SPEAKER_12: God does not need you to be confirmed.
SPEAKER_12: The question is whether confirmation will be beneficial to you in your spiritual journey.
SPEAKER_12: You don't get extra privileges at St.
SPEAKER_12: Thomas, you don't get extra rights.
SPEAKER_12: It's an opportunity for a bishop to bless the faith that's in you.
SPEAKER_12: And we we like ritual because we like good stories that take us places.
SPEAKER_12: And for many of us, the ritual could be I've had faith a long time, but I'm just finding myself not only at home, but at hope in the episcopal way of doing church, and that's the path I want to walk.
SPEAKER_12: But all of us will ultimately say something different, and the right is based on the bishop blessing the faith that is in you.
SPEAKER_12: That's the goal.
SPEAKER_12: Now, we've had to change things up because Bishop Monterroso was gonna come on the 21st.
SPEAKER_12: And then he sort of asked Beg to come on the 7th so that he can be with his spouse in Christmas, who lives in Costa Rica.
SPEAKER_12: So we've pushed up confirmation to Advent 2, which is interesting and great.
SPEAKER_12: Um so that'll be December 7th, which means we're gonna not speed through this.
SPEAKER_12: We're not speeding through this at all.
SPEAKER_12: We're still taking the same amount of time.
SPEAKER_12: The only difference is we are gonna have a meeting on the 23rd in which we talk about the Bible.
SPEAKER_12: The good news for you is if you can't be here for any reason, we have the last two years of videos of us doing this, and I'm making a sound file that'll go on our SoundCloud page as well.
SPEAKER_12: It occurred to me, video sound, I don't know, let's just do it different for a change.
SPEAKER_12: So if you miss one and want to review it, you can.
SPEAKER_12: I don't want you to turn this into me.
SPEAKER_12: You can.
SPEAKER_12: If you're an A student like I was, this might be delightful for you to say, I checked you and I checked you, right?
SPEAKER_12: You may want to do that, but I don't need you to do this.
SPEAKER_12: If you want to be confirmed, the bishop will confirm you.
SPEAKER_12: And knowing all of you in the room, as little or as much as I do, I know enough to say, I'm proud to present you to the bishop for confirmation.
SPEAKER_12: I am.
SPEAKER_12: I'm already happy to do that.
SPEAKER_12: So hopefully what we do will be beneficial and interesting to you.
SPEAKER_12: Um if it's not, you can say, pause.
SPEAKER_12: I don't actually care about what you're saying.
SPEAKER_12: What I want to know is the following thing, and I'll try to make a pivot in the moment, okay?
SPEAKER_12: Because this should be useful for you.
SPEAKER_12: I don't want to convert you to my faith, heaven forbid.
SPEAKER_12: I want us to confirm the faith that's in you.
SPEAKER_12: Does that make sense?
SPEAKER_12: In about two weeks, I'm going to ask you how many of you are up for confirmation?
SPEAKER_12: Because we do something different at our parish for confirmands than we do for those renewing or receiving in terms of a token.
SPEAKER_12: Just so you know, right?
SPEAKER_12: We we do something a little different.
SPEAKER_12: So I'll I'll ask, and you'll tell me I want to be confirmed or I want to be received, and we'll proceed from there, or hey, I want to renew my vows.
SPEAKER_12: Um, those are different parts of the service, if that makes sense.
SPEAKER_12: So I'm not expecting you to do anything other than what you want.
SPEAKER_14: Can I ask you the difference between those three?
SPEAKER_12: Absolutely.
SPEAKER_12: In some ways, I mean, so what we say, it's like similar to baptism.
SPEAKER_12: We say when you're baptized, it worked.
SPEAKER_12: If you were baptized Lutheran or Southern Baptist, we don't need to do it again because God's grace worked the first time.
SPEAKER_12: Which means if you've been confirmed somewhere else, we say we're gonna receive you.
SPEAKER_12: So you're not, we're not redoing it, we're receiving you.
SPEAKER_12: If you're renewing your confirmation, maybe you were confirmed a long time ago, and it's sort of like remembering your baptism, which we do every year, and every week we have the holy water font.
SPEAKER_12: That's so you can remember your baptism, right?
SPEAKER_12: Live into those vows knowing that God loves you and you can't get away from God as much as you want and try.
SPEAKER_12: Um, confirmation is a little different if you've not been confirmed before.
SPEAKER_12: We try to say, let's wait till we're 16 so we've got a little more time, because you only do get to do this once.
SPEAKER_12: And confirmation is we claim for ourselves uh the faith and promise and gift of grace that was made when we were born, and especially when we were baptized.
SPEAKER_12: Some of us were baptized when we were quite young, and I'll say I was baptized as an adult when I was 10, as an adult.
SPEAKER_12: Boy, I didn't know anything.
SPEAKER_12: So uh confirmation is the chance to say, hey, my brain's developed, my life's developed, and I still choose this.
SPEAKER_12: Like I want this.
SPEAKER_12: And that was an important faith milestone for me to have a bishop say, God bless you that you want this.
SPEAKER_16: And ritually, the reason it's just a one-time thing is because the this is this is an episcopal office, service, right?
SPEAKER_16: So we can't do this.
SPEAKER_16: Only bishops can do it in the Episcopal Church.
SPEAKER_16: And there is a special prayer, and he does call and ask upon the Holy Spirit to like descend upon you to empower you to give you those gifts.
SPEAKER_16: It's a it's a special prayer.
SPEAKER_16: Now, who knows what happens in that prayer, but it's a it's a one-time special prayer that the bishop does for a person when they want to make that hinge moment, right?
SPEAKER_16: And so that's why it's a has this happened in another place.
SPEAKER_16: You know, we're gonna honor that.
SPEAKER_12: But I hope you'll hear, and we'll talk about the sacraments um in two weeks.
SPEAKER_12: The sacraments are not things we do to earn God's favor, they speak to our human need about grace being embodied.
SPEAKER_12: And and confirmation's no different from the Eucharist that way.
SPEAKER_12: We need embodied grace.
SPEAKER_12: Well, that's what I think.
SPEAKER_12: And if you think they're magic, you belong too.
SPEAKER_12: Right?
SPEAKER_12: So it's it's not it's your faith that's being confirmed, not not mine.
SPEAKER_12: Um maybe if we're interested, we willing, we could go around the table, and if you would just say your name, I'd be really grateful.
SPEAKER_12: And and maybe if you could add to that, if there was one thing you really wanted to get out of the next five weeks, or hey, I'm not committing to coming back, but since I'm here today, I'd like this.
SPEAKER_12: I I'd be I'd be grateful.
SPEAKER_12: So my name's Mike, and I'm just really looking forward to hearing how your story intersects the the church's story.
SPEAKER_12: That's what I'm most interested in.
SPEAKER_16: Um yeah, I'm Sean, and I am probably most interested in hearing what is it about this tradition that makes you want to confirm your own faith in it.
SPEAKER_16: And when I'm listening for that, um, what is the thing that is meeting a need inside of you or calling you forward?
SPEAKER_10: Uh I'm Reggie.
SPEAKER_10: Um I did this like Mike mentioned when I was 13, 14, and uh that was like twenty-something years ago.
SPEAKER_10: So hoping uh I can uh go through this as an adult and get something different.
SPEAKER_00: My name is Jillian, and I grew up in the Catholic Church, so I'm interested in learning the difference between the people of Catholic faith and uh making a commitment to morning, my name is Al.
SPEAKER_02: I didn't want to put my daughter about the daughter.
SPEAKER_02: So years back, and I'm here to do it again with myself.
SPEAKER_02: The one thing I love, I'm a pilot, so I love like manuals and rule books.
SPEAKER_02: So I think that he loves to hear me talk to him about the prayer book.
SPEAKER_02: And all the stuff is in there, so that's my little thing.
SPEAKER_06: I I think a later adult again.
SPEAKER_05: I don't know.
SPEAKER_03: I was confirmed Catholic.
SPEAKER_03: I feel like I did it more for my grandmother than myself.
SPEAKER_03: So I'm here to learn and and and make that decision for me rather than Valerie.
SPEAKER_09: I was confirmed at age twelve, and I'm much, much older than that now.
SPEAKER_09: And I've been an Episcopalian most well, all my life, and I'm just renewing my vow.
SPEAKER_09: Just want to say it one more time.
SPEAKER_10: Thank you.
SPEAKER_08: I'm moving, and I was confirmed in the Episcopal Church in the early 80s.
SPEAKER_08: I left some years after that, I became a Catholic, and now I'm returning to the Episcopal Church.
SPEAKER_08: And I suspect I'll be renewing.
SPEAKER_14: My kids are only like about three or four years old.
SPEAKER_14: Uh so I was actually confirmed at that time because I was an adult accepting.
SPEAKER_14: And I have to decide what I'm doing right now.
SPEAKER_14: Um I definitely want to be received.
SPEAKER_14: And I'm looking forward to understanding the Episcopal.
SPEAKER_07: I'm Kathy.
SPEAKER_07: I was raised Catholic, so in uh second grade.
SPEAKER_07: One Sunday I had first Holy Communion.
SPEAKER_07: The following Sunday we were confirmed.
SPEAKER_07: We were so adult, right?
SPEAKER_07: Uh well I joined the Catholic Episcopal Church because my husband is Episcopal.
SPEAKER_07: I have I love it because it's the same beautiful liturgy, but it's a civilized Catholic Church.
SPEAKER_07: Well, they do, they let priests get married, they let women be priests, and they let people be priests, you know, is like a democracy whereas the Catholic Church is very much like the military, top-down do as you're told.
SPEAKER_07: And I was received into the Episcopal Church in the early 80s, but I would just like to renew my because I don't know very much Episcopal Church.
SPEAKER_13: Thank you.
SPEAKER_01: I'm I was confronted in the Episcopal Church in high school, and it was again just that's what you did, and I I wanted to do it, but I'm here to renew and remember why I did it now as an adult.
SPEAKER_01: And also my husband couldn't be here today, but he grew up Catholic and he would like to be received um in the Episcopal Church, and I'm very excited to do this with him.
SPEAKER_02: Thank you.
SPEAKER_15: Hi, I'm Jack.
SPEAKER_15: I got baptized at a very young age, and I never uh really understood it, and I'm looking forward to understanding like what's around it and understanding the other traditions of the Episcopal Church.
SPEAKER_15: Thank you.
SPEAKER_12: Okay, so I'll do my best, and if at any point we're not structuring things in a way that meets your needs, like I said, truly is your time.
SPEAKER_12: It's your time.
SPEAKER_12: Uh what I had planned for us to kind of talk about, and you'll have to stop me from getting all lectury here, is just about a little bit of the history of the church, where we sort of came from, and a couple of pivot moments that help us know where we are.
SPEAKER_12: I'll try to do this succinctly and not like overload you, but um, maybe the thing to start with is what church means.
SPEAKER_12: Um church is a, it's interesting, it's a really a Greek word that means gathering.
SPEAKER_12: So it's very similar from synagogue, which means getting together.
SPEAKER_12: Church is a gathering.
SPEAKER_12: Which reminds us, I I'd like to hope, that a lot of times in an individualistic culture, we think what's in it for me, but the church really the word implies how are we going to do this together?
SPEAKER_12: How are we gonna do this together?
SPEAKER_12: And we've had a lot of twists and turns historically.
SPEAKER_12: So starting way, way back, right, seems like Jesus went to synagogue, and it synagogue was a place where you studied and you learned together.
SPEAKER_12: And in the earliest Christian communities, just like well, the rabbinic communities that continue, the one thing you knew as a Jewish person when you went to study is you were gonna disagree.
SPEAKER_12: So you went there on purpose to disagree, and you promised you'd come back the next week and disagree again.
SPEAKER_12: Maybe you've heard the adage.
SPEAKER_12: I'm quoting a rabbi.
SPEAKER_12: He says, Maybe you've heard that whenever there's two Jewish people, there's three opinions.
SPEAKER_12: And he said, That's true.
SPEAKER_12: Because the whole point of getting together and learning and study is that there's a thesis, there's an antithesis, and then there's a synthesis.
SPEAKER_12: You've both spoken, you've both listened, and you must therefore, having listened, go away changed.
SPEAKER_12: Church began that way, not as a monolith, but as a holy conversation community, gathered around what it meant to be around Jesus and embodied his way.
SPEAKER_12: And you heard Sean mention this last week.
SPEAKER_12: The earliest Christian debate seems to be what did it mean to have the Eucharist?
SPEAKER_12: And what happened if you died before Jesus came back?
SPEAKER_12: These were like the earliest questions, not doctrines, but what does this mean?
SPEAKER_12: Who was he, and what did this mean?
SPEAKER_12: And so actually, for a number of years, like 300, a lot of variety.
SPEAKER_12: There was no Bible, as we now call it.
SPEAKER_12: Different churches used different books.
SPEAKER_12: So maybe you've heard of the Gospel of Thomas, didn't make it into our Bible.
SPEAKER_12: If you were Christian living in Egypt, you probably knew it.
SPEAKER_12: If you were Christian living in Italy, you probably never heard of it.
SPEAKER_12: And that was fine.
SPEAKER_12: The biggest thing that changed is that from the time of Jesus' resurrection, and you can read this through the book of Acts, really small group of people said, Hey, this is the guy we've been waiting for, and the invitation to actually not edit what we often call the Old Testament, we're not editing the Hebrew Bible, he's the fulfillment of everything we've been reading.
SPEAKER_12: That ultimately sort of became the claim.
SPEAKER_12: And um, which is interesting, right?
SPEAKER_16: Because one of the things to add that just to the scope of this is there's not a Christianity, there's Christianities, there always has been.
SPEAKER_16: And at one point, there was a group of Christians, self-identified followers of Christ, who followed this guy named Arius, and he believed that Jesus was actually a created, the first creature among all creation.
SPEAKER_16: Like he was a creature, but he was the first creature of which all things were created through.
SPEAKER_16: So this language of begotten and trinity and all of that.
SPEAKER_16: And at the height of it, there numerically were more Christians walking around following Arius than what we would consider Trinitarian Orthodoxy.
SPEAKER_16: There was a there was a period of time where numerically there were more people that were believing that than what we now call, now that is not what was handed down, and ultimately what we now call orthodoxy solidified in the end of the fourth century and different things and get into that.
SPEAKER_16: But the point is that this idea that there's always been one faith, you know, and we've all agreed, is just not the case.
SPEAKER_16: I mean, this is the whole process by which God has been moving the church is this holy dialogue that Mike is talking about, right?
SPEAKER_16: The spirit with God.
SPEAKER_12: And that dialogue was really contagious at a growth rate of about 10% a year.
SPEAKER_12: Yeah.
SPEAKER_12: So that you know they were not major conversions where Billy Graham like rescued 5,000 people in a block.
SPEAKER_12: Seems like the early church grew at about 10% a year, which is how the LDS church has been growing since it was founded and continues to go at that rate.
SPEAKER_12: And boy, that's exponential growth.
SPEAKER_12: It's not linear, that's exponential, right?
SPEAKER_12: And that's kind of what happened.
SPEAKER_12: So around uh around the year 300, um, probably 25% of the Roman Empire identified with a Christianity minority.
SPEAKER_12: And one of those people was the Emperor Constantine, who himself was an Arian Christian, that is, a heretic.
SPEAKER_12: He believed Jesus was subordinate to the Father and a created being.
SPEAKER_12: And the first early Christian controversy that I think still many of us wrestle with was not actually the Nicene Creed, it was what happens when your priest turns out to be a scumbag?
SPEAKER_12: What if your priest is a scumbag?
SPEAKER_12: Does that mean that your baptism or your confirmation or the Eucharist were invalid?
SPEAKER_12: And ultimately the first decision of the early church was God works through imperfect vessels, so the piety of the priest does not enhance or diminish the conveyance of grace.
SPEAKER_12: Constantine killed people, literally persecuted people for that point.
SPEAKER_12: Like he himself organized opposition in a kind of a minor inquisition and said, if you can't concede this, you might die, and you're certainly not Christian.
SPEAKER_12: So that was the first controversy of the whole church.
SPEAKER_12: The second one was when he called everybody together and said, there's too much plurality.
SPEAKER_12: Like, look, I'm the emperor and I don't believe in, well, a lot of different opinions, because that's not how empires work.
SPEAKER_12: I want one version.
SPEAKER_12: Like, what's the bottom line?
SPEAKER_12: He wasn't trying to say we all have to believe the same thing, but we need some basics.
SPEAKER_12: So maybe you know this, he called something called the Council of Nicaea, which he presided over himself.
SPEAKER_12: He sat in a rotunda where the bishop would sit in our church, right?
SPEAKER_12: Which is a Roman courtroom.
SPEAKER_12: He sat and he listened as people like Arius and Athanasius, as these hermits who lived in the middle of the desert and like St.
SPEAKER_12: Anthony, who went and lived on a plinus so he could be by himself.
SPEAKER_12: He sold everything he had and lived on top of a butte.
SPEAKER_12: And he wanted to get away from people, and like people thought he was so wise they wouldn't leave him alone, right?
SPEAKER_12: So like these kind of people showed up, and the only reason they showed up is the promise was we won't persecute you immediately following the council.
SPEAKER_12: So the Council of Nicaea wrote the Nicene Creed, essentially.
SPEAKER_12: It was edited a little bit later, and that changed Christianity probably more than anything else, because now there was an official version.
SPEAKER_12: If you weren't creedal, you were what we call heterodox, which means not right in your belief.
SPEAKER_12: You weren't orthodox, you were heterodox.
SPEAKER_12: So these heterodox people were afraid of being persecution, and many of them went and lived in the desert.
SPEAKER_12: Some of them built literally underground cities.
SPEAKER_12: You can visit these in Turkey.
SPEAKER_12: 70 feet below the surface, they carved out places and they dispersed their smoke because they wanted to practice the piety that they found most life-giving for them, and they weren't sure what would happen if they did.
SPEAKER_12: This was the first time that Christians had toleration in the Roman Empire.
SPEAKER_12: That is, they were allowed to meet in public buildings.
SPEAKER_12: Hitherto for the Nicene Creed, Christians had to meet secretly because they were considered a new age religion, and the Romans weren't interested in them.
SPEAKER_16: So now think about how significant a change happened where a tradition where their Messiah, their main figure, was literally crucified, right?
SPEAKER_16: State execution for speaking truth to power and threatening.
SPEAKER_16: I mean, Jesus was crucified for sedition against the state.
SPEAKER_16: Remember that.
SPEAKER_16: Like he was a it was capital punishment, sedition against the state, against the empire, against the that was what he was killed for officially.
SPEAKER_16: So now this thing that started as that is now empire and doing the exact same thing.
SPEAKER_16: And so this is where historians will say, now the Holy Spirit is real.
SPEAKER_16: When I'm seeing your faces, like, oh my gosh, I can't believe this is our history.
SPEAKER_16: The Holy Spirit is real, and the church has continued to move and do beautiful things because despite our brokenness.
SPEAKER_16: But one of the things that that you'll notice here that I think is different is that Mike and I are super interested in reclaiming that whole seditious reality of pushing back against the forces of empire.
SPEAKER_16: Whereas a lot of our churches just perpetuate them.
SPEAKER_16: Like they just aren't, they're just, you know, just now next in line in their own way.
SPEAKER_16: And so part of this is when he says this was the hinge moment, this is where scholars will say Christianity, you know, moved in a bit of a different direction at the end of the fourth century, in the in the in the early fifth century.
SPEAKER_12: Yeah, so I think hitherto four, like when we talk about conservative and liberal, the conservative position of Christianity before Constantine was we don't have to be uniform to be unified.
SPEAKER_12: And Constantine said, uniformity above unity.
SPEAKER_10: So I'm just curious, and I don't want to go up too much on a tangent here, but So the Nicene Creed you're saying was written there.
SPEAKER_10: Did the Apostles' Creed come later?
SPEAKER_10: Apostles' Creed came first.
SPEAKER_10: Oh, that was great.
SPEAKER_12: And it's shorter.
SPEAKER_12: The reason the Nicene Creed is longer is it's every phrase is combating some view of heresy.
SPEAKER_12: Like, was Jesus the firstborn of all creation, or was he coeternal with the Father?
SPEAKER_12: Was he made?
SPEAKER_12: No, he was begotten.
SPEAKER_12: Right.
SPEAKER_12: So like there's all of these weird language we say that we're not in touch with, honestly, but was really critical in the doctrinal basis going forward.
SPEAKER_12: A lot of people, even at the time, were like, I can't go there, literally, spiritually fine, but I can't literally go there.
SPEAKER_12: And that became divisive.
SPEAKER_12: The other thing that happened in Constantine, as I mentioned, public buildings were given, and Christian priests were given magisterial, I don't want to say privilege, but responsibility.
SPEAKER_12: That is, priests and bishops became judges.
SPEAKER_12: And they adjudicated civil matters in the courtroom of their church.
SPEAKER_12: The basilica, maybe you know that word, was the ancient courtroom.
SPEAKER_12: And the way we Christianized buildings is we add two apses to it, which made it look like a cross from above.
SPEAKER_12: But that whole round back, that's when that entered the Christian tradition, because it was an imperial building and the bishops sat in the round spot like the emperor did in Constantinople.
SPEAKER_12: So uh I don't want to say suppression, but open disagreement really sort of changed.
SPEAKER_12: Right?
SPEAKER_12: And that sort of carries through for a bit.
SPEAKER_12: The Holy Roman Empire.
SPEAKER_12: Yeah, the Holy Roman Empire.
SPEAKER_12: And interesting to know, when is the first time we used the creed?
SPEAKER_12: The creed, the Nicene Creed which we used, didn't start until Charlemagne, if you're German, he's called Carl the Great.
SPEAKER_12: I don't know if you know him, the first Holy Roman Emperor, insisted the creed be put in the liturgy for the first time ever, before the Eucharist, because he had just conquered a bunch of Goths who were Arians.
SPEAKER_12: They believed Jesus was not co-eternal, they believed he was a created being.
SPEAKER_12: So he put the creed before the Eucharist as a way of saying you can only have the life-giving sacrament if you adopt the right doctrinal position, which is mine.
SPEAKER_12: So that's when the creed came in, 800s.
SPEAKER_12: We probably know that there's some really ugly bits in our tradition, the crusades being a few of them.
SPEAKER_12: Also, the Inquisition in Spain, it actually started earlier with inquisitions in a place in France called the Langueduc, in which the Dominicans completely slaughtered what are called the Cathars or the Albigensians, wiped them out completely for the sake of uniformity in orthodoxy.
SPEAKER_12: Things kind of got real sticky in the Middle Ages, not because people didn't accept sort of the official doctrine of the church, it's because the priests weren't living it out.
SPEAKER_12: So lots of problems with the uh the church in the West.
SPEAKER_16: Yeah, the East.
SPEAKER_12: We talk about the East in just a second, but let me build up to the Reformation.
SPEAKER_12: The problem was uh priests were illiterate and they were making stuff up.
SPEAKER_12: So if you've heard hocus pocus, those are the magist magic words.
SPEAKER_12: The reason is because in Latin you say hocus corpus meum, this is my body, and that turns the bread into the body of Jesus.
SPEAKER_12: It could be that kids misheard it as hocus pocus, but it's equally likely that the illiterate priests were making it up.
SPEAKER_12: And they said hocus pocus.
SPEAKER_12: And that became the magic.
SPEAKER_12: I mean, if you can turn bread into body, I mean those are the magic words, right?
SPEAKER_12: So illiterate clergy, clergy who were having all kinds of children.
SPEAKER_12: Simony that is buying the office of bishop, absentee bishops, people.
SPEAKER_12: If you know about uh the rosary, right?
SPEAKER_12: The rosary didn't come from the church, it came from the crusades, where the crusaders went into Jerusalem and they saw Muslims praying the 99 names of Allah, and they thought, man, that's great.
SPEAKER_12: I wish we had that.
SPEAKER_12: So they put a cross on it, and that's where the rosary came from, not even lying.
SPEAKER_12: And the Pope was like, Well, I guess we've got to live with that.
SPEAKER_12: I mean, we can't strike down personal piety.
SPEAKER_12: People wanted their faith to matter, right?
SPEAKER_12: And of course, the other thing we all know about, what's the simple reason for the Reformation is nobody spoke Latin and the whole thing was in Latin.
SPEAKER_12: So stained glass windows and statuaries were there to teach you the biblical stories because you didn't know what the priest was talking about.
SPEAKER_12: And again, that's how they got away with being illiterate since you didn't know Latin, the priest didn't know Latin.
SPEAKER_12: Who knew?
SPEAKER_12: And that led to a head with the Reformation.
SPEAKER_12: But I guess I should backtrack really fast and say used to be one unified church under Constantine.
SPEAKER_12: And of course, there was this big split in 1062.
SPEAKER_12: Six?
SPEAKER_12: I think it's not right.
SPEAKER_12: Battle of Hastings, 1062, 1066.
SPEAKER_12: It's not the great schism, it's it's a schism between East and West.
SPEAKER_12: And the big fight was who has the most power?
SPEAKER_12: The Bishop of Rome or the Bishop of Constantinople.
SPEAKER_12: Right?
SPEAKER_12: If you want to know the TLDR version, in the West they used sculptures, in the east they used icons, and ultimately one said, the West said, You're worshiping those icons, and they were like, wait a minute, you got those statues, right?
SPEAKER_12: So ultimately they choose they accuse each other of idolatry.
SPEAKER_12: Came to a head when the Bishop of Rome said, I'm just gonna change the Nicene Creed and I'm gonna say the Holy Spirit proceed from the Father and the Son without having a council, because I'm stronger than you, so I can do that.
SPEAKER_12: And that was when East excommunicated West and West excommunicated each, and they have both sort of gone their own way.
SPEAKER_16: And so let's just think they didn't have the internet, it wasn't a global one-world system, right?
SPEAKER_16: And so people were affiliated with you know their cultures and their people.
SPEAKER_16: So Rome was saying that they are the best, right?
SPEAKER_16: They are the ones in charge, but people in the East different cultures, different ways of doing things.
SPEAKER_16: So when you think East, think you know, all through the Mediterranean, you know, Turkey, you know, even further, Greece, all of that, you know, you start seeing that they're culturally people are affiliating and kind of aligning with that's why when he says Constantinople, the the Bishop of Constantinople had a significant amount of authority and power, and then the Bishop of Rome, right?
SPEAKER_16: And this is where they this is where you start getting people that talk about being Eastern Orthodox now.
SPEAKER_16: They come from this tradition, right?
SPEAKER_16: This split, this tradition of people that ultimately affiliated with the cultures and the customs and the ways that they were doing and rejected the imperial reality of Rome.
SPEAKER_16: That's kind of the schism.
SPEAKER_12: And so you'll see the way we dress as clergy is the way that Roman nobility and priests dressed.
SPEAKER_12: That's where chasibles and stoles come from.
SPEAKER_12: They came from pagan priests and Roman nobles.
SPEAKER_12: So we're in that Western tradition, of course we are, because we ended up splitting with the Roman church.
SPEAKER_12: We'd already split with the Eastern Church, so we don't dress like Pharisees did at the time of Jesus, which is how Orthodox clergy dress.
SPEAKER_16: So, yeah, so think with the the so the scope of the line here is a lot of plurality, one big unity, one huge break in the middle of the 11th century, and then the people in the West, when he says Reformation, there was now the beginning of schism after break after break.
SPEAKER_16: This was this is this is where our tradition was birthed out of.
SPEAKER_16: When he says reformation, so now it's it's been break after break after break after break from this Western reality.
SPEAKER_12: Of course, the curious thing is the East has not subfractured.
SPEAKER_12: No.
SPEAKER_12: There's no, if you're Russian Orthodox or Greek Orthodox, you're both Orthodox Christians.
SPEAKER_12: It's just that one you have a different sort of local leader, but you're all Orthodox.
SPEAKER_12: You're not fighting it out, right?
SPEAKER_12: The West is a different story.
SPEAKER_12: I've tried to build up to where the Reformation ultimately comes from, and it came from somebody dead committed to the Roman Catholic Church, which is Martin Luther, right?
SPEAKER_12: He wanted to reform the church, but not split from it.
SPEAKER_12: And ultimately what happened, right, is Luther himself bought an indulgence when he was in Rome.
SPEAKER_12: It's a very powerful spiritual experience for him to buy an indulgence.
SPEAKER_12: This practice, maybe you know it, is the idea that, hey, you have to do penance for your sins and you have to be contrite in order to be forgiven.
SPEAKER_12: You have to have both things.
SPEAKER_12: But the church was trying to change the Colosseum into St.
SPEAKER_12: Peter's.
SPEAKER_12: And that took some money.
SPEAKER_12: So a few evangelists took some creative license, and they said things like anytime a coin in the coffer rings, a soul from purgatory springs.
SPEAKER_12: So what Luther was hearing was not officially sanctioned by the Roman Church.
SPEAKER_12: It was a local person saying, You care about your mom and your grandma, do you want them to suffer in purgatory, having to do penance?
SPEAKER_12: The good news is the church has enough good deeds from the saints that's called sort of the storehouse of merit, that the merit of Saint James can take away the penance your granny has to do in purgatory.
SPEAKER_16: For a hundred bucks.
SPEAKER_12: For a hundred bucks.
SPEAKER_12: Now, your granny still had to be contrite to be forgiven.
SPEAKER_12: You have to be contrite.
SPEAKER_12: But if you buy the indulgence, you're sort of making an exchange.
SPEAKER_12: You're giving merit for merit, and it's a win-win, right?
SPEAKER_12: Except Luther said, wow, I've really been reading the Bible, and that just doesn't seem right.
SPEAKER_12: So if you've read the 95 theses, they're all about indulgences.
SPEAKER_12: They're not about like the Pope shouldn't this or that.
SPEAKER_12: They're all about indulgences.
SPEAKER_12: So what happened is Luther put these theses up.
SPEAKER_12: He really wanted to have a conversation.
SPEAKER_12: And because the papacy had been purchased by one of the Medicis, sorry, Simony was a problem.
SPEAKER_12: The church said, We're going to excommunicate you, or at least we're going to put you on trial at a place called Vorms.
SPEAKER_12: And interesting thing happens at the trial.
SPEAKER_12: Ultimately, the Catholic position, the Roman Catholic position, backs Luther into a corner he didn't want to be in.
SPEAKER_12: He really wanted to be a faithful member of the church, and they said, We're going to burn you at the stake.
SPEAKER_12: And interesting thing is, the grand, the grand um inquisitor, a guy named Johannes Tetzel, was very bright.
SPEAKER_12: He said, Luther, you say we should do things on scripture alone.
SPEAKER_12: How do you think we got the scripture?
SPEAKER_12: It came from spirit-guided tradition.
SPEAKER_12: I don't think he was wrong.
SPEAKER_12: I don't think he was wrong, because we as we'll talk about it later.
SPEAKER_12: God didn't write the Bible.
SPEAKER_12: How did we put it together?
SPEAKER_12: It took the Christians 400 years to agree on the books we've gotten out.
SPEAKER_12: That wasn't decided until 381 at the Council of Constantinople.
SPEAKER_16: Most sociologists will say that a community has to be talking about something for about in the ancient times.
SPEAKER_16: They have to be talking about something between 35 and 50 years before it gets written down.
SPEAKER_16: So like before somebody wrote it down, it had to be part of a communal conversation for about 35 to 50 years.
SPEAKER_16: So I mean, you know, when we think about when and how things, they were already, all right, we call this lexerandi lexic, like the rule of prayer, the rule of faith is the rule of belief.
SPEAKER_16: But that that's that's what it was.
SPEAKER_16: And then, you know, also just remember that Jesus got in trouble for a very similar thing about turning faith into something that is about income generation for the sake of faith, right?
SPEAKER_16: I mean, that's when you monetize it.
SPEAKER_16: So, I mean, this is what was happening in the practices of selling, you know, you've turned my house, father's house, into a den of thieves.
SPEAKER_16: There is this thing that we're always pushing back against that seems to be drawing us into that sin.
SPEAKER_16: And Martin Luther was just pointing out the same sin that I think we're all in some level having to be aware of how how the economic reality is affecting our faith life.
SPEAKER_12: So his perspective was his church was willing to kill him for being faithful.
SPEAKER_12: And on his promised faith passage home, he was kidnapped by um Friedrich the Wise, probably for political reasons as much as faith ones.
SPEAKER_12: And during his being kidnapped, he translated the Bible into German, which, by the way, modern German is still based on Luther's translation of German, so it's weird, like it hasn't grown.
SPEAKER_12: It's still based on the Luther, on the Luther Bible, and this set forth what we call the Protestant Reformations plural, because Luther was protesting this particular doctrine with hope to reform his church, and he was pushed out.
SPEAKER_12: Anytime you mix religion and power, things get really weird.
SPEAKER_12: So what ended up happening, right, is northern Germany said, hey, we want to be Protestant, because then us local princes can have the monasteries and the churches and all the land holdings.
SPEAKER_12: The church was very wealthy because it controlled trade routes, right?
SPEAKER_12: And now these princes got that.
SPEAKER_12: What was the argument over really um what happens at the Eucharist?
SPEAKER_12: Boy, as I mentioned, early Christians were talking about that too.
SPEAKER_12: Can we speak our own language or do we have to speak a language we don't know?
SPEAKER_16: Does it have to be in Latin?
SPEAKER_16: Does the Bible have does the service and everything have to be in Latin, or can it be in what's called the lingua franca, the language of the people?
SPEAKER_12: Which is really curious because Latin was a barbaric language compared to ancient Greek, and Saint Jerome did the barbarians a favor by translating the Greek version of the Bible into Latin so people could understand it.
SPEAKER_12: And he was a Roman saint.
SPEAKER_12: So it's interesting how we fail to forget where we've come from, right?
SPEAKER_12: Maybe you've heard of Ulrich Zwingli before, and he was a Swiss reformer, and he and Luther almost joined forces, except they couldn't agree on what happened at the Eucharist.
SPEAKER_12: Luther said, the real presence is there, we don't know how.
SPEAKER_12: Zwingli said, well, it's symbolism.
SPEAKER_12: And on that one point, union fell apart.
SPEAKER_12: Be interesting to know what would happen if they said, that's good enough for me.
SPEAKER_12: You know, like it's good enough.
SPEAKER_12: You get one fracture, and then you get another, and then they start breaking all over the place.
SPEAKER_12: And then probably you know, we ultimately come from the Anglican tradition.
SPEAKER_12: And I want to make sure we know a little bit more about this so we don't think Henry VIII just wanted a divorce.
SPEAKER_12: Uh Henry VIII was a secondborn kid, which meant he was primed to be a bishop.
SPEAKER_12: His older brother, Arthur, was primed to be the king.
SPEAKER_12: So, what did you do in the ancient world?
SPEAKER_12: Your firstborn was going to be the monarch, your secondborn was gonna be the ecclesial monarch, and then you hope the other ones would be priests, because that's it, right?
SPEAKER_12: That's it.
SPEAKER_12: Uh Henry VIII went to seminary and was apparently very bright, Catholic theologian.
SPEAKER_12: His brother died without having consummated his marriage to Catherine of Aragon.
SPEAKER_12: So Arthur and Catherine were married, but they never consummated the marriage.
SPEAKER_12: And so Henry now found himself not bishop but king of England, which was a growing, rising power.
SPEAKER_12: He was actually relatively wealthy after the War of the Roses.
SPEAKER_12: And so he took the Bible so seriously, he wrote the Pope permission to marry his brother's widow.
SPEAKER_12: This is based on what's called leverite marriage.
SPEAKER_12: If your brother dies without children, you marry them and you have a child who becomes your dead brother.
SPEAKER_12: I know that's really weird.
SPEAKER_12: He wrote the Pope permission to do this.
SPEAKER_12: The Pope said, that sounds biblical, okay.
SPEAKER_12: Special dispensation for you.
SPEAKER_12: He actually loved Catherine of Aragorn probably more than any of his other wives.
SPEAKER_12: She was bright.
SPEAKER_12: She was also theologically educated.
SPEAKER_12: The problem is she kept having either stillborn kids, she had one girl, and then her last child was very like physically abnormal.
SPEAKER_12: And Henry decided God was cursing him for having married his brother's widow.
SPEAKER_12: Now, sure, it was politically expedient to have an heir, but I want you to hear there is a kernel of piety in this.
SPEAKER_12: He thought God was punishing him for marrying his brother's widow.
SPEAKER_12: He shouldn't have done it.
SPEAKER_12: So he asked the Pope, can I have a dispensation of annulment?
SPEAKER_12: And the Pope wouldn't give it to him because the Pope was under siege by Catherine's brother, Philip of Spain, had surrounded the Vatican and said, That's my sister.
SPEAKER_12: No.
SPEAKER_12: There's some more politics to that, but that's why the Pope didn't grant him the annulment.
SPEAKER_12: So what did Henry do?
SPEAKER_12: The only thing he could do, remember, his father took the throne after the Lancasters and the Yorks fought in a bloody civil war for a long time.
SPEAKER_12: And Henry remembered that, and he didn't want to see England fall into civil war again.
SPEAKER_12: So he said, you know what?
SPEAKER_12: Better to break from the church and keep national stability than to have another War of the Roses when I'm dead.
SPEAKER_12: So that's where Anne Boleyn entered into the story, right?
SPEAKER_12: He was he needed an heir.
SPEAKER_12: Too bad she didn't give him a son because he actually really loved her, too.
SPEAKER_12: She was the Protestant, and she taught there, she did have a son, Edward.
SPEAKER_12: He just happened to die really young, but she raised Edward to be a radical Protestant.
SPEAKER_12: Like churches would have been white, no staying glass, no vestments, no candles on the Lord's table, which was no altar.
SPEAKER_12: Hope you hear all that, right?
SPEAKER_12: Um ultimately Henry made other plans.
SPEAKER_12: We know that there were seven wives and there were six divorces.
SPEAKER_12: Well, sorry, there were three, two divorce beheaded, uh divorce beheaded survived.
SPEAKER_12: Two divorces, right?
SPEAKER_12: Couple of deaths, one survived.
SPEAKER_12: So Henry broke from the Church of England and started what we then call the Anglican Reformation, where the head of England is the head of a church.
SPEAKER_12: So we just got a new Archbishop of Canterbury.
SPEAKER_12: I don't make sure you understand, the head of the church is not the Archbishop of Canterbury, it's King Charles.
SPEAKER_12: He is the primate of the Anglican Church.
SPEAKER_12: What happened in the Anglican Church, it seesawed back and forth, right?
SPEAKER_12: Um Edward was really Protestant, and then when he died young, his sister Mary, Catherine's daughter, Catholic, took them the other way, which is why she's called Bloody Mary.
SPEAKER_12: And then Elizabeth, Anne Boleyn's daughter, right, she said, forget this, we're taking the middle way.
SPEAKER_15: She was brilliant.
SPEAKER_12: She said it's not an either or, it's a both and.
SPEAKER_12: So we call that the Via Medea, and that's where we kind of live today.
SPEAKER_12: Elizabeth was the one who basically said all of the Catholic pageantry and the Protestant doctrine.
SPEAKER_16: And this is so famous, it's called the Elizabethan Compromise.
SPEAKER_12: If you're really bored during my sermon today, you can read it.
SPEAKER_12: It's called The Articles of Religion in the Prayer Book, an historic document, not a required belief.
SPEAKER_16: And she she had the equivalent of at least one PhD.
SPEAKER_16: She she I mean, genuinely, in theology.
SPEAKER_16: She got the best theological training that was available and evidently was this brilliant scholar.
SPEAKER_16: So we can, you know, a lot of who we are is because of her brilliance in theology of understanding what it can mean to be church.
SPEAKER_12: She decided that we thought she spoke like six languages.
SPEAKER_12: She did.
SPEAKER_12: Yeah.
SPEAKER_12: And she decided that unity did not equal uniformity.
unknown: Right.
SPEAKER_12: So she made she made room.
SPEAKER_12: There were limits, but she made actually a lot of room.
SPEAKER_12: You know, there was a bunch of other breaks like Quakers, not in England, we're the shakers, but but the diggers.
SPEAKER_12: There were all of these groups that were further splintering out, and that got us to this other thinker called Richard Hooker who said, you know, in the Episcopal Church, the Anglican Church, we make decisions based on what's called a three-legged stool.
SPEAKER_12: Is it in scripture?
SPEAKER_12: Is it in tradition?
SPEAKER_12: And is it reasonable?
SPEAKER_12: Somebody asked, how are we different from the Roman tradition?
SPEAKER_12: In the Roman tradition, there's two there's scripture and tradition, and the Pope speaking from his seat, ex cathedra, is infallible even in his interpretation of scripture.
SPEAKER_12: In fact, that became so important to the Medici Pope that maybe you've heard of the Council of Trent, the Catholic Reformations.
SPEAKER_12: We have this book called The Apocrypha that we read as an appendix.
SPEAKER_12: The Medici Pope said, I'll show you who has the power.
SPEAKER_12: And that's why the Catholic Bible is different from the Protestant Bible.
SPEAKER_12: The Pope said, The Apocrypha is now scripture.
SPEAKER_16: And so the Reformation was so important that it reformed all of Christianity.
SPEAKER_16: And so scholars will tell you, and they call it the Counter-Reformation, but the Roman Catholic Church, as it is post this, you know, Protestant Reformation, it was extremely different than the one that was beforehand.
SPEAKER_16: Because what ended up happening is people started to identify themselves not necessarily for who they were, but not them.
SPEAKER_16: So what you ended up seeing is a movement from the Roman Catholics this way, so then the Protestants would counter move this way, right?
SPEAKER_16: And the Protestants would move this way, and the Roman Catholics would counter move because their identity became what are they doing?
SPEAKER_16: We're not that, as opposed to, and this is why some people will say that full communion is really hard.
SPEAKER_16: And if you think about how even the different expressions of Christianity are now, it's not so much that they're affirming who they are, they're affirming who they're not.
SPEAKER_16: And so this is one of the things that we're trying to get away from.
SPEAKER_16: From here is getting back to that idea of who are we?
SPEAKER_16: Not based on we're not you, but who are we and and how are we living into our values and our understanding and our scholarship.
SPEAKER_16: But all of Christianity, and they they and Trent is the big council that that really when the Roman Catholics came together and started moving their tradition, right, um, in a different direction.
SPEAKER_12: So if you're curious why it is that we have female clergy and why we not only consent but celebrate same-sex relationships, and that scripture can be ambiguous.
SPEAKER_12: I mean, I I I'm like a like a I'm not a scholar, but I've immersed myself in scholarship.
SPEAKER_12: You can make a lot of arguments about the Bible.
SPEAKER_12: We know it's not in a lot of the tradition, even though early on women were played leadership roles, but we don't have same-sex marriages in early tradition.
SPEAKER_12: So how do we accept this?
SPEAKER_12: Based on our reason.
SPEAKER_12: We say, what is sacramental about marriage?
SPEAKER_12: Is it the genitals or is it the union between two people?
SPEAKER_12: And we've decided it's the union, not just the genitals.
SPEAKER_12: That makes us different from other traditions.
SPEAKER_12: Based on our reason, this is why the Episcopal Church can say, yeah, maybe God created the world in evolution.
SPEAKER_12: It's fine.
SPEAKER_12: Could be seems very reasonable to us, right?
SPEAKER_12: So science is not our enemy.
SPEAKER_12: In fact, science informs how it is we review scripture and tradition.
SPEAKER_12: If you're United Methodist, you have a fourth data point, which is called experience.
SPEAKER_12: Scripture, tradition, reason, and experience.
SPEAKER_12: Why the fourth?
SPEAKER_12: John Wesley was a romantic.
SPEAKER_12: And the romantic, I mean it's literally the romantic movement emphasized experience, but Richard Hooker, our guy, included experience under reason.
SPEAKER_12: If you're a Southern Baptist, scripture alone is what you would say.
SPEAKER_12: But I want to return.
SPEAKER_12: How did we get the Bible?
SPEAKER_12: We got it through tradition.
SPEAKER_12: And how do we hear the Bible?
SPEAKER_12: We hear it through tradition.
SPEAKER_12: And we hear it through reason.
SPEAKER_12: So I I kind of love our system that it's always tripartite, not one at the exception of the others.
SPEAKER_12: But that's why I'm an Episcopal priest and no longer a Southern Baptist.
SPEAKER_16: And there's a pneumatology underneath this.
SPEAKER_16: And what I mean is a fancy word, for there's a belief about the way God interacts with us through the Holy Spirit that undergirds this idea that we can use our reason collectively, not individually.
SPEAKER_16: We have a we collectively, we have conversation and dialogue, that the same spirit that was in Christ Jesus, the same spirit that empowered the early church, the same spirit that called people together to have a sense of unity, is still doing that work.
SPEAKER_16: It didn't stop when they solidified the religious biblical canon, right, in the fourth century, when they said this is the actual book, the spirit didn't stop moving and using revelation.
SPEAKER_16: We say something happened there uniquely, but what that's just one event that we now go to, right, empowered by the Holy Spirit, but the Spirit is still moving all of us and allowing us to ask difficult questions and to engage things and to change.
SPEAKER_16: That God is no less active now in the life of the church than God was in the first 400 years.
SPEAKER_16: And so some other traditions may say that, but when you look at their behaviors, it sure seems like God pretty much checked God's self out at the end of the fourth century.
SPEAKER_16: And if God is active, it's only to help you remember and memorize and understand the rules and the laws, right?
SPEAKER_16: And so there's a there's a way that we talk about the the Holy Spirit, which is when we say Holy Spirit, we mean how is God moving today among us?
SPEAKER_16: I mean that that's really that question.
SPEAKER_12: And so I'm gonna hit fast forward a little bit.
SPEAKER_12: After Richard Hooker, we know there's the colonies.
SPEAKER_12: Hey, most colonists were either Catholic or Puritans, that is, they were Anglicans, breaking away, breaking away, but they kept things pretty Anglican, and then they were Anglicans.
SPEAKER_12: And then, you know, we have this small event in 1776 where we decided we don't want to do that anymore.
SPEAKER_12: And there was a crisis of faith because the prayer book says, by the way, the prayer book, that was the first archbishop, Thomas Cranmer, under King King Henry VIII, who gathered at prayers Christians had been praying for a thousand years to guide how they pray in common.
SPEAKER_12: Not to substitute spontaneous or personal prayer, but to guide how we pray in common.
SPEAKER_12: Some of the prayers in the prayer book are from the three, four hundreds, right?
SPEAKER_12: So there is this part of tradition where we pray with Christians, words that have been used wisely for 1,500 years.
SPEAKER_12: Well, there was this real problem with the prayer book because all the prayers were directed for the king.
SPEAKER_12: And we just said no to that.
SPEAKER_12: So we needed a new prayer book for the Congress and the President and the Supreme Court.
SPEAKER_12: So we sent this guy who is very against the war, named Samuel Seabury.
SPEAKER_12: He's the one distributing pamphlets in Hamilton, right?
SPEAKER_12: That Hamilton doesn't tolerate.
SPEAKER_12: He becomes the first bishop of the Episcopal Church.
SPEAKER_12: He goes to England and says, Hey, would you consecrate me?
SPEAKER_12: We need a bishop.
SPEAKER_12: And they said, No way.
SPEAKER_12: You rebelled against us, submit, come back under the king, or you're going to be excommunicated.
SPEAKER_12: And then there was this little secret that he worked out.
SPEAKER_12: He could be consecrated bishop by these bishops in Scotland who were part of the Anglican Communion.
SPEAKER_12: The exchange was you do the American prayer book the Scottish way, otherwise known as the Scottish Rite, which is why we have the St.
SPEAKER_12: Andrew's Cross on the shield.
SPEAKER_12: The Scottish Rite was much more of the Anglo-Catholic sacrifice, atonement, altar.
SPEAKER_12: The Anglican Rite was more food, nourishment, table.
SPEAKER_12: So we became a more Catholic tradition from our inception.
SPEAKER_12: Samuel Seabury became the first bishop.
SPEAKER_12: Episcopal Church means a church governed by bishops, by overseers.
SPEAKER_12: And what do you know?
SPEAKER_12: The name of the church is the Protestant Episcopal Church of the United States.
SPEAKER_12: So the Archbishop of Canterbury can say whatever we want, we respect him, no authority over us.
SPEAKER_12: We broke.
SPEAKER_12: And we stay in communion because we think we're better together, but the authority card is now gone, if that makes sense.
SPEAKER_12: What do you know?
SPEAKER_12: The U.S.
SPEAKER_12: government, we'll talk about this when we get to leadership roles.
SPEAKER_12: The U.S.
SPEAKER_12: government was formed by Episcopalians.
SPEAKER_12: Which is we have a diocese just like there's a state.
SPEAKER_12: We have a bishop, just like there's a governor.
SPEAKER_12: We have ecclesiastical courts just like there is a supreme court.
SPEAKER_12: We have canons that are set by council just like there is a congress.
SPEAKER_12: Rectors are tenured and we're hired.
SPEAKER_12: We're not appointed.
SPEAKER_12: That's how we're different, right?
SPEAKER_12: So we've been different for a while.
SPEAKER_12: Now, I want to let you know that there's been more U.S.
SPEAKER_12: presidents that are Episcopalian than any other type.
SPEAKER_12: Thirteen.
SPEAKER_12: That's because we made up the government.
SPEAKER_12: I'm just gonna say.
SPEAKER_12: And for the longest time, uh the Episcopal Church has been very elite.
SPEAKER_12: And I'll tell you today that the Episcopal Church will run out of members before it runs out of money.
SPEAKER_12: This is not disputable.
SPEAKER_12: This is the case because of endowments, right?
SPEAKER_12: We're not one of those churches.
SPEAKER_12: We will run out of money before we run out of members.
SPEAKER_12: I'd rather do it the other way around.
SPEAKER_12: But but to be honest, we occupied sadly a very privileged position in American culture for a long time, and we were the elite people.
SPEAKER_12: And because uh our church was full of elites, it just really helps to keep it the way it was.
SPEAKER_12: Something really changed in us.
SPEAKER_16: They called them the frozen chosen, it was literally the name of the.
SPEAKER_12: Now those are the Presbyterians.
SPEAKER_12: But we're frozen chosen.
SPEAKER_12: I'm serious.
SPEAKER_16: Yeah.
SPEAKER_12: We changed dramatically in the 1960s.
SPEAKER_12: And when I say we, I'm gonna tell you it wasn't the laity that changed first, and it wasn't even the bishops, it was the priests.
SPEAKER_12: The priests got out in front of social justice in a way that laity are still trying to catch up with, and bishops are still trying to catch up with.
SPEAKER_12: Like episcopal priests decided they would ride buses all the way from Maine and New York down to Birmingham and walk and die in their collars for the Civil Rights Act.
SPEAKER_12: Their own parishioners felt extremely betrayed.
SPEAKER_12: Some bishops, and I can tell you the Bishop of Atlanta, who owned one of the top ten high schools in the nation, which was an episcopal school, told the school, drop your episcopal affiliation so that you don't have to desegregate.
SPEAKER_12: So we've got a lot to grieve in our tradition.
SPEAKER_12: Again, the clergy got ahead of the bishops and the laity, but slowly we've been catching up.
SPEAKER_12: So that all three of us, we're not always all the way there, but we're kind of getting there.
SPEAKER_12: Not all clergy are socially progressive, but the reason I'm an episcopal, I'll tell you, is because reason shows up.
SPEAKER_12: The liturgy is beautiful.
SPEAKER_12: It is language that allows me to put to express my feelings better than spontaneity ever will.
SPEAKER_12: And I take great comfort, frankly, in praying how other Christians have prayed for a long time.
SPEAKER_12: But my top mark is we choose to include people at the risk of our privilege.
SPEAKER_12: So we weren't the first church to accept gay marriage, but we were the first church to call it a sacrament.
SPEAKER_12: I find that hard inspiring.
SPEAKER_12: We weren't the first church to ordain a woman.
SPEAKER_12: Well, we were the first church to ordain a woman to bishop.
SPEAKER_12: Find that inspiring.
SPEAKER_12: Um, since the 60s, we've really kind of all been coalescing, and to be honest, there's been splits.
SPEAKER_12: When Gene Robinson was ordained as an openly gay bishop, with it, they didn't ask, can we do this?
SPEAKER_12: They did it.
SPEAKER_12: And then the church had to say, What have you done?
SPEAKER_12: I mean, it was legal, but we didn't even get to talk about it.
SPEAKER_12: And the church said, We didn't want to wait to talk about it.
SPEAKER_12: Gene represents God to us in a way no one else has.
SPEAKER_12: So of course we elected him.
SPEAKER_12: And I'll tell you what I loved going to the council where they talked about this.
SPEAKER_12: People got to talk for two minutes.
SPEAKER_12: And after two minutes, you keep talking, but they turned the microphone off, and there were 10,000 people in the room, so nobody was gonna hear you.
SPEAKER_12: And people were not like, you dumb liberals! They were like, listen, if we do this, we're going to lose part of the World Communion.
SPEAKER_12: Like our African brothers and sisters are not gonna fly with us.
SPEAKER_12: So, yeah, we want to take off this plane, but we'll lose the wings.
SPEAKER_12: And the other people were like, but what about our gay brothers and sisters who have been hungering for love?
SPEAKER_12: Like, who do we choose to leave behind?
SPEAKER_12: Our fellow Christians or the most vulnerable among us?
SPEAKER_12: I mean, this is sort of an interesting way of making decisions.
SPEAKER_12: There was no name-calling.
SPEAKER_12: And of course, every time we've done this, people have said, I can't do it.
SPEAKER_12: I could have gone there with you until you made it final, but now that you've said, can't do it anymore.
SPEAKER_12: So what do you know?
SPEAKER_12: We've had other fractures.
SPEAKER_16: Three main ones, right?
SPEAKER_16: Over women, gay folks, and now most recently we're in the midst of it right now.
SPEAKER_16: And so losing, I mean, well, about a million people.
SPEAKER_16: I mean, like, it's not a small thing, y'all.
SPEAKER_16: We weren't ever a huge church, but through these fractures, and now we have an entire group of bishops um in African countries and other places that have just rejected the Anglican church and they're creating something else, right?
SPEAKER_16: And so this is this is still happening.
SPEAKER_16: You are part of a system that is trying to figure out how do we move forward, right?
SPEAKER_16: Conserving the best of who we are, um, but also with a bias towards welcoming those who are leaving out, knowing that there are going to be some that walk away.
SPEAKER_16: And so this is part of who we are, is asking these hard questions.
SPEAKER_16: But I mean, there are, I mean, tens of millions of of Anglicans leaving this worldwide communion right now because they just ordained the very first um Archbishop of Canterbury that is a woman.
SPEAKER_16: For the first time in history.
SPEAKER_12: We're okay with priests, we're okay with bishops, but when you make the archbishop a woman, never mind that the Queen of England was the head of the church and was a female.
SPEAKER_12: Right.
SPEAKER_12: But I mean, so again, it's this isn't reason based, this is formation-based, right?
SPEAKER_12: And I'm not putting that down.
SPEAKER_12: I'm not.
SPEAKER_12: I'm saying this is the argument we or the conversation we still have.
SPEAKER_12: And I do want to make sure you know I was attracted for inclusivity.
SPEAKER_12: I was.
SPEAKER_12: But some of our Episcopal brothers and sisters are not.
SPEAKER_16: And there are some that aren't here.
SPEAKER_16: It's a big tent church right now.
SPEAKER_16: You could go to a church right now in our diocese that will not do same-sex weddings, that will not have, you know, they they won't even hire women.
SPEAKER_16: I will tell you that.
SPEAKER_16: Like they might not officially have that, but they don't have any women on their staff and they never have, right?
SPEAKER_16: And so And they never will.
SPEAKER_16: And so that it's a big tent church right now.
SPEAKER_12: And if you're being confirmed or received or renewed, you need to know you're not being confirmed to be a member of St.
SPEAKER_12: Thomas, you're being confirmed as a member of the church, some of whom you will disagree with radically about why church even matters.
SPEAKER_12: And I will tell you, sometimes clergy conference is hard for me because I wasn't born this way.
SPEAKER_12: I chose it.
SPEAKER_12: And I chose it for the reasons I've told you.
SPEAKER_12: And when people don't value the same reasons as I do, it's hard for me to understand them, right?
SPEAKER_12: This is the national church.
SPEAKER_12: Why are you fighting it?
SPEAKER_12: Because it means something different to them.
SPEAKER_12: And I have to remember it's meaningful for both of us, even though we see it working out different.
SPEAKER_12: This could mean that you move from here and you find a church that's different from ours, and it's not that it's bad, it's different.
SPEAKER_12: And we've decided that difference is worth having.
SPEAKER_12: It can be hard and it can be really gorgeous.
SPEAKER_12: It can be really nice to go, ah, I get to be me here, and it can be really nice to go to a place that says, we can be more than we are here.
SPEAKER_12: I've certainly lived both ways.
SPEAKER_12: Okay.
SPEAKER_12: Thanks for not falling asleep visibly.
SPEAKER_12: Uh, and I've burned up our time, so sorry, sorry for doing that.
SPEAKER_12: Um next week, we'll have breakfast.