Nate Knows Nada

Openly gay Episcopal Bishop Gene Robinson smiles after being consecrated as the first openly gay bishop in the Episcopal Church in Durham, New Hampshire, November 2, 2003. Some fear that Robinson’s consecration with cause a split in the worldwide Anglican Church. REUTERS/Jim Bourg“>

So, if you’re a regular reader, you’re not surprised that I was in New Hampshire on Sunday to see the Rev. Canon Gene Robinson ordained to the episcopate.  My friends and I were hardly about to miss out on a historic moment in the life of the local and global church.  But first, some background on why this is monumental.

Anglicans, like Roman Catholic and Orthodox Christians, believe in an episcopal structure (from the Greek word episkopos).  What this means is that we have bishops as overseers and pastors for a collection of priests, deacons, and laypeople in a particular geographic area, called a diocese.  It requires three bishops to lay hands upon another person (for Orthodox, Romans, and many Anglicans in the South and to a much lesser degree in the North, that means men) to consecrate a new bishop.  We believe that there is an unbroken line of laying on of hands from the first bishop (St. Peter) to the most current bishop.  (Is this historically tenable?  I don’t know, but the stress on the unbroken line of succession is less for some sort of magic touch passed down from Peter and more to stress the continuity of the contemporary church with the historic church.  It’s all one church, whether past or present.)

Gene Robinson is by no means the first gay bishop in our church or any church.  He’s simply the first gay bishop who is open and honest about his sexuality at the time of his consecration.  There have been Roman Catholic and Anglican gay bishops before, who, for whatever reason, have not been out of the closet.

For an event such as this one, the protest was muted, at best, and the people who had legitimate grounds on which to protest (i.e., they were actually Anglicans of some sort) were generally polite, made their thoughts known, and then left.  These people below were pretty marginal.

Protestors against the consecration of Reverend Gene Robinson as the first openly gay bishop of the Episcopal Church gather outside the ceremonies in Durham, New Hampshire on November 2, 2003. Some fear that Robinson’s consecration will cause a split in the worldwide Anglican Church. Photo by Jim Bourg/Reuters“>

There were about twenty of them, total, in two groups.  Not only that, but they’re not Episcopalians or Anglicans.  If they were willing to show up, be part of our church, come to table with us, and try to be one of us, working this out in our peculiar way, then maybe we’d listen to them.  But they seemed to be intentionally fringe players.  Notably, they (and non-Episcopal supporters) were kept in special pens, to keep them separate and to keep them from disrupting the service.  The local supporters, from UNH and New Hampshire, numbered about 200, by my count.  One nice thing about the supporters: at the end of the service, as we walked out of the hockey arena and the white sign guys above were trying to be loud and vocal and yell at us, the supporters made sure they were louder, clapping and cheering for us, making sure they drowned out the yelling of the protestors.  They thanked us for being there, and I thanked them back.

These people are more problematic.

These are evangelical Protestant Christians who are not Episcopalians holding a candlelight vigil to support the dissident Anglicans.  They are not part of our branch of the church.  I think that we should politely listen to their concerns as fellow Christians, talk with them about their concerns, give them a full hearing.  But I don’t think they should have any real weight in our decisions about how to govern our branch of the whole church.  They have made the choice to be different sorts of Christians than we are, and I don’t think that we’re under any real obligation to give them weight in our deliberations about our common life. Their differences with us are more substantial than just whether gays should be in the church in general or not. If they want a voice in our piece of the church, they need to be part of us. Otherwise, I think that a smile and best wishes for working out their own challenges is pretty much all we need give them. They;ve got no significant legitimacy for our polity.

You may have heard about the Anglican objectors.  Overall, their objections were the same ones they have offered since the beginning of this affair.

• This consecration is unbiblical, as Scripture explicitly condemns homosexuality in any form.  A man living in violation of Scripture (as they understand it) does not live the moral life required of a bishop.
  
• This consecration will impair the ECUSA’s relationship with the rest of the Anglican Communion, as there are other national churches that will “break communion” with us.  (Briefly, this means that they will no longer share sacraments with us and regard any of our sacraments as invalid.  Thus, our ordinations, baptisms, and Eucharists will all be considered invalid.)  If that doesn’t happen, then our communion will be “impaired” (which has no technical meaning, as far as I can tell but does indicate that they’re unhappy and suspicious).  (Of course, no one seems to mention that for many of these churches, both in the Third World and the very conservative West, the communion is already impaired over the ordination of women, as most of these churches and people refuse to recognize the validity of women preists and bishops.  Even the Church of England does nto have women bishops yet.  So there’s already problems on this front….)
  
• The consecration is against our church polity.  This is clearly untrue.  Everything that occurred did so “by the book.”  The Episcopal Church has many checks and balances, from the local to the national level.  There are plenty of places that the approval of this ordination could have stopped, at various points.  And the idea that “liberals” foisted this upon the church by below-the-board politics is a hypocritical charge coming from conservatives in the church who are bankrolled by a multi-millionaire, have secret meetings, and engage in underhanded, hurtful tactics against their oppositions.  Furthermore, the idea that people are “just playing politics” and that that means they are not trying to work out God’s will is pretty ridiculous,  Whoever said God couldn’t do what He wants through human politics?
  
• We all should wait until everyone is on the same page.  I think that this demonstrates a fairly non-Anglican understanding of our common life.  Anglicans only require belief in four things: the Scriptures as received historically in the church, the two primary sacraments, the creeds, and the historic episcopate.  We don’t mandate how people read the Scripture, how they are to pray, or what they must believe regarding the four items above.  We’re intentionally not into the grand philosophical system and uniformity of practice in the Roman Catholic Church, nor are we interested in the uniformity of belief that the confessions of the many Protestant churches.  We’re intentionally poetic rather than prosaic.  And our religious history is one of moving for thousands of years between various pieces of Catholic Christianity and then Protestantism and Roman Catholicism.  For us, faith is not about uniformity of belief; we prefer uniformity of practice with lots of room for the local variation.  We pray together, we commune together, but we don’t always believe together.

At the center of the photo below, there’s a woman in teal-colored robes.  That’s Barbara Clementine Harris, the first woman bishop in the Anglican Communion (she’s also black, which is demographically interesting in the Episcopal Church).  Her consecration in 1989 engendered (pun not intended) much of the same reaction worldwide that Gene Robinson’s did.  Some of the churches that declared themselves to be unhappy with Sunday’s occurrences did the same 14 years ago.  And technically, they are still mad about it.  But we’re all still moving along together, as we agreed (in the end) to disagree about this issue.

Bishop Gene Robinson kneels before Bishops in Durham, N.H. Sunday Nov. 2, 2003 during his consecration. Robinson is the Episcopalian’s first openly gay bishop. (AP Photo/Jim Cole) “>

More later….