Restoration to Unity: Personal reflections in Advent

I was in the restroom at the evangelical church my brother Stephen attended near Portland. It was the day of Stephen’s funeral. Stephen had died suddenly of a heart attack at the age of 49, leaving a shocked and grieving spouse and six grieving sons.

I immediately recognized the man who walked in as I was at the sink. He was a friend of our family who had been a member of a church my father had pastored some thirty years previous. Apparently he recognized me as well, for as he stood at the urinal doing his business his rich baritone voice boomed out: “So Jonathan, I hear you’re hanging out with those liberal Episcopalians!”

I left the restroom and went back to my family.

I recall this event as a manifestation of the kind of us-versus-them binary so encouraged and promoted in the church culture of my youth  In my youth I was told of a world of binaries of “saved” and “unsaved” people, of “modernist” versus “Bible-believing” Christians, of “true” Christians versus “apostate” Christians.

My recent reading through documents left by my father when he died 47 years ago is reviving memories of this time in my life. 

My father was born in 1916 and raised in Seattle as an Episcopalian, but left that behind in his college years. He once told me of his period of agnosticism before a conversion experience which was to re-shape his life and future as the zealous and powerful advocate of evangelical Christianity that I knew. The time frame of his active ministry in various capacities was the beginning of the 1940’s until his death from cancer in 1975 at the age of 59.

To read my father’s letters and papers is to have an intimate and personal view of religious life in the 20th Century, beginning with the fundamentalist-modernist controversy of the early century. This controversy birthed evangelical movements and institutions and opened up sharp divisions between these fundamentalist and evangelical churches and institutions and the “mainline” churches over issues of biblical interpretation, evolutionary biology, the ecumenical movement, and religious pluralism. During this time the mainline churches were beginning to engage in self-critique while evangelical churches and institutions were expressing confidence that they were the true inheritors of the Christian faith standing against the apostasy of the old mainline churches of Protestantism and what they considered to be the corruptions of Rome.

This brings me back to the restroom of that church on the day of my brother’s funeral. The man who walked in and addressed me that day had also been raised Episcopalian, I now know from having read about him in my father’s documents. He’d been a choir director in his parish. He’d converted to evangelical Christianity due in large part to the influence of my father. I don’t know any details about the story of that conversion. Knowing this general story, however, I now surmise that when he practically spat those words “liberal Episcopalians,” he was expressing something I’ll never completely understand; something he felt deeply.

I can sympathize with him, in a way. I know how I feel when someone I know, a relative, a friend, pursues a path I could not follow and embraces ideas that I do not embrace. I think: “How can they think this way?” I wonder: “How can they believe that?” I’ve found meaning for life in ideas held within communities of discourse in which I participate; in a community of faith that has shaped my understanding and given me a way of being oriented to another way of knowing God and apprehending God’s life in the world. That community of faith is Anglicanism in general and the Episcopal Church in particular.  It does not claim to be an exclusive path to God, and that’s one of the things I value about it.  Following the practices of this branch of the Church continues to offer me a challenging and fulfilling path to God within a large tradition of Christian discourse over two millennia.

That man in the restroom that day had left the Episcopal Church of his youth and young adulthood to embrace another path, just as my father had left the Episcopal Church in his young adulthood to embrace a form of Christian faith. Since God meets us wherever we are, I’m assuming that his search - and my father’s search - were toward God, and since God is the one searching us out and meeting us wherever we are, I’m assuming that they met God in a new way in the context of a church community that pressed upon them the necessity of taking God seriously, of taking their own response to God seriously.

So when I remember that booming voice coming at me that day, I think: “yeah, I think I know how you feel.” I think about what I might be tempted to say on the day I meet one of my relatives who walks on the other side of a great divide in our culture today. The issues over which we are divided are serious issues demanding serious moral and spiritual engagement, issues which demand that we take a side on behalf of suffering and unjustly treated siblings on the margins of society. Nevertheless, not every occasion is an occasion for confrontation. Some occasions are simply personal occasions, occasions to nurture basic human relationships of mutual regard and respect. I’ve failed at this many times, and here I remember the wisdom of Marshall Rosenberg and his patient pedagogy on behalf of non-violent communication; a most commendable discipline for any time and place and culture.

The mission of the Church, the Book of Common Prayer in use in the Episcopal Church asserts, is to “restore all people to unity with God and each other in Christ.”

The same Prayerbook tradition also invites me to renew baptismal vows several times a year, and in those vows we promise to “respect the dignity and freedom of every person.”

The God I’m desiring to know and seeking to welcome this Advent is a God whose creation and loving regard for every one of God’s creatures is the foundation for the hope we have that in the end, God will awaken us all to the reality of our collective existence. That reality is that we are basically one, that we have dignity and worth, and that we are worthy of respect, and that we are here to care for one another and the Earth. God will do this, and the mission of the Church is to see where God is at work doing this and to ask God to do that work within us and through us, in anticipation of the coming Reign of God.