To be a miracle

This week, I was away at clergy conference Tues-Thurs,--the annual gathering for all the clergy of the diocese. We have time to hear from our bishops and each other, to hear presentations on ministry and life in the church, and also a little time to relax. Every year I grumble about driving for 2 hours (it’s held on the Cape), but every year by the time I get there it turns out to be worthwhile (however grudgingly I may admit it!) This year, we heard a presentation by Richard Parker. An economist by training and an Episcopal “PK” (preacher’s kid), he talked about how the Episcopal Church has played a unique role in politics in the United States. One of the founders of Mother Jones Magazine, he is now a senior fellow at the Shorenstein Center at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, where he teaches a class titled "Religion, Politics and Public Policy."

Parker spoke movingly of his own spiritual journey, and about how the church is called to engage in public life. He said that after having done “enough church in my first 17 years to last an average person for 40,” he spent a long time away. One day, going past St Mark’s in the Bowery in New York City, he came inside. It was in the early 80’s, when AIDS was just beginning to be recognized as a deadly illness, but a time when people were still afraid that it was communicable by touch. The priest announced that a member was in the last stages of AIDS. As his life was ending, he wanted prayers for healing. So the priest invited the congregation to come up and lay hands on the man. Everyone in the congregation came to the front, but not everyone managed to lay hands on him—some reached out the arms and didn’t quite touch him. They were afraid. But they reached out their hands all the same. Parker said that the experience showed him the way that there is no good substitute for the church—we are not the Sierra Club at prayer, or Democrats or Republicans, or any other group of people at prayer. We are the church; a group of people stumbling forward together, seeking God and God’s grace and justice for us and for the world.

The image of those people reaching their hands toward that AIDS victim stuck with me. In our times of division, in times of anxiety and fear, not everyone will have the courage to lay hands on the person they fear. Not everyone will have that revelation of God’s love—sometimes we are just too afraid. But the church is a place where we try—we are practicing our faith here. And God is always delighted when we reach out to each other, even imperfectly. We practice our faith in the world, too. Being Episcopalians, our faith is not expressed by invoking inward feelings of personal salvation, but outer-directed impulses of Christian love—the love that has the courage to touch someone who is sick or stand on a street corner with a sign advocating an unpopular position. The love that is there for the dying and the destitute, and those who think they are unlovable. The entire world is there for you to lead a Christian life—it’s not just for Sundays. Parker quoted from Phillips Brooks, who was Bishop of Massachusetts in the 1890’s. (Parts of it may be familiar—I think JFK pinched a line)

Do not pray for easy lives. Pray to be stronger people. Do not pray for tasks equal to your powers. Pray for powers equal to your tasks. Then the doing of your work shall be no miracle, but you shall be the miracle.

It will not be a miracle, he said, for us to end global extreme poverty and childhood death from preventable diseases, to stop genocide and global warming, to create a world of peace. It will not be a miracle to have a church where everyone is beloved as a child of God, whatever their sexuality, or race, or nationality or gender. But we will be a miracle for having done it.