[The first in a 4-part series by The Rev. Dr. Nancy Lee Jose, Rector, exploring the calling and mission of St. Thomas' Parish]

We at St. Thomas’ Parish celebrate our unique mission as part of the family of God known as the Episcopal Church.   In the words of  the “An Outline of Faith,” commonly called the “Catechism,” The Book of Common Prayer defines our mission as followers of Christ like this:

• The mission of the Church is to restore all people to unity with God and each other in Christ.

• The Church pursues its mission as it prays and worships, proclaims the Gospel, and promotes justice, peace, and love.

• The Church carries out its mission through the ministry of all its members.

At St. Thomas’ Parish we take very seriously the unique history of our participation in the church’ s mission of reconciliation, which itself gives flesh to Christ’s mission to restore all people to unity with God and each other.

This happens through a wide variety of ministries, or ways of living and acting as followers of the living Christ.

Our primary ministry is reconciliation that we prepare for in prayer and worship and then live out in our identity and actions as Christians.

Reconciliation with God and one another  takes shape through our promotion of justice beyond, not just within, our doors.  It starts when we keep filled our Food Basket for those who come to our doors otherwise unable to feed themselves or their families. We were a founding parish of Samaritan Ministry in Washington, DC.  Our members regularly cook meals and serve at Christ House & Martha’s Table here in the District of Columbia.  Each year we furnish an apartment for a family seeking their own home through the work of the Transitional Housing Corporation.  And on a global scale we support and participate in our Diocesan commitments to the Millennium Development Goals; parishioners regularly travel to Central America to do work for the Trinidad Conservation Project.

And reconciliation happens as we learn together in community how to promote peace and love as the grounding principles of our life together. Historically at St. Thomas’ Parish this often has found central expression in providing sanctuary and support for the LGBT community.  More recently we have chosen to begin learning the foundations and practices of nonviolent communication — respectful, civil approaches to the differences of opinion and conviction that are inevitable in human society.

Christian faith for us is not otherworldly, but deeply engaged in the needs and joys and beauty and tragedy of the world we share with others, as we seek in them the face of Christ who is the very face of God-made-flesh out of God’s neverending love for creation.

We invite you to join with us as you choose to and are able to support the presence in Dupont Circle of our small circle of whose trying daily to follow The Way that God has shown us in the compassionate and extravagantly generous hospitality of Jesus.  Our mission is to do nothing less than to help God draw the world into the embrace of love like that — and to help God heal the divisions and wounds we inflict on one another and that are inflicted upon others by the injustices of the world.

As we celebrate such mission at St. Thomas’ Parish we continue to grow in numbers and resources and desire to help God heal the world.  We are by no means perfect; but we know where God is calling us, and we are learning in love to lay the foundations for a more just and compassionate tomorrow.

>>NEXT.  Why we begin in prayer and worship in community & how that prepares us to be agents of reconciliation in the world.

HELP TACKLE HUNGER

Join us on Sun, Feb. 5, after our weekly Taizé Service (~6PM), for the heavenliest Super Bowl party around.

Of course there’s football on the big screen in the Guild Room. Also, in coordination with Souper Bowl of Caring, we are asking people to bring money and/or canned goods/non-perishable food items which will then be donated to Martha’s Table. Bring food and drinks to share. Bring money or food to donate.

And most importantly bring yourself + partner or spouse or friend/other to enjoy the game and help fight hunger. (Btw, Madonna’s doing the halftime show.)

Yet all day, I’ve had going through my head the old traditional Shaker hymn, a powerful eschatological invocation of hope breaking in out of the future in places where it cannot yet be seen,  only sung.  It’s entitled “How can I keep from singing?”  Any time I find myself answering by saying, “How long have you got …,” I know it’s time for this song again.

What my mind hears is the Folk Legacy recording of Gordon Bok, Ann Mayo Muir & Ed Trickett from the 1970s or earlier (yes, I owned it only in vinyl); but this YouTube recording by the Celtic singer Enya will have to do! Listen and pray along and tell me it doesn’t soften your sharp edges just a bit; or if it doesn’t, play it again … now again … now … [If it starts in fullscreen mode, click the bottom right corner of your screen to reduce the image so you can read along with the lyrics below.]

  My life goes on in endless song
  Above earth’s lamentations,
I hear the real though far off hymn
That hails a new creation.

Through all the tumult and the strife
I hear its music ringing,
It sounds an echo in my soul.
How can I keep from singing?

While though the tempest loudly roars,
I hear the truth it liveth.
And though the darkness round me close,
Songs in the night it giveth.

No storm can shake my inmost calm,
While to that rock I’m clinging.
Since love is lord of heaven and earth
How can I keep from singing?

When tyrants tremble in their fear
And hear their death knell ringing,
When friends rejoice both far and near
How can I keep from singing?

In prison cell and dungeon vile
Our thoughts to them are winging,
When friends by shame are undefiled
How can I keep from singing?

As well as words, gestures, posturing.

Bullying-behavior rarely resorts to the former; but bullies are masters-of-manipulation with the latter.

We live in the middle of what Ryan Halligan, a staff writer for the Desmond Tutu Peace Foundation, has described as “An Epidemic of Bullying,” verging on a societal pandemic.  At least, in the case of the bullying of children and young adults, light is finally beginning to be shed on this dark behavior, and responses are being formulated.  For example, St. Thomas’ Parish participated in the It Gets Better project, a national response to the suicides of teenagers who were bullied because of their sexual orientation and identity:

Bullying in the workplace, however, has been described as “The Silent Epidemic” — it happens regularly, but it isn’t being discussed very openly yet.  Writing for Psychology Today, Ray Williams defines such bullying as “the conscious repeated effort to wound and seriously harm another person not with [physical] violence, but with words and actions. Bullying damages the physical, emotional and mental healthy of the person who is targeted.”  And we have gotten so accustomed to such behavior in our entertainment, our politics, and our work-environments that we are numb to the effects of psychological violence, much less to potential remedies for it.

That’s one of the reasons that St. Thomas’ Parish is in conversation with Bishop V. Gene Robinson about the formation of a Center for Nonviolent Communication in our new building when he retires as Bishop of the Diocese of New Hampshire in 2013. Meanwhile, we are already beginning to work on our own nonviolent communication skills, as well as the community dynamics that can encourage and discourage them, in our upcoming parish retreat with Canon Charles LaFond, who oversees congregational development in the Diocese of New Hampshire.

This is important work for us to do, because besides being potential agents of change in a culture of violence-filled rhetoric and behavior, churches also can themselves be hotbeds for bullying.  In an organization that is built on a metaphor of sheep being cared for and protected from harm by a shepherd, churchgoers get caught off-guard when the sheep attack one another .. or sometimes, even more viciously, the shepherd.  Episcopal priest Dennis Maynard has chronicled the latter behavior in his book, When Sheep Attack, which provides chilling examples of how a lone-wolf bully, or a small pack of parishioners bent on destruction, can threaten to bring a parish to its knees through their bullying behavior.

One of the worst characteristics of church communities, however, is not just that such behavior exists — undercutting even the best efforts of a community to foster an environment of hospitality, welcome, and inclusion — but that often virtually the entire congregation is  aware of what is going on and chooses to stand by and do nothing.

Rabbi Edwin Friedman, one of the most respected voices in describing the systemic dysfunctions of families and communities like the church, challenges this bystander-behavior in the face of bullying in his little book, Friedman’s Fables, in the story he entitled “The Friendly Forest.”   There he describes the efforts of the inhabitants of a forest to encourage a lamb to disregard the continually threatening and aggressive behaviors of a tiger who has taken up residence in the same forest where the lamb lives. Some want to brush off the behavior as “just the way tigers are,”  while others even go to far as to suggest that the lamb is bringing in on herself by being so unnaturally peaceful. Then the conciliators of the forest suggest that all that is needed is “better communication” between the lion and the lamb; they should should just talk through their differences.

The fable ends rather abruptly when, following the continuing advice to the harried lamb, “Don’t be so sheepish. … Speak up strongly when it does these things,” finally “one of the less subtle animals in the forest, more uncouth in expression and unconcerned about just who remained, was overheard to remark, ‘I never heard of anything so ridiculous. If you want a lamb and a tiger to live in the same forest, you don’t try to make them communicate. You cage the bloody tiger.’”

Bullying continues until it stops.  And it seldom stops of its own accord.  It stops when it no longer is deemed acceptable to blame the victim of bullying and instead the bystanders step up — which often begins when they speak out — and state the obvious: We’ve got to cage the tiger.  Authentic nonviolent communication leads to justice in the way we behave — not by talking while the bullying continues, but by finding ways to “cage the tiger” … in ourselves and in our communities. This is the way that Christians envision the Reign of God when the “lion lies down with the lamb” … and the lamb sleeps well through the whole night.

“You yourself created my inmost parts; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. I will thank you because I am marvelously made; your works are wonderful, and I know it well.” (Psalm 139)

Of all the ways in which human beings are indeed so marvelously made, one of the most wonderful is our capacity for memory. It is in the process of remembrance that we assemble the pattern of the formative moments of our personal identity. Anamnesis Plato called it – reminiscence, remembrance. Anamnesis is at the core of our Eucharistic theology; Holy Communion isn’t considered valid without invoking the Holy Spirit (epiklesis) to transform the bread and wine to bear the presence of Christ, first comes anamnesis, remembrance, of the deeds that give significance to the communion elements. “On the night before he died,” the Celebrant reminds us. So “Do this in remembrance.”

Our own memories, likewise, and those of the communities to which we belong, that give significance to all that we have become over a lifetime. In my own memory, the spring and summer of 1968 left an indelible mark. I graduated from high school that spring and left home for the first time to begin college late that summer. All of my classmates who shared those experiences would forever remember the first half of 1968, but unfortunately not for any of the reasons we might have imagined when the year began.

Through our parents and grandparents, our lives already had been shaped by the turmoil and terror of World War II, and then Korea, and now Viet Nam. Closer to home, violence had slashed through our junior high years, when just before Thanksgiving of 1963, President Kennedy had been cut down by gunfire in Dallas. Now just five years later, our high school graduation was bracketed in time by two other assassinations by gunfire, The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King in Memphis on April 4th and JFK’s brother Robert Kennedy on June 5th.

Barely a year later other dramatic events for a while overcame the notoriety of these deaths with equally graphic and iconic cultural images: the first manned moon landing on July 20th, 1969; Woodstock that August; and between them the Stonewall Riots in New York on June 28th that began the modern gay rights movement. And then just a year after that, arson struck St. Thomas’ Parish church in the summer of 1970. There was only one Woodstock; and decades have passed since the last person walked the face of the moon, leaving us with but fading memories of those glory days. But we are still playing out the consequences of the violence of the 1960s and the ways we have learned, or refused to learn, how to deal with it.

The commemoration tomorrow of the birthday of The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. is an act of remembrance celebrating a remarkable life and recalling a painful and transformative period of our national history, a time when the effectiveness of his strategy of resistance through non-violence could seem like a pipe-dream when surrounded by the smoke of arson and the brutality of war and racial and social upheaval. Who could have imagined Barak Obama in the White House less than fifty years later, or that incessant war would still consume so much of our country’s resources across so much of the globe.

With Dr. King and the cultural upheaval of the 1960s, however, world history took a turn towards the possibility of a more redemptive future. The pains of social dislocation were the birth pangs of the culture of radical hospitality and inclusion that have now a half-century later come to define St. Thomas’ Parish. We in this very room are heirs to the legacy of the riots at Stonewall, NY, as well as those on 14th Street just blocks from here, and those that left Columbia Heights and the U Street Corridor that lay in ruins. And Dr. King’s commitment to non-violence needs to be remembered as the essential backdrop for the dream we currently explore with Bishop Gene Robinson to establish a Center for Non-Violent Communication in the new church we are building. In looking back, we frame our future, with gratitude to those who have shown us the way, however painful those memories often are.

Dr. King came from a time when it might have been said, as the Hebrew Bible speaks of the era of the ancient prophet Samuel — perhaps with a bit of tongue in cheek: “The word of the Lord was rare in those days; visions were not widespread.” People still went to church in large numbers, and plenty of preachers proclaimed what they understood to be “the word of the Lord”. But what Dr. King brought back into our national conversation was the prophetic word that, as the Book of Samuel put it, God was “about to do something … that will make both ears of anyone who hears of it tingle.” And tingle they did.

For Dr. King not only denounced what he called “the triple evils” of racism, and poverty, and war. But he dared step out of the chains of the victim and dream of the freedom and reconciliation that lay on the other side. In his words, “I have the audacity to believe that people everywhere can have three meals a day for their bodies, education and culture for their minds, and dignity, equality and freedom for their spirits.” Dr. King was bringing into the twentieth century the three thousand year old Jewish understanding of peace, Shalom, the audacious word that speaks not just of the end of violence, but of the cultivation of what Dr. King called “the beloved community,” a social reality in which redemption reigns.

Shalom, like non-violence, is primarily a relational, social concept. It is about how we live together. As King wrote in “Chaos or Community: Where Do We Go From Here?”: “This way of … injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love.” We must learn, King believed, how to “wage peace” with as much art and fervor as we “wage war.” Yet today VA Hospitals and newspaper headlines continually remind us how little we have yet learned, how much we still need to cultivate a culture of non-violence.

When, as Jesus said in today’s Gospel to Philip and Nathaniel, “follow me,” he was inviting them onto the path of Shalom, of non-violence. “It means,” in the words of the Benedictine writer Joan Chittester, “that every day we have to learn to curb our
own urge for power and to resist the propaganda designed to make enemies of strangers.”

Non-violence is the firm “No!” to degrading others simply because we can, ranging from personal bullying to international terrorism. And yet non-violence is, equally, the way we give flesh to our conviction that there are principles and people worth putting ourselves at risk for. Like Gandhi before him, and Fannie Lou Hamer after him, Martin Luther King, Jr. chose nonviolence born of the conviction that our human future depends not on the success of vengeance, but on reconciliation among enemies. Nonviolence recognizes in action our Christian conviction that beyond all our attempts at exclusion lies God’s eternal embrace.

On the Sunday before he was gunned down in Memphis, Dr. King stood in the pulpit of the Cathedral Church of St. Peter and St. Paul, otherwise known as Washington National Cathedral, to preach what no one there could have imagined would be his final Sunday sermon, entitled: “Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution.” The title comes from his opening musings on Washington Irving’s classic American fictional story of Rip Van Winkle, who went to sleep one day in the Catskill Mountains and awoke twenty years later to a completely changed world.

As King said that morning, “When Rip Van Winkle went up into the mountain, [he saw a sign that] had a picture of King George the Third of England. When he came down twenty years later the sign had a picture of George Washington, the first president of the United States. [Rip Van Winkle] slept through a revolution. While he was peacefully snoring up in the mountain a revolution was taking place that … would change the course of history—and Rip knew nothing about it. … One of the great liabilities of life is that all too many people find themselves living amid a great period of social change, and yet they fail to develop the new attitudes, the new mental responses, that the new situation demands. They end up sleeping through a revolution.”

In a time when our technological advances have shrunk our world into a neighborhood, King said, “we have not had the ethical commitment to make of it a brotherhood. … But somehow, and in some way, we have got to do this. We must all learn to live together as brothers or we will all perish together as fools. We are tied together in the single garment of destiny, caught in an inescapable network of mutuality. And whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. For some strange reason I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. And you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be. This is the way God’s universe is made.”

King spoke eloquently that day of the ways in which “racial injustice is still the black man’s burden and the white man’s shame. … We must face the sad fact that at eleven o’clock on Sunday morning when we stand to sing “In Christ there is no East or West,” we stand in the most segregated hour of America.”

King recognized, too, that racism is intimately linked to our acceptance of the inevitability of poverty, whether in the slums of Calcutta or in Southeast DC or the homeless men and women whose presence in our parks and on our streets vexes us still. He spoke prophetically of the parable of the beggar Lazarus and the rich man who passed him by daily giving him not even a drop of water. In King’s words the rich man went to hell not because he was rich, but because “he passed by Lazarus every day and he never really saw him. He went to hell because he allowed his brother to become invisible.”

Warfare, violence, and terrorism only further demean the humanity we all share. Speaking in the midst of the cold war’s threat of mutually assured destruction, King was clear: “It is no longer a choice, my friends, between violence and nonviolence. It is either nonviolence or nonexistence.”

And yet, he concluded on that fateful Sunday morning, “however dark it is, however deep the angry feelings are, and however violent explosions are, I can still sing “We Shall Overcome,” the great protest song inspired by our Epistle reading today: “Let us not grow weary in doing what is right, for we will reap at harvest-time, if we do not give up.” We shall overcome, King preached, “because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” “We will reap at harvest-time, if we do not give up.” Our challenge, Dr. King concluded, is in his words to “be participants in this newness and this magnificent development. If we will but do it, we will bring about a new day of justice and brotherhood and peace. And that day the morning stars will sing together and the sons of God will shout for joy.” Our challenge meantime is “Staying Awake Through a Great Revolution”.

In Washington, DC, as across our land, race still divides us; the gap between rich and poor only widens; women still struggle to move beyond the advances of the previous generation; and rights for LGBT persons are not by any means universal. Our challenge at St. Thomas’ Parish is to discover how to give flesh to our own deep conviction that, despite the scars that we bear from the past — evidence of the violence inflicted on us — our future is shaped by a strong confidence that “We Shall Overcome.” Our own vision of a Center for Non-Violent Communication is another way of extending King’s legacy. His approach to non-violence challenges us to “walk the walk” that matches how we “talk the talk” of radical hospitality. Our parish retreat on January 28th with Canon Charles LaFond from the Diocese of New Hampshire will provide our first opportunity to venture as a parish community into a more intentional embrace of the practice of non-violence that we dream will one day be shared with our neighbors close and far.

Our history as a parish has without doubt been altered by the violence in our past. May our future be shaped by individual and community conversion into the way of Shalom, as we take our place among all those many others who have led lives committed to the radical alternative of non-violence.

When we leave this building today, we will do so singing that great African American spiritual, “We shall overcome”. And we will be sent out with the words: “Go in peace – Shalom – to love and serve the Lord.” Then I invite you to take your song sheet away with you so you can read on the back when you get home – if you’re not one of those doing so right now — the history of this great hymn.

In these small but symbolic ways the “we” of St. Thomas’ Parish can join in solidarity with the “beloved community” of those before us who like Dr. King risked and gave so much. And we can take upon ourselves the mantle of responsibility for cultivating a culture of reconciliation in the present, and discovering “another way” into the future where coming generations in this church will still find beloved community here, still “walk hand in hand” and still find sanctuary that allows them to say with conviction, “We are not afraid.” For like those on whose shoulders we stand – one of whom, The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., our nation honors this weekend — “We, too, shall overcome.”

Gather by candlelight on Sunday evening, December 18, at 5:00 p.m., to hear lessons from the Hebrew Bible and Christian New Testament about the coming Messiah and the birth of Jesus and sing carols about the coming of Christ-among-us, then and now.  Classical guitar preludes begin at 4:40 p.m.

Music includes choir, classical guitar, oboe, English horn, piano, and double bass to accompany anthems and congregational carols.

Outtake from “Love Free or Die”

“Love Free or Die: How the Bishop of New Hampshire is Changing the World,” the documentary film directed by Macky Alston and produced by Sandra Itkoff, will be one of sixteen U.S. documentary films to have its world premier at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival.

Described as “A portrait of Gene Robinson, the first gay partnered bishop in the Episcopal Church, and his refusal to quit either the church or the man he loves,” the film is an important reminder that much of our country, ironically, lags far behind the traditionally-risk-averse Episcopal Church in confronting our society’s systemic as well as individual homophobia.

What strikes me most, however, in such attempts  to measure the enduring significance of an iconic figure like Bishop Robinson, is that his legacy may well prove to be not just what he has already contributed to the gay rights movement in church and state, but what church and state still have to learn from Gene about our common calling to our higher selves.

I believe the heterosexual community is learning from faithful and pastoral Christian leaders like Gene Robinson not just how to be more humane towards our LGBT sisters and brothers in the faith, but how to be more fully human ourselves, and more faithful to our calling as Christians to see Christ in our neighbors, without reserve, rather than presuming that  there is already enough Christ evident in us to show off to others with ease.   It’s one thing for Gene Robinson to teach us about what it means to be gay; it’s another when he begins to show us superior ways of being straight, as well.

The backlash against Gene Robinson hasn’t just been because he is ‘the gay bishop’ but also because he has shown us through who he is, not just what he says or does, the deeper bonds that unite us as Christians once we no longer let ourselves judge others by their sexual orientation.

Once we allow him to be the faithful human being and priest that he is, we begin to imagine what Bishop Robinson may have to teach us about ourselves, whatever our sexual orientation.  Gay rights really becomes human rights, and we all become more able to be our authentic selves, and perhaps even to become more than we believe we are capable of being.  If so, then it’s no exaggeration:  This Bishop can change not just the church, but the world. (W. Floyd)