baptism.

While the public agenda of that conference focused on how Anglicans worldwide can implement United Nations Millennium Development Goals such as gender equality, environmental sustainability, poverty eradication, maternal health, and child mortality reduction, the hidden agenda of the more than 400 Anglicans, gathered at Boksburg from around the world, concerned how our House of Bishops would respond by the September 30 deadline set in the February 19 Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, Communiqué of the Anglican Communion's Primates.

Concerned that the Episcopal Church is practicing a standard of teaching on human sexuality different from that advised by the Communion's Bishops at the 1998 Lambeth Conference, the Primates requested that: (1) We commit to the design process for an Anglican Covenant (defining "authentic Anglicanism") that will be discussed at the 2008 Lambeth Conference, later perfected by the Anglican Consultative Council, and then sent to each of the Communion's 38 provinces for ratification - in our case, by the 2009 General Convention in Anaheim; (2) We not authorize same-sex blessings or ordain partnered or non-celibate homosexual persons; (3) We neither pursue property dispute litigation where rectors, wardens, and vestries have sought to wrest their land and buildings from the Episcopal Church, nor alienate properties from the Episcopal Church; and (4) We establish a Pastoral Council to negotiate structures for the pastoral care of parishes dissenting from recent General Convention decisions and appoint a Primatial Vicar to whom the Presiding Bishop would delegate specific powers and duties in places where her ministry is deemed unacceptable.

These demands were hanging in the air when the Boksburg conference opened with a unforgettably-spirited Eucharist at All Souls' Church, Tsakane, in the Diocese of the Highveld, where the Archbishop of Canterbury preached. When eight Episcopal Church bishops met with him in private the next day I asked him, "When after September 30 will a decision about our place in the Communion be made, and will you be the one to make it?" His reply that he would leave the decision to the Primates - the same group that had authored the Communiqué - left me fearful for our future in the Communion. On the other hand, his statement that he did not know when a decision would be made reassured me that no one is rushing to judgment or desirous to dismiss us.

Confirmation of my assessment came a few days later when two dozen bishops from elsewhere joined seven of us from the Episcopal Church for a heart-felt sharing of our expectations for the proposed 2008 Lambeth Conference, and whether it should be about mission or sexual ethics, or both. An hour into the conversation Nathaniel Makoto Uematsu, the Primate of Japan, confessed with deep emotion how grieved he was when "at the recent Primates' Meeting some said that if others holding some views on some things came to Lambeth, they would neither attend nor permit their bishops to do so."

There ensued what I can only call a "holy silence" that lasted a seemingly endless time as 31 human souls and shepherds of Christ's church contemplated the seriousness of what had just been said and the lengths each may go to maintain communion with the others. But it was also an "awkward silence" in the face of what is still for most an unmentionable a subject - sexuality - because it is considered so sacred.

We ourselves were once silent on the subject. When in 1974 Robert Rusack, the Bishop of Los Angeles, asked me to chair a committee in an effort to implement a 1973 General Convention resolution calling for a study of sexuality in every diocese, he called it "The Committee on Human Sexuality and the Family" - because adding "Human" and "the Family" lessened the scandal of talking about "Sexuality" in a church setting.

Such initiatives, however, spelled a breakthrough, and in the 1970's we as a church did learn to speak openly of "sexuality," in the 1980's of "homosexuality," and in the 1990's of "heterosexism" as a systemic injustice where straight people are advantaged to the detriment of gay men and lesbian women. The freedom that attended this emerging speech felt like singing a new song.

It is a song many in the Communion still find difficult to sing, largely because "family" is still at the heart of their socially constructed relational lives. With its hierarchical organization, its patriarchal episcopate, and its bishops' wives presiding over each diocese' Mothers' Union, the church in many places of the Anglican Communion is still more of an extension of the "family" than a diverse, inclusive community.

This came home to me at Boksburg during a sermon on Mark 2:1-12, the story of the four people who carry a paralytic to Jesus to be healed. The members of the churches in East and Central Africa responsible for the preaching did so by acting out the story. Down the church aisle came four of them with large poster-board signs on their backs signaling that they represented more than just themselves: "Church," "Community," "Society," and, tellingly, "Family."

The word "family," as we understand it, of course, does not appear in the New Testament. Jesus broke with his own family in order to create a new community that would include Jew and Gentile, slave and free, rich and poor, male and female, child and adult. It was to be a truly "catholic" (the Greek kata holos means "according to the whole") community. Baptism into Christ's Body became the means of entering into and fulfilling his inclusive vision and program.

All of the churches of the Communion hold this belief about baptism. But in the Episcopal Church this belief is driven home repeatedly by our recitation of the Prayer Book's Baptismal Covenant, above all at Easter when, in the words of the Apostle Paul, we celebrate the fact "that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death … so we too might walk in newness of life."

Our belief in the liberating power of baptism has been reinforced by the influence of the democratic American experience on our church. Colonial America was unfriendly to the church for baptizing slaves, as there was fear that they might thereby assume they were free. Indeed, in 1667, for example, Virginia passed a law prohibiting baptism as a means to obtain freedom from slavery. In the 1740's preaching about the power of baptism led to the American Revolution by causing people to conclude: (1) "If we, like King George III, are baptized, we are on a par with the King, and he has no right to rule over us," and (2) "If we in Pennsylvania, and those in, say, Massachusetts, are all baptized, then we are not actually separate colonies, but one American people." American experience, shaped by baptism, has buttressed the Episcopal Church's emphasis on baptism's liberating, democratizing effects.

The wider Communion's difficulty with our Baptismal Covenant came out during lengthy plenary sessions on the last full day of the Boksburg conference when the participants worked to perfect the language of ten recommendations that have been published since. During the debate on Recommendation #10 - Protecting Children's Rights and Preserving Young Lives - I went to the microphone and argued that we should include the words, "We advocate opening the Lord's table to all, including infants and children, at baptism." Archbishop Ndungane, seated near me, grimaced visibly. Someone went to a mike to challenge me about what I could possibly mean. My suggestion was the most controversial of the day and the only one not included in the final document we saw the next morning. At the final Eucharist of the conference, for which the Episcopal Church was responsible, we included the words of our Baptismal Covenant, but called it a "Baptismal Commitment," so as not to offend.

By the end of our time in Boksburg we of the Episcopal Church felt that: (1) Despite whatever ways we may fail Christ or one another, as a Communion we are in fact bound together indissolubly in Baptism, and nothing we can do now or in the future can change that indissoluble reality; (2) Not only we, but others around the Communion, too, would be profoundly grieved were we dismissed from the Communion or had our membership in it in any way downgraded; (3) We are today the church that we are, informed by the Baptismal Covenant, and standing on the positions we have taken, including that on homosexual persons, and to be other than who we are is to fail the Communion by holding back from it the gift of who we are; (4) Were our Presiding Bishop dismissed from the Primates' Meetings, our representatives from the Anglican Consultative Council, or we from the 2008 Lambeth Conference, we would still continue to give our time, energy, and the 36% of the Communion's budget that we presently fund in order to see the mission of the Communion go forward. Such seemed to us to be the kenotic response of self-oblation called for from us in imitation of Christ's example in Philippians 2.

As I flew from South Africa to the debate on the Primates' Communiqué at the House of Bishops meeting in Texas, I realized that the Boksburg conference had become a bridge between the Dar es Salaam meeting and our gathering outside Houston, and that the Baptismal Covenant would be the basis, as indeed it became, for our response.

It was with this thinking that I entered the debate in Texas where we produced the "Communication from the March House of Bishops Meeting to the Executive Council" - turning down the Primates' request that we establish a Pastoral Council and have a Primatial Vicar, and remaining silent on the other demands raised in the Communiqué on the assumption that: (1) General Convention has already set forth our stand on same-sex blessings and the ordinations of homosexual persons; (2) We have a legally-binding fiduciary responsibility regarding church properties; and (3) The Anglican Covenant is a work in progress that we will take up later. To read the statement, please go to www.diopa.org . Its adoption by the Bishops spelled more excitement, unity, good spirit, and sense of purposefulness than anything I have witnessed in my ten years in their company. It did not come about easily. On the contrary, it is the fruit of years of pain and difficulty, silence and song, and baptismal living into the Paschal Mystery of Christ's death and resurrection. But as I flew home to Philadelphia my heart told me that a long silence had been broken, as in this Easter hymn:

- Charles E. Bennison, Jr.