Bishop John Bryson Chane writes to his diocese:

Dear Sisters and Brothers in Christ,

As you may remember, our diocese is proposing that the Episcopal Church include civil rights leader and former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall on its liturgical calendar. By resolution of the 2006 Diocesan Convention, we recommended that May 17, the anniversary of Marshall’s victory in the landmark Brown v. Board of Education school desegregation case be observed as his feast day.

The 2006 General Convention referred the resolution to the Standing Commission on Liturgy and Music, which, we hope, will bring it forward at the 2009 General Convention, next summer in Anaheim.

One important criterion that the Commission considers is whether there is widespread local observance of a candidate’s proposed feast day. So to strengthen our presentation at the 2009 General Convention and, more importantly, to hold up before our people the Christian witness of Justice Marshall, please plan to observe Saturday May 17 or Sunday May 18 as Thurgood Marshall Day in your parish.

You can learn more about Justice Marshall at edow.org.

In Christ’s Peace Power and Love,
Bishop John Bryson Chane

The Washington Window has written numerous stories on the effort to include Marshall's name in the book of Lesser Feasts and Fasts. (1, 2, 3, 4.) The mainstream media has also paid some note.

Liturgical resources for the feast of Thurgood Marshall, May 17

Propers suggested by the Diocese of Washington. Music suggested by students at Seabury-Western Seminary and St. Augustine’s Church, Washington, D. C.

Collect
Eternal and Ever-Gracious God, you blessed your servant Thurgood with special gifts of grace and courage to understand and speak the truth as it has been revealed to us by Jesus Christ. Grant that by his example we may also know you and seek to realize that we are all your children, brothers and sisters of Jesus Christ, whom you sent to teach us to love one another; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God for ever and ever. Amen.

Suggested scripture readings
Amos 5:10-15, 21-24
Psalm 34:15-22
I Corinthians 13:1-13
Matthew 23:1-11

Suggested Music
Song of Praise
Christ Has Arisen from Lift Every Voice and Sing (LEVAS) 41

Sequence
Zimbabwe Alleluia

Offertory Hymn
How Great Thou Art LEVAS 60

Memorial Acclamation Sung to the tune of We Shall Overcome:

Jesus Christ has died.
Jesus Christ is risen.
Jesus Christ will come again.
Oh, deep in my heart, I do believe,
Jesus Christ will come again.

Communion Hymn
Just As I Am LEVAS 137

Processional Hymn (and Marshall’s personal favorite)
Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory LEVAS 226

By Peter Carey

I was recently at a gathering of church leaders and the question arose, “what has the church had to say about the ongoing Iraq War?” While I realize that there may be churches that have taken on the issue of the war, for the most part, I believe we (and I include myself) have done a poor job to take on the issue of war in any kind of a helpful or constructive way. (If your church has engaged the question that is awesome; let me know what you’re doing!)

Of course, there are a variety of perspectives about war that emerge from the Christian tradition, and preachers and church leaders would do well to recognize that pacifists, veterans, active duty officers, as well as victims of war sit in our pews. But still, couldn’t we have the courage to examine the tradition of just war and the various forms of pacifism and do this in a way that could raise the tenor of discussion? Why haven’t our churches taken up the subject of the war in a more direct way? Are we fearful that any criticism of foreign policy will lead us to an I.R.S. audit (such as happened at All Saints Episcopal Church, Pasadena)? Or, are we worried that if we try to be prophetic someone might post it on Youtube and we would be labeled as “anti-American”?

Fear may be at the root of our reluctance, but there may also be deeper reasons for the church’s reluctance to take on war and violence. I believe that Western Christianity would receive a mixed verdict in terms of how it has addressed global issues of violence. All too often, the Church has become enmeshed in the power structures of society and has not offered alternatives to the dominant world-view.

In studying these questions in seminary last year, my thesis advisor, Rev. Dr. Michael Battle, helped me to see that one area on which to focus attention in order to address global issues of violence is on the virtues within Christian spirituality. Fear often leads to violence. This fear may be loss of possessions, of our way of life, or of our sense of security. If those of us in the church focused on the virtues of the monastic life such as poverty, chastity, obedience, work, study and worship, then a more grounded, nonviolent way of life may result. The bumper sticker, “Live Simply So that Others May Simply Live” is a secular outgrowth of these same virtues.

What if we worked to understand that one’s possessions, one’s family and friends, one’s nation and one’s very self are all gifts from God? If we truly see that this is all gift, that we deserve none of it, would we still be so willing to act violently to cling to it?

As one of my heroes, the preacher and activist William Sloane Coffin said, “People say, ‘I just want what I deserve; what is coming to me!’ but they don’t! We’re all in deep trouble if we were to get what we truly deserve.” Is it our fear of loss, ultimately our fear of death that leads us to choose the wrong path and exclude and dehumanize others rather than embrace and love them?

Ideally, our corporate worship is a corrective to an overly individualized spirituality. Our corporate worship ideally brings us together across those divides of class, of race, of politics, of theology. In Christ we are persons who are tied up with one another as parts of a body, and not as mere individuals. We need our neighbors and our neighbors need us. In thinking we can reach God on our own, without any need for either corporate fellowship, or love for others, we are no longer worshiping the God who calls us to “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul and mind, and your neighbor as yourself.” We become islands unto ourselves, and our own dehumanization and violence runs amok. You may remember those lines of Paul Simon and Art Garfunkle who sang of the dehumanizing consequences of a individualized world view:

I am a rock, I am an island.
I’ve built walls, A fortress deep and mighty, That none may penetrate.
I have no need of friendship; friendship causes pain. It’s laughter and it’s loving I disdain.

A recapturing of the early Western Christian spirituality is needed in order to encourage people to look beyond themselves, to see that who they are is bound up with others.

I began by asking “Why haven’t our churches taken up the subject of the war in a more direct way?” What’s stopping us from even engaging in discourse? Perhaps we are afraid of what might happen to our institution if we took on such a controversial issue. Perhaps people would leave the church. On the other hand, maybe people would see that the church is actually engaging with some of the key ethical and political questions of our time. Perhaps people would begin to see the church actually living out the gospel and come knocking in droves. Who knows?

From our biblical and theological tradition, the church has a unique understanding of humanity as being deeply relational. In addition, we have a rich biblical and theological tradition to draw upon when it comes to issues of violence and war. Of course, the church is not blameless or without fault when it comes to violence and war. However, from the prophets to Jesus, and from St. Augustine to Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Church has had something to say and proclaim about violence and war. What if we were more willing to draw upon this tradition? Cultivating a robust corporate spirituality might give us the courage to lift up helpful and hopeful voices within the church on these important issues of violence and war. Isn’t it time to make our voices heard?

The Rev. Peter M. Carey is the school chaplain at St. Catherine's School for girls in Richmond, Virginia and is also on the clergy staff at St. Mark's Episcopal Church in Richmond. He blogs at Santos Woodcarving Popsicles.

Second of two parts

By Andrew Gerns

Recently I presided at the funeral of a woman named Polly, who I had come to know a bit in the months before her death. I was familiar with her medical care, and it struck me that in her last years almost all of her energy she spent on paying for it.

The more I thought about Polly’s situation, the more I realized that we are all at risk of the very same fate. Not just the poor and the working poor, but everyone who stays in a job “for the insurance” or who considers putting off a doctor’s visit or filling a prescription either because of the cost, the hassle of dealing with insurers, or an inability to handle growing “co-pays.”

Other healthcare systems around the world handle sick people the way we handle sick pets. No one is cared for unless they pay the money up front and even then they must bring their own food, bandages and relatives to care for them during recovery. We are in a system that guarantees a minimal level of access but which often saddles a person or family with a mountain of debt and which often does not cover the cost of providing the care in the first place.

The way we structure paying for healthcare poses serious moral questions for all of us. Namely, who pays for Polly? Because of the way the system of reimbursement is structured and because of the way the health care market works, we are all complicit in the health care mess.

Today we work under an operating principle that assumes that I will only pay for the cost of my care, and I want that cost as low as possible. Know it or not, we are all caught up in that game: insurer, employer and consumer. None of us want to pay more than what is supposed to cost to care for me and me alone.

And no one of us wants to pay for overhead.

The choices that are made because we only want to pay for own costs and no one else’s left Polly out in the cold.

When the Great HMO Experiment collapsed in the late 1990's and early 2000's, we were left with a system that contains many elements of everything that came before it. Which brings us back to how providers and insurances negotiate rates.

Each insurer group will go to each hospital or network and say "We will only pay $M". The hospital says well, we want to charge you "$X" because it really costs us "$Z" to provide this service. But at the end of the day, the provider will negotiate a "special rate" of $M and hope they make up for the short-fall on volume. But to justify this, to make "$M" really look like a discount, the published rate for any given service must be somewhere between $X and $Z.

So here's the formula: "$M" = rate paid, "$X" = rate charged and "$Z" = actual cost of care plus overhead. Hospitals and providers that survive and prosper are the ones who can build enough cash reserves to operate and grow based on getting as many people as possible who can, through their insurers, pay somewhere between "$M" and "$X" and enough patients who can actually afford to pay "$Z" when the insurance runs out or won't cover what they need.

The truth of the matter is that most providers have to get by on "$M" and from that pay for staff, supply and overhead. They have to staff and deliver care accordingly. Most of what passes for cost-containment doesn't contain costs at all, but shifts the actual costs someplace else.

And neither your (or your employer's or your government's) insurance premium nor your provider's negotiated rate of "$M" fully takes into account the cost of the competing bureaucracies, the one designed to maximize collections (provider) and the one designed to minimize payments (insurer). Every time you compare an explanation of benefits and a provider bill, you are caught in between the competing bureaucracies.

In truth, a provider in a reasonably busy market will charge a wide variety of rates for a wide variety of contracts looking for that magic balance of volume and reimbursement just to stay in business. If you think that you are only paying what it costs you to get the care you got, think again.

But wait, there's more. This is where we move from craziness to immorality.

If the provider has to post "$X" as their rate, even though most of the insurers that insured patients used has negotiated "$M", does any one pay "$X?" You bet! Polly paid.

Those without the "buying" power of a group pay full freight because they cannot negotiate a “discount.” That means the uninsured. That meant Polly.

When your local hospital, be it tax-exempt or for-profit, publishes it's "charity care" numbers, a large part of what you are seeing is the write-down between what it charges its poorest clients (because those with insurance including Medicare pay at a rate far below cost) and what it can ever possibly hope to collect.

In poor rural or urban areas, the cost of the write-downs can be greater than their collections, even if they are filled to the brim with patients. Without a healthy margin (or profit if the hospital is not tax-exempt), there is not enough cash to go from day to day and that means more debt. Which means that hospitals in poor areas spend much more money managing debt than paying for care.

Of course, the insurers have to make a profit to stay in business or, if they are the government, spend as little as possible for legislative and budgetary reasons. So they will do all they can to cap, limit, direct and ration care while at the same time paying as little as they can to the ones who provide the services.

The system is ripe with immoralities. Of the many immoralities of our "system" of paying for health-care, the biggest one of all is that we have broken the social contract that says that the majority of us who have help pay for the care of those who have not.

We have broken the contract that says that we are who are healthy, or even relatively healthy, and who have resources either in terms of insurance or wealth help pay for the care of those who are sick or poor, or who need extra care. We have devolved a system which will only tolerate what it seems to cost to pay for me alone and the system tries to make up for that fact with decreasing service, increasing overhead, and evermore limited access.

Having entered the system, Polly was all but bankrupted by it. One of the other documents that she never completed was the final order declaring her bankruptcy. She did not have the money to pay the court and lawyer fees to complete the process.

Polly's health suffered because her nutrition was compromised. Her baseline health was in the basement. Her dental care was non-existent, which left her open to all kinds of new health problems. She lived in substandard housing because that was what she could afford. She avoided follow-up care and basic care for things like colds and sore feet for obvious reasons. When she could, she bought her shoes and clothes at the dollar store or the Salvation Army.

On the other hand, she used to tell me or her doctor at the filling station that she had the best exercise program on earth...fifteen blocks each way. Only one way uphill!

We have a system so weighted towards the payers who can obtain the lowest rates, that there are many with no insurance or inadequate insurance who are charged the highest, unnegotiated rates out there. We have a system in which many with insurance are bankrupted because the more specialized care they need, or the longer they are in the system, the less likely it is that they will find providers who will accept only the payment assigned to them.

This is one reason why healthcare causes the most personal bankruptcies, why we have the most expensive health related bureaucracy and why we have the most inefficient and haphazard basic care delivery system of the major industrial economies.

I am not so naive to think that Polly is alone in this. Just look around your parish. There are probably many in her shoes, but perhaps not as obvious. These are the ones who are one serious illness away from disaster.

If we as a society are going to seriously and adequately address the health-care crisis in this nation, we will have to come to terms with the moral question of how we all share in the cost of each other's care. Are we responsible for each other, or not? Do we have obligations to each other, or not? We will bear, even on the most minimal level, each other's burdens, or not?

The sad truth is that one way or the other, we all paid--and will pay-- for Polly. We just didn't help her.

The Rev. Canon Andrew Gerns is rector of Trinity Episcopal Church in Easton, Pennsylvania in the Diocese of Bethlehem and keeps the blog Andrewplus.

First of two parts

By Andrew Gerns

We all paid for Polly.

The other day, I did the funeral for a woman. Let's call her Polly. She lived alone, worked as a cashier in a gas-station/variety store 50 to 60 hours per week saving $5 here and $20 there to "pay off" the bills she carried after a being hospitalized for a seizure. As far as we can tell, her care was very good. Care was not the problem. The problem was that she was never going to pay her bills in anything like a normal lifetime.

She died of a massive stroke. She was able to have some of her organs donated to another. We prayed over her body at her bedside and did a pauper’s ceremony after she was cremated in a cardboard box.

I saw some of Polly's healthcare bills before she died. She was charged the highest possible rates that her hospital and most of her providers could charge. I know because I carefully track my own, everyday costs—and I am reasonably healthy—and I saw the difference that the same hospital charged Polly and what they charged me and my insurance company, and what my insurance company and I actually paid.

Between the two of us, I was the lucky one. Not only do I have insurance, but generally I do not have to pay the difference between what the hospital charges and what the insurance pays, except for a comparatively tiny co-pay. Part of my premium goes to pay for the negotiating power of the plan that my church-employer can pay for. Polly had no one to negotiate for her.

The only provider who cut her a break was her physician who often wrote off his care for her. He would make sure he bought his gas where she worked so he could check on her without her going to the office. On her death, she had mounds of charity care forms that were incomplete and unprocessed because either she did not understand them, was too busy working, or was too darned depressed.

Polly's story is everyone’s story. She is not alone. She was a little luckier because she had a small circle of folks who cared for her. But her story is a story about how astoundingly backwards our so-called health care system is: how fees are structured and how contracts with providers are negotiated.

I'm a priest not an economist, but I have spent nearly half my ministry in healthcare and this is what I have learned about how we pay (or don't pay) for our healthcare and what it meant to Polly and how we all pay in the end.

Most health insurance plans negotiate the rate they will pay with the provider or network of providers they will use. This provider could be a hospital and it might also be a pharmaceutical company.

This is why someone’s insurance will tend to emphasize one or two pharmaceutical companies over another regardless of what medication is needed and why most plans require extensive paperwork and appeals if a patient is prescribed a drug that is "off-list" and why patients are often "encouraged" to use generic or "clinically equivalent" brands through the creative use of co-pays. And why doctors are forced to use a ladder approach moving from the most general drug up to the most specific, in an attempt to keep that drug either generic or on-list, but which many times ends up costing patients lots of money in co-pays both in drugs and repeat visits and in mind-boggling waste because of both the paperwork and the volume of unused prescriptions.

But the thing I want to focus on is how hospitals and other providers have to negotiate rates with insurers and how that affects both the Pollys of this nation as well as the insured. The idea is this: the insurer wants to pay as little as possible for health care services but the provider needs to earn as much as possible through the money it collects.

In the "old days," a hospital had one rate system, usually covering three distinct operational areas: "room" which paid for the care the person received while in hospital, "board" which paid for support services that made the stay possible, and physicians who were paid separately. Often other providers and specialist areas were paid separately, too. In these "old days" there was an old-style Blue Cross, which covered hospitals, and a Blue Shield, which covered physician costs.

The system was simple, but was based on several assumptions that no longer apply about how health care was delivered: longer stays, a building boom in hospitals (that was both government-encouraged and market-driven) and the fact that providers were pretty much in charge of setting the costs.

The big disadvantage was that there was no way to contain costs and no incentive either. When the revolution of medical technology really took hold and every hospital, no matter how big or small, got into a space race of having to provide all the services and technologies that a competitor might provide. Every new technology both drove up costs and increased what hospitals charged. The old system had lots of flaws and it left many people out. It was also based on assumptions about who worked where, for how long and for what kind of company that no longer apply. The whole house o' cards collapsed in the 1980's.

The first attempt to contain this was the invention of DRGs. You know: the idea that the average appendectomy or child birth costs "$X" so that's what insurers would pay. If hospitals could keep costs below "$X" then they kept the difference, and if it cost more, then they'd eat it. The hope was that over the broad average of a typical year there would be more money kept than lost. It looked good on paper but had problems in reality. Still, some version of this tool is still with us today.

The next thing that happened was that it was decided that "cost-shifting" was bad. Very, very bad.

Cost-shifting means that a provider would pay for its poorer or money losing patients (who might not have been poor or uninsured but whose DRG-related insurance did not cover the cost of care) by spreading their costs over the whole pool of all their insured and wealthy patients. In other words, thems that had coverage helped pay for thems that did not.

When looked at micro, it seems unfair that my insurance rates should be higher because somebody else could not pay their bill. Cost-shifting became anathema in the era of the infamous Reagan "welfare queen." It was a rhetorical flourish describing a reality that never really existed but surely won votes! Cost-shifting was deemed to be bad because it seemed to encourage waste, fraud and personal irresponsibility.

But on the macro level, the end of cost-shifting meant the end of an important social contract that all of us together would share our resources to care for those who have fewer resources available to them.

The inability to address that basic social contract is the elephant in the room when it comes to talking about paying for health care today. The question comes down to this, who pays for Polly?

Tomorrow: Confronting the moral questions.

The Rev. Canon Andrew Gerns is rector of Trinity Episcopal Church in Easton, Pennsylvania in the Diocese of Bethlehem and keeps the blog Andrewplus.

By Lauren R. Stanley

RENK, Sudan – A quick lesson in cultural differences:

In Sudan, a bride price is paid when two people want to get married. No bride price, no marriage.

In the United States, no bride price is paid. People get married for love.

In Sudan, if the families and the community don’t agree to the marriage, it doesn’t take place.

In the United States, if the families don’t agree, too bad. And who asks the entire community for permission to wed?

In Sudan, paying a bride price – in cattle, pigs, beads or money, depending on the tribe – is a given. It is considered by many to be payback for all the investment that went into raising and educating the girl. The more educated she is, the more cows (or pigs or beads or money) is paid to the girl’s family, to recompense them for their investment and for “losing” the girl, who goes over to the man’s family. (And yes, it is normal for a “girl” to marry a man – the men often are much older than the women.)

In the United States, paying back the woman’s family for educating her is not even a consideration.

Why is bride price – or the lack thereof – so important to figuring out how culture affects our understanding of God?

Well, it’s a major portion of our discussions in theology classes at the Renk Theological College, because it’s such a good example of understanding the “tradition” leg of the three-legged stool of Anglicanism.

The first thing the students learn is that “tradition” comes with both a capital “T” and a small “t.” The capital-T Traditions of the Church include the Sacraments, the Creeds and the Lord’s Prayer. Small-t traditions include the cultural ethos of the people in the Church.

To help the students understand these differences, we frequently talk about bride price. About one-third of our students are married; all of them paid the traditional bride price for their tribe and clan. None of them can understand why we in the United States do not do this. When I tell them that paying for a bride in America is not only not part of our tradition, but also could be considered illegal – “We don’t pay for people in America; we outlawed that in the 1860s.” – the students here are appalled.

“How can such a thing happen?” they ask.

I assure them I understand the differences in our small-t traditions, and that since I live in both Sudan and the United States, I pay attention to both. If I were to marry here in Sudan, to a Sudanese man, a bride price would be paid. That’s all there is to it; the local culture has to be honored.

But, I say, if I were to get married in the United States, no such thing would even be considered. We don’t do that; it’s not our tradition, capital “T” or small.

Who would set the bride price, they want to know, if I were to get married here. Oh, I explain, that bride price was set more than two decades ago, when I was a Peace Corps volunteer in Kenya. An elderly tribal chief decided he had to have me as his fourth wife. In a desperate attempt to help both him and me save face, I wrote to my Pops and asked him to set a ridiculously high bride price – 2,000 cattle, 1,000 goats and 500 chickens. My Pops wrote back a beautiful letter, setting forth the price and explaining that I was his beloved daughter, and that it would break his heart to lose me to Kenya forever.

When the chief received the letter, he was devastated. “Ah,” he said, “I cannot pay that price. But I am glad to know that your father values you so highly. You must be special indeed. But the marriage cannot take place.” (I never did tell the chief that I was not devastated in the least by his decision; that would not have been appropriate.)

Since the going bride price here is 20-30 cows among the Dinka tribe, my bride price is considered ridiculously high and helps keep the conversation light, which is necessary, because then we move to the nitty-gritty of the theological discussion.

Whose tradition is correct? I ask. The adamant reply, from both sides: Ours. How can you be sure? I ask. It’s our tradition, we each say. Who decides? I ask. We do. But what if we can’t agree? And that’s where the conversation stops for a while, every single time.

For what are we do to when two cultures clash? How are we to reconcile ourselves to each other’s traditions? Do we fight over them? Do we simply agree to disagree? Do we disparage each other?

Or, I always ask, can we agree that what is appropriate in one culture – paying bride prices – is not appropriate in another – no bride prices even considered – and still manage to maintain our unity in the body of Christ?

Always, always, the discussion ends the same: Cultural differences must be respected – as long as we remember that we all are members of the same body, and as long as we remember not to make another culture do what we want.

When we’re discussing bride prices, it’s easy to come to this conclusion. This is a cultural difference that in the end is not all that important in the greater scheme of God’s plans for us.

But when we move the discussion to the next level – to other cultural disagreements between one part of the Anglican Communion and another – it becomes a little harder to come to a quick conclusion. Cultural differences over sexuality are huge, particularly between the Sudanese and American churches. It takes a lot of discussion, a lot of prayer, a lot of arguing, before we, a tiny slice of that Anglican Communion, finally can come to an agreement:

As long as you don’t force your culture on us, or make us change our culture to fit yours, we can live with each other.

Every one is a little uncomfortable with this idea of different cultures co-existing in the same body, but in the end, when we keep our focus on Jesus and the love of God for all us, it works out. We rely on Gregory the Great’s instructions to Augustine of Canterbury: If the local tradition is not impeding the faith, let it stand.

We have great disagreements over sexuality in the Communion today. Perhaps if we all stood back a bit, if we all looked at this the way we look at bride price, perhaps, then, we could all remember: We are all members of the same body, even when our local small-t traditions aren’t the same.

Will this discussion, small as it is, solve all the problems the Communion is facing today? No. But it’s a start.

The Rev. Lauren R. Stanley is an Appointed Missionary of the Episcopal Church serving in the Diocese of Renk, Sudan. She is a lecturer at the Renk Theological College, teaching Theology, Liturgy and English, and serves as chaplain for the students.

By Margaret M. Treadwell

During the weeks when high school seniors make their final decisions regarding college versus whether to take a gap year or get a job, I had the opportunity to spend five days at Cornell University talking with students about their hopes, dreams and challenges, especially during freshman year. What was their greatest challenge or surprise? Could they have prepared themselves better before arriving on campus? In retrospect, was there anything they would have done differently during the first semester? When so much is written about sex, drugs and alcohol on college campuses, what keeps them sober and mature in their decisions?

Two women, one enrolled in the famed Hotel School and the second in pre-med, her family’s tradition, said they always had known what they wanted to do and where they wanted to go to do it. So the huge university, a city unto itself, was an easy transition that nevertheless constantly required an attention to “balance” – the greatest challenge for everyone I interviewed.

The majority of students explained how they floundered when they didn’t fit in right away. “If you can’t take a challenge you can’t make it at Cornell or probably any college,” said a second-semester freshman. His method of survival was to take time during the first weeks to determine what he wanted to do with his life at Cornell, all the while forming friendships to decide whom he wanted to be with. Then when he saw an opportunity to get involved, he plunged in with others he respected and liked. Now he’s so busy and committed that it requires organization through a color-coded Microsoft Outlook program to keep his balance.

An articulate young man said he wished he had taken a gap year to grow up and learn about himself before beginning his studies.

“If only I’d known that to be open doesn’t mean to be without a plan,” he said. “Had I created a clearer picture of what I wanted to do with my life, including a goal and direction, I would have been less disoriented. A direction would have allowed me to try things, change my mind and stop making decisions the exact opposite of my parents’ wishes for me. My reactivity to them wasted my time and energy, but I appreciate their letting me make my mistakes because I learned from them.”

Colleges have different personalities and everyone agreed that it’s important to know the “brand” and what suits and encourages you – size, school spirit, quiet or active campuses, the residential situation, social environment and how you want to live and relate to the community.

Kirsten Gabriel, associate director of The Cornell Commitment, says, “The world can be a bubble in college, and service work gives a different perspective about where you are and what you’ve been given. For example, students are inherently joyful, and half an hour talking with a chronically ill elderly person gives insight into their ability to give joy, which is empowering. They tell me that they stay on track, make their best grades, that life is full and rich when they are thinking beyond themselves by committing to the campus and community life.”

On the other hand, Dina Zemke, an assistant professor in the School of Hotel Administration, talked about students who spend class time on their Blackberries or computers. “They are masters at multi-tasking and communicating through technology, but I often wonder about the balance in their lives,” she said. “Something has to suffer, often academics, when a person is Jack of all trades, master of none.”

Differing views raise more questions, the most important being one a human being needs to ask for a lifetime and can only answer for him or herself: “What do you want to do with your life?” Although the question implies a singular answer, in fact late adolescent and early adult years offer a chance to try out many different ideas, interests and disciplines and to learn from mistakes.

Rainer Maria Rilke provides useful advice in his “Letters to a Young Poet (1903):

“...I would like to beg you dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.”

Margaret M. (“Peggy”) Treadwell, LCSW -C, has been active in the fields of education and counseling for thirty-five years. Following a long association with Dr. Edwin H. Friedman, she co-edited and helped posthumously publish his book, A Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix. She teaches a course on congregational leadership at Virginia Theological Seminary and creates and leads conferences across the country for bishops, clergy and church lay leaders, helping them to apply family systems concepts to their leadership in diocesan and parish ministry.

By Kathleen Henderson Staudt

Over the altar at Virginia Seminary, where I teach, are the words from Mark 16:15. “Go into all the world and preach the gospel.” (“proclaim the good news to the whole creation” is how the New Revised Standard Version has it.) These words have inspired generations of people called to the ordained ministry of word and sacrament. But as one of the people called to the ministry of teaching in and beyond the church, I find myself drawn, this ascensiontide, to Matthew’s version of the Great Commission, and I wonder what the church would look like if we spent more time reflecting on what Jesus might have meant here. In Matthew 28: 19-20, he says “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”

A lot of the literature I’ve seen on stewardship and congregational development seems to focus on attracting more members to our congregations, through programs that meet perceived needs: it’s about “marketing” the church. Young adult ministries, I’ve noticed, focus some energy on encouraging vocations, but often that means raising up young people to be the next generation of ordained ministers in the church. But I have been wondering what we would look like as a church, as congregations and schools and communities, if we focused more energy, not so much on selling the church or attracting new members, but on “making disciples” of the people who come in our doors, and the seekers who inquire about us. What might this call to “make disciples of all nations” mean in our time and culture and in the current theological climate?

The term “discipleship” is probably associated, for some of us, with more evangelical and fundamentalist traditions and “making disciples” primarily with overseas mission, often associated with cultural conservatism. But I believe it’s a term that we in the Episcopal/Anglican tradition should be reclaiming, reframing, and considering in light of our tradition and the culture surrounding us. Brian McLaren, in A Generous Orthodoxy, moves in this direction as he seeks a very Anglican-sounding “generous third way” between Evangelicals’ preoccupation with a personal savior and liberals’ with modern culture. He writes of how he muddled for some time over how to describe the mission of the Church, moving from the familiar language of Evangelicals in his description of the church. He tells how he started with formulaic language: the church’s mission is to make “more Christians and better Christians.” But on reflection he tweaked it further, moving to “To be and to make disciples of Jesus Christ” and then “To be and to make disciples of Jesus Christ, in authentic community, for the sake of the world.” I like his movement away from labels to the affirmation of discipleship as part of our communal identity and our work in the world. And I like the language of discipleship better than language about “the ministry of the laity” (much as I revere the work of Verna Dozier and others of her generation) because it gets us out of ecclesiastical categories back into Biblical language that describes the shared mission of everyone in the Church. How do we understand discipleship in our time? That’s the question we should be asking together, regardless of office or vocation within the structure of the Church.

The idea of discipleship also gets us back to the concept of our faith as something we practice – the great insight of Diana Butler Bass’s influential work. Jesus tells his followers to make disciples of all nations – i.e. not only the Jewish community that they know but ALSO all nations: this is for everyone. And it’s about observing what he commanded. Love your neighbor as yourself; pray; teach, heal, feed the hungry, clothe the naked, seek forgiveness and reconciliation; look at the world through the lens of one who can say “blessed are the poor/ blessed are the meek.” This is not about convincing people to be like-minded or to join-up, nor is it a self-help project, about “becoming a better person.” Rather, the idea of discipleship gets to the heart of who Jesus is or wants to be for us. It moves us beyond worrying about the shape of institutions and back to a focus on the mission that Jesus has promised to support, if we try to follow him: “I am with you always, to the close of the age.”

What would the Church look like if we thought of “disciple-making” as our core purpose, in adult formation programs, in seminary education, in worship? The language of the baptismal covenant and baptism service in the prayer book provides some good language for this, in our tradition – though somehow or other the “ministry of the baptized” has been relegated to a category that goes with “not called to ordained ministry,” in many discussions in seminaries and vocation/formation programs. (Sometimes implying a contrast between the ministry of the ordained and the ministry of the baptized, as if the ordained were not baptized!) But discipleship: that’s something we all share, whatever office we’re called to in the church – it’s something we can reflect on within our tradition and also across denominations. How might the vision of a “disciple-making church” transform and refocus our work, worship and teaching? A question to reflect on as we approach the Feast of Pentecost.

Dr. Kathleen Henderson Staudt keeps the blog poetproph, works as a teacher, poet, spiritual director and retreat leader in the Washington DC area, and teaches courses in literature, theology and writing at Virginia Theological Seminary and the University of Maryland, College Park. She is the author of two books: At the Turn of a Civilisation: David Jones and Modern Poetics and Annunciations: Poems out of Scripture.

By George Clifford

Luke’s gospel ends with an unidentified force or actor carrying Jesus up into heaven (Luke 24:51); in John’s gospel, Jesus speaks of his impending ascension (John 20:17), and the book of Acts begins with a retelling of Jesus’ ascension (Acts 1:9). Based on those New Testament passages, the Church annually commemorates Jesus’ Ascension into heaven on the fortieth day after Easter. This year, the feast fell on May 1.

From a scientific perspective, the concept of Jesus’ ascension into heaven as depicted in Scripture is nonsensical. If Jesus ascended into heaven, then given the right information an aerospace engineer could calculate heaven’s direction, but not its distance, from earth. The accurate data needed for that calculation includes the geographic point at which the ascension occurred, the hour and minute, day of the year, and year in which the ascension occurred, Jesus’ trajectory into the sky, and the relative location of the solar system and universe within the cosmos at the time of the ascension.

Some might ridicule a literal reading, contending that heaven – the place where Jesus sits at the right hand of the Father – surrounds the cosmos, lying outside space and time. Yet the New Testament ascension narratives presume a flat, three-tiered cosmos consisting of heaven above, earth in the middle, and hell below. Before dismissing my claim that the New Testament presumes a three-story cosmology as wrong, remember the words of the Nicene Creed we Episcopalians (like many other Christians) often say at Holy Eucharist, “he [Jesus] ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father.” Those who have personally circumnavigated the world know that the earth is round. For others, video and photographic evidence from outer space provides convincing evidence that the earth is spherical. In other words, a basic presumption of the New Testament versions of the ascension is scientifically wrong.

Presupposing that one rejects a literal interpretation of Jesus’ ascension, what better options do twenty-first century Christians have for understanding Jesus’ ascension?

The first option, already mentioned, consists of spiritualizing the ascension, postulating the existence of a spiritual realm that lies outside the space-time continuum. Increasing numbers of people, however, find the idea of a supernatural deity, a deity who exists not only in but beyond the cosmos, unbelievable. Scholars and spiritual leaders like Bishops John A. T. Robinson (Honest to God) and John Spong (Jesus for the Non-Religious) have helpfully articulated why such a belief seems incompatible with other elements of our modern worldview.

A second option is to ignore Jesus’ ascension and hope that others do so as well, an approach that Ascension always falling on Thursday aids. After all, Christianity emphasizes God's presence not absence in the world. Historically, one of the important functions of the ascension was to explain Jesus’ physical absence to people who believed in a physically empty tomb and Jesus’ bodily resurrection. The New Testament specifies that Jesus appeared amongst his disciples for forty days after rising from the dead. When people stopped encountering Jesus, what had happened to him? Novelists and others have imaginatively answered that question, producing a wealth of material. Jesus went to India; he disappeared unknown among peasants elsewhere; etc. Those explanations typically undercut Christianity’s premise that Jesus was not resuscitated but resurrected, receiving a qualitatively new form of life. Thankfully, the feast of Pentecost quickly follows Ascension and ecclesial attention shifts from the absent Jesus to the now present Holy Spirit. This overly facile and dishonest option describes what many contemporary Christians do, especially in Churches without a liturgical calendar or lectionary that forces one to pay at least annual lip service to the ascension.

A third option, my preference, begins by acknowledging the theological difficulties that Jesus’ ascension poses and then re-examines the data. Biblical numerology provides a helpful starting point. The Bible – Old and New Testament alike – associates the number forty with a theologically significant period of extended duration. For example, rain fell for forty days and nights while Noah was in the ark (Genesis 7:4). The Israelites who fled Egypt ate manna for forty years (Exodus 16:35). Moses was forty when he visited his Israelite relatives (Acts 7:23) and then sojourned in the wilderness forty years before his experience of the burning bush (Acts 7:30). Moses spent forty days and nights on the mountain before receiving the Ten Commandments from God (Deuteronomy 9:11). Jesus fasted forty days and nights in the wilderness (Matthew 4:2). Perhaps the forty days the risen Jesus spent with his disciples points to an indefinite but considerable period of time following Jesus’ crucifixion in which the disciples experienced Jesus’ presence with them. They experienced Jesus in a new, radically different manner, a manner that the disciples did not know how to describe, a manner that transformed their despair over his death into the hope that built the Church. So the disciples grasped the metaphor of resurrection as a way to speak about their new experience of Jesus (see my earlier Episcopal Café essay, “Resurrection, Not Resuscitation”). In time, the disciples’ experiences of Jesus in this new way diminished in frequency and dimmed in intensity. Ascension became the accepted metaphor for explaining why that had happened.

Metaphors and other figures of speech are the only way in which humans can speak of God because our language, by definition, is human language and God is not human. Our perspective as humans is perhaps equally or even more limited than language. Twenty-first century Christians need offer no apologies for finding first century metaphors highly problematic. The first century metaphor of resurrection presumes a worldview in which gods often have or assume human form, an idea common to both the Greek and Roman pantheons. Similarly, the three-storied cosmos ascension presumes was intrinsic to the dominant first century worldview.

The note that I hear most clearly and loudly in the New Testament ascension narratives is that the disciples, post-resurrection, were utterly convinced that the Jesus story had not yet reached its end. They believed that God would write at least one more chapter in the Jesus story. Our Eucharistic prayers affirm this belief in a story for which the conclusion has yet to be written with some form of the proclamation that “Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again.”

The Rev. George Clifford, a retired priest in the Diocese of North Carolina, served as a Navy chaplain for twenty-four years.

(This is the first in a series “7 Dates and Why They Matter for Anglican Faith”)

By Derek Olsen

From our current perspective, the politics and history of the Ancient Near East 2500 years ago look like successions of waves on a beach as empires ebb and flow on the world stage. Foreign names and foreign places: The defeat of Sinsharishkun and the fall of Nineveh; containment of the Egyptians at Carcemesh; the fading of the Hittites and the rise of the Neo-Babylonians. And yet, one relatively minor episode in the succession of names and places dotting ancient history had a revolutionary impact on how we think about God and what we believe as Christians.

From what we can tell from primary documents—clay tablets, stone stele, temple carvings, ancient hymns and the like—many of the peoples of the Ancient Near East held a philosophy of religion called henotheism. That is, they had their gods but recognized that other peoples had other gods as well. Gods tended to be thought of in regional terms. To put a finer point on it, clans and tribes told stories about their gods that were intimately tied to their lives and to their geographies. A god wasn’t “just” a god, rather it was god X who made himself known to ancestor X at place Y in such-and-such a way. When cultures clashed the wars were not just occurring on the physical realm, the gods of the peoples were pitting their strength against one another. And the events of which we speak begin with just such a war…

In the waning years of the 7th century BC and the opening years of the 6th, Judah and its capital Jerusalem were still under the reign of kings from the line of David. For a brief time under King Josiah it enjoyed a period of relative independence from the whims of the empires around it. Josiah’s death in battle against Egyptian forces was the beginning of the end, though. The Neo-Babylonian Empire was on the rise with Nebuchadnezzar at its helm. Under threat of invasion, Judah began paying a heavy tribute to Babylon. Chaffing under this burden, King Jehoakim thought the moment opportune to rebel, counting on the Babylonians being distracted by troubles on the other side of the empire. In the year 601 King Jehoakim gambled but it was his son, the new King Jehoachin who had to face the music. In 597, a large Babylonian army surrounded the city which quickly surrendered in the face of the superior force. The Babylonians were lenient; rather than sacking the city, they took the city’s elite—the king and his household, the government, many of the priests (including the priestly prophet Ezekiel)—into exile in Babylon. The king’s uncle Zedekiah was put in charge of what was left.

Ultimately, Zedekiah proved no wiser than his brother Jehoakim; he too revolted against the Babylonians in 589. This time the Babylonian response was not only swift but ruthless. After an eighteen month siege, Jerusalem fell and the Babylonian army descended upon it in fury. The city was pulled to the ground. The Temple built by Solomon was utterly destroyed; the city’s inhabitants killed, sold into slavery, or scattered across the land. Babylonian client states—Edom in particular—savaged anything that was left.

Now—this story in and of itself is not unique. It has played out in hundreds of times and places; only the names change. What makes this case different is not the record of the events themselves. Rather, what is remarkable is the response to it. Ironically—but perhaps not surprisingly—the place where we turn now is the community of exiles in Babylon. With the destruction of their homeland they could have given up. They could have assimilated into the people around them. Instead it prompted them to write, record, and consider who they were. Cut off from the land of their ancestors and the geography of their god, they could easily have turned to the worship of the new gods of their new place. But what happened instead was a revolution.

Although we cannot be certain of times and places, most scholars believe that it was this community displaced in Babylon that was responsible for forming the heart of what we know today as the Old Testament. The great stories of the ancestral patriarchs and matriarchs were collected and woven together. The records of the early years of the kingdom of Israel and its split into Israel and Judah were updated and reworked. The words of the prophets were gathered and formed into stable collections. The songs of the Temple were collected even if there was no place left to sing them. And—we believe—above it and behind it all, the hand of God and the breath of the Spirit were moving, working, and inspiring. What had before been scattered scrolls and remembrances became a coherent collection, a body of writing that recorded the people’s story of themselves and their dealings with their god. And it is one we revere to this day.

Indeed the catastrophe of 587 and the events surrounding it are well represented in our Bibles. The book of Jeremiah records the histories and prophecies of the years before and immediately after the crisis. We have Jeremiah’s own feelings, poetry, and sermons as well as the events that befell him recorded by the hand of his scribe Baruch. Ezekiel balances Jeremiah; while Jeremiah remained in Jerusalem, Ezekiel was taken away in the first group of exiles and proclaimed the Word of God to the exiles in Babylon, and narrated events as the Spirit directed. The book of Lamentations communicates the shock and horror of the sack of Jerusalem. The book of Obadiah too responds not only to the fall of the city but the abominable acts of the Edomites in the tragic aftermath. The two great histories—the political history of 1 Samuel through 2 Kings and the condensed ecclesiastically-focused history of 1 and 2 Chronicles—both tell of the events leading up to the tragedy in their own ways. Psalms 74 and 78 reflect on the destruction of the Temple itself.

Considering the psalms in light of these events, Psalm 137 comes in particular to the fore. Many know this as the beautiful psalm whose end is marred by disagreeable verses unworthy of Scripture. Indeed, our current Daily Office lectionary makes verses 7-9 optional whenever this psalm rolls around. Coming up short at these words is inevitable if our morality is intact. But what these words point to—more basic than morality—is the humanity of those who wrote them. Read Lamentations. Read Obadiah. Then read Psalm 137. These are not simply words of cruelty but of pain, of despair, of wrath coming from the darkest places of human experience. Happy are we who do not understand them—having not seen the bodies of our children in the ruins of our homes. These words put us in touch not with the anonymous ebb and flow of historical tides but of the real people crying to the skies thousands of years ago—the same skies we turn to in pain as well.

Before turning aside from this psalm, however, Psalm 137 gives one more clue to understanding the revolution of 587 BC. In verse four the psalmist plaintively asks one of the key theological questions of the day: “How shall we sing the LORD’s song upon an alien soil?” Remember, in the henotheistic thought of the day, they were no longer in the territory of their god. They were no longer in the lands where the god of their ancestors walked but in the fields of Enlil and Marduk. How could they sing the songs of YHWH into the ears of foreign gods? Ezekiel answers at the very head of his prophecies. The vision he receives by the banks of the Chebar is not just a vision of a god in glory, but of a god on the move. The angelic chariot, the mobile throne, is one of the key features of the vision—and for a reason. Casting aside notions of territories and places, Ezekiel sees a god not contained by space and time but free to dwell in the midst of the people whom he had chosen.

At some point in this process, in the reading, the reworking, the meditating, and the writing the people taken out of Jerusalem came to a profound realization. Their god was not “a” god, one among many. Rather, this being who had become personally entwined in their lives and stories was none other than “the” God—not just the god of a region, of a bounded place, of a strip of land along the coast of Palestine, but the very Creator of heaven and earth. Henotheism gave way to monotheism. And the rest—as they say—is history.

The wheel of fortune turned and the Persians overcame the Neo-Babylonians. The Persian Cyrus allowed the exiles to return home, to rebuild their city and its temple. Some of the exiles stayed, but—taking with them the collections of books that told the history of their relationship with God—more left. Ezra and Nehemiah tell their stories. But the events of 587 were forever marked in the Scriptures that they passed down and that, in turn, we have received. As a result of this tragedy, the people of Israel clarified their history and self-identity in a narrative about their on-going covenant relationship with the being who they—and we—believe is none other than the One God, the Creator of heaven and earth.

Derek Olsen is in the final stretch of completing a Ph.D. in New Testament (with a healthy side of Homiletics) at Emory University. He is a database programmer and an adjunct professor at Emory’s Candler School of Theology where he teaches in homiletics, liturgics, and New Testament. His reflections on life, liturgical spirituality, and being a Gen-X dad appear at Haligweorc.

By Martin L. Smith

What kind of conversation should there be between Christians and atheists? One way of looking at that question is to consider this to be an invitation to a kind of interfaith dialogue, and one that serious Christians should equip themselves to conduct.

Today interfaith dialogue is literally coming home. It isn’t something to be reserved for experts on official commissions. Our daughter might return from college having adopted Tibetan Buddhism. Our brother might marry a keen and eloquent Muslim wife. Hindu neighbors might move in next door. We might become close friends with a new co-worker who is deeply observant Jew. But the chances are just as high we will be spiritually face to face with a humanist agnostic or committed atheist. I am not talking about someone who is merely tone-deaf when it comes to religion. I mean atheism chosen as a moral commitment—and that kind of atheism can be understood as a type of (non-religious) faith, and therefore a world-view and commitment that invites our conversation.

Think of serious agnosticism and atheism as a stance of faith. Its adherents believe human beings can and must create for themselves lives that are worth living, that we must forge values that work now without the claims of a supernatural source. It believes that though human beings enjoy only a few decades of existence and our species is destined for extinction, yet the adventure of human existence is sufficiently glorious to be lived well.

Now, as the late Bishop Krister Stendhal has reminded us, the only kind of interfaith dialogue worthy of the name is a conversation between equals that puts both parties at risk of being drawn to adopt the other person’s belief; so we must mean business and take that risk. If the outcome is that someone comes to know God through our conversation that is great. But even if she doesn’t, it will do us good to discover that atheists have something important to contribute to our religious faith. They can keep us more rigorously honest. Their challenges can have a purging effect and jolt us into more mature belief.

Take ethics and morals. Unfortunately, Christians bear some responsibility for the popular caricature of religion in which choosing good and avoiding evil seems to be governed by fear of divine punishment or expectation of divine favor. Go deep in conversation with our humanist neighbor and we might discover a commitment to justice, decency, compassion, even to virtue, for their own sake. The idea that atheists are intrinsically likely to believe that anything goes morally is a slander. So in dialogue with humanists, Christians may find themselves more in agreement than they imagine. When I talk with an avowed humanist committed to social justice and strong personal ethics of compassion and fidelity, I find myself in hearty agreement that goodness is to be chosen from the heart because it is good, as our mystics have always held. Making a choice from fear of punishment is spiritually infantile.

And what about superstition and religious illusion? In a sense, much of the critique that atheists direct at religion is an offshoot of the biblical critique. If we knew how to read the Bible properly, we would find that a great deal of it is devoted to exposing the elements of illusion and self-deception in so much human religiosity. It isn’t that the prophets merely attacked pagan idolatries as superstitious and toxic. They directed their most devastating analyses to the religion of their own people, all in the name of a very mysterious God who refused to be represented by any image, and who inspired his messengers to vigorously disassociate him from a host of practices performed supposedly in his name. It is out of this prophetic critique that the Jewish saying arose, “The next best thing to believing in the Lord is not to believe in God!”

Another incentive for American Christians to enter into dialogue with atheists, not just intellectual counter-attack, is that they can remind us that God is not obvious. Most Americans claim to believe in God and our cultural climate favors the idea that the existence of God is somehow obvious. But God is far from obvious, and our atheist friends can recall us to that truth. Faith is faith, not taking something for granted. There are millions of intelligent people who aren’t prejudiced against spirituality but who see no signs of the existence of God when they look hard at the same world we live in as people of faith. It is very healthy for Christians to realize how mysteriously hidden God is. We believe that God is hidden intentionally. If God were obvious, our devotion would be coerced. It is because we can say No to the being of God that when we do say Yes we are acting in real freedom.

Martin Smith is well-known in the Episcopal Church and beyond as a priest, writer, preacher and leader of retreats. Through such popular works as A Season for the Spirit and The Word is Very Near You and in numerous workshops, lectures and retreats, he continues to explore a contemporary spirituality that encourages a lively conversation between new knowledge and the riches of tradition.