I'm not really sure why Bishop Frade gets the idea that General Convention said no blessings of gay unions. GC never said that. It's true that It didn't say "yes". And it still has not initiated the process for formal rites. But that is not saying "no". It acknowledged that it happens in some dioceses and our GC never has taken any steps to stop it or say that it is not allowed. After reading the sermon, I wonder what motives Bishop Frade has for keeping his Southeast Florida ladder in place. I think he doesn't want to get beat up by the right wing anymore than he already has. But it's time to move that ladder. I'm one of many in this diocese who loves Bishop Frade and will support him. He would not be going it alone, He will in fact, have much support. It's time to respect and practice our congregational vow in our prayer book:
"Will you strive for justice and peace among all people and respect the dignity of every human being?"
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Bishop Frade's Sermon given to
the Consortium of Endowed
Episcopal Parishes at
All Saints Episcopal Church
Fort Lauderdale, FL
March 1, 200
Welcome to this wonderful place that we call Southeast Florida. We hope that you will enjoy all of the wonderful things that you can do here in winter. None of them will require heaters, thermal underwear, or snow blowers.
I am indeed very fortunate to be the bishop of this tropical diocese that covers Southeast Florida from Key West in the south all the way to Hutchinson Island in the north. Sandwiched in-between we have glamorous places like Isla Morada, Ocean Reef, South Beach, Miami and Ft. Lauderdale Beach, Boca Raton, Palm Beach and Hobe Sound. It is a rough job but somebody has to do it.
But of course we are not perfect. This is the area, if you recall, that brought you all the excitement of the hanging chads, the little Cuban boy Elian Gonzalez that Janet Reno sent back to Castro at gun point; you are now in the place that OJ chose to live with all of his unused cutlery; and of course just a few days before you arrived we were able to come up with a crazy taxi driver crying judge and also plethora of paternity suits and DNA testing. Actually I am one of the few men at this time that doesn’t claim to be the biological father of Anna Nicole’s baby daughter.
But I must warn you that before you quit your jobs and decide to rush down here to enjoy all the excitement of Southeast Florida you have to be aware that this is also the area that hurricanes love to visit.
But enough talk of Southeast Florida. I want to talk to you about a ladder.A particular ladder. This ladder is found in the Holy Land. If you look at any photograph or drawing of the front of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher dating back to 1840 you will notice a ladder placed there in the window ledge a little bit to the right of the church.
My wife Diana and I just returned from our 8th pilgrimage to the Holy Land. I’m sure I don’t need to tell you how wonderful this experience is. But in all of my previous visits I never noticed the ladder. I asked a Christian Palestinian friend why the ladder was there. He smiled and began to tell me the story.
He claimed that there were several versions of why it was there. The ladder was part of the ‘Status Quo” and it had to remain there, even when it rots it has to be replaced with another wooden ladder. Nothing can be changed even if there is no need for a ladder anymore.
His version had it that the ladder was first introduced during the Turkish Ottoman Empire. The Muslim Turks taxed Christian clergy every time they left and entered the Holy Sepulcher church. The clergy who served the church avoided going out as rarely as possible so they set up living quarters in the Holy Sepulcher church.
The window, ladder and ledge all belong to the Armenian Orthodox Church. The ledge served as a balcony for the Armenian clergy. It was their only opportunity to get fresh air and sunshine without paying the Turkish Muslim tax. Some said that they even grew fresh vegetables on the ledge.
In 1937 after an earthquake that happened in Jerusalem an Armenian monk came down the ladder and began to clean the debris that had fallen on the ledge. In order to move the rubble he had to move the ladder and by doing so he violated the Status Quo that came from a ‘firman’ or edict issued by the Ottoman Sultan in 1757 and reaffirmed in 1852. That edict defined the rights of the different Christian denominations that share that church.
The consequences of moving the ladder is that a major turmoil took place when the Greek Orthodox could not fathom anyone making any changes for whatever reason even if it made sense. The end result was that the Armenian monk was attacked and since then no one has dared to move the ladder.
Actually that has not been the only major fight that has taken place in that holy temple. More recently in the summer of 2002 a Coptic Monk who is stationed on the roof of the church to guard the Coptic claims to the Ethiopian part of the roof dared to move his chair from its agreed spot from the sun into the shade. This of course was seen by the Ethiopian Orthodox as an invasion of property.
The end result, the Jerusalem police tells us that eleven monks both Coptic Orthodox and Ethiopian Orthodox ended up in the hospital after the resulting fracas.
In September of 2004 another major fight occurred when a Franciscan Roman Catholic monk refused to close the door of the Roman chapel at the request of the Greek Patriarch Irenaus that was leading at the time a procession to commemorate the Blessed Cross of Christ. As he passed by in front of the Roman Catholic area he asked a Franciscan monk to close the door of the Roman chapel. I imagine that he preferred not to see any of the Latin decorations of the Chapel.
The results of this ecumenical encounter according to the Jerusalem police is that 4 Greek monks were arrested, and a Franciscan monk required medical attention because he was bodily attacked by the Orthodox.
Probably you know other shameful stories of how bad Christians get along with each other not only in the Holy Land but also around the world. Luckily for us as Anglicans we don’t have to worry about that. Or do we?
Well yes we do and that is why I want to talk about that ladder, or should I say the need to move our ladder.
It seems that we Episcopalians have been moving the Anglican ladder too much.It probably started when we elected our first bishop in America. We sent him to the Mother Church and he was refused to be consecrated by Canterbury because he was unable to pledge allegiance to the British King that we had just managed to defeat. Actually it was our first bishop that in rebellion moved the ladder when he went with the Jacobites in Scotland for consecration.
Our Episcopal Church and our particular polity were not established during a colonial time instead when we were founded we also came up with a peculiar and different polity in a free America over 200 years ago. We moved the ladder when we made the changes. We eliminated anything that smelled like an Archbishop and managed to remove part of the imperial power of the bishops.We even decided to share that power with the presbyters and the laity and came up with something that we called today the House of Deputies.No official decision can be made in this Church without them.
I began to think of how many other times we moved the ladder. Was it when we allowed birth control or decided not let the mother die during childbirth in order to save the baby? Or was it when we allowed divorced Episcopalians to remarry in the church.
Let me see what else? Oh yes, women’s ordination. I was there in 1976 when we moved the ladder again and voted in Minneapolis to approve the ordination of women to the presbyterate and the episcopacy.
Of course at the same time we up the ante a little more by also changing our Prayer Book to reflect modern English as it was spoken in America during the 20th Century.
It looks like we have been moving the ladder for a long time. It just happens that we are what we are. It’s not easy for others from far away to understand who we are. We are what we are. We were not formed because we were a colony of England that handed over sovereignty. We came to be Episcopalians precisely because we spent years and shed lots of blood fighting the British.
Everything has a consequence and moving the ladder makes people crazy. I know that very well because when I voted with the majority of our church to consent to the consecration of the bishop of New Hampshire I was the recipient of considerable irrational behavior. I was aware that there were going to be some in my diocese that were not going to agree with me but I never realized the angry and almost irrational and bitter reaction of some people that love to call themselves Orthodox.
Let me tell you what happened. When I was the Bishop of Honduras, where I served as Bishop for 17 years my wife Diana responding to the need that little girls had for shelter and in order to prevent their abuse she started a home for abandoned, abused and orphaned girls that today houses and educate over 75 girls, it includes also a school with over 200 students and a clinic to help the indigent of Honduras. Today we have graduated 2 of those girls from the university; we have 14 girls presently studying in the university and over 20 in High School.
But to my amazement after the General Convention of 2003 we began to receive angry letters and cancellation of sponsorships from different parts of this country explaining their cancellation of the sponsorship was because Diana as the Director of the home was also married to this horrible bishop that had voted to give his consent in Minneapolis.
Our Little Roses, a home for abandoned, orphaned and abused girls, a home that is not even in my diocese but in Central America was deprived of over $60,000 dollars of annual sponsorship by angry and irrational people that were willing to hurt and starve the girls in order to somehow hurt me.I find this amazing because those beautiful Honduran girls may know who George Clooney or Brad Pitt are but I am sure that they don’t have the foggiest of who Gene Robinson is.
The girls suffered because of this irrational and inhuman reaction. Since then we have recover some because other people gave us a hand, coming from places like All Saints, Ft. Lauderdale, including their Integrity Chapter.
We still need help so if you happen to have some money around to support the abused, abandoned and orphaned girls of Our Little Roses in Honduras please give us a hand.If you need more information talk to me or to Diana. The girls need your help. We will be around today and tomorrow or search the Web: www.ourlittleroses.org has all the information. I partially apologize for begging for the orphans but those girls need our help and I couldn’t resist the opportunity for a commercial. Now let me get back to the ladder.
We have been told not to move the ladder. I think the message has arrived to us loud and clear.
We are all aware that we have recently received directives from a communiqué that the way it is written requests from us to be a different Episcopal Church. The problem I see as an Episcopalian in America is that they are asking us to look to Leviticus 20 that inform us who to stone and not to Leviticus 19 that inform us who to love.
Now, I do not want for you to get the wrong impression. You are not in a liberal diocese. I am not a liberal bishop.Ethnically and by birth I am a III World Bishop. It has been six and a half years since I arrived to Southeast Florida from an III World diocese in Central America where I served for almost two decades. I was also born in the III World in a country that the United States has tried to defeat for years but because of the bad aim of the CIA has been unable to. But this American church decided to move the ladder one more time and now this Cuban refugee boy also happens to be the bishop of Southeast Florida. As Ricky Ricardo used to say to Lucy:“Honey I’m home.”
This is now my home and you are in a diocese that has been in complete compliance with the directives of the Windsor Report even before it occurred to the Primates to prepare it.Now this is also a diocese that recognizes that because of our policies we are discriminating and forbidding the participation of all the baptized into the ordained ministry. We recognize that we can bless dogs and cats, cars and all kinds of boats, homes and businesses but we have to refrain from blessing our faithful, believers in Christ that have lived a monogamous respectable life for decades but happen to be of a different sexual orientation.
We do this not because of the demands of foreign prelates but because we believe that it is not allowed by our American General Convention.
In past years we continued our conversation and many in our midst have worked hard in order that our General Convention eventually will allow the full inclusion of all the baptized members into its leadership and give its blessing to all of its members. And now it seems to me that they want us to stop discussing and to stop thinking.
We are supposed to find ways to ignore all the new evidence of science and also we have to show partiality with our sisters and brothers of different sexual orientations with whom we share this church and inform them that they have to continue being second class Episcopalians.
I fervently pray that we may continue in the Anglican Communion but I want to continue in it as an Episcopalian.
I am committed to continue being part of the Anglican Communion but I also want you to know that I am faithful to this Church that was God’s instrument to bring me to Christ and whose form of government was established more than two centuries ago.
I want to continue being a faithful member of this church that for centuries has been sending and keeps sending prayers, financial resources and missionaries to all parts of the world in order to proclaim the Gospel of Christ. We are part of a church that has brought Christ to the world including some of the areas that today point an accusing finger at us.
I firmly believe that if our founders wanted to have the same church polity of other parts of the Communion where presbyters and laity don’t have an equal voice as bishops then they would have chosen to move to Canada or the UK and join those who opposed our justice and independence.
I don’t know how the House of Bishops will respond this coming March when we meet in Texas. I for one will support my Presiding Bishop; Gosh I forgot that!A woman Primate, that’s another time when we moved the ladder.Roman Bishops say that they back the Holy Father; well as an Episcopal Bishop I say that I back the Holy Mother.
It is my fervent prayer that we can find the way towards reconciliation. I am willing to make the necessary sacrifices in all humility but I hope that the rest of the Communion will respect who we are as Episcopalians.
I pray that whatever we do will be seen with pleasure in the eyes of Jesus Christ. A Christ that loves and cares for all and that also calls us to love our neighbor as ourselves.
We are Christians, yes we are.
We are Anglicans, yes we are.
But we are also Episcopalians,
and yes we are what we are.
I want to end with the words of the German singer Paul Van Dyk when he expresses his sentiments in his song: Wir Sind Wir = We are what we are:
“We’re what we are
We’re standing here
We’re not going down
No time to be angry
We’re what we are
We’re standing here
We’re what we are
Divided, defeated and else
But finally, we still exist!
We’re what we are
We will get over it
Because life has to go on
We’re what we are.
This is just a bad phase
We will never give up!
Amen.
No comments:
Post a Comment