August 2009
In her opening address to the General Convention, The Most Rev. Katharine Jefferts-Schori, our Presiding Bishop, said that there were three words that all Episcopalians need to write in their hearts. Those three words were mission, mission, and mission.
We have from the beginning been a missionary people, and we must in our rapidly changing and often tumultuous world reclaim our heritage. Our bishop, The Rt. Rev. Larry Benfield wrote: “Almost all of us agree it’s time to be about the mission of the church. A reporter asked me what I thought this convention would be remembered for, and I replied that in the long run it will be as a convention that said ‘business as usual’ is no longer acceptable.”
As I reflected on the Presiding Bishop’s address, our bishop’s reflections, and all the new enriching initiatives of the convention, I am extremely excited about the future of our church both nationally and locally. I have reflected on the call to mission, and I would add three new other words: opportunity, opportunity, opportunity. I deeply believe that we now stand in a unique position to be a significant spiritual influence in the lives of all our neighbors locally, nationally, and globally.
An illustration of our opportunities is what has happened in the current economic crisis. Many of us had our eyes painfully opened to a new economic world. None of our new economic conditions are the same “business as usual” as they were last year. Change has hit us, and we can either adjust to the change or try and ignore it and thereby miss an opportunity to face some things we have all needed to face about the way we use our money.
We can look at all the opportunities we have been blessed to receive from God and then reach out to those in need. The Christmas “Sharing and Caring” program is the classic example of what God challenged us to do by reaching out and touching the lives of disadvantaged children in our area while at the same time we were experiencing our own shrinking incomes. We didn’t do less than the year before; we did more! Change, mission, and opportunity walk hand in hand.
I am surprised that we haven’t read about a Broadway revival of The Death of a Salesman by Henry Miller. Willy Loman, the salesman, woke up one day and realized that the world had changed without his permission. Rather than seeing the change as an opportunity to sell a new line in a new way, he resisted the change and kept trying to sell the same old line of products in the same old way. He was so shocked when his sales dramatically dropped and he was fired that all he believed he could do was to die -- and so he did.
Fortunately during our thirty-year obsession with human sexuality to the exclusion of many, many other important matters, God has not fired us but keeps on presenting to us new opportunities to be the missionary people God needs us to be!
Let us all prayerfully seek God’s guidance in how we can seize our opportunities and be a missionary people. Jesus said: “You did not choose me. I chose you.” Amen
Fr. Ken †
