A fiddlehead strikes an episcopal pose. Photo by {link:http://www.flickr.com/photos/princebart/2608626295/}Prince Bart{/link} on Flickr.
This is the second of three articles by the Ven. Dr. Thompson on the orders of ordained ministry—priests, bishops, and deacons. The first installment presented the ordained ministries as refracting the ministries conferred in baptism, then focused on the ministry of priests. Mr. Thompson took up the question of holiness as the promise that “the bare soil is not the last soil and that business as usual…is not the only business afoot.” He then invited readers to understand the community of the baptized as bearing witness to that holiness, and the ministry of priests as nourishing that witness among the baptized. In this installment, we turn to the ministry of bishops and to the episcopal ministry of the baptized.
The bishop is the “celebrity” of the ordained, showing up from time to time in parishes, with accessories unique to the office—mitre, crozier, ring. Because the bishop is less familiar than the parish priest, one might think of him or her as a visitor from head office, causing an interruption in the normal rhythms of a parish community.
But the bishop is more than a head office supervisor, and much more than an interruption. The bishop, like the priest, refracts a dimension of the ministry of the baptized, a dimension that plays a vital part in healthy discipleship. Episcopal ministry, both as exercised through the office of bishop, and as enacted in the community of the baptized, is a ministry of communion, of the unity of the church, and of a common humanity in the image and likeness of God.
Episcopal ministry stretches the community of the baptized beyond what is comfortable and familiar into encounters with the Other who is strange and sometimes frightening. In the discourse of Jesus, the parable of the Good Samaritan is an example of episcopal teaching, a call out beyond tribal and provincial loyalties into the hard work of negotiating a common humanity.
Episcopal ministry calls the community of the baptized to establish communion as a principle of the first order.
In a communiqué at the end of their meeting in Portugal in 2000, the primates of the Anglican Communion asserted that “When we turn away from one another, we turn away from the cross of Jesus.” At a subsequent meeting of the House of Bishops of the Anglican Church of Canada, Archbishop Terry Finlay of Toronto made an impassioned plea for the unity of the church, inviting those present to see the arms of Jesus, stretched out on the cross, as arms gathering all people together.
Episcopal ministry, then, is concerned with the unity of the church, and more comprehensively, with human communion. That communion is grounded in the communion of the Trinity, in whose image we are fashioned, not just as individuals, but as persons-in-relationship. That is to say, as persons-in-relationship, we reflect the truth of God the Holy Trinity as persons-in-relationship.
Bearing witness to that truth is not easy, comfortable, or safe. It goes against the grain of tribalism to acknowledge a common humanity, especially in the face of profound diversity, divergence, and conflict among tribes, cultures, and peoples. Within Anglicanism, diversity was, for a long while, submerged by the assertion of English cultural and tribal practices as universally normative. Especially in light of the global prevalence of the cadences and idioms of the Book of Common Prayer, “sameness” took the place of unity.
In the past half-century, the Anglican Communion has had to contend with a post-colonial reality and the indigenization of ministry, leadership, and liturgy in ways that make obvious the diversity, divergence, and conflict among the tribes, cultures, and peoples who make up the communion.
The quest to reconstitute “sameness” as a proxy for unity has led, in the past decade, to the establishment of something called “orthodoxy,” departure from which is deemed to be departure from faithfulness. Among those pursuing this retrenchment of sameness under the rubric of orthodoxy (with orthodoxy understood as “what we believe and not what you believe”), diversity, divergence, and conflict constitute a basis for division, not a challenge to negotiate unity, a common life, communion.
In Constructing Local Theologies, Robert Schreiter asserts that catholicity is a movement toward unity among diverse, divergent, and even conflicted local churches. As a movement, it depends on both polar elements—the unity of one pole and the diversity of the other. It is precisely in honouring this movement, and in holding its elements in creative tension, that the episcopal ministry of the church finds its contemporary purpose. Those who inhabit the office that refracts the church’s episcopal ministry are not free simply to insist on sameness as the only possible basis for unity. Nor is it faithful to abandon the quest for unity in favour of an orthodoxy that they themselves define and by which they would exclude others from human and divine communion.
Unity is not the means by which the church carries forward God’s mission in its life and ministry. It is not an instrument by which God pursues God’s purposes for creation. Unity is itself among the ends of God’s mission. Unity is at the heart of the church’s sacramental understanding of relationships as expressed in marriage. God seeks to knit together the diverse, divergent, and conflicted tribes, cultures, and peoples of the earth. God calls us in our baptism into a community—the body of Christ—whose mandate includes a call to incorporate every “Other” into the meaning of “We.” It is the work of those who inhabit the office of bishop to serve and refract this dimension of the ministry of the baptized.
The world is plagued with hostility, indifference, and violence among its human creatures. And our failure to inhabit the communion with one another for which we were created has consequences not only for our common life, but also for the mutual custodianship by which we relate to earth and earth’s creatures. That mutual custodianship first comes to light in Genesis 1 and 2, in which the fruit of the garden is to sustain its human inhabitants, and in which God declares the human vocation “to till and keep it.”
The episcopal ministry of the community of the baptized, and of those who serve that ministry as bishops, is one of a comprehensive mutuality that gathers earth and earth’s creatures into the peaceable kingdom promised, among other places, by the prophet Isaiah. The proclamation and enacting of this comprehensive mutuality is at the heart of episcopal ministry, a ministry betrayed whenever the community of the baptized, or those who serve it as bishops, allow diversity, divergence, and conflict to overwhelm the community and obstruct the work of God’s Holy Spirit by fostering or enacting the division of the world into a holy, good, and faithful “Us” and a diabolical, evil, and apostate “Them.”
The episcopal ministry of the baptized, and of those who refract and serve that ministry as bishops, is a vector aimed at the heart of God’s dream for creation, of God’s promised and emerging kingdom. Every act that fosters communion in the face of diversity, divergence, and conflict contributes to the church’s episcopal ministry and participates in the mission of God, who has, in Christ, “broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us” (Ephesians 2:14). It is not, it turns out, just Gentile and Jew that God sets out to reconcile, but the whole household of creation.
The wolf shall live with the lamb,
the leopard shall lie down with the kid,
the calf and the lion and the fatling together,
and a little child shall lead them.
7The cow and the bear shall graze,
their young shall lie down together;
and the lion shall eat straw like the ox.
8The nursing child shall play over the hole of the asp,
and the weaned child shall put its hand on the adder’s den.
9They will not hurt or destroy
on all my holy mountain;
for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord
as the waters cover the sea. (Isaiah 11:6–9)
