By Jean Fitzpatrick

The bride in a black cocktail dress with a black veil, carrying a flower bouquet adorned with miniature skulls. The groom in dark slacks, a pirate shirt and a top hat. Theme music from The Addams Family and The Munsters. Guests in costume. That's what Lisa Panensky and Jim Nieves had in mind when they booked their Halloween 2009 wedding at Westchester County's Old Dutch Church, built in 1697 and cited by Washington Irving in "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow." "Sleepy Hollow is the Halloween capital of the world," Nieves told the local Journal News explaining the couple's eagerness to be married there. "It's a landmark."

But the Rev. Jeff Gargano, pastor of the Old Dutch Church, nixed the plan. Gargano did offer to perform the ceremony outside in the church's historic "Burying Ground" (where, it is said, Irving's Headless Horseman tethers his horse nightly among the graves) but Nieves and Panensky declined. The wedding will reportedly take place -- Munsters music and all -- at their home in nearby Elmsford.

But the couple remained disappointed and puzzled by the minister's objections. (This is, after all, a church where Irving's ghoulish story is read aloud every year in the sanctuary.) "I don't know where he [Gargano] got this idea of burning crosses and killing babies," said the bride-to-be. I guess the pastor worried that darker forces might be involved in the Halloween wedding, he perhaps not subscribing fully to the engraving on the 1685 Old Dutch Church bell: "If God Be For Us Who Can Be Against Us?"

I'll admit that I'm partial to the long white wedding dress. But let me tell you what really upset me about this story, and it had nothing to do with the Addams Family. According to local news reports, the church had decided to waive its requirement that the couple participate in premarital counseling.

Now, that's scary.

You've heard the statistics. And with or without a pirate shirt and skulls, today's couples -- so often lacking role models for how to sustain a marriage through crises and everyday conflicts -- benefit enormously from the opportunity to reflect on their union and learn practical relationship skills. Sadly, many are so busy with work and wedding plans that they are hard pressed to find time to lay the groundwork for their relationship without encouragement. Even if they've had some previous therapy, as a couple prepares to walk down the aisle, it is essential that they talk together about the meaning of marriage, their own experiences of relationship, their struggles and hopes and dreams.

As for the Old Dutch Church couple, what a missed opportunity that was to make a real connection with them. I can't think of anything more telling than to ask an engaged couple about their masks and disguises. The costumes we choose, like Venetian carnival masks, conceal our identities...but they also reveal our deepest yearnings and fantasies. What do those skulls mean to Lisa, anyway? And why did Jim the groom decide to don a pirate hat? How do their two "characters" relate to each other? Sounds like the start of a rich and interesting conversation.

Through the years, those identities and yearnings often evolve. With each new life stage we deepen certain aspects of ourselves, discard others, discover new ones. I can't count how many times a husband or wife has sat in my office and told a partner, "I don't know you anymore," or "This is not the person I married." At times like these we feel as gloomy and bedraggled as trick-or-treaters on a rainy night. The beauty is that if you're willing to keep on stumbling along in the dark, sooner or later a door opens, you wind up at a house that's all lit up and warm, and a friendly face is inviting you in.

Jean Grasso Fitzpatrick, L.P., a New York-licensed psychoanalyst and a member of the American Association of Pastoral Counselors. A layreader in the Diocese of New York, she is the author of numerous books and articles, including Something More: Nurturing Your Child's Spiritual Growth and has a website at www.pastoralcounseling.net.

By Joy Caires

As a pediatric chaplain I saw people of all faiths pour all of their being into the attempt to save a child's life, again and again--regardless of any differences we may have had. The Orthodox Jewish family anticipating their baby's heart surgery; the lesbian couple seeking baptism for the infant they knew would not survive much beyond birth; the Hindi family I led in prayer as we gathered barefoot at their adult son's bedside; the Jehovah's Witnesses watching their son's last breath leave his body; the evangelical fundamentalist father expressing concern over his son's obsession with Heaven; the teenager I baptized who's grandmother had left the Episcopal Church over the ordination of openly gay and lesbian clergy-desperate in their need they welcomed my presence. They didn't question whether I was "eligible" to pray for them, bring the sacraments to them, or love them. They clung to me like a life boat and I in turn held steady at their grasp. As they watched their children struggle their relief at the presence of the priest was often palpable. In that moment all they cared about was the fact that a child, their child, was dying and that I was there.

Now that said, the relationship was primarily one way. I had something they needed, I wore a collar, and they were in crisis. So, no personal questions were asked of me-and I rarely volunteered information about myself. Occasionally in the quiet moments, or as the relationship grew I would answer their questions while still dodging the inevitable "so are you married?"s with an answer of "yes" and a quick follow up question. They would keep talking and I would keep listening--their question answered but not answered--and I would feel relief at my preservation of the pastoral relationship. Yes, I often found myself wondering, did my duplicity help or hinder my ministry? If they knew about my sexuality would they still call me to anoint their dying child? Would they still ask for me if they knew that part of my familiarity and comfort in the medical setting came from having met my beloved while she was still in medical school and learning the language of medicine second hand?

And, I wonder, and part of my wondering is the knowledge that many of these families want the pastoral relationship to continue beyond the bounds of the hospital. They want to visit me at my parish; they invite me to birthday parties for children that made it despite it all. They, gasp, want to friend me on Facebook so that they can share photos taken of me with their children! How much do I let them into my life now that their crisis is over? Would knowing more about me harm their memory of the relationship I had with them in the hospital?

As a chaplain it was about them--and after the crisis I got to walk away. There was little risk of rejection and I knew with surety that what I did was crucial. In the parish I find that getting the bulletin proofread does not strike me as a crisis (at all) but that it is its own kind of ministry. I find the parish world to be a different kind of challenge-with greater personal risk. Because, now, as a parish priest I find that it is usually about us, as a congregation, as a gathered community. These are people who share the journey with me-they know my spouse, in sermons I share with them some of my story as we embark on the journey of faith together. It seems odd at times to have so many know so much about my life. But, at the same time, I can see the difference it makes to the people who make up the congregation to have these insights into my life and love.

So, I wonder...what would have been different if I'd let patients and parents in a bit further, if I'd answered instead of evaded? And, as these relationships settle firmly into the past, I wonder whose loss it has been?

The Reverend Joy Caires, a graduate of Episcopal Divinity School, is currently the Associate Rector at Church of Our Saviour in Akron, Ohio. Joy's first call, after ordination, was as the pediatric chaplain at Rainbow Babies and Children's Hospital in Cleveland, Ohio.

By Kathleen Staudt

Whenever a baby is baptized in my congregation, the priest presents the newly baptized child to the congregation and announces joyfully. “Join me in welcoming the newest member of our church,” and there is applause, and rejoicing and delight all around. Baptism is what makes us part of the Body of Christ, the Church .

When we welcome the newly baptized as our newest “member,” the celebration is of inclusion, expressing the open arms of the community of faith. Theologically it is the incorporation of a person into the mystical Body of Christ, of which we are all “living members,” and we celebrate that, even though we know that often the baptism of a child is primarily a rite of passage for a family.

But very quickly, even well intentioned language about “membership” begins to sound like language of exclusion. I’ve been mulling this over as our congregation begins the process of revising our bylaws, part of which involves deciding who is a “member” of the congregation, mainly for purposes of vestry elections and voting at the annual meeting.

The old bylaws defined a member of the church as a communicant in good standing who made a regular financial pledge. But the question has been raised lately about whether one can be a “member” of the church without making a pledge: whether it is sufficient to have made a financial contribution during the previous year – whether membership should rely on making a financial contribution at all. Our culturally diverse congregation’s mission statement is “to be a home for all God’s people.” How does that square with putting a financial requirement on “membership”? people wonder, perhaps rightly. Our rector wants to keep the bylaws language about membership consistent with what he says at every baptism. As long as you’re baptized and we’ve recorded it here, you’re a member. That’s what the canons say. So far, so good

But in the theology expressed in our local practice, this all quickly becomes more problematic. Under our current bylaws, the bar is actually higher for voting at the annual meeting than it is for receiving communion! On the one hand, the priest’s announcement at each baptism reminds us that we are members by virtue of our baptism. At Eucharist, like many Episcopal churches, we have a local practice of open communion: we gladly welcome all who wish to receive.

In practice, then, in a post-Christendom world, Eucharist is for some people the point of entry into the life of the church. Baptism, for an adult not previously baptized, becomes once again the major step of risk and commitment that it was for the earliest Christians -- a serious moment of intentional commitment to Christ. We do not insist that someone prove that they are baptized before they come to the altar. We have lost that ancient connection between a catechumenate and admission to the Eucharist, and the statement that this makes about Christian identity: that we are baptized into both the death and Resurrection of Christ, and that Eucharist is the meal that nourishes us for faithful living. I love that teaching, in its positive version. I believe it.

The trouble is, to someone coming in the door of the church for the first time, what I think of as an inclusive statement: “All baptized Christians are welcome to receive” gets heard as exclusion. I’ve experienced what it’s like to feel excluded from the Eucharist (see my previous post), and I see the wisdom of the open table practiced in my church and in many Episcopal churches now: we simply say “all are welcome to receive” and leave it to the Holy Spirit, working through the life of the local community, to invite those who are drawn to Christ to receive communion, and perhaps eventually, if they are not baptized, to embrace what amounts to a “believer’s baptism” – making their own adult commitment to the Christian life, in full awareness of all that it involves. But I think we have some work to do on supporting and encouraging people toward that second step. And on remembering why Baptism is important.

One of these days there will have to be a conversation in the Episcopal Church about open communion and how we understand it theologically. It seems to have become part of our witness to an open and generous-hearted Christianity in a post-Christian world, and I expect it is here to stay. Indeed, I welcome the practice, despite theological reservations. But the power and grace of Baptism also needs to be reclaimed as part of our understanding of who we are as Christians.

I am glad that ours is a liturgical tradition where “praying shapes believing,” where to some extent we learn where the Holy Spirit may be leading us through our evolving practice, rooted in tradition but also changing with the times. So where is the practice of open communion leading us, in terms of our understanding of what it means to be “members” of the body of Christ? Is there perhaps an opportunity here, in a post-Christian world, to reclaim baptism itself as a truly intentional commitment to Christian discipleship? I really am interested in what readers of the Café have to say about this.

Dr. Kathleen Henderson Staudt keeps the blog poetproph, works as a teacher, poet, spiritual director and retreat leader in the Washington DC area. 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 Kathleen Staudt

Several weekends ago, I spent a refreshing and prayerful time on retreat at Holy Cross Abbey, a Cistercian monastery near the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. As one might expect in an atmosphere infused with the monastic tradition, I felt thoroughly welcomed and quieted, and was nourished by the opportunity offered to enter what T.S. Eliot called “time not our time. In the one conversation I had with a monk, I was reminded of the Cistercian devotion both to prayer and to the intellectual life, two parts of myself that I’ve been a long time in bringing together. (A favorite book title of mine, about the monastic tradition, is called The Love of Learning and the Desire for God. I think that does describe something important about my vocation).

Sure of the divine welcome in the place (and of creation’s welcome, among the meadow flowers, birds and mountain scenery), I became vividly aware on Sunday of the obstacles to welcome that still exist in a church that is still far from the unity for which Jesus prayed. As a Roman Catholic order, the Cistercians abide by a discipline that limits participation in Eucharist to Catholics. I knew this. I knew I could present myself for Eucharist and no one would speak or object, but I was interested in the way that the non-invitation to Eucharist was worded. “The Catholic bishops do not allow us to invite non-Catholic Christians to receive Eucharist. We ask that you respect the discipline of the Roman Catholic Church and join us in prayer for the unity of all Christians, for whom our Lord Jesus prayed on the night before he died.”

My own operative theology is scandalized at the idea of excluding anyone from Eucharist, believing that we go at Christ’s invitation, rather than at the invitation of a human community, however organized or faithful. And the careful wording of the placard I’ve just quoted suggested to me that whoever wrote it might even share the same operative theology. I’m certainly glad that the Episcopal Church has pushed back against any statement that would begin “The Anglican Communion does not allow us to invite. . . . " But there was also in this sad non-invitation a solid piece of truth-telling that I appreciated. I was grateful to the community for honestly naming the brokenness. It caused me to experience, as I have not before, what it is to be excluded from a rite that is our central expression of belonging. It was wrong. But it was true to how things are in the Church for whom Jesus prayed, and died.

So, I accepted, and learned from, the invitation to “join us in prayer for the unity of all Christians, for whom our Lord Jesus prayed on the night before he died.” As people lined up to receive the Body and Blood, I remained kneeling, praying fervently and deeply for the unity of a broken church, the whole church catholic, Anglican, orthodox, whatever our sad divisions may be. I heard in my heart snatches of hymns: “Bid thou our sad divisions cease/ And be thyself our king of peace. . . . . “ “By schisms rent asunder, by heresies distressed.” It was a rich, full and genuine participation, in its way – a sharing in the broken heart of Christ, in the midst of the assembly. I wouldn’t want to make a habit of this way of prayer. But at least on this day, it was an unexpected gift.

Dr. Kathleen Henderson Staudt keeps the blog poetproph, works as a teacher, poet, spiritual director and retreat leader in the Washington DC area. 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 Joy Caires

There are times when I crave the island I grew up on--missing it with a longing indeed a yearning, that nothing can fill. Last week, I was in line at the pharmacy’s photo kiosk and a man came up behind me. He looked like any of a number of the men I grew up around—the uncles, cousins and friends who would gather around my dad’s pick-up truck late in the afternoon “talking story.” I knew it wouldn’t be appropriate to turn around and say “where are you from?" That would have been rude. But, I longed to speak. I longed for a tangible reminder in the middle of my summer afternoon and I began to long for home.

But, rather than speak, I waited for the photos from our mission trip to download—glancing behind me a bit too frequently for politeness. Then, he picked up his cell phone and began to speak. And suddenly, the familiar lilt of Pidgin English filled my ears—intonations I rarely hear, except in the occasional long distance phone call. As he finished his call I steeled myself, turned and asked, “Excuse me, are you from Hawai’i?” He looked startled—this was probably not a question he’d heard often in rural Ohio! With his “yes” we plunged into conversation—how often do you get back, how long have you been here, where do you get good Hawaiian food, wow, they really let you check a cooler full of Ahi tuna!

As we talked the photos from the mission trip to Kentucky downloaded and soon it was time to go. But, this encounter cued the longing in my soul for the smell of the salt air, the taste of kalua pig and a time zone that fits me just a little bit better than the one here does. So, as my longing for home has increased I’ve cued up the Hawai’ian music in my car and I crave the foods that I grew up enjoying: Spam musubi, manapua, kalua pig, poi (the list goes on) chicken long rice, haupia, lau lau, cone sushi, pulehu beef, char siu, hekka, komoda’s donuts, saimin, opihi. (Are you hungry yet?) This food represents comfort and my taste buds long for it as this litany of the soyu soaked, sugar filled and salt cured appears across my computer screen.

When I graduated from high school I was given a rice pot—just like every other graduating senior who was headed to the mainland for college. Our relatives feared that we would starve on the mainland without rice. Rice that had been rinsed in cold water until the starch was released from the grain, rice poured into the pot and swirled with your hand and then drained. Rice which was cooked in the rice pot where it would sit, waiting to be scooped into the next bowl or plate, until it was time to make more rice. Rice came in 25 pound bags—and there was only one kind of rice. Going away to college with our rice pots in tow was our community’s way of telling us that we were loved and would be missed. And, for many of us, our rice was salted with tears in those initial days.

I’m guessing that most people know what “home food” is, what “comfort food” should taste like. Southern friends search out grits of the right texture, taste and consistency and know that most things improve with a generous lashing of bacon grease. Fry bread, baked beans, biscuits, rice, spaghetti…we all have our own litanies. But, for most of us, our hunger isn’t about the need to fill our bellies; it is about the need to fill our hearts. My hunger for local food isn’t about the food—although I wouldn’t turn down a plate of chicken long rice or a stick donut if it were offered. It is about the familiarity, the love, the sense of wholeness I have when I am back on Maui.

It is about the security that comes of being related to everyone and the comfort of fitting in. It is about the unity of family and the way the air smells of flowers and salt breezes. It is about being surrounded by people who are more than happy to speak the truth in love and who, despite their grumblings, love you even when you are most unloveable. It is about being with people who share my story and quite simply, get it. I long for the bread, or in this case rice, of eternal life—the rice that gives me back that sense of home, of family, of being known and belonging. It is this yearning, this craving, which brings me to church and calls me to the altar. This is the hunger that drove me to awaken with the bells on Sunday mornings in college and to warm up the car’s engine on wintry Ohio Sundays. It is a soul deep hunger and I long to fill and be filled with good food, food that will indeed “give life to the world.”

So, approach the railing and extend a hand—fill your soul and abide until you are home once more.

The Reverend Joy Caires, a graduate of Episcopal Divinity School, is currently the Associate Rector at Church of Our Saviour in Akron, Ohio. Joy's first call, after ordination, was as the pediatric chaplain at Rainbow Babies and Children's Hospital in Cleveland, Ohio.

By Joy Caires

On my first day in the children’s hospital my only experience with pastoral care in the clinical setting was eleven weeks of clinical pastoral education--in a geriatric psychiatric unit. My seminary education was heavy on scriptural work and theology—light on pastoral care courses beyond the required. I had worked with children as a youth minister, as an assistant teacher at a daycare center and as everybody’s favorite babysitter. At the time, it didn’t particularly occur to me that accepting a position as the only pediatric chaplain at a 244 bed children’s hospital was, well, kind of crazy. But, even if it had occurred to me—well, what else was I going to do with my newly minted collar and newly minted seminary debt?

Minutes into my first day my pager sounded for the first time. The pediatric intensive care unit needed me. I walked briskly towards the elevators, I had not yet found the stairs that were the most direct route from the first floor of the hospital to the pediatric intensive care unit. My heart was thumping in my chest as the elevator doors opened and I swiped my keycard to access the unit. The unit secretary pointed me towards the room where I had been requested. The nurse, who had never seen me before (I had only been in the PICU once before on a quick tour) hastily filled me in on the situation. A car accident late the day before, his mother had died on impact—it would have been better if he had died then as well.

I drew a breath before I entered the room; the child lay prone in the hospital bed. A young woman was at his side. She glanced up, taking in my collar, before turning her face back towards the little boy. I stepped closer to the bed side, his body was connected to IVs, his breathing controlled by machines. But, the tubing was not the worst of it nor was the steady hush of the vent. His head and face were completely covered in gauze-- gauze that despite the best efforts of the doctors and nurses was slowly filling with blood. He had no face. I took a deep breath and my nostrils filled with the tangy iron smell of blood.

“I’m Reverend Joy, the chaplain here…” The woman at the bedside paused and looked at me again…”I’m his aunty.” And, as he lay dying I learned about his life--the bicycle he loved to ride, the video games he played and his easy smile and affection for his family.

Throughout the day, relatives gathered and he continued to bleed. The doctors looked weary and drawn and the smell of blood haunted us. Later in the afternoon the pastor who had come the night before returned. The room ‘s air was thick with grief and I struggled to find my place within that grief--to offer love, perhaps comfort but mostly to be a non-anxious presence in the midst of the pain. But, that was in retrospect, at the time all I knew was the taste of blood and the clear sense that I was needed and wanted in that room. The other pastor was older than me by a couple of decades and I was shocked by her own level of need and her palpable anxiety. As his heart rate continued to drop she turned to me in the midst of the now crowded room. “I think we should baptize him”.

I had never baptized anyone before but I felt very strongly that I would never bring up baptism, much less baptize, unless the family initiated the request. So, I whispered back to her—“we should discuss this outside of his room”. Because she had been there the night before, because it was my first day, because she had been a pastor longer than I, I conceded—she could ask the family.

As we entered the room the boy’s grandmother looked up at us, questioningly. And in response to the question about baptism she replied, “if you think we should”. To which the other pastor perked up and announced that I would baptize him. I hope now that my face did not reflect my anger in that moment….I felt trapped and manipulated. Yet, there was no turning back as I gathered the family around the bedside. I glanced at his covered face and quickly looked away, not wanting to see the ravages where the gauze had slipped. I poured the sterile water into a shell and then slowly let three drops fall into his open palm.

Welcome to the household of God.

I can still taste blood when I think about him.

He died within the hour.

The Reverend Joy Caires, a graduate of Episcopal Divinity School, is currently the Associate Rector at Church of Our Saviour in Akron, Ohio. Joy's first call, after ordination, was as the pediatric chaplain at Rainbow Babies and Children's Hospital in Cleveland, Ohio.

We are now observing summer hours on Daily Episcopalian. Rather than six essays per week, we will be running five, with fresh essays appearing Sunday and then Tuesday through Friday.

By Peter M. Carey

At my family’s cottage on Cape Cod, there is a bird feeder place in the middle of the front yard. It has been there for 20 years or so, made of brown metal, on a black pole. It has a kind of a perch for the birds to sit on which “shuts off” the access to bird seed if an animal larger than the average bird tries to get the food. It is designed so that squirrels and blackbirds will not be able to get to the food. Over the years, this bird feeder has been given new life through a black bungee cord which helps to keep it attached to the pole, and also through several stakes pounded into the ground and fastened to the pole, so that it continues to stand more or less upright.

Recently, I was sitting and watching the bird feeder out of the corner of my eye during a Sunday morning rain shower. The birds came steadily to feed. Sorry to say I am no accomplished birder, but I recognized red-winged blackbirds, cardinals, blue jays, robins, an agile blackbird or two, as well as countless little birds beyond my ability to identify. What was also remarkable were two chipmunks who found a way to climb up the pole, onto the perch, and who filled their cheeks with food and then scurried down and into the woods. The chipmunks took turns, it seemed, to grab the food and then sock it away. At times, the chipmunks shared the perch with a bird or two, and at times the chipmunks startled the birds, and at times a bird startled the chipmunks. But, on that Sunday morning, there was plenty of food to go around. I even saw a courageous and agile squirrel hold onto the top of the feeder and stretch down to eat bird food for several seconds before sliding off the feeder. Luckily for the squirrel, the birds are somewhat messy eaters, and there is plenty of birdseed scattered on the ground.

While not the perfect metaphor or parable, what captured my attention about this old bird feeder is that it gave me a moment to wonder about the internal squabbles of our beloved Episcopal Church. It seems to me that much energy is being spent about who is welcome and who is not (ironic, of course, when you consider our Episcopal Church motto: “the Episcopal Church welcomes you”). I do wonder if we need greater attention to and reflection upon the sacrament of the Eucharist.

On rainy Sunday mornings (and every day), we are fed with the overflowing gifts from God, and we are all welcome and invited to the table. There is plenty of God’s grace to go around, if only we noticed it, if only we refocused our emphasis. I don’t mean to argue for some Pollyanna solution for our very real conflicts; that we only need to say “hey let’s get along.” For I know all to well the hurt, frustration, and anger that has welled up for so many people in the midst of our squabbles. However, I do feel that while we work through present disagreements and infighting we would do well to reconsider the importance of our mutual bonds to one another, at the foot of the Cross and around the Eucharistic Table. There is plenty of food to go around.

The Rev. Peter M. Carey is associate rector at Emmanuel Episcopal Church in Greenwood, Virginia. He blogs at Santos Woodcarving Popsicles.

By Martin L. Smith

On the day that the vintage had begun, my brother and I treated ourselves to an afternoon of wine tasting at one of his favorite vineyards of Martinborough in the Wairapa Valley, where some of the most celebrated wines of New Zealand are produced. We could watch the members of the owners’ family deftly snipping away every bunch of grapes as we sat sipping wines and enjoying superb bread straight from the oven. It set me thinking later as I took my daily walk by the ocean, about bread and wine and the Eucharist; a priest’s meditation about how hard it is to prevent the Eucharist from becoming disconnected from the fabric of everyday life.

Those who have explored the history of the sacraments become painfully aware of their vulnerability to mutations that distort their original meanings and weaken their impact with all sort of compromising adaptations in the name of efficiency. I suppose my reflections were triggered by marveling at the way wine is becoming more widely appreciated than ever, available as it is to ordinary people in a dazzling profusion of variety. And yet as more and more people love wine and make it part of their lives, most churches are stuck in a groove of convention that dictates that ‘communion wine’ must be a special cloying, sticky product that can be tolerated in a single sip, but would disgust us if we had to drink a glass of it.

And it is not so different with bread. There has been in the fast few decades a reaction against the bland industrial product and a demand for wholesome, fresh baked bread has grown up. The trend continues with the opening of more and more neighborhood bakeries that provide every day a range of breads that once only those who traveled to France would ever have encountered. And yet in church we present as bread a product that doesn’t resemble any bread eaten anywhere in the world, odd white disks that appear to be cut from paper and taste of nothing.

If there had been a deliberate campaign to isolate the Eucharist from everyday life, and seal it off a in a purely ritual context, the results could have hardly been more successful. But of course there hasn’t been. It’s just that the desire for efficiency and an almost superstitious concern with what we suppose to be reverence have created conditions for severing the roots of sacramental practice from our everyday lives. Wafers can be efficiently counted and stored, they don’t make crumbs. They don’t require any effort, simply being delivered by mail. The sickly fortified wines marketed by the ecclesiastical supply houses keeps indefinitely. We have dozens of excuses to justify using these customary products as the elements, and we would prefer not to examine the spiritual losses we incur. At home we can savor wonderful wholesome bread, and appreciate even modest wines day by day as the glorious distillation it is of earth and sunshine. And then we go to church and find unique ecclesiastical stuff being used that has no connection with what we love to eat and drink normally.

And in church, even the actions of eating and drinking have become something unrelated to meals. A lot of us refuse to drink at all (we’re hygienic), preferring to dip a corner of a host into the chalice. And eating the wafer isn’t even like normal eating, more a kind of special technique we deploy to prevent it from sticking to the roof of our mouths.

Our meditations could easily take in the Baptism as well. The robust practices of the early Church, in which the plunging of converts into water really looked and felt like the symbolic drowning it was meant to be, have been almost universally replaced by the scattering of a few droplets from bowls or miniature fonts that more closely resemble ornamental bird baths than anything our ancestors would have recognized as suitable for the sacrament of death and rebirth.

It is a challenge worth exploring in depth, because the introduction of authentic bread into the Eucharist, the use of wine that is actually like the wine we drink, the encouragement of real eating and real drinking, the expansion of the use of water from fiddling with drops to real wetting and plunging, won’t take on if reduced to the level of liturgical tinkering, as in the wretched game of ‘guess what the Rector is trying to foist on us now!’ The purpose of the sacraments is the transfiguration of our everyday lives and experiences, and the challenge is to undo the damage inflicted by generations of compromises, asking ourselves at every level: How can we restore the intimate connections that the symbols we use in our worship should have with the fabric of our real lives?

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

A sermon preached at the annual convention of the Diocese of Washington

By Trevor Mwamba

Dear friends, I would like to convey on behalf of the Diocese of Botswana, our heartfelt greetings and God’s blessings on you all in the Diocese of Washington. We especially join you in praying for the success of this Diocesan Convention.

Botswana is in the southern part of Africa and is renowned for its working democracy and economic prosperity. But I think that for many of you Botswana is famous for Mma Ramotswe, the heroine of the bestselling series of books: The No.1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, by Alexander McCall Smith.

Mma Ramotswe, you will be delighted to hear is a very devout Episcopalian! In the book, In the Company of Cheerful Ladies, in which I appear, Mma Ramotswe comes to the Cathedral of the Holy Cross in Gaborone, the capital of Botswana when I am preaching. But, Mma Ramotswe is not concentrating on the sermon as her mind is wandering on how to solve a case involving a pumpkin. She stops herself and thinks, “This is not the way to listen to Trevor Mwamba!”

Well, being in the “Company of Cheerful Episcopalians”, I hope your minds will be clear of pumpkins!

Tonight I have much to be grateful for.

There is a lovely story set in the African forest which reflects gratitude, well. A missionary came across a big lion. Trembling with fear the missionary got on his knees and prayed fervently for dear life. Opening one eye he noticed that the big lion had also gotten on its knees and paws together was also fervently praying. The missionary truly heartened by this sight opened the other eye and said, “I see my brother we are of the same faith.” The lion replied, “I don’t know about you but I am just saying grace!” For what I am about to receive, O’ Lord, I am truly thankful.

Tonight, I am grateful to God for the honour of preaching in what Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., 40 years ago described as, “this very great and significant pulpit.” For making it happen I express my deep personal thanks to my dear friend Bishop John Chane for his gracious invitation to me to preach at this Diocesan Convention.

Bishop John is a man of integrity and highly respected in the Anglican Communion. Indeed, my respect for him increased by a hundred percentage points two years ago in El Scoria, Spain, when over dinner he told me he had been a drummer in a rock and roll band. I am also grateful to Dean Sam Lloyd and the Cathedral Chapter for the opportunity of worshipping with you all in this great Cathedral Church of St. Peter and St. Paul. I stumbled across an interesting fact about the National Cathedral in an episode of The West Wing, entitled “Two Cathedrals”. It is that you can lay the Washington Monument on its side in this Cathedral. Just imagine. Another point worth saying is that, Aaron Sorkin, who was the writer and executive producer of The West Wing, described this Cathedral as the “Yankee Stadium of all Cathedrals.”

Now, in this holy place, the “Yankee Stadium of all Cathedrals,” we gather to begin the Diocesan Convention by celebrating the Holy Eucharist which is the ultimate Act of Thanksgiving. The word Eucharist is derived from the Greek, Eucharistos’ which means to give thanks. In the Eucharist we give thanks for God’s saving grace profoundly revealed in the gift of Christ. In the Eucharist we give thanks for our calling to share in God’s mission of healing and reconciliation in the world.

It’s in the spirit of thanksgiving that we become aware and humble to see that everything in life is a gift from God. We cannot take anything for granted, people, friends, family, places, happenings, this moment.

Tonight, in the Eucharist we especially give thanks for this Diocesan Convention. In the context of the Eucharist may I impress on you the theme of this Diocesan Convention: That we may be one: Making Disciples.

To summarise the theme for those of you who might doze off! Here it is in two sentences. That we may be one is intrinsic in God in whom we exist. It is to know God and reveal Him to others in a living relationship that we are called.

Let me unpack this for you in two stages by first focusing on the first leg of the theme: that we may be one. We tumble over our oneness because we don’t take God seriously and each other. Six years ago, Bishops declared war on each other over the homosexuality issue. It was breaking news for the media who simplistically, to sell papers, created two bitter opponents, the conservatives compromised of African bishops in one corner and weighing quite a lot! And liberals comprised of Western bishops in the other and weighing the same as the Africans. The war was nasty. Totally dismayed, three years ago, I wrote an article in the Church Times published in London, entitled, "Consider the Communion’s Calling," which was
a plea for mutual tolerance among Anglicans worldwide. We are all children of God and need to be reminded of the generosity of God, humility, respect, and love for one another.

It was gentle reminder of the gift of oneness we share whether we like it or not, and how: we must all learn to live together. I quoted the wise words of the late Archbishop of Canterbury, Robert Runcie, who in 1981 in a foreword to a book entitled, Grow or Die, wrote

“…no single form of Christian experience, conviction or organisation is going to prevail over others. Conservative and radical, contemplative and activist, pietist and social reformer, all must learn to live together. They may and should see much to criticize in their own and others’ position. The critical faculty must not be lost. Reverence for truth must still be paramount. But all must learn to live together, for in religion, as in all else, the same things do not appeal to everybody.”

Mahatma Gandhi suggested that one of the greatest challenges of our day is finding unity amongst diversity. Unity implies oneness. But oneness does not necessarily imply sameness. In other words, we may all be different, unique individuals but through unity of purpose we can team together to accomplish great things – things of love where the whole is greater than the sums of its parts.

This is the heartbeat of the Eucharist: the mercy and extravagant generosity of God is greater than the sums of its parts. God is the whole and the parts, you and I, find a place at the table of love. All are welcome: black and white, male and female, poor and rich, straight and gay, clever and dumb, Peter Akinola and Gene Robinson. No one is left out.

Each of us is a reflection of God who calls us into existence. We are all hewed from the same Rock of Ages. Or to paraphrase John Donne’s insightful words: “No person is an island entire of itself. Every person is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.”

John O’Donohue picks the thread up in his magical book, Eternal Echoes, when he talks of God as the “Divine Artist” who is born in each of us revealing a different dimension of His divinity. It is not all the same. God has no spare wheels in life. We all have a special role in the world to which we are called. Each of us has our own work, gifts, difficulties and commitments to deal with. God expects us then to live out our unique gifts in order to bring forth an aspect of God that is only contained in our life. If you don’t live out your talent then that aspect of God cannot be known in you. And you cannot awaken new blessings in your life and the world. You will be poorer and the world too.

Amazingly, last summer, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Williams, in his Retreat addresses to the bishops at the Lambeth Conference, touched on this. Quoting Galatians 1:16, where Paul speaks of God “…who set me apart from birth, called me by his grace, and was pleased to reveal his Son in me.” The Archbishop reminded us that, “Everything starts here because every calling… every vocation in the Church of God… is a calling to be a place where God’s Son is revealed. And that is because there is more to be revealed of the Son of God than any one life, or any one book, or any one church can reveal… Each one of us is a place in which the Son of God is revealed.”

That we may be one points us to be a place where Christ is revealed. How is Christ revealed? I discovered this snuggled in a cute book entitled Mister God this is Anna. The book is about an extraordinary child and her relationship with God, whom she called Mister God.

With that perceptive gift that children have of getting at the heart of things, she describes God this way, “Peple in Cherch are misrable because peple sin misrable songs and say misrable prers and people make Mister God a very big bully and he is not a big bully, because he is funny and loving and kind and strong.”

That is a good picture. Our oneness is that we become the place where people can see in us someone who is not a bully, because we are funny and loving and kind and strong. Like God. We don’t take ourselves seriously because we focus on the negative picture of the mess that we are.

How are we a messed up? Let me quote Mother Mary Clare of the Sisters of the Love of God, in Judy Hirst’s book, Struggling to be Holy. Mother Mary Clare says, “When you go before God in prayer you cannot leave anything behind. You carry in your heart every person, every incident, every thought, every feeling you have ever had and as you lay yourself before God so you bring all the mess as well. My prayer,” she said, “is really one sentence: Here I am what a mess”.

The Eucharist deals with mess and transforms it. The symbols of bread and wine are transformed elements having passed through a messy process. The bread is made from grains of wheat, sifted, ground, baked, to finally produce one bread. Likewise lots of grapes are pressed together in one vessel, and wine made. These are then consecrated and become places where the Son of God is revealed.

Imagine each grain of wheat as a life of person. Imagine each grape as a life of person. Imagine the sifting, grounding, baking, pressing, as the experiences and adversities we pass through in life. This messes up people. But in the Eucharist we drag our messed up lives and lay ourselves before God and we are transformed. Here we are what a mess. Here is the Anglican Communion what a mess. Here is our world what a mess. But God who is not a big bully, but funny and loving and kind and strong in His infinite mercy and generosity welcomes us and in our mess we are transformed in Christ. We are made new.

Ask not how? “For My thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways, My ways,” says the Lord.

That’s true. It is also true that as St. Paul in his second letter to the Corinthians says: that if a person be in Christ, they are a “new creature” old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new.

In the Eucharist we are spiritually joined, first to Christ, and then with each other. Though we are many we are one body for we all partake of the one bread. In our oneness we proclaim together one faith, one baptism, one Holy Spirit, and bond of love. The first leg of oneness reveals then our identity in God. God is one and we must express the oneness we hold in common by being the place where we reveal God by living out love.

This brings us to the last leg of our theme: making disciples. The Eucharist is holistic it concludes with us being sent out into the world in the power of the Holy Spirit to live and work to the praise and glory of God. It send’s us out to deal with the mess of the world. God is at work in the political, economic, social, scientific, technological, and cultural world out there. We need to recognise this. The God of righteousness, peace and Justice does not doze off after the blessing. The Spirit of the Lord is always at work engaging the world and bringing about change to make it a better place for all.

In 1960, during his tour of British colonies in Africa the British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan gave an historic speech in South Africa which became famously known as the, Wind of Change, speech. He said in effect, “The wind of change is blowing through this continent and whether we like it or not, this growth of national consciousness is a political fact. We must all accept it as a fact…”

Three year years earlier, in 1957 Ghana had become the first African British colony to gain independence led by a charismatic leader named Kwame Khrumah, like President Obama, he was 47 years old. It marked the beginning of the end of the British Empire. Lots of foreign Statesmen attended the Independence celebrations.

The most enthusiastic guest was Richard Nixon, then the United States Vice President. From the moment he touched down in Accra, Ghana, he rushed about shaking hands, hugging paramount Chiefs, playing with black babies and posing for photographs. Once surrounded by a crowd of Ghanaians at an official ceremony, he slapped one man on the shoulder and asked him how it felt to be free. “I wouldn’t know, sir,” replied the man, “I’m from Alabama!”

God was at work in Africa and the world. The wind of change was blowing.

In America, God was also at work in the civil rights movement as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. so eloquently stated in his I’ve been to Mountaintop, speech. “…I see God working in this period of the twentieth century in a way that men, in some strange way, are responding — something is happening in our world.”

Yes. God was at work. The wind of change was blowing.

And God continues to work in America with the recent historic inauguration of President Barack Obama, as the first black President of America. In this changing and uncertain times faced with the global financial crisis and it’s still unfolding negative impact. In the face of global poverty, climate change, HIV/AIDS, malaria, and all that robs people of their human dignity. God is at work. The wind of change is blowing.

Tonight, the Diocese of Washington, in oneness with God, is called to be that wind of change blowing through America that makes life better for all. Whether we like it or not, God’s purposes come to pass. It is as we address the suffering of God’s children wherever they may be that we realize our oneness with each other and become the place where God is revealed and disciples made.

The Rt. Rev. Trevor Musonda Mwamba is Bishop of Botswana

By Jacob Slichter

In the spring of 2007, as the date of our wedding approached, my then fiancé, Suzanne, and I discussed the political dimensions of marriage. Specifically, we spoke of how two close friends, Joe and Priscilla, had forgone legal marriage altogether because of their objections to the discrimination enacted by marriage laws, bans on same-sex marriage and so forth. In lieu of a wedding, they had a commitment ceremony, a commitzvah as they called it, a label that announced the extra-legal nature of their lifetime union (with a nod to Priscilla’s Jewish roots). “That’ll make Priscilla’s family your out-laws,” one person told Joe. Given my religious belief, I told Suzanne, I wanted to have a wedding and be married, but Priscilla and Joe’s commitzvah raised questions we could not ignore, especially given our support for same-sex marriage.

Our ceremony would take place at Saint Gregory’s Episcopal Church in San Francisco, my old parish, where same-sex couples had been joined for years. The auspices of Saint Gregory’s presented no problem; California’s ban on same-sex marriage did. We considered removing the marriage license signing from the church premises and having a separate legal marriage at city hall, thereby keeping the state out of our ceremony. (As it turns out, this was already Saint Gregory’s practice.) Still, this would leave us partaking of legal rights denied to others, and after further reflection, we decided to adopt a modified form of what Joe and Priscilla had done: forgo legal marriage and instead draw up a slew of documents that would approximate legal marriage. If and when same-sex marriage became legal in New York (where we live) we’d get married. Meanwhile, we’d have a church ceremony and exchange rings and vows in public.

The next question was what to tell our wedding guests. What was the point of doing all of this if no one else knew? We briefly entertained a printed statement or an announcement, but we didn’t want to come off as scolding the married people in attendance. I was already wincing over having invited my predominantly atheist friends and family to a church wedding where they would be asked to say such things as “Amen” and “Hallelujah.” We decided instead to inform family and friends of our extra-legal status in conversation, over time.

Our wedding day arrived. We exchanged vows and rings as those atheists belted out their hallelujahs, and we found ourselves swept along a tide that followed us out of the church and into our new life together. Upon our return to New York, I began the process of exploring what it would take to assemble wills, join our finances, draw up hospital visitation agreements, and all the other arrangements necessary to approximate legal marriage. The lawyers I consulted estimated it would cost us thousands of dollars in fees. Put off by the expense, I bought a CD-ROM of pre-made legal documents, but quickly found myself overwhelmed and confused by the number of options. I wondered if there was a simpler, cheaper solution—a civil union in New Jersey? Unavailable to straight couples. We could get married in nearby Massachusetts, where gay marriage was already legal, but New York would not recognize same-sex marriages performed in Massachusetts, so we’d still be partaking in a discriminatory system. The legal steeplechase occasioned discussion with friends and family about our marital status.

“Wait, Jake, are you married or not?”

“We’re married, but not in the legal sense.”

Straight friends puzzled. Gay friends chuckled. “Just get married. I would.” An email exchange on the subject left an old high-school friend bewildered. “Is Suzanne a man?” Frustrated by how our gesture seemed to arouse only laughter and perplexity, I also felt a rising urgency regarding the legal documents, especially a will. I worried about Suzanne’s financial security in the event of my accidental death. The crosswalks of New York City never felt so dangerous.

Finally, last May, our solution presented itself when Governor David Patterson decreed that New York would recognize same-sex marriages performed in states where it was legal. We picked a date, borrowed a car, and drove to Greenfield, Massachusetts where we lunched with my cousins before strolling over to the town hall. After submitting our application to the town clerk, we went to the courthouse to seek a waiver on Massachusetts’ three-day waiting period, assuming this meant waiting in line for a rubber stamp. But after sitting through separate interrogations with a uniformed court officer (who asked each of us if we were marrying of our own free will), we were ushered into a courtroom and found ourselves standing before a judge.

“You two live in New York?”

“That’s correct, Your Honor.”

“And yet you’ve decided to get married in Massachusetts. Why?”

At last, here was the perfect venue to air our thoughts on marriage equality. Perfect, that is, provided the judge didn’t mind the injection of politics into his courtroom, that he wouldn’t be outraged by our views, and that he wouldn’t therefore reject our waiver request. “Your Honor . . . I have cousins in the area. We thought it would be fun to see them.”

Signed waiver in hand, we slunk out of the courthouse, returned to the town hall, and presented the waiver to the clerk, who doubles as a justice of the peace. She led us outside, stood us under a tree, and beamed as she read from her script. “Marriage is a solemn . . . ” I had anticipated a ten-second procedure, not a three-minute mini-wedding that coupled the legal and spiritual realms we had labored to separate. “And now please join your hands.” We exchanged vows, again, the clerk pronounced us husband and wife, and as she handed me the certificate, I felt only the lifting of my recurring anxiety: getting pancaked by a bus and leaving Suzanne penniless.

So ended our adventure in nuptial social action. I began with my eye on principle and concluded by figuring out how to secure inheritance rights for Suzanne on the cheap, an irony that argues more cogently for marriage equality than anything we had said or done.

I realize that what I had really wanted was to emerge with a sense of mastery—to know we had stirred conversations and reflections, to feel the vibrations moving outward, but all of that seems to have eluded us. We take away only a deepened appreciation for what marriage rights entail—a small prize, but one more real than mastery.

Jacob Slichter is the author of So You Wanna Be a Rock & Roll Star, a behind-the-scenes look at the music business. He lives with his wife, Suzanne Wise, in New York City. He has a Web site at www.jacobslichter.com.

By Donald Schell

A note from a younger priest stirred up a lot of memories for me:

A couple I met on Thursday are getting married two weeks from today. He's been married before and needs some kind of sense of closure from his previous marriage. I think he wants some kind of ceremony that will help him leave it behind. The new wife doesn't want the old wife to be involved...

Do you have any suggestions about what to do here?

What had I actually learned from my own divorce and remarriage almost a third of a century ago? Memories flooded in, a strange mix of crippling grief, guilt and exhilarating hope.

Thirty-three years ago, I was a divorced priest with a five year old daughter. I was engaged to be married but felt shaky accepting the happiness of new love. Though I trusted my fiancée and everything I saw and felt about how we were with each other, the promises I’d made in my first marriage haunted me. I had failed a good human being to whom I had promised lifelong committed love. Could I make the same promise again in good faith? When an evangelical friend demanded I tell him who was at fault, I knew in that moment that neither blame nor self-accusation would serve the truth. But when I told him I couldn’t reply, it cost me the friendship.

Questions of fault or blame, and just plain ‘what happened?’ filled pages of my journal and months of conversation with my spiritual director/confessor. Gradually my director, my bishop and the priest who pastored my fiancée and me, helped me find a balanced story of the first marriage’s failure, a story of two people trying hard in some ways, failing one another in other ways, sometimes even trying hard to hold together in ways that actually hurt and divided.

Seeing mutual failure in the divorce sowed the seeds of forgiveness and gave me hope that my ex-wife and I could learn to make the new relationship we’d need to raise our daughter in two households after the divorce. As our daughter grew up, our working together, much to our surprise I think, renewed friendship and deep respect.

But look, there I am trying to leap out of the uncertainty. My colleague’s question wasn’t about later. What transpires in that confused, uncertain time before making new vows? When I examined those memories directly—without filtering them through the lens of the good things that happened later on—I finally saw how much of my dilemma lay in my fiancée’s deep trust for me. Partly Ellen’s trust healed, but it also stung. A shadow in me brooded over her readiness to stand with me and make promises asking family and friends to bless the joy we felt God inviting us into. Reluctant as I was to admit it, my gut said it would easier somehow if Ellen had also been divorced. Illusions of balance or fairness (justice) and some share of guilt got me thinking that if we had divorces behind us, my conscience would rest and let me make new promises. Was I really wishing the loss and suffering of divorce on Ellen?

Conscience can be a trickster. Mark Twain wrote Huckleberry Finn to show a good-hearted boy’s struggle with his damaged conscience. Huck feels guilty helping Jim escape slavery. Like Huck Finn, the best I could do was tell my troubled conscience to be still. But when that accusing voice was quiet, I heard another – what if Ellen’s hopes and trust in me were naïve? Her hope looked so much purer than mine. Could such seemingly pure hope live with my dark memories of failure and loss? How many months after our vows would she be waking in the night as I was now, wondering who this man really was?

Especially at the beginning divorce hangs its quarantine sign on memories as if they could infect those who heard them. Some memories feel burdensome, embarrassing or shameful. Others treacherously turn accusing and vindictive. The good memories may not be quarantined, but they’re orphaned. The couple who birthed all those good memories died.

Time does change and heal some of that. Present trust can make even old memories trustworthy. Over some years Ellen came to know the boy I had been growing up, the kid I was in college, and the young man I was in my first marriage. Now when that younger me shows up in our children, we can love, trust and forgive him. Other relationships grow and heal too. My daughter is the big sister in two families. Her four parents have come to respect each other. Ellen and my children are friends with their sister’s other sister.

But my mind is rushing ahead again. When the confusion was still fresh in Ellen’s and my first year together, she and my dad were talking, and he stopped, something crossed his face, and he said, 'We're really glad Donald found you, but his mother and I only wish he'd met you first.' Though she felt the welcome he intended, his words left her speechless. Regret simply made no sense. Ellen knew I was a different man for my failed first marriage. And none of us – not Ellen the new stepmother, nor either parent, nor the grandfather who was speaking regretted our daughter, his grand-daughter What was he saying? What could he really mean?

He was wishing for what couldn’t be – no divorce, no pain, no confusion. But wishing a more perfect and orderly life for me – not divorced – missed new life and blessing that was already showing up like fresh growth after a forest fire. Dad’s affectionate welcome to family risked rewriting the past, erasing real people, my ex-, our daughter (his grand-daughter!), and me.

Yes new life did happen, but how did we carry ambiguity and memory of failed promise into a whole-hearted, unambiguous commitment to new promise?

A month or so before the wedding, David Boulton, the priest who married Ellen and me, said he wanted to talk with me alone. I was afraid he’d seen how little I trusted myself. Would he try to talk me out of the wedding? No, David simply but forcefully told me I had to GIVE UP my pretense that I knew more any about marriage than Ellen. 'Your failed first marriage doesn't make you an expert,' he told me. ‘Offer your best to Ellen and learn from her while she learns from you.’ David’s words complemented what my spiritual director was doing.

David, Fr. Paul, and a handful of trusted listeners cleansed my memory and heart, letting me forgive myself and my ex-, reflect on a past that was ending, and let it go. Letting go, I entered a living future, a real marriage with Ellen.

Thirty-three years later I look back with gratitude at how the church – a bishop, two priests, and some very good friends – offered penance, counsel, challenge, and encouraging words that made me trust myself (and God’s grace) enough to make the promises I so wanted to make and live with a partner I love.

So now, pastorally what do I offer someone still raw from divorce and mistrusting himself/herself, but wanting to make new promises? I use the Prayer Book Rite of Reconciliation (penance or confession) or some informal approximation of it. Penance offers the release and simplicity of acknowledging promises made and not lived out. Penance and reflective counseling invite letting go of both blame and accusation. New life begins as the divorced partner makes confession and we talk, sometimes deflecting blame, sometimes probing for honest statement of failure. We can pray together for the person, and also for the ex-partner.

This pastoral work and ritual of penance make most sense to me by working with the divorced partner alone. or each alone If both partners are recently divorced. So many of the stories we tell ourselves as we come to marriage vows are burdensome illusions. Penance is a place to lay the burden down.

Broken promises demand the strange work of learning to find one’s self trustworthy all over again. I’ve often told people in their relationships (and their workplace) that ‘shattered trust’ can be rebuilt. Trust isn’t a commodity or a fixed state, it’s the unfolding experience of finding yourself or another person trustworthy. That’s as true trusting ourselves as it is trusting another.

The Rev. Donald Schell, founder of St. Gregory of Nyssa Church in San Francisco, is Creative Director of All Saints Company working for community development in congregational life. He wrote My Father, My Daughter: Pilgrims on the Road to Santiago.

By Ann Fontaine

I would rather do a funeral than a wedding. People are often startled when I say that. They respond but a funeral is so sad and a wedding is so happy – why do you prefer funerals?

A current issue of Newsweek speaks to some of my problems with weddings:

Fast Chat: the Price of Marriage

Why are brides spending so much money—and losing their minds?

We live in a consumerist society. You're not a bride, you're a consumer of bridal products. And second, there's something very profound psychologically happening. A wedding once marked a major transition in a person's life—the first time you slept with your spouse, lived with your spouse. Today, you're just not that different the day after the wedding, so the wedding planning has to function as a traumatic experience. So you can say, "I've been through this experience that was so demanding, it must mean something."

Is it fair to say the bridal industry took over the sacred space that religion left behind?

The bridal industry has filled a vacuum of authority that used to be important to how weddings are conducted. If you talk to ministers now, they hate doing weddings. The brides want to change the vows. They want to put flowers where they don't belong. They don't listen. What's so interesting is that one of the things the bridal industry says it's selling you is tradition. But if you asked your grandmother if she needed a personalized aisle runner when she got married, she'd say no.

As a priest at St. John’s Episcopal Church in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, with a beautiful chapel in Grand Teton National Park, I became even less enamored of weddings than I had been before. The large window over our altar shows a spectacular view of the Tetons. The Chapel of the Transfiguration is a 1925 log building with buck and rail fences surrounding the property. It is featured on most of the wedding planning sites in Jackson. Although we had a strict policy and required pre-marital counseling, those who were looking for a destination wedding would question every guideline. One secretary spent much of her time managing the 2-4 weddings per weekend held from Memorial Day until the end of September. Families spend amazing amounts of money on bringing families and friends for a week of festivities in the Jackson area. The wedding is almost an afterthought. And that is where I have difficulty.

I love a wedding when the couple sees it as place to make their vows to God and to ask their community to support them in their marriage. When this happens, discussing the wedding is a joy and the wedding is a celebration of their commitment to marriage and caring for one another. In the one same sex blessing service where I presided, that couple was one of the most involved in having a rite that reflected these ideals.

The money spent is not so much an issue except when families go into debt to buy the perfect wedding and all the trappings. The issue for me is what the church is doing to support a couple in the making of their commitments. When we respond in The Celebration and Blessing of a Marriage to the question “Will all of you witnessing these promises do all in your power to uphold these two persons in their marriage?” I want the church to mean it when we say, “We will.” This is not a one shot ceremony attached to a party. It is heartfelt and for the long haul. Others can officiate at weddings, for me the church offers more. In 2006 Newsweek wrote of the post wedding blues for many brides. Maybe our offering can cure these blues.

And what is it about loving funerals more than weddings? At the time of death and during planning of the ceremonies for saying goodbye to a loved (or even on not so loved) one there is openness to the presence of God. There is an awareness of what is truly meaningful in life. People look at the importance of family and friends in their lives. If these elements are present at weddings I could learn to love weddings, too.

The Rev. Ann Fontaine, 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 Richard Helmer

“What do I need to do to get my child baptized?”

I’ve fielded this question, by phone, from people I have never met several times over the past year. The conversation has inevitably followed a somewhat vexing, but now familiar pattern:

It begins with the caller pulling out the “I’m an Episcopalian” card. The implication is clear enough: while perhaps I have not darkened the door of a church community for quite sometime, the fact that I was raised in the Episcopal Church means I have a claim on her sacramental rites, customs, and clergy. Then the claim gets pushed a bit further. Would a private baptism therefore be possible? Family are coming to visit on such and such a holiday, and wouldn’t it be nice to do it while everyone was in town?

I’m initially stymied by the request. I hear an almost subconscious cultural assumption being made about baptism: a church, like a grocery or convenience store, stocks certain products, and not least among them is baptism. Or a more apt analogy is that well-meaning parents who truly love their children want the best for them, so there’s a checklist of goods and services to procure: diapers, formula, toys, crib, health insurance, life insurance, and – oh, yes, coming sometimes almost as an afterthought – salvation or at least spiritual “insurance” . . . also known as baptism.

It’s hard not to sympathize. I can imagine in some cases the rumblings of a grandparent or an aunt and uncle or two behind the scenes. By pushing the importance of baptism, anxious relatives might somehow hook the next generation back into the church community. Then there is the natural inclination of a family scattered over many states to gather and engage in a customary ritual that has multi-generational roots. We have so few of these customs left as a society, it seems, and the church is one of the few institutions remaining with an understanding of them and their practice.

But baptism, of course, is not just a ritual. Nor is it simply an opportunity to touch base with family tradition or custom. And, for sure, it is not as everyday as taking out a life insurance policy for a family member. Parents who have their children baptized are making serious counter-cultural promises on their behalf:

• putting Christ at the center of their lives and household
• renouncing evil – which means evil is real and sometimes near at hand
• upholding the dignity of every human being – which means actively resisting the easy polemic, demonization, and protectionism of our society
• embracing a life of true obedience – which means so much more than the one-dimensional complicity that gives us cause to dismiss it in the name of freedom
• proclaiming the Gospel – which implies we need to know at least a little bit about it, and better yet endeavor to live into it!

The conversation begins to turn south the moment I express my desire to meet with the family at least four times before the baptism. I figure if I’m not doing at least as much consultation as I would before marrying a couple, I’m not encouraging the level of commitment baptism demands. Christian life-long union, after all, has its foundations ultimately in baptism, as are all our sacraments. I live in earthquake country. Foundations are profoundly important.

But beyond all this is among the most compelling moments of the baptismal rite for me personally, especially when it involves a young child or infant. Immediately after the baptism and chrismation, the child is often carried by the priest into the midst of the congregation, away from the parents. It’s too often done almost without a second thought, but the action itself says something profound about what has just happened: The parents have offered their child to God, and to the community – the Body of Christ. It’s a kind of offering that might well give most parents of small children pause for thought. It certainly does for me.

Moreover, the language of baptism is significant. The parents brought in a biological child. They go home with more than that: a little Christian, died and raised with God in Christ. This means things from then on will be different, or ought to be at least, for everyone. Parents need time and space to reflect on what this might mean.

My spiritual director is fond of pointing out that for the Christian community, water runs thicker than blood. Baptism trumps blood ties. Godparents, in some mysterious way, are considered to be even closer to their charge than biological parents. We rarely see that played out in practical ways these days, but at least there should come a recognition that the biological or adoptive parents are at most stewards of this new life, no longer owners. The newly baptized child is a living revelation that this precious, tender humanity belongs ultimately and completely to God. And baptism turns responsibility from the parents outward and into the community of the Body of Christ. This is one reason Jesus talks about potential division when it comes to choosing between loyalties to the Gospel and to blood ties. It’s dangerous, countercultural stuff. It’s about joining a new family that is not entirely recognized by even contemporary legal and secular laws and customs.

And here’s the final rub: we promise as part of the baptismal covenant to continue in the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, in the breaking of bread, and in the prayers. In short, an important step in engaging in our baptismal covenant means being active in Christian community. This is where these phone conversations too often end. I gently remind our inquirers that baptism is about being part of community, and that in the baptismal rite the community pledges to uphold the child in a life-long journey, demanding a life-long relationship with the Body of Christ. The community has to be present to make this pledge!

So for the heart of this priest, at least, a private, convenient, impromptu baptism really won’t cut it. While pastoral exceptions might be made in extreme cases, most of us who have participated in a baptism with little catechetical foundation know the end result: we never see the children or their families again. We deserve no better.

God’s grace is indeed free, but how we respond to it surely matters if our relationship with God is real. Love requires more of us than just pulling a sacrament down off the shelf and moving into the checkout line. And our beloved children simply need and deserve more than that from a transformative spiritual tradition and a truly loving community.

So I don’t stock salvation insurance.

The Rev. Richard E. Helmer, a priest, pianist, and writer, serves as rector of Church of Our Saviour, Mill Valley, Calif. His sermons have been published at Sermons that Work, and he blogs regularly at Caught by the Light.

By Derek Olsen

Proponents of Communion without Baptism (CWOB) present a set of propositions from Scripture to demonstrate the truth of their position. These principles, they maintain, should be normative guides for our current Eucharistic practice. The first is that Jesus’ own meal practice was unusually non-exclusive, inviting the socially marginal and the morally suspect to the table as a sign-act pointing to God’s great eschatological banquet at the end of time provided by God’s extravagant bounty. If Jesus invited all without regard for their status, so should we. The second is that meals with Jesus exhibited a surprising liminality, a fluidity, between the roles of stranger, guest, and host that should give us pause lest we act as gate-keepers for in doing so we may be turning away angels unaware or—worse yet—may reject the very host Himself who is found in the person of the least.

I take these arguments seriously, but I don’t find them compelling to the point where CWOB should be permitted. Some contain methodological flaws while others are absolutely correct but are misapplied when directed to our current sacramental practice.

Many of the arguments for the first proposition rest upon a saying found in both Matthew and Luke: “the Son of Man came eating and drinking, and they say, 'Look, a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners!'” (Matt 11:19; Luke 7:34). The arguments I’ve seen suggest that the references to “glutton and drunkard” point to a bounty suggesting the eschatological banquet and that the “tax collector and sinner,” therefore, refer to the marginalized with whom Jesus shared fellowship. The conclusion drawn from this is that if Jesus welcomed the marginalized and outcast to his (holy) table we should as well. While I agree with the identifications of bounty and the marginal, I disagree with the conclusion drawn. In fact—I think this text presents an argument against CWOB…

If we examine the marginal here again, we find people on the outskirts of the children of Israel. The tax collectors of first century Judea were the traitors of the age. They not only didn’t resist Roman rule, they aided and abetted in the oppression of their own people by levying and collecting the taxes, typically through force and extortion. Politically, then, they had placed themselves outside of the people of Israel by means of their treason. “Sinners” is a much more generic term but at the very least identifies those who failed to follow God’s Law to the satisfaction of the community, thus—again—placing them outside of the “true” children of Israel. The evangelists nowhere clarify the purposes of the meals but what they suggest by means of verses like Matt 10:7 is that Jesus was issuing a call to the “lost sheep of the house of Israel.” That is, he defied the authorities and gossipers by welcoming those people who were members of the covenant community—the children of Israel—but whose actions had put them outside of its cultic boundaries. The welcome of Jesus demonstrates the mercy of God to those members of the covenant community who had failed to uphold their part of the covenant. Furthermore, an integral part of many of the meal scenes that the evangelists do portray is repentance on the part of the tax collectors and sinners, a desire to return to their covenant responsibilities, to acknowledge the welcome of God in Christ by returning to walk in God’s paths.

If we would try and make an equation between these meal scenes and our sacramental practice, it would seem that the radical welcome found here is a welcome to rejoin the covenant community. The Christian understanding of covenant community is rooted not in the Abrahamic covenant marked by circumcision nor even in eucharistic fellowship—rather, it is found in Baptism. To issue the invitation Christ issued is to welcome the outcast and marginal into God’s covenant community through Baptism.

The second proposition is, to me, the most intriguing. The idea of fluidity between guest and host, known and unknown, is quite attractive. But when I turn to the texts put forward as evidence I do not find this pattern—the idea seems to be placed upon the texts rather than proceeding from them. The best treatment of this notion that I have seen comes from Dr. John Koenig’s New Testament Hospitality. Here—working exclusively with material from Luke’s pen—he appeals to seven “role-reversal” scenes. But I find it in only one, the Emmaus encounter: the unknown stranger issued an invitation to be a guest reveals himself to be the Host in the breaking of the bread. I don’t find it in the other cited passages. Yes, Jesus is present; yes, he takes a dominant position—but it is a teaching position, not that of host. The teaching role is different from the hosting role. Rabbinic literature indicates that teachers were invited to meals presumably for the purpose of instructing those gathered—there is no sign that through their teaching they somehow became hosts. I will agree that the guest-host fluidity appears in the Emmaus experience but I cannot see it as a characteristic of meals with Jesus through the rest of the Gospel record.

The argument against gate-keepers, tying into Jesus’ constant warnings about and injunctions against religious hypocrisy, proceeds from worthy motives but fails in its limited scope. CWOB proponents tend to argue hospitality from the pages of Luke-Acts. But Acts in particular presents an overly irenic picture of early Christian relationships. All of the inner-church struggles are resolved peaceably. No one leaves the Jerusalem Council mad; those who hold wrong beliefs are instructed and quickly see the errors of their ways. The letters of Paul and the Catholic Epistles—especially the Johannine Letters—tell a very different tale. Warnings against false teachers fill the pages of the New Testament. They do so not because of a desire to restrict or control God’s message of love and life, but because God’s message is not any generic message of love and life but has actual content to it! These authors understand the Church to be a covenant community, bound in Baptism, connected in Christ, and with covenants come responsibilities. These include both holding and enacting the basic beliefs of the Christian faith: Jesus is the Son of God who came in the flesh to announce the Kingdom of God and through whose death, resurrection, and ascension reconciled God and humanity. The insistence on Baptism is not about gate-keeping but rather about who we are as an intentional community—a covenant community.

Proponents of CWOB are correct to lift up practices of hospitality and to remind us of the Gospel’s call to share our possessions and our lives with others. Hospitality and the sharing of possessions with the stranger and the wanderer is a theme that runs throughout Scripture and is especially highlighted in the New Testament. Indeed, we are covenant-bound to offer hospitality and, if we follow the example of our God who showers gifts upon the just and unjust alike, this sharing of possessions should be extended without doctrinal tests or requirements.

However, the message of the Gospel is not simply a message of hospitality alone. Scripture also insists upon the reality and the responsibility of the covenant community. True Christian hospitality is a sharing of not merely of things or of time—as valuable as these are. Through these vehicles it is a sharing of what God has done for us, a sharing through both deeds and words, and an invitation for the stranger to remain a stranger no longer but to enter the covenant community through Baptism.

Derek Olsen is completing a Ph.D. in New Testament at Emory University. He is 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.

Step inside St. Gregory of Nyssa Episcopal Church in San Francisco and you enter a soaring octagonal rotunda with a mural of ninety larger-than-life saints –from Frances of Assisi and King David to Malcolm X and Anne Frank—dancing above the altar in the center of the space. Stay for a service and you encounter a densely textured event, full of musical and liturgical elements from all over the world, with an Eastern/Byzantine feel that evokes fourth-century Christian practice. There is no organ; there are no pews or altar rail: the lively congregation sings unaccompanied, in four-part harmony, and moves confidently throughout the whole building. St. Gregory of Nyssa is a pioneering church: its innovations in liturgy, design, leadership and outreach have given it an influence far beyond the Diocese of California. Its practices of open communion, lay deaconing and liturgical dancing have outraged some and inspired more.

St. Gregory’s was founded in 1975 by priests Richard Fabian and Donald Schell, who met as students at General Seminary in NYC and discovered a common love for liturgy as a way to engage people in meeting God. With then-bishop Kilmer Meyers, they founded a special mission of the Diocese of California, putting into practice their developing ideas about how to remake church. St Gregory’s has been more than an “experiment.” It has pointed the larger church in a direction that has influenced a generation of church leaders around issues of open communion, lay leadership and participation, and liturgical innovation.

This month, Fabian and Schell are leaving St. Gregory’s and devote more time to the All Saints Company, a not-for-profit foundation established in 1978 to promote liturgical development and new models of collaboration throughout the church. Daniel Simons, executive director of All Saints Company, spoke with them in San Francisco.

It’s been a long three decades. Can you talk about the changes in Episcopal worship since you began working together?

DS: I was ordained about halfway into the Trial Use explorations that eventually led to the 1979 Book of Common Prayer, so it was a time of tremendous liturgical change and controversy. We were also taking our liturgy into public places to witness for peace and civil rights. Some of the church's official voices were insisting that we weren't changing our theology, only the language. But the Prayer Book Society and other conservative voices saw otherwise, as did those of us who were most enthusiastic and optimistic about what change would mean for Christian community.

I think the most profound changes were in holy action and in holy space. Asking people to exchange the peace with one another hinted that we might encounter God during a face to face touch among laypeople in the liturgy. Ideas for reordering church space gave people the experience of gathering together for hearing the word and for sharing bread and wine.

When the 1979 Book of Common Prayer became the official liturgy of the church, a lot of people breathed a huge sigh of relief. Many places assumed we now had a new document to sustain a new rubrical obedience. We squandered much of our momentum for the renewal of community and mission... The big, obvious changes tended to stick, but the flexibility and rich options in the new book seemed less and less evident as time passed.

But for the last fifteen or twenty years, at least some people have again been writing new material, borrowing from the New Zealand Prayer Book and other Anglican sources, and amending texts from the 1979 BCP. A welcome hint of freedom has re-emerged, sometimes reductionist, often unsystematic, but also sometimes inspired.

RF: Today there’s broad interest in participation, more lay ministries, and frank liturgical expression of our church’s official ethic. Plus growing attention to non-cathedral music and openness to non-British culture and identity. Optimistically maybe, I’m betting these trends are already re-orientating our liturgical strategy—from conformity toward mission.

A lot has changed. What do you think remain the most challenging areas of Episcopal worship?

RF: Lack of clarity about what we’re up to. Often our services are not so much culturally irrelevant as opaque. We have parishes with thoughtful preachers, timely social programs, and cornucopial coffee hours--where visitors could hardly guess from what we do in church what it is that we think we’re doing in church. Instead they meet a clubby strategy of reassuring a (steeply aging) group of insiders, and reluctance to talk openly or frankly with each other.

DS: What I most regret about Episcopal worship is a formalized, numbed aesthetic and an Anglophile caricature of Gothic revival. It’s a too-settled, status-quo feeling in liturgy that carries smugness: we say people have to “learn to appreciate it.” It’s sectarian and arrogant, it doesn’t touch people’s lives, and it’s why our Anglophile churches in America are relics.

What have you discovered, through work at St. Gregory’s and with other liturgists, that can break through that numbness?

RF: People, look east! Eastern churches offer a wealth of public worship that Anglicans have long admired and incorporated. Massey Shepherd, Prayer Book author and Church Divinity School of the Pacific professor, said if you line up all the world’s Anglican Books of Common Prayer in order of their publication dates they show a steady march eastward. Today we enjoy rich modern scholarship about Jesus, as well as about ancient traditions of worship. Our Prayer Book’s rubrics were written flexibly to guide us, putting these resources to work. So prioritizing and re-tuning rubrics for mission is faithful, as well as urgent.

DF: St. Gregory’s liturgy is deeply and radically traditional. This means shared leadership; real lay authority with lay liturgists, composers, preachers and worship leaders. It means musical richness—in our case, unaccompanied--- from a variety of sources. It mean naturalness rather than recitation; physicality and movement; and it puts the invitation to participate in worship at the center. In a passive, consumerist culture, our congregation sings; people move from their pews, they touch one another.

What do you see as the future of worship in the church?

RF: Today’s controversies continue a two-thousand year contest between reform and sectarian schism. Reformers say the Church is always corrupt, so we must always improve it (Luther’s “ecclesia semper reformanda”). Sectarians say this church is corrupt, so we must now leave it. Open invitation—to Jesus’ table, to baptism, to worship and full participation in making liturgy—charges us crucially today. We cannot simply say “we Episcopalians have always done this,” or “we do what headquarters approves,” or we will go the way of the Masons.

DS: We are always wholly in the presence of God, and always struggling humanly with our fears. Rowan Williams has said that it took sixty years after the council of Nicea for the church to accept that teaching. It would be great to hear our archbishop say, likewise, that it may take three generations to recognize that the Spirit spoke in New Hampshire, with the ordination of Gene Robinson.

Liturgy that welcomes the unprepared as Jesus did, that incorporates us into the heavenly banquet right now, gives us the power, Spirit, and experience to live Good News. It is completely continuous with life.

Praying together and communion make us one. This is not a “unity” based on documents and doctrinal nicety, or the theological platform of a party. When we allow the sacraments their God-given power, when we invite people to participate in worship that touches their lives, we find a fundamental alignment in action that may offer surprising latitude to explore our differences.

By Derek Olsen

So—what is the connection between the foregoing discussion about salvation and sacraments and the current issue upon the table—Communion without Baptism (CWOB)? The issue is about liturgical practice and how we greet strangers and seekers in our midst, not theology, right?

Well, I’m not so sure… I’m fond of telling my students that there are no such things as liturgical changes; rather, there are theological changes with liturgical implications. While there is more than a bit of hyperbole in that statement it captures an essential truth: our rites communicate our theology. When we change our rites, very often there is a change in the theology we are expressing whether we recognize it at the time or not. Thus, when faced with a decision about our liturgical practice (i.e., whether or not we should invite the unbaptized to receive the sacrament of the altar) we must first remember what we believe and why we believe it.

You see, Anglican—Christian—sacramental theology is the logic and theology of intimacy. Even the metaphors Scripture uses for the relationship between God and believers bespeak this intimacy: to abide, to dwell with, to remain within. The prophets and poets of sacred page have used time and again the figure of bride and groom in scandalous and sometimes shocking ways to communicate both the depths of intimacy (Revelation and the incomparable Song of Songs) and intimacy’s betrayal (Ezekiel and Hosea). Remembering the logic of intimacy, remaining faithful to its vision of life in relationship grounds our ritual ways, our liturgical practice, in a theology that honors the God who has chosen to be in relationship with us.

At the heart of intimacy is commitment. Nothing more—and nothing less. Intimacy is not instant; it grows over time. Intimacy is a process of growing into knowledge, love, and trust gradually—and its gradual nature demands that those growing remain committed to the process and to each other. It grows through hearing promises, then seeing those promises come true; through sharing truths, then recognizing and confirming those truths embodied in the patterns and rhythms of everyday life.

In our sacramental life, the moment of commitment is baptism. Like promises exchanged between lovers, like the promises made before the altar in marriage, baptism is a covenant relationship. God is constantly inviting us into relationship, simultaneously presenting and fulfilling the promise to be in relationship with the whole creation and with each individual member of it. In Baptism, individuals—or those presenting them—both recognize the call of God and return the commitment, recognizing the identity of God as it has been revealed to us in the baptismal creed and promising to be faithful to the relationship with God. This, we believe, is an everlasting covenant. Even if we fail, even if we fall away and betray the promises made or refuse their claim on us, God continues to love and call us again to the fullness of a life hid with Christ in God.

When we accept this call, however, God’s ongoing commitment and revelation of his deepest self to us comes through the Holy Eucharist: Christ’s own flesh and blood, given to us as a true sharing of body and essence, true intimacy. In the Blessed Sacrament we receive Christ into ourselves to abide, remain, and dwell so that we likewise may abide, remain, and dwell in him.

Furthermore, this intimacy to which we are called is not just about individual gratification or knowledge. For as we are baptized, we are baptized into the whole company of faithful people, into the company of all those also joined to Christ and most especially those embodied in our local communities. As we approach the altar we never do so alone; rather we participate—in the most literal sense—in the Communion of all the saints without regard to time or space or the limits of the flesh. For this too is part and parcel of the mystery of the life hid with Christ in God: as we grow in love, trust, and intimacy with God, we grow too towards one another and to the whole of humanity, indeed God’s whole creation, as we learn to love as God loves. This is the logic of Communion with Baptism; this is the theology of intimacy.

Coming from this perspective, Communion without Baptism misreads the logic of the liturgy. It demands intimacy without commitment, relationship without responsibility. To apply this same logic to another sphere of human relationship, this is the logic of the one night stand—the logic of the “meaningless” fling. Is this the relationship that we wish to have with the God who knows us each by name and who calls that name in the night, yearning for our return to the Triune embrace? But then again—who is this “we”? Exactly whose relationship are we talking about? Is this “we” the clergy, the members of the vestry, those who populate our pews day in and day out? Are those the ones invited to receive communion without baptism? No. The seekers, the strangers, the wanderers in our midst—they are the ones in view here. And here is my question; this is what we must answer to the satisfaction of our own consciences: Do we have the right to choose for the stranger and the seeker a relationship contradicting the logic of intimacy without offering them a yet more excellent way? Do we who make decisions for the church uphold our own baptismal commitment and covenant by offering the strangers and seekers less than what has been offered to and received by us?

The call of God is to all. God’s radical hospitality is for all. Truly Christ stretched out his arms of love on the hard wood of the cross that everyone might come within the reach of his saving embrace. Truly the Spirit moves over the waters of renewal and new life, beckoning and inviting. To the stranger, to the seeker, through our mouths we offer and issue God’s words of invitation: “Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden…” inviting them through the waters of Baptism into the household of God. And in doing so we fulfill Christ’s commission to baptize those of all nations and teaching them his words and ways, the depths of his love, the depths of a life hid with Christ in God.

Derek Olsen blogs at Haligweorc. This essay is part of a continuing reflection on the place of the sacraments in the life of the Episcopal Church. A future essay will focus on Scriptural issues. For a differing view, read Deirdre Good's essay on hospitality, and visit the Cafe on Monday for an interview with the leaders of a church that practices open communion.

By Micah Jackson

A couple of weeks ago, Ruth Graham, wife of evangelist Billy Graham, died after a long illness. As an admirer of Billy Graham, I was sad that his wife had passed away, but I will confess that one of the first questions that came into my head when I heard the news was "where will she be buried?"

This was not a random question. For the last several months of her life, there had been some controversy about plans for her gravesite. Last December, The Washington Post reported that Ruth and Billy's son, Franklin, wanted them to be buried at the now open Billy Graham Library in Charlotte. Ruth, according to the story, didn't like the Library, and wanted to be buried at The Cove, the Graham's rural home near Asheville. She felt that the Library was too commercial, and wasn't the kind of place she'd like to have her body. Novelist, family friend, and Ruth Graham biographer, Patricia Cornwell, also opposed the Charlotte site. "I was horrified by what I saw," she told Billy after touring the library. Ultimately, the leaders of Billy Graham Evangelistic Association prevailed. When Ruth Graham was laid to rest, it was at the place Franklin favored, a garden at the end of a cross-shaped stone walkway, at the end of the Billy Graham Library and Museum tour.

It reminded me of another recent controversy about the burial site of a celebrity. When Rosa Parks died in 2005, her body was laid at the Rosa L. Parks Freedom Chapel in Woodlawn Cemetery, in Detroit. Though she and some of her family members received their plots for free, prices to be buried at the chapel skyrocketed, especially after her death. Reports indicated that the cost rose to more than $65,000 for plots near the woman who many say touched off the civil rights movement.

This is nothing new, really. Early in Christian history, many people wanted to be buried ad sanctos, near the martyrs. At first there was competition for actual burial plots near those whose faith was officially recognized. When that became impossible due to the large number of Christians (and the comparatively few saints), people began scattering the ashes of the faithful near the graves of the saints, and then finally near any site associated with them in life.

Why this human fascination with the final resting place of a person's body? Should it matter to a Christian how their mortal remains are treated or where they are laid to rest? After all, the body is just a shell. After death the soul is released from this world and makes its way to the next. But, (if you read 1 Cor 3:16 this way) the body is the temple of the Holy Spirit, and should be treated with the utmost respect. Jesus had a body, just like ours, and we confess in the Apostles' Creed that we believe in "the resurrection of the body."

The Book of Common Prayer is clear, "Baptized Christians are properly buried from the church." (BCP 468, 490) The burial rite assumes that a coffin with the body normally will be present at the funeral, though Episcopalians are choosing cremation in increasingly greater numbers. And this makes sense. Because the Spirit of God resides in our bodies, and because we have been marked with the cross of Christ at our baptism, our bodies are holy, and should be disposed of as any holy object when its useful life is over—by burial in the earth, or by reverent burning. During the funeral, the body is censed with three swings, the same honor paid to a cross, a gospel book, or any other symbol of Christ and his Resurrection.

Christians have always honored the mortal remains of the faithful dead as the former home of a member of Christ's body. And this is as it should be. But our true home is in Heaven with our God. Disputes over the disposition of our bodies aren't worth a family splitting argument, or a $65,000 price tag.

The Rev. Micah Jackson, a priest of the Diocese of Chicago, is a doctoral student in Homiletics at the Graduate Theological Union. His personal blog is St. Jerome's Library.

By Derek Olsen*

One of my friends was recently writing about the end of a ninth-month chaplaincy placement. During an online discussion of worship practices, he stated that he had prayed and sat and wept with a lot of suffering people over that time; what then, he asked, does a lengthy document on sacramental theology have to do with the suffering of a common person?

My response—perhaps a bit flippant—was to suggest that if it wasn’t immediately obvious how the sacraments connected with the suffering, then either the lengthy document was bad theology, or the caregiver needed reeducation in basic Christian theology. In his case I was preaching to the choir. Just a few posts earlier, he had treated us to a moving meditation on a request for baptism from an inmate of the psych unit, one whose endless rounds from the ward to the streets and back again left him at the literal margins of Christian community.

Conversations about the sacraments are not—or should not be—esoteric arguments about essences and obscurities several frames of reference removed from our daily realities. No, the sacraments stand right next to our daily experience because they stand at the heart of what we understand Christianity to be; they are part and parcel of the mystery of salvation.

The whole issue of Christian salvation is fraught with difficulties and confusion: Who gets saved? Do I get saved? Does that guy get saved? How do I get saved? As we all well know, different Christian groups have answered and debated these questions in different ways, a debate that has accelerated since the Reformation and caused innumerable divisions between Christians. More effective than arguing “who,” I find, is contemplating “what.” What, as far as the Scriptures are concerned, is salvation? The answer to which I return again and again—an answer which seems to contain both so many other answers and possibilities—comes from one of the those books towards the middlish-end of the New Testament, one of those books we hear about too little and pass over too often: “…your life is hid with Christ in God” (Colossians 3:3b).

Your life is hid with Christ in God… There is no other promise in Scripture as open or deep as this, for what Scripture teaches is not simply metaphor but the ontology of the new creation—to be a Christian, to be saved, is not about getting wings and a halo when you die, nor having your consciousness expanded by a great teacher who died long ago. Rather, it is to participate in the very life of God through what Christ has done for us—and to us.

And, as Colossians tells it, the path to this life is through death; indeed, that’s the first part of the verse…: “For ye are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God.” This death of which Scripture speaks is mentioned but a few verses before:

“Buried with him in baptism, wherein also ye are risen with [him] through the faith of the operation of God, who hath raised him from the dead. And you, being dead in your sins and the uncircumcision of your flesh, hath he quickened together with him, having forgiven you all trespasses…” (Col 2:12–13).

Death, Christ’s death, is our path to life through the waters of Baptism. Again—as Paul writes in Romans:

“Know ye not, that so many of us as were baptized into Jesus Christ were baptized into his death? Therefore we are buried with him by baptism into death: that like as Christ was raised up from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life” (Rom 6:3–4).

There—that’s the key… We in our baptism are buried into death; we are drowned beneath the waters: the waters of the Flood, the waters of the Red Sea, the waters of the womb of the Spirit. As they close over our heads our breath is stripped from us and replaced with a new breath, a new Spirit, a Holy Spirit, and we rise from the waters new people of a new people, rising from death to resurrection life, a life invigorated by the power of the Spirit, a life hid with Christ in God.

Now, you may be thinking that all this is very mystical sounding—and it is. This may be all well and good for meditation in a cloistered nook—but what about reality: a poopy toddler in one hand, a frozen chicken in the other, and twenty minutes to get dinner done? The truth is simple—this too is the resurrection life. It is incarnate, and therefore messy. But it is in these moments, in that split second when trying to wipe and re-diaper before the wriggling infant can stab her foot into the filth of the recently removed diaper, that I have the potential to realize I am doing more than just one more chore; rather, I am performing an act of service to the very image of God, to a member of Christ. This is to live the life hid in God—but all too often, the diaper remains a diaper; the chore, a chore. The message, the truth of resurrection life is simple, so simple—but the remembering is hard.

This is one of the functions of the Eucharist. To recall us, to remind us, to bring us once again to an awareness of our place in the narrative of what God has done, what God is doing for the world through Jesus Christ. We gather to discern the Body, in broken bread, in gathered bodies, to find the presence of Christ made real and true and tangible in the words of the Gospel and in the wine. The relationship begun in Baptism—the life hid in God—is nourished, not by bread alone but by everything that proceeds from the mouth of the Lord, and when those words and bread are joined and the bread becomes bread alone no longer, then we truly receive the bread that satisfies, the bread of life. This bread, this wine, they lead us deeper into the relationship begun in baptism, changing us, converting us, not through a conversion of mind alone, but into the literal conversion of the nature of our being: as we take the very Body and Blood of our Lord Jesus Christ into our body and blood we are changed more and more into his likeness—and another small piece of creation is invited into the redemption wrought by Christ.

Furthermore, as we receive this bread-which-is-Body we, in turn, become Body-which-is-bread to feed a world hungry and thirty for love, for knowledge of God and—indeed—for basic bread itself. The conversion is proofed, is completed when the Body of Christ moves like a Body, the limbs and members caring for one another, extending itself with arms outstretched to welcome the world, to invite the whole of the groaning creation into a life hid with Christ in God. And not just in the abstract either but with hands washing dishes, with arms enfolding those who weep, with bodies that labor on behalf of others, with voices that bring forth songs to praise and delight, and—yes—even in the changing of diapers.

* Derek Olsen blogs at Haligweorc.

About this article he writes: This post is in response to a string of comments from a while back concerning Communion without Baptism—sometimes referred to as “Open Communion.” (Because I find the latter term a bit ambiguous, I prefer the former language.) This is the first of a three-part consideration of the Eucharist in our Episcopal communities, especially in reference to the place of Holy Baptism. The current post considers the sacraments in the context of Christian life, the next will examine the issues of Scriptural interpretation connected with this debate, and in the third I hope to clarify conceptions and misconceptions about the relation between Baptism and Eucharist.