A bishop’s weekend can entail a Sunday visitation to a congregation where ministry is usually well established, plus a Saturday celebration of a rector or vicar’s new ministry. This was my joyful lot last weekend in Orange County, at my old hang in Rancho Santa Margarita and then in Laguna Beach.
The visits were distinctly rich. Yet the Holy Spirit is always making ones out of twos. Just look carefully, all around you, and I promise you will see it. This is how the Spirit teaches us to anticipate the unity of heaven. As often happens, my weekend took on a thematic unity, as the threads of scripture and life entwined.
During Advent, we hear Isaiah promise that nations will beat swords into plowshares and stop making war. We keep hearing the Prince of Peace remind us that we can be his co-sovereigns, if we will only love God and love our neighbor as ourselves. Two millennia after the Christ event, 2700 after First Isaiah, God is still waiting.
While celebrating local ministry, I’m finding it hard to ignore the chaos in Washington or the agony around the world, from Ukraine to Sudan, where nations are at war and the innocent at risk. As in the first century, state religions are letting down the Prince of Peace. With none of their house theologians uttering a word of complaint, our president and his operative at the Pentagon, purportedly Christians, slaughter people of color on the high seas without a minimally defensible pretext. Backed by his bishops and priests in solemn array, Moscow’s czar presses on with a criminal war.
Neither Trump and Putin nor their spiritual mentors are obeying Jesus’s great commandment, to love God and love our neighbor as ourselves. Until they do, we must insist they do — we followers of the Risen One, and our siblings in other traditions who also lift up the universal law of love. It is our ministry at last to insist that the Golden Rule is not just a theological proposition. To those who fall back on the separation of church and state, I reply that we can’t afford it in the age of Trump and Putin and weapons of mass destruction. Faith leaders must insist in one voice that while everyone and every nation has the right to defend themselves, none has the right to kill without cause or for the sake of self-interest or profit. Doing so is abhorrent to creation.
The folks at St. John Chrysostom Church in Rancho Santa Margarita got an especially big dose of my inchoate golden rule theocracy on Saturday as we celebrated the new ministry of their vicar, the Rev. Jerry Sather, whose 42 years of military chaplaincy took him to the ends of the earth, just as Jesus commanded us in his great commission, which Jerry himself read out from Matthew’s gospel. He got shot at, held the hands of the mortally wounded, and did his best to answer unanswerable questions from brave U.S. volunteers dealing with the moral hazard of military service. Having seen humanity at our worst, in his gracious way Jerry insists by the authority of the gospel that we can always be at our best.
As I presided and preached where Canon Kathy Hannigan O’Connor and I served for nearly 12 years, it was a blessing to be back at the St. John’s altar with Andy and Loreen Guilford, Paul Reza, and our former Bloy House dean, Linda Tolin Allport. The 30-member choir comprised voices from the congregation and the Festival Singers, Orange County CA, including my friend and mentor, former church administrator Cindy Michaels Drennan, all under the direction of organist Gary Toops. Though deep in a season of mourning and celebration of her beloved spouse, Bruce, the Ven. Laura Eustis Siriani was aboard as archdeacon of the mass.
D.j. Gomer was prima inter pares of a 15-member hospitality corps. Paul Hinson and Rick Anderson, bishop’s and people’s wardens, headed the presenters. Kathe Sherrill Hayden’s flowers were heaven’s vision as usual. Her and Bob’s daughter, Brenna, whom I first met in 2004 when she was cradled in her father’s left arm, is soon off to Catalina to take up her work as an environmental scientist. I’ll never forget Brenna and Elizabeth Mezejewski, in her senior year at Cal State San Marcos and engaged to a retired United States Marine, saying after church Saturday that my voice had comforted them as children.
At St. Mary’s Episcopal Church Laguna Beach, which I visited Sunday, the Rev. Will Crist arrived early this year as priest in charge. Both he and the congregation say they’re having a ball. Texas born and bred like his spouse and brilliant collaborator the Rev. Dr. Mary Crist, Will brings deep spirituality, canny business sense, and gifts as a communicator and interfaith minister to his seaside ministry. St. Mary’s is famed for its LGBTQ+ outreach during the epidemic in the eighties. Having collected 643 pounds of food for local families for Thanksgiving, they’re devoting themselves to Sudan relief during Advent.
The small miracle of pairings continued as the Laguna Beach Children’s Choir joined the St. Mary’s choir for two anthems. Young Ezra, my chaplain for the Holy Eucharist at our Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles convention last month in Riverside, reprised his duties and introduced me to his friend and theological conversation partner, OB. At a sun-dappled lunch on the parish’s beautiful grounds to which senior warden Linda Bratcher could not have welcomed me more warmly, conversation included questions about my preferred Bible translation and members’ good advice about retirement. Among other things, during my golden years, expect more about the Golden Rule as the sovereign law of the universe.
