WEBVTT
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[SPEAKER_00]: This is the first in a series of conversations about the Episcopal tradition and who we are and why we do things certain ways.
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[SPEAKER_00]: My name is Mike Angel.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I am one of the clergy at Saint Michael and all angels of Episcopal Church here in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and I'm glad to be with you.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Today we're going to look at the question, why Christianity and the sort of sub-question
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[SPEAKER_00]: On Sunday, we gathered with the newcomers class for the first time, and I was honestly really impressed by the questions.
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[SPEAKER_00]: We had everybody go around the room and say their name and the spiritual tradition that they've spent the most time in, and then to share a question that they want to talk about in newcomers.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And I was honestly really deeply impressed by the questions, because a lot of times those questions can be sort of trivia.
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[SPEAKER_00]: What is the episcopal teaching on the Eucharist or what is a bishop?
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[SPEAKER_00]: And definitely we'll talk about some of those questions in this class, but the questions that were shared by this group of newcomers were more fundamental.
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[SPEAKER_00]: What role can spirituality play in my life?
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[SPEAKER_00]: How can I be a part of a faith community?
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[SPEAKER_00]: Why Christianity?
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[SPEAKER_00]: And I want to start there today.
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[SPEAKER_00]: So I want to share a little bit about me and my journey of faith as a lens for this question, why Christianity, why the Episcopal Church, why the Episcopal Branch of the Jesus Movement, as our former presiding Bishop Curry, Michael, former presiding Bishop, Michael Curry used to say,
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[SPEAKER_00]: So I want to give three starts for me for why Christianity, and I want to begin with Christianity as a spirituality of resistance.
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[SPEAKER_00]: We're living in a time when the idea of deconstructing our faith is a common discussion.
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[SPEAKER_00]: We read new stories about how the church is shrinking, how Christianity is fading and relevance.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And there are a lot of folks who have come into this discussion with some trauma.
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[SPEAKER_00]: from the church.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The church didn't welcome them, didn't welcome someone they loved.
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[SPEAKER_00]: They encountered a tradition in the church that was more about control than it was about exploration, a spirituality that was about adherence more than how to go into depth and wisdom.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And so,
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[SPEAKER_00]: I want to say that I re-encounter Christianity when I was in high school and into college reading the work of liberation, theologians, and beginning to understand that Christianity was meant to be a spirituality of resistance.
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[SPEAKER_00]: One of the early voices in reshaping Christianity or our understanding of Christianity in this way was the late Howard Thurman.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Thurman was a mentor of Dr. King.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He was the preacher at the chapel at Boston University when King was a doctoral student there.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And Thurman had also gone to school with King's dad.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Howard Thurman is thought of in many circles as the mystic of the civil rights movement.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And Howard Thurman wrote in his famous book, Jesus and the disinherited, that for him Christianity is worthless unless it has something to say to the person with their back up against a wall.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I've encountered in Christianity a tradition with a great deal to say to people with their backs up against the wall.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Thurmin and other liberation theologians have helped us to see that Jesus lived in a time where there was a great deal of political oppression and suppression.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Jesus was a Palestinian Jew living at a time when Palestine and Galilee where Jesus started his life
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[SPEAKER_00]: were places on the edge of the Roman Empire and it was a violent edge.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Jesus encountered soldiers, Jesus encountered people who were being taxed to their wits and Jesus and his family likely were among the poorest of the poor in that region.
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[SPEAKER_00]: and Jesus initiates a way of thinking about faith of spirituality that keeps those on the margins at the center.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Our Thurman says you have to understand Christianity as a technique for survival.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And I have found that to be an incredibly important part of how I approach this tradition now, to look at how this tradition helps me to stay alive when the world around can be so oppressive.
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[SPEAKER_00]: How it brings dignity to the people who are most on the margins, most oppressed.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And the way it causes us to engage.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The second reason why Christianity, for me, is the wisdom tradition that Christianity represents and it's a place in our culture.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The stories of the Bible, in many ways, are sort of the deep code underneath a lot of our culture.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The biblical metaphor is the language of the Bible, is so central to how my world has been shaped.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I'm thinking about little phrases from scripture like yay though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death and how many times that is appeared in literature or in poetry or in the spirituality of my grandparents.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And what's interesting about that is depending on
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[SPEAKER_00]: what cultural groupings you grew up in, the language, the traditions, different pieces of Christianity may have been emphasized, different stories, different metaphors.
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[SPEAKER_00]: in a lot of Latin America, Matthew 25, where Jesus says, whatever you do unto the least of these, my siblings, you do unto me, has been a central part of the birth of a sort of spirituality of liberation and resilience.
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[SPEAKER_00]: in the black community in the United States, living through the time of enslavement, and the time of Jim Crow, the story of the Exodus.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Of God setting God's people free was one of the dominant metaphors and narratives for their experience.
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[SPEAKER_00]: many of the spirituals sing about Moses and they are talking about what it means to have a spirituality and a trust that God will set you free.
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[SPEAKER_00]: So it is a tradition that resonates through the generations, through the centuries, and in our common expression, our life today.
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[SPEAKER_00]: But I think it's important that we also claim the pieces of that tradition that have meaning for us.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Part of the reason I'm actively involved in Christianity today is I think we cannot allow the dominant culture around us to determine our metaphors, our stories, and their meanings for us.
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[SPEAKER_00]: There's so many churches out there that use the Bible as a way to exclude, as a way to control.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And so I want to be part of a spirituality that says, this is how I interpret the story.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And we don't see eye to eye on what you're saying.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And part of that is understanding the Bible less as a book of directions for how to live your life as a set of rules by which you have to live by, and more as a book of direction.
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[SPEAKER_00]: We'll talk more about that in our session on scripture, but to understand that what we inherit
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[SPEAKER_00]: Christianity is a wisdom tradition.
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[SPEAKER_00]: These are stories and teachings that have helped people to set themselves and others free at crucial times in the human history.
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[SPEAKER_00]: These are stories that have helped people understand the depths of our world.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Understand that at the hardest moments
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[SPEAKER_00]: Yay though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, thou art with me, that there is something in that wisdom tradition worth holding on to, that those prayers, those songs that our grandparents sang, their way of gathering, really still can matter and can matter for us.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And the third reason for me why Christianity is Jesus, Jesus of Nazareth, as much as it sort of makes me nervous sometimes to say that we're Jesus out loud in our culture, I am in love with Jesus.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Jesus of Nazareth lived at a time as I said when oppression and suppression were all around.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And Jesus walked and taught in a way that brought people to life.
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[SPEAKER_00]: One of the early church teachers, Erineus, said that the glory of God is the human person fully alive.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And if you watch Jesus in the gospels, if you watch what he's doing, who he's touching and what happens,
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[SPEAKER_00]: you see people becoming more fully alive, healed from what was separating them from society and reintegrated into their community.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Even when Jesus is frustrated with the powers that be whether those are governmental or religious powers, and part of what I admire so much about Jesus, is this person who someone we could consider young and arse's hiding has the guts to stand up to the religious and governmental institutions, but even when he does so, Jesus does, and even when he's angry about it,
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[SPEAKER_00]: There's an invitation that people might live their life more fully, live more fully in community with one another.
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[SPEAKER_00]: John Sabrino, this Salvadoran liberation, theologian, says that to understand Jesus, you need to understand that the center of Jesus' teaching was not Jesus.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The center of Jesus' teaching was the reign of God.
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[SPEAKER_00]: What we sometimes translate, kingdom of God, was this alternate place.
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[SPEAKER_00]: this alternate reality, this way of being in the world, this place, where all people were welcome, where the table was opened to all, where no one was left out, no one was left hungry, Jesus preached the reign of God in the face of the reign of cruel emperors.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It's what God
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[SPEAKER_00]: But the cross is not the end of the story.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The cross is one moment in the story.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And when we get to Easter, we proclaim the resurrection, the idea that what Jesus taught the life that Jesus brought is stronger than death, that no death dealing powers of the world will have the final word.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And so Jesus is
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[SPEAKER_00]: The last reason I'm listening, but probably the primary reason why I stay Christian.
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[SPEAKER_00]: So let's turn to the Episcopal branch of the Jesus movement.
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[SPEAKER_00]: That language I'm intentionally borrowing from Michael Curry because calling us a branch of the Jesus movement reminds us that
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[SPEAKER_00]: This is not about preserving some institution, and we are not alone in following Jesus as Episcopalians.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Part of what I appreciate about the Episcopal tradition is that descending from the Church of England, coming from our Anglican roots, we didn't create at the time of the Reformation a whole list of doctrines that you must believe.
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[SPEAKER_00]: A lot of the traditions and Protestantism did that, Catholicism and reaction to the reformation really got more dogmatic, and our tradition didn't say you must believe this whole list of things.
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[SPEAKER_00]: You must sign on the dotted line.
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[SPEAKER_00]: We backed ourselves up to the creeds, to the ancient statements of faith,
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[SPEAKER_00]: And in doing so, we created room and breath and with in our tradition.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The comedian Robin Williams has a whole set on the Episcopal Church.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He was Episcopalian and he says one of the beautiful things about the Episcopal tradition is that no matter what you believe, you'll find at least one Episcopalian who agrees with you.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And he's doing that to be funny, but there's also a bit of truth in it.
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[SPEAKER_00]: We are a wide tent.
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[SPEAKER_00]: We are intentionally a wide tent.
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[SPEAKER_00]: We seek to be comprehensive.
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[SPEAKER_00]: That is to say, to be able to hold together people from different backgrounds, from different approaches, that the Episcopal Church, when we are at our best,
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[SPEAKER_00]: Now, I have to be honest about the Episcopal Church, because we have been the Church of Empire, the Church of Power.
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[SPEAKER_00]: In the beginning of the United States, the Church of England was part of the colonial project, religion was part of colonization.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The Episcopal Church blessed and parts of it defended slavery.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Now, we also had members within the church who prophetically preached against slavery and worked against the enslavement.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It's a both-and, Absolum Jones was the first black Episcopal priest.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He was a man in Philadelphia who had purchased his own freedom, led an Episcopal congregation, and his sermon on the day of
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[SPEAKER_00]: the end of the slave trade in the United States is one of the first religious documents we have imagining a United States without slavery.
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[SPEAKER_00]: So there is within this tradition disagreement and there are moments when we have been both the church of power and the church imagining liberation at the same time.
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[SPEAKER_00]: But the Episcopal Church is wrestling with its history of abuses of power.
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[SPEAKER_00]: My seminary is located in Alexandria, Virginia, just south of Washington, D.C., many of the historic buildings were built by enslaved labor.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And just a few years ago, Virginia seminary made the New York Times front page because they were the first academic institution in the United States to start a formal program of reparations.
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[SPEAKER_00]: They set aside a part, admittedly not a huge part, but a part of their endowments.
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[SPEAKER_00]: to offer compensation to the families of those who were enslaved and whose labor helped to build the institution.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The Episcopal Church is wrestling with our legacy and I think it's an important moment to be doing that and I'm glad to be in a tradition where we are beginning that wrestling.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The other thing I want to say about the Episcopal tradition and why I find it compelling
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[SPEAKER_00]: is that I think we can be described as the historic church seeking to engage with context.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The Episcopal tradition comes from the Church of England and it comes its born at a time when a big impetus of the work wasn't to list some new doctrinal set of beliefs
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[SPEAKER_00]: but was to take the tradition and to put it in the language of the people.
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[SPEAKER_00]: That was English in our first incarnations, but when we are at our strongest, we are a church that seeks to operate in multiple languages.
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[SPEAKER_00]: We have official prayer books in English and Spanish in French across the Anglican Communion.
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[SPEAKER_00]: There are hundreds of languages, prayed every Sunday in our churches.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And I find that to be really important.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I appreciate being in a tradition that tries to take the earliest wisdom of Christianity, the ways of gathering that actually in some ways predate Jesus.
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[SPEAKER_00]: When we gather around a sacred meal each Sunday,
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[SPEAKER_00]: We are remembering Jesus, but we are remembering his Jewish tradition.
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[SPEAKER_00]: We are remembering the Seder meals, and other ways of blessing and breaking bread together.
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[SPEAKER_00]: We're re-interpreting ancient symbols.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And I think when we are at our strongest, the Episcopal Church is trying to be both traditional and worship.
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[SPEAKER_00]: and intentionally progressive in our engagement with the world around us.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I know friends who have a viscable church, saying slogans, they put on on t-shirts, that says something like, you know, all saints church, ancient worship, progressive theology.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And there's something beautiful about that, about inviting the ancient tradition to speak to our modern times.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Finally, I'll say that that in my lifetime has meant that as an openly gay man, there was never a bar for me to serve as a priest.
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[SPEAKER_00]: My wedding was blessed in an Episcopal Cathedral before the state where that look at the
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[SPEAKER_00]: with the trans community and working to be more inclusive and we've got a lot of work to do to be more inclusive here in New Mexico of the Spanish speaking and Latino-Iarged peoples to be more inclusive of people with disability to be more inclusive in a great deal of ways but I'm grateful to be in a tradition that is actively working on these questions.
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[SPEAKER_00]: So I want to finish with two images.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Those two images, I think, helped to tell you a little bit about the Christian faith, and they get us into the big question I'd like us to consider in discussion.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I'd love to hear when we meet in the comments here what is it about Christianity?
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[SPEAKER_00]: What is it about the Episcopal Church that still inspires you that makes you want to watch a video about why Christianity, why the Episcopal Branch makes you want to engage in a newcomer's class?
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[SPEAKER_00]: And I think a part of that is about our images for God.
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[SPEAKER_00]: So I want to offer two images for God that are related, that have been important to me.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The first is an icon by Rubelev, a Russian iconographer.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It's an image of the Trinity.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Christians are
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[SPEAKER_00]: Tricky, when it comes to whether or not we're monotheists, other monotheistic siblings will tell us I have a Jewish rabbi friend who says, Mike, you're not monotheists, and I always have to have a caveat.
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[SPEAKER_00]: But the image of the Trinity by Rube Blav has these three angelic figures seated around the table.
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[SPEAKER_00]: and it holds this idea that I think for Christians is really important.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And as I talk about it, I'd encourage you to think about what are your images for God?
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[SPEAKER_00]: We'll be talking about that together in the class.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I'd invite you to write about it in the comments.
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[SPEAKER_00]: But what are your images for God?
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[SPEAKER_00]: The rublave image of the Trinity is one of my images of God, because it features these three persons seated around the table.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The Christian tradition teaches that God is triune, three persons in unity, and this is an image of what that can mean.
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[SPEAKER_00]: One of my favorite names for God, are ways of naming the Trinitarian God, comes from St. Augustin, who says you can also call God instead of Father's Son and Holy Spirit, the lover, the beloved and love itself.
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[SPEAKER_00]: In the image from Luke, Rubel of those three figures, seated around a table are distinct persons, but in fellowship with one another, there is a dynamism, a life in the heart of God, a meal that is shared, a fellowship.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And part of what I find so powerful about Rubelev's Trinity is that there is a space open.
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[SPEAKER_00]: When you look at the icon, you're not looking down on the figures or you're not particularly a part.
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[SPEAKER_00]: You notice that the table is open to you.
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[SPEAKER_00]: the Trinity that God's life is so hard to describe that we have to consider God a mystery, our language is all metaphor and symbol when it comes to God.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And we're invited to participate in that mystery, in that inner life, in that dynamism at the heart of God.
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[SPEAKER_00]: So that's why Rublev's image of the Trinity is one of my favorite images of God.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The second one I want to share with you is actually a modern reinterpretation of Rubelev.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It's an icon written by my friend Kelly Lattamore.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It was commissioned by another friend, the Episcopal Priest, Mark Bizzoudi Jones.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And in this image, Kelly's playing with Rubelev's Trinity.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And you can see that rather than these sort of non-distinct and delicate figures, you have three women.
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[SPEAKER_00]: black woman in the center with long dreads, an Asian woman, and a brown skid woman who might be Latina, she might be Lebanese.
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[SPEAKER_00]: All gathered around in that same shape, that same dynamic unity.
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[SPEAKER_00]: But on the table is a rainbow tablecloth.
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[SPEAKER_00]: This is an image that celebrates what I think the Episcopal Church, the Episcopal branch of the Jesus movement, is trying to approach in our own day.
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[SPEAKER_00]: That is to say clearly that people who have been excluded from the table fellowship.
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[SPEAKER_00]: people who have been doubted in their faith and their worthiness to lead, those people are invited, exactly those people are invited into the life of God, into the table fellowship of Jesus.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The table is such a powerful image in Christianity.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It is a lot of what Jesus got in trouble for.
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[SPEAKER_00]: His table was too wide open for the religious leaders of his day, and so that image of the table
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[SPEAKER_00]: that is intentionally including those who have been left out in the history of the church, is a powerful image I think today for why this expression of Christianity can be a worthwhile expression, can be a safe space to explore, to plumb the depths, and even to belong.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And so I want to finish there, but to name that my reasons for Christianity and for the Episcopal Church are not the end of the story.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I'd really encourage you to think about why this tradition, why this branch of the Jesus movement for you, and what are your images of God?
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[SPEAKER_00]: What is the God that you are hoping to encounter again?
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[SPEAKER_00]: I look forward to more discussion.
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[SPEAKER_00]: God bless.
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[SPEAKER_00]: This is the first in a series of conversations about the Episcopal tradition and who we are and why we do things certain ways.
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[SPEAKER_00]: My name is Mike Angel.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I am one of the clergy at Saint Michael and all angels of Episcopal Church here in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and I'm glad to be with you.
00:20.891 --> 00:29.599
[SPEAKER_00]: Today we're going to look at the question, why Christianity and the sort of sub-question
00:30.507 --> 00:38.517
[SPEAKER_00]: On Sunday, we gathered with the newcomers class for the first time, and I was honestly really impressed by the questions.
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[SPEAKER_00]: We had everybody go around the room and say their name and the spiritual tradition that they've spent the most time in, and then to share a question that they want to talk about in newcomers.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And I was honestly really deeply impressed by the questions, because a lot of times those questions can be sort of trivia.
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[SPEAKER_00]: What is the episcopal teaching on the Eucharist or what is a bishop?
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[SPEAKER_00]: And definitely we'll talk about some of those questions in this class, but the questions that were shared by this group of newcomers were more fundamental.
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[SPEAKER_00]: What role can spirituality play in my life?
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[SPEAKER_00]: How can I be a part of a faith community?
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[SPEAKER_00]: Why Christianity?
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[SPEAKER_00]: And I want to start there today.
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[SPEAKER_00]: So I want to share a little bit about me and my journey of faith as a lens for this question, why Christianity, why the Episcopal Church, why the Episcopal Branch of the Jesus Movement, as our former presiding Bishop Curry, Michael, former presiding Bishop, Michael Curry used to say,
01:57.363 --> 02:09.769
[SPEAKER_00]: So I want to give three starts for me for why Christianity, and I want to begin with Christianity as a spirituality of resistance.
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[SPEAKER_00]: We're living in a time when the idea of deconstructing our faith is a common discussion.
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[SPEAKER_00]: We read new stories about how the church is shrinking, how Christianity is fading and relevance.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And there are a lot of folks who have come into this discussion with some trauma.
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[SPEAKER_00]: from the church.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The church didn't welcome them, didn't welcome someone they loved.
02:41.502 --> 02:57.565
[SPEAKER_00]: They encountered a tradition in the church that was more about control than it was about exploration, a spirituality that was about adherence more than how to go into depth and wisdom.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And so,
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[SPEAKER_00]: I want to say that I re-encounter Christianity when I was in high school and into college reading the work of liberation, theologians, and beginning to understand that Christianity was meant to be a spirituality of resistance.
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[SPEAKER_00]: One of the early voices in reshaping Christianity or our understanding of Christianity in this way was the late Howard Thurman.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Thurman was a mentor of Dr. King.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He was the preacher at the chapel at Boston University when King was a doctoral student there.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And Thurman had also gone to school with King's dad.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Howard Thurman is thought of in many circles as the mystic of the civil rights movement.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And Howard Thurman wrote in his famous book, Jesus and the disinherited, that for him Christianity is worthless unless it has something to say to the person with their back up against a wall.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I've encountered in Christianity a tradition with a great deal to say to people with their backs up against the wall.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Thurmin and other liberation theologians have helped us to see that Jesus lived in a time where there was a great deal of political oppression and suppression.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Jesus was a Palestinian Jew living at a time when Palestine and Galilee where Jesus started his life
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[SPEAKER_00]: were places on the edge of the Roman Empire and it was a violent edge.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Jesus encountered soldiers, Jesus encountered people who were being taxed to their wits and Jesus and his family likely were among the poorest of the poor in that region.
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[SPEAKER_00]: and Jesus initiates a way of thinking about faith of spirituality that keeps those on the margins at the center.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Our Thurman says you have to understand Christianity as a technique for survival.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And I have found that to be an incredibly important part of how I approach this tradition now, to look at how this tradition helps me to stay alive when the world around can be so oppressive.
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[SPEAKER_00]: How it brings dignity to the people who are most on the margins, most oppressed.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And the way it causes us to engage.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The second reason why Christianity, for me, is the wisdom tradition that Christianity represents and it's a place in our culture.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The stories of the Bible, in many ways, are sort of the deep code underneath a lot of our culture.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The biblical metaphor is the language of the Bible, is so central to how my world has been shaped.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I'm thinking about little phrases from scripture like yay though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death and how many times that is appeared in literature or in poetry or in the spirituality of my grandparents.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And what's interesting about that is depending on
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[SPEAKER_00]: what cultural groupings you grew up in, the language, the traditions, different pieces of Christianity may have been emphasized, different stories, different metaphors.
06:51.848 --> 07:11.730
[SPEAKER_00]: in a lot of Latin America, Matthew 25, where Jesus says, whatever you do unto the least of these, my siblings, you do unto me, has been a central part of the birth of a sort of spirituality of liberation and resilience.
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[SPEAKER_00]: in the black community in the United States, living through the time of enslavement, and the time of Jim Crow, the story of the Exodus.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Of God setting God's people free was one of the dominant metaphors and narratives for their experience.
07:31.403 --> 07:42.016
[SPEAKER_00]: many of the spirituals sing about Moses and they are talking about what it means to have a spirituality and a trust that God will set you free.
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[SPEAKER_00]: So it is a tradition that resonates through the generations, through the centuries, and in our common expression, our life today.
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[SPEAKER_00]: But I think it's important that we also claim the pieces of that tradition that have meaning for us.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Part of the reason I'm actively involved in Christianity today is I think we cannot allow the dominant culture around us to determine our metaphors, our stories, and their meanings for us.
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[SPEAKER_00]: There's so many churches out there that use the Bible as a way to exclude, as a way to control.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And so I want to be part of a spirituality that says, this is how I interpret the story.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And we don't see eye to eye on what you're saying.
08:39.359 --> 08:52.956
[SPEAKER_00]: And part of that is understanding the Bible less as a book of directions for how to live your life as a set of rules by which you have to live by, and more as a book of direction.
08:53.657 --> 09:01.587
[SPEAKER_00]: We'll talk more about that in our session on scripture, but to understand that what we inherit
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[SPEAKER_00]: Christianity is a wisdom tradition.
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[SPEAKER_00]: These are stories and teachings that have helped people to set themselves and others free at crucial times in the human history.
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[SPEAKER_00]: These are stories that have helped people understand the depths of our world.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Understand that at the hardest moments
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[SPEAKER_00]: Yay though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, thou art with me, that there is something in that wisdom tradition worth holding on to, that those prayers, those songs that our grandparents sang, their way of gathering, really still can matter and can matter for us.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And the third reason for me why Christianity is Jesus, Jesus of Nazareth, as much as it sort of makes me nervous sometimes to say that we're Jesus out loud in our culture, I am in love with Jesus.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Jesus of Nazareth lived at a time as I said when oppression and suppression were all around.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And Jesus walked and taught in a way that brought people to life.
10:29.722 --> 10:38.215
[SPEAKER_00]: One of the early church teachers, Erineus, said that the glory of God is the human person fully alive.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And if you watch Jesus in the gospels, if you watch what he's doing, who he's touching and what happens,
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[SPEAKER_00]: you see people becoming more fully alive, healed from what was separating them from society and reintegrated into their community.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Even when Jesus is frustrated with the powers that be whether those are governmental or religious powers, and part of what I admire so much about Jesus, is this person who someone we could consider young and arse's hiding has the guts to stand up to the religious and governmental institutions, but even when he does so, Jesus does, and even when he's angry about it,
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[SPEAKER_00]: There's an invitation that people might live their life more fully, live more fully in community with one another.
11:44.630 --> 11:55.989
[SPEAKER_00]: John Sabrino, this Salvadoran liberation, theologian, says that to understand Jesus, you need to understand that the center of Jesus' teaching was not Jesus.
11:56.931 --> 12:00.197
[SPEAKER_00]: The center of Jesus' teaching was the reign of God.
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[SPEAKER_00]: What we sometimes translate, kingdom of God, was this alternate place.
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[SPEAKER_00]: this alternate reality, this way of being in the world, this place, where all people were welcome, where the table was opened to all, where no one was left out, no one was left hungry, Jesus preached the reign of God in the face of the reign of cruel emperors.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It's what God
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[SPEAKER_00]: But the cross is not the end of the story.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The cross is one moment in the story.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And when we get to Easter, we proclaim the resurrection, the idea that what Jesus taught the life that Jesus brought is stronger than death, that no death dealing powers of the world will have the final word.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And so Jesus is
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[SPEAKER_00]: The last reason I'm listening, but probably the primary reason why I stay Christian.
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[SPEAKER_00]: So let's turn to the Episcopal branch of the Jesus movement.
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[SPEAKER_00]: That language I'm intentionally borrowing from Michael Curry because calling us a branch of the Jesus movement reminds us that
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[SPEAKER_00]: This is not about preserving some institution, and we are not alone in following Jesus as Episcopalians.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Part of what I appreciate about the Episcopal tradition is that descending from the Church of England, coming from our Anglican roots, we didn't create at the time of the Reformation a whole list of doctrines that you must believe.
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[SPEAKER_00]: A lot of the traditions and Protestantism did that, Catholicism and reaction to the reformation really got more dogmatic, and our tradition didn't say you must believe this whole list of things.
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[SPEAKER_00]: You must sign on the dotted line.
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[SPEAKER_00]: We backed ourselves up to the creeds, to the ancient statements of faith,
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[SPEAKER_00]: And in doing so, we created room and breath and with in our tradition.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The comedian Robin Williams has a whole set on the Episcopal Church.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He was Episcopalian and he says one of the beautiful things about the Episcopal tradition is that no matter what you believe, you'll find at least one Episcopalian who agrees with you.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And he's doing that to be funny, but there's also a bit of truth in it.
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[SPEAKER_00]: We are a wide tent.
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[SPEAKER_00]: We are intentionally a wide tent.
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[SPEAKER_00]: We seek to be comprehensive.
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[SPEAKER_00]: That is to say, to be able to hold together people from different backgrounds, from different approaches, that the Episcopal Church, when we are at our best,
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[SPEAKER_00]: Now, I have to be honest about the Episcopal Church, because we have been the Church of Empire, the Church of Power.
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[SPEAKER_00]: In the beginning of the United States, the Church of England was part of the colonial project, religion was part of colonization.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The Episcopal Church blessed and parts of it defended slavery.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Now, we also had members within the church who prophetically preached against slavery and worked against the enslavement.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It's a both-and, Absolum Jones was the first black Episcopal priest.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He was a man in Philadelphia who had purchased his own freedom, led an Episcopal congregation, and his sermon on the day of
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[SPEAKER_00]: the end of the slave trade in the United States is one of the first religious documents we have imagining a United States without slavery.
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[SPEAKER_00]: So there is within this tradition disagreement and there are moments when we have been both the church of power and the church imagining liberation at the same time.
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[SPEAKER_00]: But the Episcopal Church is wrestling with its history of abuses of power.
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[SPEAKER_00]: My seminary is located in Alexandria, Virginia, just south of Washington, D.C., many of the historic buildings were built by enslaved labor.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And just a few years ago, Virginia seminary made the New York Times front page because they were the first academic institution in the United States to start a formal program of reparations.
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[SPEAKER_00]: They set aside a part, admittedly not a huge part, but a part of their endowments.
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[SPEAKER_00]: to offer compensation to the families of those who were enslaved and whose labor helped to build the institution.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The Episcopal Church is wrestling with our legacy and I think it's an important moment to be doing that and I'm glad to be in a tradition where we are beginning that wrestling.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The other thing I want to say about the Episcopal tradition and why I find it compelling
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[SPEAKER_00]: is that I think we can be described as the historic church seeking to engage with context.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The Episcopal tradition comes from the Church of England and it comes its born at a time when a big impetus of the work wasn't to list some new doctrinal set of beliefs
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[SPEAKER_00]: but was to take the tradition and to put it in the language of the people.
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[SPEAKER_00]: That was English in our first incarnations, but when we are at our strongest, we are a church that seeks to operate in multiple languages.
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[SPEAKER_00]: We have official prayer books in English and Spanish in French across the Anglican Communion.
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[SPEAKER_00]: There are hundreds of languages, prayed every Sunday in our churches.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And I find that to be really important.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I appreciate being in a tradition that tries to take the earliest wisdom of Christianity, the ways of gathering that actually in some ways predate Jesus.
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[SPEAKER_00]: When we gather around a sacred meal each Sunday,
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[SPEAKER_00]: We are remembering Jesus, but we are remembering his Jewish tradition.
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[SPEAKER_00]: We are remembering the Seder meals, and other ways of blessing and breaking bread together.
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[SPEAKER_00]: We're re-interpreting ancient symbols.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And I think when we are at our strongest, the Episcopal Church is trying to be both traditional and worship.
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[SPEAKER_00]: and intentionally progressive in our engagement with the world around us.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I know friends who have a viscable church, saying slogans, they put on on t-shirts, that says something like, you know, all saints church, ancient worship, progressive theology.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And there's something beautiful about that, about inviting the ancient tradition to speak to our modern times.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Finally, I'll say that that in my lifetime has meant that as an openly gay man, there was never a bar for me to serve as a priest.
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[SPEAKER_00]: My wedding was blessed in an Episcopal Cathedral before the state where that look at the
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[SPEAKER_00]: with the trans community and working to be more inclusive and we've got a lot of work to do to be more inclusive here in New Mexico of the Spanish speaking and Latino-Iarged peoples to be more inclusive of people with disability to be more inclusive in a great deal of ways but I'm grateful to be in a tradition that is actively working on these questions.
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[SPEAKER_00]: So I want to finish with two images.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Those two images, I think, helped to tell you a little bit about the Christian faith, and they get us into the big question I'd like us to consider in discussion.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I'd love to hear when we meet in the comments here what is it about Christianity?
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[SPEAKER_00]: What is it about the Episcopal Church that still inspires you that makes you want to watch a video about why Christianity, why the Episcopal Branch makes you want to engage in a newcomer's class?
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[SPEAKER_00]: And I think a part of that is about our images for God.
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[SPEAKER_00]: So I want to offer two images for God that are related, that have been important to me.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The first is an icon by Rubelev, a Russian iconographer.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It's an image of the Trinity.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Christians are
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[SPEAKER_00]: Tricky, when it comes to whether or not we're monotheists, other monotheistic siblings will tell us I have a Jewish rabbi friend who says, Mike, you're not monotheists, and I always have to have a caveat.
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[SPEAKER_00]: But the image of the Trinity by Rube Blav has these three angelic figures seated around the table.
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[SPEAKER_00]: and it holds this idea that I think for Christians is really important.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And as I talk about it, I'd encourage you to think about what are your images for God?
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[SPEAKER_00]: We'll be talking about that together in the class.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I'd invite you to write about it in the comments.
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[SPEAKER_00]: But what are your images for God?
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[SPEAKER_00]: The rublave image of the Trinity is one of my images of God, because it features these three persons seated around the table.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The Christian tradition teaches that God is triune, three persons in unity, and this is an image of what that can mean.
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[SPEAKER_00]: One of my favorite names for God, are ways of naming the Trinitarian God, comes from St. Augustin, who says you can also call God instead of Father's Son and Holy Spirit, the lover, the beloved and love itself.
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[SPEAKER_00]: In the image from Luke, Rubel of those three figures, seated around a table are distinct persons, but in fellowship with one another, there is a dynamism, a life in the heart of God, a meal that is shared, a fellowship.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And part of what I find so powerful about Rubelev's Trinity is that there is a space open.
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[SPEAKER_00]: When you look at the icon, you're not looking down on the figures or you're not particularly a part.
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[SPEAKER_00]: You notice that the table is open to you.
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[SPEAKER_00]: the Trinity that God's life is so hard to describe that we have to consider God a mystery, our language is all metaphor and symbol when it comes to God.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And we're invited to participate in that mystery, in that inner life, in that dynamism at the heart of God.
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[SPEAKER_00]: So that's why Rublev's image of the Trinity is one of my favorite images of God.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The second one I want to share with you is actually a modern reinterpretation of Rubelev.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It's an icon written by my friend Kelly Lattamore.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It was commissioned by another friend, the Episcopal Priest, Mark Bizzoudi Jones.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And in this image, Kelly's playing with Rubelev's Trinity.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And you can see that rather than these sort of non-distinct and delicate figures, you have three women.
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[SPEAKER_00]: black woman in the center with long dreads, an Asian woman, and a brown skid woman who might be Latina, she might be Lebanese.
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[SPEAKER_00]: All gathered around in that same shape, that same dynamic unity.
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[SPEAKER_00]: But on the table is a rainbow tablecloth.
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[SPEAKER_00]: This is an image that celebrates what I think the Episcopal Church, the Episcopal branch of the Jesus movement, is trying to approach in our own day.
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[SPEAKER_00]: That is to say clearly that people who have been excluded from the table fellowship.
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[SPEAKER_00]: people who have been doubted in their faith and their worthiness to lead, those people are invited, exactly those people are invited into the life of God, into the table fellowship of Jesus.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The table is such a powerful image in Christianity.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It is a lot of what Jesus got in trouble for.
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[SPEAKER_00]: His table was too wide open for the religious leaders of his day, and so that image of the table
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[SPEAKER_00]: that is intentionally including those who have been left out in the history of the church, is a powerful image I think today for why this expression of Christianity can be a worthwhile expression, can be a safe space to explore, to plumb the depths, and even to belong.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And so I want to finish there, but to name that my reasons for Christianity and for the Episcopal Church are not the end of the story.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I'd really encourage you to think about why this tradition, why this branch of the Jesus movement for you, and what are your images of God?
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[SPEAKER_00]: What is the God that you are hoping to encounter again?
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[SPEAKER_00]: I look forward to more discussion.
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[SPEAKER_00]: God bless.
