On Mercy…

TL/DR: The Episcopal Church has been there and done that.

…you do not believe in it. I understand. You think that the call to love our neighbors as ourselves is a geographic claim, an ethnic claim. I get it. You quote the Bible about obeying the laws of the land. Sure. I get that, too. You proclaim a Gospel of Purity. Yeah…that’s also all too familiar.

You claim to follow the God of Love as incarnated in Christ Jesus, but you reveal nothing of his often scandalous Grace. Instead, you pander to the powers and principalities. You confuse power and grace, privilege and blessing. You conflate rather than contrast the Kingdom of God with the Empires of this world.

We have done the same. Often. It is how we know you are doing it now. We see the same mistake. We recognize it from our own capitulation to the powerful.

The National Cathedral? See what we did there?

But you hold the keys of Empire now. Be careful with those. You may find yourselves on the wrong side of history with the slave owners, colonizers, and the fashioners of genocide. We’ve been there. We know.

And we’re only just beginning to understand our own family history.

Virginia Theological Seminary came out in support of Bishop Budde. She is a product of that institution. They stand with her. They have also set up a reparations fund because they used slave labor to build the institution. You can read more about that here. We are just now waking up to our own complicity with Empire.

I worked at VTS. I was the chapel coordinator for their summer programs for a brief time. This was ten years ago now, but the struggle to understand race and gender and their relationship to institutional power was real. Why doesn’t the Episcopal Church have a Juneteenth liturgy? Well…yeah. That’s easy. But why it doesn’t make room for women in leadership is also at issue. Bishop Budde is a long time trail blazer. She is the first woman to hold the position of bishop in the Diocese of Washington DC.

We’re still paying for our sins of complicity and power mongering. We were the Church of England in the Colonies before we were the Episcopal Church. We get it. So many of us get it.

My father’s family, good Methodists, owned slaves. My father’s family, good Methodists, also presided at the weddings of freed blacks. Legacy is complicated. Who we are as an institutional Church is complicated. We have committed many sins.

So, when we say to you, “Have mercy,” we are also imploring you to not do what we have done. Hubris is some shiny shit. Power is intoxicating.

But we are called to the Way of The Powerless.

Y’all be excellent to each other.