Outgoing vice-chancellor Jeff Baker, a University of Alabama law professor and associate dean, invited convention delegates Nov. 8 “to just say Amen if the spirit moves you” during his impassioned Margaret Parker lecture at the 130th annual meeting of the Diocese of Los Angeles in Riverside.
The series honors the legacy of the late Canon Margaret Parker, a lay leader and ministry partner with her husband, the Rev. Canon Richard I. S. Parker, who served 42 years as a rector of St. Cross Church in Hermosa Beach.
Baker was introduced by Parker’s son Richard, an economist, author, lecturer in public policy and senior fellow at the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, and a co-founder of Mother Jones Magazine. The series, launched in 2008, a year after Parker died at the age of 93, addresses topics of peace and justice through the empowerment of women.
In that vein, Parker noted his parents’ action in the 1970s to employ at St. Cross Church the Rev. Canon Victoria Hatch, the first woman to be ordained a priest in the diocese. Hatch was present at the convention and greeted the Parker brothers after the lecture.
Both the Parker family and Bishop John Harvey Taylor gave him a charge to “consider how the church in this moment can and should be a witness to the world,” Baker said. “How we can be a light in an era of creeping nationalism, massive, massive, nearly unprecedented wealth disparities (when) revisionist authoritarianism emboldens white supremacy, anti-immigrant riots and needless and brutal war.”
Baker offered an emotional tribute to the Rev. Canon Melissa McCarthy, who earlier that day had withdrawn her candidacy for eighth bishop of the diocese. “Melissa was our first priest, our pastor,” he said. “She ministered to us and my family and my daughters and wife, directed by the Holy Spirit at a moment of our lives in our history when we needed it most, and no one else could have done what she did.
“She’s been pastor and priest, friend and collaborator, and dear sister now for more than a decade, and Melissa; today, I just want to say we love you so much and we are so deeply proud of you.”
Continuing with his address, Baker said, to a chorus of enthusiastic “Amens,” “We are in a storm, but the storm will spend itself before the light goes out. We are not facing anything in our nation or in our life as a church or people that we have not faced before, and we should let that be a source of hope and courage and joy.”
He noted, “There will be injustice and there will be real loss, but we are scrappy people of the incarnation and the resurrection. So, I approach this question today – how should our church, The Episcopal Church, the Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles, even the Diocese of Alabama, and our one, holy, catholic and apostolic church – how do we project our values, our faith, our witness, into our times? How do we shine a gospel light in the rising darkness of our world?”
The goal, he said, is what it has always been: “to love God, to love our neighbors, to bring forth justice, however flawed and imperfect we may be, and a beloved community that will approach the kingdom of God. And let’s hold on to this reminder; whenever Jesus teaches about the Kingdom of God, it was always a surprise to his listeners. His vision of the kingdom of God is subversive, counterintuitive, rooted in a holy economy that does not resemble ours at all. It does not resemble unbridled, metastasizing capitalism and oligarchy. It does not resemble a heedless government that depends on violent coercion to advance its policies.”
The goal is not to be distracted by “the trappings of empire or our imperial republic,” he added.
“Let’s keep our eyes on the upside-down kingdom of God, where the last shall be first and the least shall be the greatest.”
A video of Baker’s address may be viewed here.