Earlier in the month, I did what I’ve done almost every year for the last ten and took a six-day driving trip around the great southwest — listening to music, stopping impulsively at roadside attractions, and absorbing creation’s beauty. I’m not much of a contemplative. It’s the closest I get to a silent retreat, because I don’t really talk to anyone.
To the Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles, the search committee has described this week as a discernment retreat. Unaware of the program, I find myself wondering if it’s a retreat, an inquisition, or something in the Anglican middle. Either way, you’ve been in my prayers since Tuesday and will continue to be throughout.
I don’t expect to see any of your retreat photos. I posted a lot from my trip, including one of the Hoover Dam, which pedestrians can see from a walkway along State Route 93. I added a caption saying I hadn’t yet figured out how to get a sermon out of it. Then a colleague sent the readings for today’s service, including this from the prophet Isaiah: “I give water in the wilderness, rivers in the desert, to give drink to my chosen people, the people whom I formed for myself, so that they might declare my praise.”
The Lord’s water is infinitely lifegiving. With the Hoover Dam, it’s complicated. It sends electricity to three states. Over half its power is used in the dioceses of Los Angeles and San Diego. Controlling flooding, enabling irrigation, benefiting growers – yet disrupting whole ecosystems and the lifespans and the very existence of species that had thrived for 100,000 years.
They poured concrete for two years, finishing a century ago this May. I learned this next bit on a prior visit, when I took the guided tour. If you haven’t been, it’s art deco inside – very nice. I learned that at the heart of the dam, the concrete will take another quarter-century to cure. That means it’s not all dry yet. It means that under all that weight, in that impossible darkness and pressure, water molecules are hanging on for their lives. Little solar systems, little universes, keeping hope alive, like the water of baptism, clinging to our foreheads after all these years.
Our baptismal hope has brought us all here – those discerning about being our eighth bishop, and my devoted colleagues who are helping. Hope for our church, hope for the nation, hope for the world. But our hope is feeling the pressure. You may have seen The New Yorker cartoon earlier this week. Standing on the deck of a patio overlooking the ocean, a man says to his spouse, “I can’t believe that the summer, and civilization, are almost over.” So much of what we see and experience – especially what those most at risk in our nation and in the world are enduring – sometimes it feels as though it wants to squeeze the life out of us. And yet here we come in hope.
First, I’m eternally hopeful about the future of The Episcopal Church. When Jesus said that the harvest was plentiful but the laborers scarce, he wasn’t talking about the little progressive denominational church in the 21st century. He was talking about his little band in the first century. They were under pressure from the same kind of inhumanity. Our way of worshiping, our love of justice as proclaimed by the prophets, unfashionable though they may be, will help ensure our church’s survival, as they did in the generations after Jesus.
And perhaps most of all, we’ll survive because we’re good at gathering people and making them feel at home. We all know what sociologists say will rescue society from its patterns of isolation and loneliness. They call them third places, between work and home, where people find a sense of belonging, accountability, and meaning. Eighty percent of parochial ministry is asking and listening, since people’s answers reveal context, passion, pain, and hope. Don’t ask me where I got that number. I made it up. When we ask, listen, and learn, we become more committed to one another, we fall in love and into accountability. We plant the seeds of mutually supportive communities of connection and care that, if they proliferate, would cure a good deal of what ails us as a society.
If congregational ministry dies in the United States, it will have to be reinvented. So after a generation of supporting diocesan overspending by selling sacred property, we have managed to get through eight years without closing and selling a church building. Should the next bishop and their colleagues ever decide the time has come to take such a step, systems will be in place to make it easier for the proceeds to build up the whole body – including by giving our neighbors places to lay their heads in affordable housing projects.
Our church also shines the light of hope for a nation that is slipping into the shadows. Presiding Bishop Sean Rowe has called on The Episcopal Church to be a focal point of resistance. If our denominational constellation comprises 106 focal points of light, the Los Angeles must continue to shine among the brightest. Whether it’s Trump’s cruel roundups of immigrant workers of color, his scapegoating of our trans and non-binary siblings, his efforts to erase heroes of African descent from history and, now, unlearn lessons about the sin of slavery – it’s hard not to take a stand in Los Angeles on behalf of our eternal hope of liberty and justice for all.
Sometimes we feel pressure because not everyone agrees about politics. The last thing we want to do is make someone feel unwelcome because of their vote. Not wanting to give offense, not wanting to get too involved in policy conversations – the pressure of these times tries to squeeze the gospel out of us. But if the spirit is leading you to Los Angeles, it means you’re being invited to shake the dust of concrete off your feet, stand in the light, breathe deep, and bear witness.
As you do, you’ll be a leading figure in ecumenical and interfaith circles. These relationships have been strained and even broken by the Hamas attacks on Israel and the Gaza war. St. Paul’s Commons, Echo Park, with our co-tenants the Immaculate Heart Community and Nefesh, enjoys improved financial sustainability while embodying the potential for a kind of mature, unifying interfaith collaboration that will enable power and privilege better to hear God’s voice.
Finally, your hope for the world has brought you here today. In Galatians, Paul is of course rebutting those who have construed the law as a stumbling block to Christian conversion. They say the law comes first. Paul is at his wittiest when he says there is no law against love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.
Jesus Christ spoke into a savage age about a way human beings might be with one another that was sacred and life-giving. Putin doesn’t understand it. Trump doesn’t understand. Xi Jinping of China doesn’t understand. Narendra Modi of India doesn’t understand. Power and privilege rarely follow the law of love. But this is the first time in my lifetime it’s been possible to say the leaders of four of the biggest countries, including our own, are ruthless nationalists who, if they could, would drag the world into a darkness that would make the heart of the Hoover Dam look like a sunny day on the California coast.
That feeling we sometimes get that we don’t matter, we don’t count, no one comes to our churches, no one in the media covers what we say – it’s just the pressure of all that cultural concrete bearing down. Yet there has never been a time, perhaps since our Lord’s day, when leadership in the church of the risen Christ has mattered so much, modeling in our lives and our communities a countercultural way of living — rooted in mutual acts of self-sacrificial love and a radical curiosity about one another, all of us made in the image of God, all of us, therefore, infinitely interesting and deserving of being treated with radical kindness.
Our people need all this Resurrection hope. We are its pioneers. So be of good cheer. Love every one of them. Hold the light of Christ high so they can see it and pass it from one blazing torch to another until we find our way together through the wilderness.
The reminder from John’s gospel that we are to love one another as Jesus loved us is always welcome. But all these passages in John add up to more even than that. Jesus’s new commandment is to the apostles, commanding them to love one another, that the world might see from the love expressed within their community who God and Jesus were. Our scandals and bickering give those who need Christ an excuse to stay away.
So this is our invitation to the evangelism of example. Episcopal elections are evangelism of example enterprises. I think for instance of how our search committee has modeled a wholesome and transparent process during an incredibly difficult year. Cochair KC Robertson losing her home, cochair Thomas Diaz pastoring to scores who lost their homes, and yet they and all of you staying the course. The comprehensiveness of the financial report you received from our colleagues yesterday – please understand it as standing for a whole community that has labored for four years to stabilize our finances, for the sake of one of you and your leadership team, for the sake of the glory of God, for the sake of our obligations to God’s people.
I’m confident the selection process will continue in that spirit all the way through to November. May this week and the weeks ahead be a holy time of discernment — for our diocese as well as for you, a middle way between retreat and inquisition. Each of your vocations is so precious to God. However we discern, may this be a time of learning and blessing for you. I give thanks you’ve come this far through the wilderness, to hear about what we hope for and offer your hope in return. For the gifts of hope and risk you have bestowed already, on behalf of all of us, I offer thanks in the name of the risen Christ
[My Holy Eucharist sermon during the bishop search committee’s retreat with candidates last week. The committee will announce its slate in September. The eighth bishop of Los Angeles will be called during diocesan convention Nov. 7-8 at the Riverside Convention Center. Photo: Hoover Dam, March 2022]