Q: Let's start by talking about the new Lambeth Commission Report. What did you say in the House of Bishops meeting about how the U.S. church will be receiving this report?
A: It's very important for us in the United States to receive the Lambeth Commission Report on communion in a generous spirit and in a humble spirit. One of the realities is the Episcopal Church, by association with United States policies -- which are perceived in other parts of the world as very self-serving if not unhelpful to other societies -- I think often the Episcopal Church is so associated with American policy abroad that we are thought of as arrogant and insensitive to other cultural realities and other concerns, and therefore it's very important that we receive this report seriously, with openness of mind and a genuine desire to find ways in which we can be better partners with other parts of the Anglican world.Q: In the years since the General Convention, how much hurt, how much anger, how much confusion have you heard about from some of these partners?
A: I've had the advantage of being able to travel to other parts of the world. I've been to Nigeria, where I gave a retreat to the bishops of Nigeria and visited a number of dioceses and saw the work and understood some of the complexities of life there. And the same is true also in Uganda. And therefore, I'm very aware of how different the contexts are in which, let's say, the Anglican Church in Nigeria or Uganda is seeking to interpret and live the Gospel. And then in contrast, I'm very aware of different realities that are present here in the United States. And in fact, one of the primates, not from a Western country, said to me, "I think the Holy Spirit can do different things in different places."
One thing about Anglicanism -- and this is in some of the documents that have been generated by such things as the Lambeth Conference -- the Anglican tradition realizes that the Gospel is locally embodied, and therefore it's going to be affected by cultural and political realities in different parts of the world, and therefore what may seem to many people in the United States as a genuine unfolding of a Gospel direction may in another part of the world be seen as extremely unsettling and threatening.
So, I have a very deep sense of the complexity of all this, and it's further complicated by the immediacy of communication. I mean, years ago, no one would have known about the ordination of the bishop of New Hampshire until letters had arrived some months later. But now, television, for example, beamed the ordination service around the world, so suddenly it was as if it were happening in Nigeria and other places. And so, naturally, the reaction was more intense because here it was, right in my own living room.
Q: When you as a church are making those determinations of how the Gospel is embodied in a particular context, where is the line at which point it's not the same church, or the beliefs are so different that it no longer is still the same body?
A: I think what is very disturbing to me at the present moment is that sexuality seems to have trumped the creeds in determining fundamentals of the Christian faith. And the truth is that a great deal more unites us than divides us. There's a common appreciation of the creeds as the ground of our articulated faith, and we all believe that the Old and New Testaments contain everything necessary to salvation. And then the interpretation of Scripture becomes something that varies. Even the primates themselves, when they met last October, in their official communications said there are differences in how we interpret Scripture, and we need to acknowledge those things.
Q: I want to ask you to simply explain this notion of a communion. I think it's difficult for people outside the Episcopal context to understand what that means -- how the U.S. church is autonomous, but yet in relationship with all of these other churches. How does that work?
A: There are two important things about communion. First of all, communion is a gift from God and not something we simply create. Communion is the intimate life of a relationship that exists between the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit that is then expanded to human beings through baptism, and we are all then connected in what Paul calls "the body of Christ." He says we're all limbs, members of this body -- arms and legs and constituent elements of a body. So, communion is about deep relationship created by God.Now, the Anglican Communion exists not juridicaly -- I mean -- there is not a pope. The Archbishop of Canterbury does not occupy that kind of position. But communion is a matter of relationship on many levels. And so, though there may be strains formally between the heads of the various churches of the Anglican Communion, relationships also continue on the ground, and they are much more intimate. They are sometimes bishop to bishop, or a group of women from one part of the Anglican Communion, for instance, came here to New York to be part of a U.N. conference, as Anglican women, about women in the world. Well, this is a manifestation of communion.
So, it's not a formal relationship so much as it is a kind of lived pattern of many relationships. And I think, too, it's important to point out that the Episcopal Church, which was the first, as it were, breakaway from the mother church in England, saw itself as quite independent, and the notion of Anglican communion really is a more recent development, as largely British missionaries went to various parts of the world and established churches in what were British colonies. So the notion of communion has evolved, and it is still evolving. And I think part of the present strain is, what is the proper relationship between the local reality and an international body of churches in fellowship with one another, and where does the action of one church drastically affect the life of the other churches?
So, this is part of what we're struggling with. And I think the Lambeth Commission report will help us in that struggle.
Q: To what extent do you think that you are in some ways redefining or evolving the notion of how all of these Anglican bodies relate to one another and live together or don't?
A: Well, my hope and my prayer is that we will find a way to continue to be partners. For instance, there is such poverty and disease and internal turmoil in various parts of the world where we have resources that can be helpful and useful, and we want to be in a living relationship with brother and sister Anglicans who are dealing with HIV/AIDS, for example.
So, my hope and prayer is that the Lambeth Commission report, which really, as its title suggests, is about communion, will really be an invitation to live what I will call a more sacrificial life, not just on our part but on the part of everyone, to make a little more space for one another, because in this shattered and broken world where division is the order of the day, I think it's so important that the church manifest a capacity to contain difference with grace and focus its attention on human need. After all, the church doesn't exist for itself, it exists for the sake of the world and the world's well-being.
Q: What is the U.S. church's responsibility as a church here to deal with the people here, and then to what extent should outside voices have an impact here, as the church here deals with the people here?
A: I think when you look at the Episcopal Church you have to ask the question, "What kind of church has it been historically?" And you have to go back to the 16th century, when the Church of England, our parent, came into being, and at that time you had on the one hand reforming zeal, and on the other hand you had a sense of Catholic continuity. And these two really were at loggerheads with one another. But the Anglican solution, Anglican comprehensiveness as it's sometimes called, saw containing those two realities within one reality, namely the Church of England, rooted and grounded not in perfect agreement, but rooted and grounded in a capacity to pray together. And so in the Anglican tradition, the liturgy has always been this sort of meeting point for difference, where difference is reconciled, not at the level of the head but at the level of the heart. Historically, we've always been a church that can contain and live difference.
So, that brings us now to the present moment and I think the overwhelming reality of the Episcopal Church is what I would call "the diverse center," people who hold a variety of opinions, not just with respect to something as emotional as homosexuality, but all kinds of other things -- war and peace, should we be involved in military operations or not? You have a church that has multiple points of view and by-and-large can live with that multiplicity of points of view because of the sort of common focus beyond ourselves, mediated by the liturgy, namely the person of Christ.
A: I find the endless fixation on sexuality, and more specifically homosexuality, a distraction from other areas that quite frankly are matters of life and death. I remember vividly, when the primates met last autumn in England, at the end of our meeting, which was focused mostly on the blessing of same-sex unions in a diocese in Canada and the actions of the Episcopal Church in confirming the election of the then bishop-elect of New Hampshire, one primate said, "You know, it's been sex, sex, sex, and I am facing poverty and disease and life and death in my diocese, in my church." And several of the other primates just sort of sighed. And I apologized. I said, "I am very sorry that this issue has been made center stage in the life of the Anglican Communion," and I went on to say, "and that has happened in large measure because of people within my own church who are unhappy, who have insisted that this be the issue in the life of the Anglican Communion." So that does sadden me deeply. And when I retire as presiding bishop, I hope that I'm known for something other than this issue.
