Comment on Diocese of Florida Episcopal Election Results

My comment on the results of the most recent episcopal election in the Diocese of Florida after a day of reading, marking and inwardly digesting various letters, comments and reactions.

Yes, there's plenty of pain to go around. And it grieves the heart of God when there is polarization and division. And there is much work to do by all of us who love, tend and seek to call this church to become the Beloved Community it strives to be. But let's not perpetuate the false equivalency between feeling discriminated against because you're disagreed with and being discriminated against because of who you are. One of those things is categorically not like the other.

This is not about who we like, love, or tolerate. This is not about engagement across difference or -- God forbid -- "imposing a litmus test of secular politics on the sacred life of our Church." This is about the end of a long, sad process that was demonstrably hard-wired to disenfranchise Episcopalians who disagreed with their bishop about how to live out our call to be Episcopalians -- a particular people of God who have since the 16th century valued striving to live out the value of Anglican comprehensiveness. And this is about the DM that continues to echo in my heart this day from a long time member of the Diocese of Florida who wrote: "For so many years we felt alone and forgotten. This process has shown us that we are neither."

And the fact that the Episcopal Church has spoken -- through its historic polity -- and refused to consent to the election of a bishop who refused to commit to address the systemic marginalization of God's LGBTQ beloved in the Diocese of Florida is for many -- including me -- something to be grateful for.

O God, you made us in your own image and redeemed us through Jesus your Son: Look with compassion on the whole human family; take away the arrogance and hatred which infect our hearts; break down the walls that separate us; unite us in bonds of love; and work through our struggle and confusion to accomplish your purposes on earth; that, in your good time, all nations and races may serve you in harmony around your heavenly throne; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Deploying Religious Liberty as a Weapon of Mass Discrimination

Again with the Religious Liberty as a weapon of mass discrimination thing! Whether the debate has been about achieving marriage equality or preventing employment discrimination or providing gender affirming care or protecting reproductive freedom it seems that someone, somewhere is absolutely convinced that their religious liberty is under attack because not everyone agrees with them. It is, of course, not a new phenomenon. It has been going on at least since Pat Robertson launched the Culture Wars with the speech that drove me out of the Republican Party in 1992. But I digress.

The reason religious liberty is back on the top of the news cycle is, of course, the recent Supreme Court decision siding with the Colorado woman who filed suit to protect herself from having to offer the same services to same-sex couples that she offers to opposite-sex couples in her website business.

Although not unexpected given the make-up of the current Court, it was a chilling harbinger of things to come as we watch before our very eyes the ongoing erosion of equal protection allegedly guaranteed all Americans. As Justice Sotomayor wrote in her dissenting opinion, “Today, the Court, for the first time in its history, grants a business open to the public a constitutional right to refuse to serve members of a protected class.”

And because this ruling comes with the double whammy of allegedly protecting the religious liberty of some by eroding equal protection for all, I’m reminded of these words from our former President of the House of Deputies Gay Jennings who wrote: “Religious liberty is a bedrock of our country and a right cherished by Americans of many faiths. But disguising homophobia as religious freedom … is not only a dangerous legal precedent, it is a gross distortion of the teachings of Jesus.”

So one more time with the refresher course: The First Amendment protects us from any laws “impeding the free exercise of religion” thus guaranteeing that each and every American has the liberty to believe — or not believe — absolutely anything he, she or they choose about what God wills or intends, blesses or condemns. It also — up until now — has protected the rest of us from any other American imposing those beliefs on us.

In short: Religious liberty is NOT the liberty to impose your religion on everybody else.

For example: A Jew has the religious liberty to keep a kosher kitchen — but not to take away your ham sandwich. A pre-Vatican II Roman Catholic had the religious liberty to abstain from meat on Friday — but not to confiscate my pot roast. And an Evangelical Christian has the right to believe that God doesn’t bless same-sex marriages - but not to deny equal protection to the marriage of the lesbian couple next door.

The First Amendment is doing its job protecting our religious liberty. And anybody who tells you otherwise needs to do a little remedial reading of the Ninth Commandment. (I'll save you having to look it up: that's the "shall not bear false witness" one.)

Bottom line: The equal protection guaranteed all Americans by the Constitution is not equal protection unless it protects all Americans equally. And we cannot rest until it does.

So buckle up, friends … there’s work to do to end this annual SCOTUS Watch ritual where we wait one more time to see if our full humanity and citizenship will be affirmed or diminished by the ongoing efforts to chip away at those rights by using religion as a smoke-screen for homo/transphobic bigotry. And there are miles to go before we live in a nation where liberty and justice has become not just a pledge we make but a reality we live. La lucha continua!

Equal Protection is Not Equal Protection if it doesn't Protect Equally

 

And so we end Pride Month in a year where it is literally open season on LGBTQ people in our nation with another SCOTUS decision chipping away at the ideal that the equal protection guaranteed by the Constitution to all Americans equally protects LGBTQ Americans.

To paraphrase Bishop Barbara — who famously said “there’s no such thing as half-assed baptized” — there is no such thing as half-assed equal protection. So regardless of the majority opinion of the Supreme Court packed with social conservatives by the twice impeached, indicted former President, there remains a distinct and definitive difference between the First Amendment protection of the freedom to exercise religion and the freedom to weaponize religion to assault the equal protection of those who believe differently than you do.

And yes ... it is exhausting to continue to have your life, your relationship, your family and your equal protection a subject of ongoing debate. So it might be a good week to offer the LGBTQ folk in your lives a little extra TLC. And if you’re part of the rainbow tribe to offer yourself a little self-care. Because clearly la lucha continua. And there are miles to go before we rest and -- for the record -- we will not rest until we finally become a nation where liberty and justice for all is not just a pledge we make but a reality we live.

Beyond Inclusion to Transformation

Sermon for June 11, 2023  All Saints Church, Pasadena  | Susan Russell

It was 1998 and I was the Associate Rector at St. Peter's in San Pedro. The Inclusion Wars in the Episcopal Church were heating up with a resolution from the Lambeth Conference of Anglican Bishops declaring "homosexuality incompatible with Scripture" -- a resolution the Diocese of Los Angeles immediately "declined to receive."

A "concerned parishioner" made an appointment to come and talk to me ... and we met in my office. He started out by assuring me he wasn't anti-gay ... "but the thought of two homosexuals standing in the same spot in my church where my wife and I stood and took our marriage vows makes me sick to my stomach -- nothing personal."

Yeah. "Nothing personal." Except, of course, it was.

How is the fact that your relationship with the love of your life makes someone sick to their stomach not personal?

That moment came flooding back to me this week as I read about organizers of the protests against LGBTQ inclusive curriculum in North Hollywood and Glendale who declared: “We want to reiterate that our protest is in no way an attack on the LGBTQ community” while at the same time urging parents to keep their children home because “videos about families will be shown to the students including one where it says, ‘some kids have two mommies, some have two daddies.’“

 Yeah. This "is in no way an attack on the LGBTQ community." Except, of course, it is.

How is the fact that the very existence of LGBTQ families causes outrage, protests and even violence not an attack?

For those of us who have been at this work of bending the arc of history toward inclusion for God’s beloved LGBTQ people over these last decades, it feels a little like we’re in a bad remake of the film “Groundhog Day.” Wait – didn’t we already do that? Didn’t we already fix that?

Is there really someone on the sidewalk heckling us with the same toxic theology talking points we endured back in the 90’s when we started blessing same-sex unions and in 2008 when we were fighting Prop 8?

But we in the LGBTQ+ community are not alone in this Groundhog Day scenario.

The overturn of Roe v Wade and the stripping of bodily autonomy from those who can become pregnant has turned the clock back on reproductive freedom while hard won voting rights are being rolled back, disenfranchising Black and Brown voters. Science is suspect, data is debatable and hate is being monetized to finance an upcoming election cycle in our divided and polarized nation.

White Christian Nationalism is on the rise and Homeland Security has declared a heightened threat environment for domestic terrorism from “individuals inclined to commit violence due to their perceptions of the 2024 general election cycle and legislative or judicial decisions pertaining to sociopolitical issues” and a CNN feature this weekend drew a lot of attention declaring “11:00 on Sunday mornings one of the most dangerous hours in America.”

 Nevertheless, we persist.

We persist in proclaiming the Good News of God’s inclusive love available to absolutely everybody … the work that has been part of the DNA of All Saints Church at least since the 1940’s when the then-rector Frank Scott protested the deportation of Japanese Americans during World War II … the work that incited death threats to the rectory when then rector John Burt helped organize the rally that brought Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to the Coliseum … and the work that inspired then rector George Regas preach the words we heard as our first reading from his sermon at the 1997 Beyond Inclusion conference.

 Beyond Inclusion. That was the language we chose in the 1990’s to frame the work of moving beyond simply including to centering and celebrating gay and lesbian people in the work and witness of All Saints Church. And that was the context where George preached these words to a packed church which had become accustomed to picketers and hecklers on the sidewalk on Sunday mornings after it risked stepping out in faith – and ahead of the rest of the church – with the blessing of the union of Mark Benson and Phil Straw in 1992.

It took great courage for you to risk the livelihood, the reputation, the wonderment of All Saints Church on justice for gay men and lesbians. Yet, we trusted in the depths of God's mystery that truth would be vindicated someday … because we believed God raised the Jesus of inclusive, unconditional love from the dead. We trusted God would bless the courage of this place. You can do the right thing and still survive and thrive. This nation longs for such a church.

 My brothers and sisters and gender fluid siblings – the nation still longs for such a church.

Longs for a church willing to risk getting into the Good Trouble that results when it follows Jesus – the radical rabbi from Nazareth who got into his own Good Trouble by centering the marginalized, by siding with the oppressed, by eating with sinners and outcasts, by insisting that the kingdom of God could not come until there was not a single stranger left at the gate – and by insisting that centering those who have been historically excluded is not erasing those who have been historically centered – it is erasing the silos, barriers and boundaries that keep us from being the human family God created us to be.

Yes, it sometimes feels like a bad remake of Groundhog Day as we take two steps forward only to find ourselves one step back on the journey toward turning the human race into that human family. But it is the journey we sang about in our opening hymn – the journey we’re called to make if we are going to move beyond inclusion to transformation of this broken world into the Beloved Community of blessing it was created to be.

And the words of the reading we heard this morning from Jan Richardson “Here’s one thing you must understand about this blessing: it is not for you alone.”

It is not for you alone.

For if we stop at inclusion – my inclusion, your inclusion, anyone’s inclusion – we miss the point of what it is we’re being included in when we proclaim -- as we do every time we gather here in this sacred space  -- "Whoever you are, and wherever you find yourself on the journey of faith, you are welcome to come to this table to receive the bread and wine made holy."

 These beloved and timeworn words of welcome  -- coined by George Regas and become ubiquitous throughout the Episcopal Church -- are Step One.

Step Two is to be fueled by that bread and wine made holy to go out into the world as beacons of God’s love and justice … of compassion and transformation.

And there are as many ways to do that as there are beautiful, diverse, gifted images of God gathered here this or any Sunday.

 If there was only one way, Jesus would only have had one parable. And he had a million of them … because he knew whoever you were and wherever you found yourself on the journey you needed to hear the Good News he had to proclaim in the way it would speak to your heart and transform you into a partner with him in the work of making that kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven.

This kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed …

The kingdom of heaven is like yeast a woman added to the flour …

The kingdom of heaven is a like a shepherd who leaves 99 sheep to search for the one lost one …

The kingdom of heaven is like a woman who lost a coin,

like a son who squandered his father’s inheritance …

like whatever story it is that is going to get through to you that God’s love is absolutely limitless and that Beloved Community includes absolutely everybody.

 Which makes me think of another story.

 It was 2009 and the Episcopal Church was gathering for its first General Convention after the 2008 meeting of Anglican bishops at Lambeth. The Archbishop of Canterbury had traveled all the way to Anaheim to bring us greetings … and a not so thinly veiled warning, saying he hoped there would not “be decisions in the coming days that could push us further apart” … which was code for opening the way to ordaining any more LGBTQ bishops.

And in that context, we gathered for a Eucharist organized by Integrity – our then LGBTQ Episcopal Church Caucus – where Bishop Barbara Harris of blessed memory was our preacher and uttered these immortal words:

"If you don’t want LGBT folks as bishops, don’t ordain them as deacons. Better yet, be honest and say, “We don’t want you, you don’t belong here,” and don’t bestow upon them the sacrament of Baptism to begin with. How can you initiate someone and then treat them like they’re half-assed baptized?"

 My brothers and sisters and gender fluid siblings, the word we have to the world today from All Saints Church is that there’s no such thing as half-assed baptized and there’s no such thing as half-assed Beloved Community.

And the word we have for world today is that All Saints Church will continue its legacy of being a first responder church … running toward – not away from -- whatever threatens anyone from being a loved, valued and centered member of the Beloved Community we aspire to be.

Because either we’re all in or none of us are.
Either all of us are safe or none of us are.
Either all of our stories and images are represented or none of us are.
Either the radical welcome that calls us beyond inclusion to transformation includes all of us or none of us.

 La lucha continua -- the struggle continues. But we're in it to win it … so as much as we yearn to hear those longed-for words “arriving at destination” from our spiritual GPS, we know there are miles to go before we rest – before liberty and justice for all really means all -- before that kingdom come on earth is not just a prayer we pray but a reality we live.

And so we continue to take two steps forward and the occasional step back …
trusting in the depths of God's mystery that truth will be vindicated someday …
trusting God will continue to bless the courage of this place ...
trusting you can do the right thing and not just survive  -- but thrive – as we journey together into the of the God who loves us beyond our wildest imaginings – and into the blazing day.

We your people, Ours the journey
Now and ever, Now and ever
Now and evermore. Amen.

Nothing Personal

So it was 1998 and I was the Associate Rector at St. Peter's in San Pedro. The Inclusion Wars in the Episcopal Church were heating up with a resolution from the Lambeth Conference of Anglican Bishops declaring "homosexuality incompatible with Scripture" -- a resolution the Diocese of Los Angeles immediately "declined to receive."

A "concerned parishioner" made an appointment to come and and talk ... and we met in my office. He started out by saying he wasn't anti-gay ... "but the thought of two homosexuals standing in the same place where my wife and I stood and made our marriage vows makes me sick to my stomach -- nothing personal."

Yeah. "Nothing personal." Except, of course, it was. How is the fact that your relationship with the love of your life makes someone sick to their stomach not personal?

That story came right back to me when I read this in the LAT article about the protests today in North Hollywood:

“We want to reiterate that our protest is in no way an attack on the LGBTQ community,” the group wrote. “We recognize the importance of promoting equality and acceptance for all individuals.” The group, however, had set its sights on Friday’s Gay Pride and Rainbow Day assembly and urged other parents to keep their children home that day. “Keep your kids home,” a flier posted by the group said. “Videos will be shown to the students including one where it says, ‘some kids have 2 mommies, some have 2 daddies.’ This has caused outrage among parents.”

Yeah. This "is in no way an attack on the LGBTQ community." Except, of course, it is. How is the fact that the very existence of LGBTQ families causes outrage and protests not an attack?

La lucha continua -- the struggle continues. But we're in it to win it, so we'll just keep doing what we've been doing before, during and after 1998. Showing up. Supporting each other. Giving thanks for our allies. Returning again and again like the persistent widow in Luke's gospel ... until liberty and justice for all truly means all becomes not just a pledge we make but a reality we live.

Eat your Wheaties, friends. There's a lot of work left to do.

The Consultation Weighs in on Diocese of Florida election process

Bishops with jurisdiction and Standing Committees around the Episcopal Church continue to weigh in on consents to the election of a new bishop for the Diocese of Florida. It is always a long, drawn out process -- in this case made the more so by widely debated and much discussed concerns about both the integrity of this election process in general and this episcopal candidate in particular. 

On May 13, The Consultation -- the Episcopal Church's progressive collaborative "striving for peace & justice since 1985" -- sent out a letter which included this essential reminder:

We continue to believe that this particular consent process has reverberations not only for the Diocese of Florida but also for the wider Church. At stake in this election, which emerged out of a documented discriminatory system, is whether we as a wider Church will hold ourselves to account to our non-discrimination canons. 

It also reminded us of the crucial importance in this process of listening to the voices on the margins of church -- those "strangers at the gate" who remain directly impacted by the systemic discrimination which we continue to struggle to overcome on our journey to become the Beloved Community we aspire to be. We are not a distraction from -- or a "politicization of"-- the process. We are part of the process. 

Participating in the polity of our church, and making use of the ways it provides for input and discussion by all four orders of ministry and especially those groups historically on the margins, is part of the work of becoming the Beloved Community. We stand in the light of saints whose courage helped forge our work and brought us to where we are today, including Bishop Barbara Harris, Louie Crew Clay, and the Philadelphia Eleven whose 50th ordination anniversary we will celebrate next year.

We need the kind of comprehensive insight, perspective, and truthfulness that communities such as our coalitional members, as well as the LGBTQ+ Caucus, the Deputies of Color, and many more, lend to shine light on our collective path ahead. In all of our struggles, we hold together in solidarity and love.

Bearing in mind that my "day job" is as the Canon for Engagement Across Difference here in the Diocese of Los Angeles, I recognize that good people of deep faith are going to come to different conclusions on whether or not to consent to this election. And at this point, no matter what the outcome, there is going to be much healing and rebuilding of both trust and discipleship needed on the other side as we continue to aspire to those core Gospel values of solidarity and love. 

Nevertheless, we persist. We persist in calling the Church hold itself to its non-discrimination canons. We persist in recognizing that there is a fundamental difference between feeling discriminated against because you are disagreed with and being discriminated against because of who you are. And we persist in believing that we can become a Beloved Community where the full and equal claim promised to God's beloved LGBTQ people becomes not just a resolution we adopt but a reality we live -- in every diocese of this Church.

Gracious God, we pray for your holy Catholic Church. Fill it with all truth, in all truth with all peace. Where it is corrupt, purify it; where it is in error, direct it; where in any thing it is amiss, reform it. Where it is right, strengthen it; where it is in want, provide for it; where it is divided, reunite it; for the sake of Jesus Christ your Son our Savior. Amen.

  

Telling the Philadelphia Eleven Story

Friends, we are coming up on the 50th Anniversary of the stained-glass-ceiling-shattering ordinations of the first eleven women as priests in the Episcopal Church: July 29, 2024. A brilliant feature length documentary -- The Philadelphia Eleven -- is on final approach to mark that anniversary ... and I am writing today to ask you to join with those who are helping complete the work by making a tax-deductible donation to finish the work. 

The inimitable Dr. Fredrica Harris Thompsett famously taught that the reason we learn our history is to get a running start on our future -- and as we face a future where it increasingly looks like we are going to have to continue to battle to both secure the hard won rights of the past and move the needle forward for those who are still on the margins, the story of these valiant women and their allies offers both balm in Gilead and strength for the journey. 

First watch this three minute trailer:

The Philadelphia Eleven (official trailer) from Time Travel Productions LLC on Vimeo.

And then click here to join with the great cloud of witnesses to tell the Philadelphia Eleven story. 

Ready. Set. Go!