My portion of our program tonight is called a fireside chat, for which there are at least two antecedents. About 30 times during his presidency, usually beginning with the words “my friends,” FDR spoke by radio to the people of the United States about the Great Depression and World War II. Someone called them fireside chats because of their reassuring tone.
The Episcopal Church borrowed the term when a presiding bishop, at a conference center, standing in front of a roaring fire, spoke at a House of Bishops meeting. The tradition persists without the fireplace. In my time, Presiding Bishops Curry and Rowe used the time to talk frankly, confidentially, and often reassuringly, in the tradition of the Episcopalian Roosevelt. So if I may, and as briefly as I can, some reflections about the diocese’s life and mine — pastoral, practical, prophetic, and personal.
I remember a certain Sunday when I was a parish priest at St John Chrysostom in Rancho Santa Margarita. I looked from behind the altar and realized I had a recent connection with almost congregant I saw. The same has been true today, in meetings around the hotel and now, as I see your faces. Maybe we’ve had a pastoral conversation, worked on a problem together, or discussed an issue by email. Sometimes we got to know one another better when, preparing to visit your parish or mission, I called to ask nosy questions so I could learn or be reminded about your formation journey. Perhaps I had the privilege of asking you to serve at a place or first got to know you after the vestry called you. Some of our conversations were easier than others.
You are an amazing community of pastors, theologians, teachers, and preachers. You work long hours. You love and care for your people. You gather and treasure the narratives of the places you serve, each of them precious and unique. It has been an incredible blessing and honor to serve with you.
I’m thinking especially of two priests being formed for ordained ministry while I was on the Commission on Ministry. In each case, I asked if I could serve as their shepherd. We now call them COMpanions.
The first is our speaker and teacher this week, the Rev. Dr. Francisco Garcia. He was already a local legend as a labor organizer. I wondered at the time if the question had occurred to him why the Holy Spirit had decided that the companion of a progressive community organizer in Los Angeles should be the former director of the Nixon library in Yorba Linda.
The other priest and former shepherdee I’ll mention is the eighth bishop of Los Angeles, the Rev. Dr. Antonio Jose Gallardo Lucena. Professor and entrepreneur, balancing his church work and his seminary studies, even then Antonio was incredibly busy. Some rounds, we just exchanged voice mails.
As always, we can see what the Holy Spirit was doing – bringing God’s servants together across all kinds of distance and division, to identify our commonality as constituents in the body of the Risen Christ. No worldly circumstance can change that. Our eternal interrelatedness was ordained at the beginning of all things.
It’s the same in our congregations. People are there because they are. They come because they do. It’s always a miracle. Each is a burning bush. As I said to a group of confirmation candidates at All Saints in Pasadena on Sunday, for two thousand years, all this was mandatory. People came to church because they had to. They got their babies baptized because the church taught the heresy that the unbaptized were at risk of damnation.
People come now because they need it, want it, and love it. Church membership confers no social status anymore. People come because it feeds them. This is a brand-new model. We are beta testers. We keep it up by God’s grace and in defiance of empires of polarizing politics and economics that can get more from us, in the form of power or profit, if we stay in our segregated, isolated buckets. When people come, we try to figure out what God is doing and how we can consolidate and amplify the miracles of their presence so that God is glorified and God’s people are cared for.
About the practical, my second subject, I will say as little as possible. As we prepare for Bishop Antonio, the diocese is exactly as sturdy and healthy as the diocese feels it is.
I will say that, as a leadership collective, we’ve tried hard to increase the spirit of collaboration in our fiduciary bodies and be careful about what we spend and how we account for it, as parishes rose magnificently to the challenge of accepting 12% as an assessment rather than a pledge.
We’ve offered affordable housing as a way to use our real estate to care for our neighbors and sustain our congregations. We got one another through Covid together.
We have stood with affiliated organizations such as Episcopal Communities & Services, which champions affordable housing, and the Neighborhood Youth Association, which sends first-generation young people to four-year colleges, helping make America great, notwithstanding our government’s cruelty to their immigrant generation families. With Episcopal Sacred Resistance as our vanguard, we have stood with congregations and neighborhoods being targeted by our government’s cruel, racist, transphobic policies.
We work one-on-one with congregations to help them discern the path to a more abundant future. We help congregations and individuals recover from disaster. We’re rolling up our sleeves once again with innovative ministry to children, youth, and young adults. And we’re working on our exchange program with the Taiwan Episcopal Church 台灣聖公會.
In ten years, we haven’t sold any sacred real estate, although the bishop-elect and his team will have decisions to make about the property at St. George’s in Hawthorne, which had its last Sunday service in February.
Thinking of all that and other things, and especially thinking of all the items that remain on the to-do list, one is reminded of the beloved prayer from the New Zealand prayer book, appointed for Compline and modified as follows: “What has been done, has been done; what has not been done – that’s why God sends us new bishops!”
As for anything that has gone right, having a hand in it all was our canon to the ordinary for almost my whole time, my friend and colleague for all these years and forever, the Rev. Canon Melissa McCarthy.
The former director of the Nixon library is also not the obvious choice for the prophetic portion of this message. Nevertheless, for my whole time as bishop-elect and bishop, including even the Biden presidency – indeed since our episcopal election in December 2016, when we began a tradition of eight ballots that has caught on – all this time, the forecast has been cloudy with a 100% chance of Trump. As we students of U.S. history know, the end of a rogue presidency won’t bring an end to barriers to the perfection of our union such as our founding sin of racism and some people’s preference for authoritarian solutions.
It could get worse before it gets better. Even now, our promise in the baptismal covenant to respect the dignity of every human being invites a federal indictment if we stand up for DEIJ programs. When Alex and Rene stood up for the dignity of every human being, they were cut down in cold blood in the streets of Minneapolis. No one has yet been held accountable. So my first proposition is that, if we take the dignity of every human being seriously enough that we insist in the public square on its civic equivalency, which is liberty and justice for all, we are, in these times, taking a considerable personal risk.
My second proposition is that people of faith need to organize politically. I’ve said this before. I say it almost every church I visit during my au revoir tour. About 160 million Americans embrace a theology or secular philosophy that has the golden rule at its core. Most Americans at least theoretically accept the proposition that the law of nature, the law of the universe, and the law of God is that one should behave toward others is we would have them behave toward us. Confucius may have said it first. Jesus said it in Matthew 7:12. Then our Lord gave himself up on the Cross and rose from the grave to prove it.
The golden rule is neither Republican nor Democratic, liberal nor conservative. It’s the only thing that works. It’s the source of all contentment, justice, and mutual love. It applies to you and me. It applies to the heavenly bodies in their predictable courses. At long last, after thousands of years, it’s time to apply it to the likes of Trump and Putin. Since the golden rule rules out cruelty for cruelty’s sake, it would make things instantly better for our immigrant worker siblings, our Haitian and Somalian siblings, and our trans and non-binary siblings. Since the golden rule is at the heart of just war theory, it would bring an end to unjust war.
People of faith are irrelevant in this secularizing culture only to the extent that we have failed to organize ourselves around essential principles we hold dear – because we have not yet found the vocabulary and the sense of desperate purpose that we will need to punish golden rule violators ruthlessly at the polls and send them home to learn some manners.
Finally, the question I’ve been asked most the last few months is if I’m counting the days to retirement. The answer is yes, but not in the way I think most questioners think. To be honest, I feel as though I’ve just gotten the hang of this job. The canons say I have to retire. But I don’t feel like I’m done. As the number of my days as your bishop decreases, my love of the vocation increases.
But here’s the magic. I’m an insecure overachiever who seeks affirmation. I’ve been working hard for half a century. At long last, I need to figure out why God loves me apart from work. I feel as much enthusiasm about finding the answer as I do in my vocation.
I’m going to read and write more, exercise and sit in the sun more, and enlist, to help me answer my existential question, my beloved Kathy; Valerie and Lindsay, my children; Dan and Meaghan, Kathy’s children; our children-in-law, Mark, PJ, and Michelle; our grandkids, Frannie, Harriet, Silas, and Emmett, and all the bodies that spin around them in our family circle. Kathy and I are just making our way from one circle of love to another. Thank you for being you and for praying Antonio, Kathy, and me through this time of glorious transition.
[My remarks Monday evening at our annual clergy conference at the Mission Inn in Riverside. The photo shows Bishop-elect Antonio, some of our colleagues, and me.]