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 Richard Helmer

While gathering paperwork to get our son registered for kindergarten a few weeks ago, I came across the hospital record of his birth in San Francisco. Beneath his gender designation, length, and weight at birth was his racial designation in big-block capitals:

UNKNOWN.

It stopped me dead in my tracks. Our son, born in 2003, holds immediate claims to two heritages: American and Japanese. Had his mother been, say, French or Swedish, he would have easily been classified as White or Caucasian. Had his mother been African American, chances are he would have been classified as Black. But because his mother is Japanese, and I am of European – mostly English – ancestry, Daniel is a mystery, an unknown quantity in the slippery pseudo-science of race and identity.

Part of me rejoices that he defies standard classification. Part of me worries that his heritage falls into that nebulous, but ever-growing population of children born of marriages that transcend the boundaries of nation and race; children who get a second glance on the street as a rude question bounces around the conventional mind. It’s a question best summed up in the title of a work by author Pearl Fuyo Gaskins: What are you?

“UNKNOWN,” its big, black-on-white, block capitals seemed to also carry with it a mild insult. Marrying across racial boundaries and then having children continues to trip up the legal system in its categorizations, even in an avowedly liberal city like San Francisco. As I prepared Daniel’s kindergarten registration, I was reminded that we are still less than half a century beyond the day when anti-miscegenation laws were ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. And still only decades from an era when I might have been shipped off to an internment camp with my wife for simply living and loving in the wrong place at the wrong time, for being wed on the wrong side of the war.

In its infinite wisdom, the government now offers a new racial category to the list of choices, and I don’t mean that bland Other ____________. (Please fill in the blank.) It’s "Mixed," which brings to mind the ways Daniel can at times look white and at other times, Asian. Which stereo-typed feature shall we pick? The brown eyes and dark hair or the fair skin? The long fingers or the round face? Will he “pass” as a white person when he needs to, or is he Asian enough to go unnoticed in Japan? Or perhaps he simply fits into the relatively new classification of happa, a term that denotes someone born of one Asian and one non-Asian parent. But even happa says very little. Once considered derogatory, the word is derived from the Hawaiian hapa-haole, which simply means, “half white.” But no Solomon could ever determine which half of Daniel is which.

Mixed belies the deeper truth about our common heritage. Daniel might be mixed but he works: he’s healthy, happy, and behaves like most four-year-old boys do, taking over space in all the lives he meets with his boundless energy. Mixed at one time in the Judeo-Christian tradition implied something or someone impure, less than fully functional, whole, or worthy. The truth is, we are all Mixed if you dig back in our genetic history very far. Our wholeness is deeply rooted in our unity as people made in God’s image, and a shared genetic history that is only several tens of thousands of years old. Our racial categories are very late to arrive on the scene. We have in each of us the biological essence of what it is to be European, African, Asian, Latino, Aborigine, Indian, Native American. . .and the capacity to see the face of Christ in one another and the Body of Christ revealed in one another’s cultural heritage.

It’s also in this way that we are all Unknown.

Unknown like the first-born child of young woman and her carpenter husband two millennia ago. Unknown to the world, born in a stable in a backwater town far from the seats of power and empire. Unknown, yet Mixed, says our tradition – of divine and human origin, but not happa; rather 100% each in the theological math that never seems to add up. Instead, it plunges us into the mystery of a God who touches every piece of us, giving new meaning to that line from the Creed that reminds us that ours is the God of the “seen and unseen,” or in that line from the confession, the Redeemer of the “known and unknown.”

Unknown like every child is born – children who must be named and must receive a social identity from those who care for them. Unknown even then, as they must ultimately find themselves and grow into the gifts they have received. Gifts that came from the only One who truly knows each of us when the stardust comes together in a new way, the genes play mix and match, cells divide, and a new heart begins to beat.

So perhaps Unknown is a good category for a child who is a mystery as much as any of us. Our two-dimensional racial categories pretend to know a person, saddle us with an identity that may or may not fit, pigeon-hole us without regard to our unique natures as children of God. The racial categories, while they might remain useful to track our slow institutional progress in honoring the dignity of all, ultimately reveal the hand of human hubris at work in God’s Creation.

Maybe one day, Daniel will recognize Unknown not as a slap for those who fall in the arbitrary fault-lines of race and culture, but a true freedom to become who God made him to be.

All I can do is keep vigil, pray, and wonder, and reflect on my son’s Unknown-ness – that which has yet to be revealed.

The Rev. Richard E. Helmer, a priest, pianist, and writer, serves as rector of Church of Our Saviour, Mill Valley, Calif. He has served in interfaith, ecumenical, diocesan, and national church organizations, including Episcopal Asiamerica Ministries. His sermons have been published at Sermons that Work, and he blogs regularly about spirituality, ministry, Anglicanism, and church politics at Caught by the Light.

By Ann Fontaine

Last year I updated my anti-racism training as required of lay and clergy leaders in the Diocese of Wyoming. As part of our training we pledged to work against racism in our churches and communities. Since I am white I wondered how I can fulfill that pledge as an ally with those who experience racism because of skin color and/or ethnic group. It is the same question I have when working with lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (lgbt) brothers and sisters.

Reflecting on the struggle by women for equality in church and community, I know there is more to working as an ally than just being helpful and nice. An ally is one who works with others to attain their goals. An ally does not just stand beside one, but also “has one’s back,” offering to watch out for unseen dangers. I know from my own place of needing allies that it needs to be done with respect and consultation. Ask for information and guidance from those with whom one wishes to be an ally instead of assuming one knows best for the other.

Some questions to consider in ally work:

Are there ways that being a white person who is an ally to other racial communities, being a man who is an ally to women, being straight and an ally to lgbt persons, and being non-transgender and an ally to transgender people are similar? Different?

If we are members of marginalized groups what do we look for in non-members who want to be allies?

Are allies helpful or harmful to progress? Is it something in between?

The author, James Baldwin spoke about the danger of allies with savior complexes. Have any of us had experiences with allies who thought of their role in that way? Have we fallen into that mode of acting ourselves?

Working as an ally is often difficult. The story of the Good Samaritan shows how easy it is just to walk on by and not get involved. During Civil Rights struggles of the 1960s people who were allies suffered physical harm and death. In South Africa, white women who belonged to the Black Sash movement and who demonstrated against the white apartheid laws and assisted people negotiating the difficulties of the “pass” laws were shunned by their white friends. Those who ally with people who are transgender, gay, lesbian, and bisexual for civil rights are attacked with name-calling and worse. Those who work as allies are often marginalized along with those with whom they ally. Allies can find themselves on the outside of both the dominant group and the marginalized group. It can be a lonely place unless there are other allies with whom one can work and talk.

The reward of justice and space for all to live into the fullness of their creation is worth the difficulties but it is important not to underestimate what might happen as well as one’s own ability to fail at the task.

A possible Code for Allies might be:

We listen to those with whom we work without judging the perspectives, experiences, and feelings of the members of the marginalized group, even when the words feel accusatory towards us. These perspectives, experiences and feelings reveal what we do not know about those with whom we seek to become allies.

We seek to learn from those with whom we ally in order to educate ourselves and others about the culture and concerns of those with whom we are allied. We examine our fears of “the other. We recognize the interconnectedness of “isms” and other examples of individual and societal prejudice.

We understand the commonalities and the differences among the various expressions of prejudice and isolation of groups.

We identify and work to change our prejudicial beliefs and actions as well as to change the beliefs and actions of others, both individual and institutional.

We build relationships with other discredited, marginalized, oppressed, non-privileged groups.

We work for the equalizing and responsible use of power and authority.

We advocate for policies and activities that support those affected by injustice.

We use appropriate language.

We confront inappropriate language.

We ask questions rather than assume we know the answer.

We take risks.

We appreciate the efforts by members of our ally group to point out our mistakes.

We combat the harassment, discrimination, and physical assault that marginalized groups experience in our society by speaking out, by our presence and by working to change the systems that continue oppression and give one group privilege over another.

We appreciate the risks taken by our allies for their own freedom.

We recognize that groups need to work on their own and with others – even when that means we may be left out of the discussion and work.

We support other allies.

We act as allies with no conditions attached.

What should be done as an ally if one thinks a chosen course of action is unwise or will not work as planned? One option is to ask how the strategy was developed and what it seeks to accomplish. This helps to open up the conversation and perhaps give an opportunity to express questions. Giving support does not require blind obedience, but if the group decides this is the right way to proceed then an ally needs to choose whether to participate or not. An ally who undermines the group is worse than those who are not allies.

In the end it is worth asking why one might wish to be an ally? Why does one think it will be helpful? Is anyone asking for help? Examining motives helps to keep one from falling into savior roles or trying to get needs met at the expense of others.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. often quoted Theodore Parker saying, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice." If we are to be part of this moral universe becoming an ally helps bend the arc.

In our baptismal covenant we promise to seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving our neighbor as ourselves and to strive for justice and peace among all people, respecting the dignity of every human being. These promises are a foundation for the work of becoming an ally.

We become allies as followers of Christ, who commands us to love God with all our heart, mind, soul and strength and to love our neighbors as ourselves. The work is for us and our souls as well as for the healing of our communities and the world.

(My thanks to Lelanda Lee, Michael Music, James Toy, the blog Bilerico, Kay Flores, Kristin Fontaine, and Laurie Gudim for their help with this article.)

The Rev. Ann Fontaine, of the Diocese of Wyoming, keeps the blogs Green Lent and what the tide brings in. She is the author of Streams of Mercy: a meditative commentary on the Bible.

By Steven Charleston

One of the less well known chapters in the recent history of the Civil Rights Movement is that part of the movement that arose from within the Native American context. As we look back to the legacy we have inherited from Dr. King, we look back at many paths from many cultures that became the tide of change he initiated.

What was unique about the Native American civil rights experience was the crucial issue of treaties. Unlike other ethnic communities, Native Americans maintain a treaty relationship with the United States, just like foreign nations do. Much of the historic struggle of Native People was fought out in the courts over interpretations of these solemn treaties, or, in many cases, their enforcement. Never have so many treaties been broken so consistently and so blatantly as they have been between the United States and the sovereign indigenous peoples of the Americas. It is the story of civil rights embedded in legal precedent over generations. It is the moral foundation for all that was to follow through genocide, slavery and the importation of the poor into America as cheap labor. The destruction of Native American rights was the fertile soil on which American racism took root and grew. The effort of Native men and women to protect themselves against this evil cloaked as racial superiority is the true subtext of all American history.

The gift of Native Americans to the civil rights movement is the gift of a tiny minority fighting for its legal rights against overwhelming odds. Long before there were sit-ins at segregated lunch counters, there were Native activists fighting for justice in the Supreme Court. In fact, it was exactly one of these cases that President Andrew Jackson derided and ignored, contrary to the Constitution of the United States, when the Supreme Court told him he could not forcibly evict Native People from their land. Andrew Jackson herded my ancestors on a death march in total violation of that court decision. He abrogated the Constitution. He sent troops to quell opposition. Like George Wallace, he wanted a South that was segregated for eternity.

Many years later, as the Civil Rights Movement gained momentum, the great-great grandchildren of those who were sent on the Trail of Tears continued the struggle in places like Alcatraz and the second Wounded Knee. Names like Russell Means and Dennis Banks became common in the media. The American Indian Movement made America nervous as it began to tell the truth about people like Andrew Jackson. Icons of oppression and propaganda like Mount Rushmore became symbols that would challenge the American Dream.

Today, the struggle that began in 1492 continues. I hope that as we celebrate the achievements of the Civil Rights Movement that we never forget the first Americans to fight for justice: those who are proud to call this land their home, their birthright as free and sovereign people.

The Rt. Rev. Steven Charleston, former Bishop of Alaska, is president and dean of Episcopal Divinity School, and keeper of the podcasting blog EDS's Stepping Stones. A citizen of the Choctaw Nation, Bishop Charleston is widely recognized as a leading proponent for justice issues and for spiritual renewal in the church. He has written many articles on both Native American concerns and spirituality.

By Roger Ferlo

What are you looking for? It’s a question that tends to get asked in Episcopal churches this time of year, when we gear up for what we quaintly call Inquirers’ Classes in hopes of swelling our numbers a bit with new recruits. The answers are as various as the people who find their way into the rector’s study, once they manage to negotiate their lonely passage past the vast sea of backs that greets them at the parish coffee hour . “What are you looking for?” we want to ask, knowing full well that more often than not the answer is “I’m not sure.” My experience over the years leading many such classes is that the answer people are trying to articulate is not “I am looking for something” but rather that “Something—someone—is looking for me.” It’s an unsettling place to be.

Like the seekers (and the sought) in our Inquirer Classes, Jesus asked a lot of questions too. People tended to listen closely when he asked them, if only because his questions almost invariably put them on edge, left them scrambling for answers. Who is neighbor to the wounded man? Who would cast the first stone? Whose face is on that coin? Will you lay down your life for me? Where have you laid the body? What are you looking for?

I’ve always admired the presence of mind that allowed two of Jesus’s earliest followers to answer this last probing question with another question. The story gets told in the first chapter of John’s gospel, which tends to be read in church this time of year. You would think that they might have answered him this way: I’m looking for answers. I’m looking for secret knowledge. I’m looking for ways to improve my life, to lose weight, to get a degree, to feel needed, or to feel loved, or to stop hating myself, or to feel vindicated, or to escape my life, or to make money, or to find someone to love, or be on the right side ant the right time when everything hits the fan and I’m left to pick through the pieces.

But that’s not what happens in the story. When Jesus approached two potential inquirers to ask them what they were looking for, what they said was not “I am looking for X, or Y, or Z.” They instead answered his question with another question: “Where are you staying?” Now this is an incredibly foolish response. They know almost nothing about this man, and what they did know about him meant that to ask where he was staying was to ask for trouble. They had just heard John the Baptist call him the Lamb of God. Given what they knew about sacrificial lambs, they should have been running for cover. Because the Lamb of God will by definition be wounded, sacrificed, destroyed, and anyone who stays the course with the Lamb will be wounded, sacrificed, destroyed as well.

So much for the quaint safety of a rector’s Inquirers’ Class. To enter the place where Jesus dwells means to answer a summons not to self-improvement or self-actualization, but to a world of risk and pain and the fear of loss, and at the same time to claim that it’s there, in that world, that you will find a peace that passes all understanding. To seek Jesus where Jesus stays, where Jesus lives, is to come out of hiding—to take the risk of loving yourself, and loving your neighbor, even your neighbor who hates you. To come to Jesus where Jesus lives is to enter the public realm.

Of course, given the idiocies that pass for Christian thinking in political speeches these days, entering the public realm as a Christian is the last thing any of us might want to do. But coming out of hiding as a Christian doesn’t necessarily make you a right-wing Republican. When this story got told in church this past Sunday, it coincided by sheer coincidence with the commemoration of Martin Luther King. Martin Luther King was a lot of things to a lot of people, and at this late date his memory has been mythologized and sterilized and romanticized past all recognition. But he knew how to answer Jesus’ question—he knew what it meant to come out of hiding as a Christian. He knew what it meant to be sought. What are you looking for, Martin? I’m looking for justice. Where do you seek it? I seek it here, now, with you, in this time and in this place, in the name of the God who does not know black from white, rich from poor, except when the difference betokens the sin of injustice, and then with the Lamb of God broken and sacrificed and resurrected I will make no peace with oppression.

We know a lot now about Martin Luther King, in some ways too much, and in many ways too little. One thing we know for sure is that he made no claim to perfection. To respond to Jesus’ question the way he did was not to claim perfection—it was to guarantee that his every imperfection would be revealed. Imperfection of motives. Imperfection of desires. Imperfection of language. Imperfection of intention. How much easier to remain quiet, intimidated by the loudest voices claiming perfection for themselves, to answer the question “What are you looking for” with the standard religious response to which all of us fall prey, no matter where we position ourselves on the religious or political spectrum: “ I’m looking for what’s in it for me.”

That answer’s not good enough any more, as if it ever was. To visit Jesus where Jesus lives, even the smallest act of boldness—parrying one racist remark, countering one xenophobic rant, standing up for one impoverished child, offering just one alternative to the self-centered anger and fear-mongering and scapegoating that bedevils American religion as much as American politics--even the tiniest act of grace will reveal what Jesus called God’s kingdom as it breaks in upon us.

What else in the end is worth looking for?

The Rev. Dr. Roger Ferlo is Professor of Religion and Culture, Associate Dean and director of the Institute for Christian Formation and Leadership at Virginia Theological Seminary.

By George Clifford

Barak Obama and Hillary Clinton recently clashed over a remark that Hillary Clinton had made in reference to Martin Luther King, Jr. The tempest has subsided and all agreed on King’s unique importance and contributions to social justice. But the controversy prompted me to once again reflect on King’s significance for my own life and ministry.

From the time I was in college, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., has been a role model for my life and my ministry. Having grown up in Maine, racism (combining prejudice and power to discriminate against another race) was primarily an intellectual concept until I attended college. As a student at our nation’s first college to award a degree to an African-American, I learned that racism comes in many different forms. The Klu Klux Klan exemplifies overt racism. Institutions that claim to provide equal opportunity but that use tests known to disadvantage a minority practice covert racism. Latent racism is perhaps the most insidious and intransigent form of racism, representing the cultural stereotypes and prejudices to which all of us are exposed as a consequence of being born and raised in a racist society.

The idea that we live in a racist society offends some. It shocked me when a college friend first suggested it. Then I started to listen. I listened to how teachers and employers treated college classmates. I listened to the men with whom I worked in Trenton State Prison whose death sentences had been changed to life imprisonment when the death penalty was ruled unconstitutional (a ruling since reversed). Then, as with those on death row today, their numbers were overwhelmingly African-American. All things being equal – economic status, education, social class, etc. – African-Americans are far more likely to receive a death sentence than Caucasian Americans are. I listened to the first inter-racial couple who asked me to officiate at their wedding. Seven other clergy had refused to officiate because the man was black and the woman white. I listened to the parents who brought their adopted children to my parish, and to the children, tell of the racism that they experienced at school and in other churches because the families included Caucasians, Asians, African-Americans and Native Americans.

When I joined the Navy, I continued to listen. The first African-American chaplain promoted to Captain told me about the obstacles he had faced in the Chaplain Corps, prejudice that continues even into the present. An African-American ship captain, a former star athlete at the Naval Academy, told me of the hatred and racism that he had faced. Senior Marines told me how the Marine Corps has struggled unsuccessfully for decades to correct the imbalance in the ratio of African-American officers to enlisted. Listening to stories of racism brings tears to my eyes and raises my blood pressure. I feel face to face with evil.

Martin Luther King, Jr., knew all of the above. He personally experienced racism’s destructive and dehumanizing power. Yet he believed and preached that Christ's power to save is not limited to what happens when we die but includes transforming our values and attitudes in this life. Martin Luther King, Jr., believed that the world could become a better place. He lived and worked in the hope that one-day children all of races would live and play together as brothers and sisters. He was killed because he believed that walking in Jesus' footsteps meant opposing the evil of racism and other forms of social injustice at all costs but that the opposition must take a Christ-like shape.

When still in college, I felt called to spend my life making the world a better place. I briefly considered the law and politics. But by the seventies, when I was in college, enormous legislative and judicial strides had been taken. Overt racism, except as protected free speech, was largely illegal. Separate facilities for different races were abolished. Inter-racial marriage was increasingly common. Education, employment, and residential discrimination were less open and against the law. Covert racism was being slowly rooted out. Institutions were establishing equal opportunity policies, programs and offices. Affirmative action resulted in significant positive steps towards rectifying past discrimination.

Yet latent racism remained pervasive. People needed healing in their lives. Hatred, prejudice, and resentment needed transforming into genuine love for all of one’s neighbors, regardless of race or any other characteristic or belief. All are God's children and God loves all equally. Martin Luther King, Jr., was a living example, for me, of an extremely effective and articulate clergyperson who transformed lives and society into a closer reflection of Christ's image. His example inspired me to seek ordination and to serve the Church. I believe that God called me to the ministry to assist in changing lives and our world into a place where people are judged by the content of their character and not the color of their skin. Even today, almost a quarter of a century later, when I feel discouraged or wonder if I might have made more of a difference in the world, I remember Martin Luther King, Jr., and find myself encouraged and strengthened. He is truly one of the saints of God.

The Rev. George Clifford, Diocese of North Carolina, served as a Navy chaplain for twenty-four years, with tours at sea, with the Marine Corps, on the staff of the Chief of Chaplains, on exchange with the Royal Navy in London, as the senior Protestant chaplain at the Naval Academy, and as the senior chaplain at the Naval Postgraduate School.

By Martin L. Smith

I read with fascination recently the account of an experiment studying interactions between white and black Americans. In the first phase researchers set up individual conversations between African Americans and whites, and the African Americans recorded their impressions. Then the researchers divided the white participants into two groups. The first had made their racism obvious through their insulting tone. The second had conversed respectfully. A second round of conversations took place, and the researchers immediately subjected all the white participants to a set of cognitive tests in private. The results were very interesting. Most of the white participants who pleased the African Americans by their respectful behavior did far worse in these cognitive tests than those who had not been nice! However, if the tests were administered again an hour later the discrepancy in the results between the two groups disappeared.

The researchers propose this explanation: most of the white folk who were behaving respectfully to the African Americans were having to devote a huge amount of energy to the unconscious process of censoring their actual negative impulses. So much so, that it took the brain an hour or so to recover equilibrium and restore normal service to all its functions. The racist whites made no bones about the contempt they entertained for blacks, so their brains weren’t overtaxed at all when they talked with them.

Surely, these are the kind of explorations that should most fascinate and challenge Christians like ourselves. After all we inherit thousands of years of meditation on human experience, and scripture itself is a rich resource of reflection about the conviction that reliance on outer behavior alone to judge the condition of the heart is sheer folly. God is the one that sees through, sees into, sees behind the appearances many human beings can keep up. Episcopalians should be specially concerned since, generally speaking, we entertain a rather Anglo-Saxon devotion to good manners and correct appearances. Our standards of respectful behavior are fairly high, and when we embrace enthusiastically all sorts of slogans about inclusiveness and equality it can easily seem—at least to the white majority—that the work of purging the church of racism has been almost achieved. Actually, though the worst outrages might have diminished, the real work has only started. There is a vast difference between the ability to perform as if we regard one another as equals and relationships based on a far more profound change: conversion, what the prophetic tradition of scripture calls getting a new heart of flesh instead of a heart of stone, and a new Spirit.

Primarily because I am in an interracial partnership I’m keenly aware that it is a matter of conversion not cosmetics. Before I moved to Washington, I had taken the excellent anti-racism training our Church offers. I had been on the board of a non-profit dedicated to supporting inner-city youth, mainly black. I’d thought it had registered when black friends told me that they had come to expect on average about ten put downs a day from white folk. I could talk about the unearned privileges of being white. But it was only by actually being taken into friendships, into social networks, by many African Americans, and embarking on a partnership with an African American, that I really started exploring the reality of racism, beginning with my own. Of course, I could behave with superb manners to black folk, but what good were these if they successfully masked engrained attitudes, ways I was wired? Thus started a spiritual adventure of unlearning, rewiring, facing fears, listening for things I had never heard, sensing things I had never realized, jettisoning things I had thought were part of the fabric of reality and now know to be obscene deceptions.

The protocols of political correctness are worse than useless if they merely make people more adept in censoring inner negativity. They can deter us from dealing with the endemic affliction of the heart, our very brains that wired themselves to correspond to society’s perversions and made themselves recruits for reinforcing and transmitting them. Instead, we should be digging deep wells into our scriptural spirituality that really does insist that in order for a person to be in Christ, in order for there to be a new creation, the old has to pass away. Our polite, predominantly middle class religious culture doesn’t find the radical language of Paul to its taste at all, but I have never been more profoundly convinced that there we must stop avoiding his robust language about the pain involved in separating ourselves from the prerogatives of power: “I have been crucified with Christ.” And those of us who have enjoyed the majority’s unearned privileges need the insight that our built in sense of superiority can’t be just adjusted or ameliorated. It needs crucifying for our new humanity to emerge from within.

Martin L. Smith is a well-known spiritual writer and priest. He is the senior associate rector at St. Columba’s in Washington, D.C.

By Kit Carlson

For many years, I was a serious Anglophile. I loved being an Episcopalian, because we talked like Thomas Cranmer every single week (at least until the 1979 revision of the Prayer Book). I was obsessed with the Masterpiece Theater series on Henry VIII and Elizabeth I, and the connection between my local church and the its convulsive beginnings in the 15th Century was really powerful for me.

As I got older, I drifted in and out of churches. As a young 20-ish woman, there was nothing that spoke to me in most Sunday services. But on All Saints Sunday 1986, my husband and I wandered into Our Saviour Episcopal Church, just next to the Beltway in suburban Maryland. We had relocated to Silver Spring, I was pregnant with our first child, and I wanted to find a church we could settle down in as a family.

Our Saviour had a pipe organ. And a choir, one that needed a soprano. It worked for me. We joined.

Shortly after, something wonderful began to happen at Our Saviour. It had been founded in the late '50s as a "white flight" church, spun off from another Our Saviour in the Brookland area of Washington when things began to "change" in the neighborhood. But as the 1980s turned into the 1990s, Our Saviour-Hillandale also began to change. Folks started showing up, immigrants from Africa and China and India and the Caribbean.

It was another connection to British history, its history of empire and of conquest. For if once the sun never set on the British Empire, then it also never set on Britain's national church. There were Anglicans all over the world and as they moved to the United States, many of them made their home at Our Saviour.

Harwood Bowman, the founding rector, had planned for Our Saviour to be built next to the Capitol Beltway, then only a dream, because he wanted folks to come to Our Saviour from "all over." Folks were definitely coming to the church from "all over," from places Harwood had never imagined they might come, bringing their culture and customs with them. It became a Pentecostal church ... not the kind that rolls around in the ecstasy of the Spirit, but a church that looks like the feast of Pentecost, when each person heard the good news proclaimed to them in their own language.

Through these changes, Our Saviour flexed, painfully at times, but accommodated the shifts. When I worshipped there last month, for the first time in years (and for the last time for me as a resident of Maryland ...), it was very different and yet the same.

The congregation was more than three-quarters black. But not because the whites fled ... the old-timers were still filling the same pews. The parish had just grown and changed along with them.

The Mother's Union, another exported British tradition, had turned out to make a presentation. In their matching blue dresses and white hats, they claimed their pride of place as a force of feminine leadership. The sermon -- preached by the new young assistant, who is also the parish's pastor to its Latino congregation -- was free-form, delivered from the aisle, and powerful. The music was traditional (with ALL the verses of St. Patrick's Breastplate) and pietistic, with three hymns from LEVAS at communion, sung with great volume and joy. Some people waved their hands in the air. Others silently bowed their heads in prayer. It was my church. It was a homecoming.

Our Saviour is not a perfect parish. It has had its dissensions, its debates, its struggles over what is going on in the wider Communion and what is going on among its own members. But it is a community that has held together through those dissensions and struggles. It is Anglican in all the best definitions of that word ... international, comprehensive, thoughtful, traditional, yet open to the leading of the Spirit.

I am proud to have called it my church home. It has made me the Anglican I am today.

The Rev. Kit Carlson, is the rector of All Saints Episcopal Church in East Lansing, Mich. She was associate and interim rector at the Church of the Ascension in Gaithersburg, Md., for seven years.

By George Clifford

Two recent Supreme Court decisions have ignited fiery discussions about the role of race as a criterion for assigning children to public schools. The decisions, in one case from Louisville and another from Seattle, appear to have largely reversed the landmark 1954 school integration case of Brown vs. Board of Education.

My initial response to the decisions was one of anger. Then I began to reflect on some of the ways in which race issues intersected with my life and ministry.

I performed my first inter-racial marriage in 1980. Eight other clergypersons had declined to officiate because the man was an African-American and the woman a Caucasian. That was in northern Maine. Since then, I have officiated at many inter-racial marriages and learned that such marriages were formerly against the law in some states. Today, in Raleigh, NC, I frequently observe inter-racial couples going unnoticed in restaurants, shops, churches, and elsewhere. This is a different world than in 1954.

In seminary, my advisor was an African-American. In the military, I worked for several African-Americans and had several work for me. Two of my six ecclesiastical superiors have been African-American (including the current Bishop of North Carolina); a third was an Asian-American. When celebrating Holy Eucharist, they drink from the chalice first; in confirmation, they lay hands on the confirmand; they approve the remarriage of divorced persons; and nobody is offended. This is a different world than in 1954.

Thanks be to God for a new song! God, as Peter learned through his vision in Acts 10, loves all people equally, regardless of a person’s race, ethnicity, nationality, or gender. The Civil Rights movement, Supreme Court cases like Brown vs. Board of Education, and important legislation such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964 dramatically changed life in the United States. Most, if not all of us, have sung this new song in our life and heard it in the lives of family, friends, neighbors, and communicants.

Yet race is often the “elephant in the room” about which nobody wants to speak. When I preach about racial justice, whether in a predominantly Caucasian or African-American congregation, invariably at least one person will tell me that I was brave for doing so.

Why does the topic of race make people uncomfortable? I suspect there a variety of reasons. For some, the problem is one of guilt, over what not only happened in prior generations but events in their own life. Another source of guilt is recognizing that racial bias and discrimination are un-Christian but still widespread in the U.S. Other people are simply uncomfortable with racially formed identities, their own and that of others.

The truth is that we who sing this new song have a difficulty staying on key and in time. Most forms of blatant racism are gone. Now the prejudice is more subtle. Listening to blacks (as well as women!) in the military tell their stories, I always heard them speak of others singing off key notes. But that is not the whole story. In spite of visible successes, like that of General Colin Powell who retired from the Army as the United States’ senior military officer, disproportionately few blacks serve as commissioned officers and even fewer become senior officers.

The military, in spite of its imperfections, deserves its reputation as one of the nation’s foremost equal opportunity organizations. The proportional lack of black officers stems from not only lingering expressions of racism but also from differences in quality of education, access to education, and other factors over which the military has no control.

White liberals, and even a few blacks, criticized the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., when he started voicing his opposition to the Vietnam War. He replied that he had to speak – the issues of racism and an unjust war were inherently connected. He received similar criticism when he rightly linked the issues of poverty, education, and racism.

In the United States, race remains inherently connected to most other issues of social justice. For example, mandatory school integration prompted white flight. Busing accelerated parents turning to the ironically named Christian schools and then to home schooling. Fair housing laws have achieved marginal results. Sunday morning remains perhaps the most segregated time of the week.

Discrimination based on race is illegal, as it should be. However, racism, along with other forms of injustice, remains deeply embedded in American culture and therefore contaminates most of us. Long, late night conversations with a friend in college started to open my eyes to some of the ways in which this culture and I were racist. Subsequent reading and conversations have opened my eyes further.

One reason that I answered a call to the priesthood was realizing that changing laws and winning court battles were only the first steps, the easy steps, towards creating a more just society. The hard steps lay in changing hearts and minds, eradicating all forms of discrimination and injustice that are incompatible with the gospel.

Perhaps the recent Supreme Court cases are a disguised gift from God. No longer can school districts view race in isolation from other forms of injustice. To grasp that gift, Christians will need to follow Dr. King’s lead. They will have to engage the political process and push for schools in which the students reflect a cross-section of the larger community’s socio-economic composition. Doing so will more directly and fully address the multi-faceted sin of racism as well as other forms of injustice. Doing so will force people to talk about the elephant in the room, creating the possibility for healing and transformation. Most importantly, doing so will help us to sing this new song that God has give to us with more fervor and more on key.

The Rev. George Clifford, Diocese of North Carolina, served as a Navy chaplain for twenty-four years. He was the senior Protestant chaplain at the Naval Academy, and the senior chaplain at the Naval Postgraduate School. He taught philosophy at the Academy and ethics at the Postgraduate School.

The Unition of Black Episcopalians wraps up its annual meeting in Houston today. Before the conference began, Carol Barnwell, director of communications for the Diocese of Texas interviewed outgoing UBE president the Rev. Canon Nelson Pinder (see below.) The Houston Chronicle covered Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori's sermon at the opening Eucharist, and Betty Conrad Adam followed daily developments on her blog: The Magdalene mystique.

By Carol Barnwell

The Rev. Canon Nelson Pinder, outgoing president of the Union of Black Episcopalians, believes the organization has work to do. “We have profound influence,” he said in an interview during the UBE’s annual conference, held in Houston, Texas, July 2-6. Pinder credits the UBE assistance in the adoption of many General Convention resolutions on human rights as well as women’s ordination. “We helped get women ordained,” he said. “Barbara Harris is the first Anglican woman bishop and she is a UBE member!”

Five women bishops was honored at the conference’s banquet, Thursday evening, celebrating 30 years of women’s ordination, including Harris, along with Bishops Dena Harrison of Texas, Carol Gallagher of Newark, Gayle Harris of Massachusetts and Bavi “Nedi” Rivera of Olympia.

Pinder described the 1000 member UBE as having a multigenerational ministry. It is also multicultural, he said, with people from the Caribbean, Central and South America, the United States and Africa. “We speak English, French, Spanish and many other languages,” Pinder explained.

A retired priest from Florida, Pinder said his vision for UBE has been to “stay spiritual” but he is not afraid to address the hard issues of money. “We need to get to a financial place where we can operate in a healthy manner.

He expects this conference to consider reshaping the UBE and important partnerships with the historical Black Voorhees College in South Carolina and the Diocese of Honduras.

“Any company goes through review and revisions from time to time to find out where they are. We need to see where we are, who we are, that’s part of the necessary retooling,” Pinder said.

Pinder also expects the UBE to discuss issues within the Anglican Communion at their business meeting on Thursday and indeed, House of Deputies President Bonnie Anderson encouraged the group to make their voice heard, “whatever your position,” during her remarks to the group on Tuesday. While the UBE has no official position on the issues, Pinder said he personally believes African bishops are wrong to cross boundaries. “Until a family can have a good fight, we don’t need referees,” he said.

Pinder hopes the UBE will help more people of color get into places of power in the Church where the money is being spent. I want a structure where any kid can see the possibility of being anything [he/she] wants to be all the way to bishop, whether they are Black, female or speak Spanish,” he said.

He said the group chose Houston for their annual gathering because he likes to move the “big event” around the country to be visible, to support local Black congregations and let them know they are not alone.

Bishop Don Wimberly was delighted to welcome the UBE to the Diocese of Texas. “Although we don’t have many Black clergy,” he said, “it is part of our ongoing vision to improve that situation and further reflect the multicultural community in which we live and minister.” Wimberly supported the conference with a $20,000 grant and members of the local John Epps Chapter of the UBE hosted the conference, held at the Hilton Americas in downtown Houston.

While Sunday’s are the most segregated time of the week, Pinder supports neighborhood churches. “Church, to me, was a training ground [in leadership] … a place to get community news,” he said. And while he believes people should worship where they are comfortable, he believes churches should strive to have multicultural staffs and to meet the neighborhood where they exist.

“The Episcopal Church offers the Black community an exercise in spirituality, an exercise in intellectualism, an exercise in the ability to be a community leader and an exercise in how to serve people,” Pinder said. He admits that recruitment of Blacks for ordained ministry is difficult and said salary is an issue. “A priest brings vision to the people. The people are asked to support that vision through prayer, financially and with their works. Our money belongs to God. It’s the best deal in town,” he said. “Give me 10 percent and you can keep 90 percent. Even the government supports that!”

Leadership development is a key piece for the UBE, which was founded in 1968, Pinder said. “We are a volunteer organization and we need about $125,000 to hire a staff and set up an office. We are gaining technical sense throughout consultations with Voorhees but right now I have a computer and phone at home and one volunteer to keep up with the work,” he said.

Although we are past segregation, Pinder said, “Racism is still with us. We have to deal with it … We are the action group. We can call the Church to be accountable.”

Carol E. Barnwell, communications director of the Episcopal Diocese of Texas, is an award winning photographer who writes and edits a monthly newspaper for the diocese's 84,000 plus members. She has served on the press teams of four General Conventions and the 1988 Lambeth Conference, and has covered stories in England, Central America, Africa and Haiti.

By Steven Charleston

Have you been watching the media recently? If you have, I am sure you have been aware of the triple header from our nation’s campuses: Duke, Rutgers and Virginia Tech. Three major universities. Three major stories. And all involved in different shades of the perennial question of race in America. But what do these stories have in common? What do the good young men of Duke, the good young women of Rutgers, and the lost young man of Virginia all share that can help us discover a message about where this nation is in its efforts to find racial/gender equality?

There is more than one answer, but here is the most obvious: their stories were played out in the media. While the men of Duke were certainly caught up in a legal issue, it was one of those now familiar moments when the lines of distinction between the courtroom and the public media become blurred. Like the O.J. trial, it was a public spectacle as much as a legal proceeding.

In the same way, the women’s team from Rutgers received ten times more coverage from the attack by Don Imus than they did from their pursuit of the national women’s basketball championship. And the tragedy of Virginia Tech has been a media vigil that will stay in the public consciousness for many years to come. The face of a Korean American pointing his guns at the camera is too powerful to be easily forgotten.

White, Black, Asian: the issues of race and justice, race and violence, have become something like reality TV for the American public. But have we stopped watching long enough to notice that all of these news stories are about the outcomes of a broken society, not about its healing?

The Civil Rights movement was the first time that race broke into the media in a meaningful, life changing way. The images of Black marchers being attacked by police dogs or battered by water cannons riveted America, but their true impact was felt in other sectors of our culture, places where change could actually take place. The Civil Rights movement showed America its racism, but it also forced that question into action in our government, our justice system, our schools, our business community. We were not only watching race relations on television, we were translating those images into change where it counted.

Are we still doing that? Or are we content just to watch? Unless all of the images from Rodney King to the Rutgers team can be transformed into systemic change, what ultimate value do they have for us beyond shock value and sorrow? And unless the predictable media figures who always surface as color commentators for these tragedies can be replaced by leadership of the stature of a Martin Luther King, what hope do we have for moving the story from the flat screen into the real centers of power where they can effect genuine change? The answer is troublingly unclear and uncertain. Our will to confront causes more than images is unsure. Our leadership is content to be talking heads. In the meantime, we are watching more than we are doing.

The Rt. Rev. Steven Charleston, former Bishop of Alaska, is president and dean of Episcopal Divinity School. His daily podcasts are collected at EDS’ Stepping Stones.