AnglicansUnited.com

http://www.melbourne.anglican.com.au/main.php?pg=news&news_id=37826&s=157

[Ed. Note:  The Presiding Bishop flew from New Zealand to Brisbane, Australia yesterday at the invitation of Archbishop Philip Aspinall of Australia.  In a press briefing yesterday, Dr. Aspinall said, "The Presiding Bishop is welcome to visit the Brisbane Diocese as were four other Primates from around the Anglican Communion who have visited us in the past year,..."   the Brisbane press person added, "This is an informal visit by Dr Jefferts Schori, who is visiting Australia and New Zealand this month, as the reverberations from her Church's episcopal consecration of a partnered gay woman continue to shake the Anglican Communion. Dr Jefferts Schori's recent visit to England caused a stir when some clergy protested against her invitation to preach in Southwark Cathedral..."  The Presiding Bishop told the Executive Council two weeks ago, ""I'm to speak with people there about their conversations around human sexuality and also about their missionary development work ..."   It seems to me that this is still a trip to friendly provinces that can and will petition the Archbishop of Canterbury to restore TEC members removed from committees.  Although the trip was planned two years ago, it comes at a very good time for the Presiding bishop to make her case for restoration.  Cheryl M. Wetzel]

http://anglicantaonga.org.nz/Features/Trouble

Lloyd Ashton  for Anglican Taonga, the Anglican news agency in the Province of  New Zealand,  Aotearoa and Polynesia

30 Jun 2010

Bishop Katharine at the Canterbury Womens’  Club

Disagreement with The Episcopal Church about gay bishops is one thing: but why have those two ordinations provoked such intense antagonism?

Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori told yesterday’s Q&A session at Te Hepara Pai that she figures that’s about loss of power.

“I think it represents the pain and discomfort of people who used to be at the centre, and who are now finding themselves being moved to the margins.

“In my context, 200 years ago the landed white gentry were in control of a monoculture. ‘Now all of these people have come along and messed with that: how dare they?’”

She told the Tikanga Maori hosted forum that wide swathes of US society were living in anxiety. People who’d once held down jobs for life had seen their employment being exported to China and India, they were enduring economic meltdown – and now the focus of their anxiety was shifting to immigrants from Central America.

Bishop Katherine said that she hoped that “somewhere down the road” TEC and its most hostile critics “will discover the gospel in a new way” that allows them all to find common cause.

“But for that kind of resurrection to happen, death has to take place first.”

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“We are,” says the Presiding Bishop, “seen as ‘that church which causes trouble!’”

“Yet we cannot be who we are not.”

The Episcopal church, she said, had been grappling for 50 years with the question of what it means for gay and lesbian people to live a whole life – “and we still wrestle with that question: we’re not all agreed with the ordination of gay and lesbian bishops.”

TEC is, and always has been, a missionary society, claimed the bishop, and the mission is far greater and broader than the same sex issue.

“For example,” she said, “we are much more concerned with the Millenium Development Goals, with the elimination of poverty and sickness, with overturning lack of education and lack of access to the blessings of life.” Read more…

[Ed. Note:  Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori is in New Zealand and Australia for 2 weeks, preaching and renewing friendships. This is quoted from the Anglican Taonga, the news service of the Province of New Zealand.  Cheryl M. Wetzel]

http://anglicantaonga.org.nz/Features/Sermon

On June 27 Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori preached at Holy Trinity Cathedral, Auckland, in the morning, and at evensong at St. Michael and All Angels in Christchurch.

The readings for the day were: 2 Kings 2: 1-2, 6-14; Psalm 77: 1-2, 11-20; Galatians 5:1, 13-25 and Luke 9: 51-62.

Well, I rejoice with you over the success of the All Whites, and lament their exit.

All the hoopla around the World Cup brings to mind another athletic celebration.  In 1968 two American athletes stood on the podium in Mexico City and raised their fists. They wanted to make a statement about freedom and their lack of it, for they were black.

Even though the law insists that all people are equal, people of color continue to suffer injustice, in my homeland and, I think, in yours.  Their salute got them thrown out of the summer Olympic Games, but it raised the consciousness of a lot of people, and helped the cause of freedom for many, many others.

In one of the biblical languages, the word for prayer means opening a clenched fist.  That black power salute began another petition in a continuing prayer across the world, that all people might be free.  The crucifixion is a cosmic version of that same prayer – Jesus’ arms and hands open so wide they take in the whole world, indeed, the whole creation.

‘For freedom Christ has set us free.  So stand up and stop being a slave,’ Paul says (Gal 5:1).  But freedom isn’t only freedom from ; it’s freedom for – for loving self and others.  We have been set free in order that we might become that same sort of liberating love in the world, setting others free.

Freedom is directional.  It moves away from slavery, and it moves toward something more, the more that God intended from creation.  It has something to do with what those two guys on the podium were protesting – an end to slavery, an end to oppression, an end to poverty and systems that keep some in thrall while others profit.

Freedom also has something to do with expansion – in the same sense that Mary prays, “magnify the Lord” – let the glory and love of God in our hearts expand our capacity to be tools and servants of that greater possibility.

The freedom we have received in Christ is meant to give us larger hearts and wider-seeing eyes that don’t focus so much on our own fears.  That sort of freedom gives us the ability to look for the larger good, rather than only our own.

It’s what is told of a sailor in the Pacific during the Second World War.  His ship was bombed and a fierce fire broke out in the hold, where the munitions were stored.  The crew fought the fire for two days.

At some point a gunner’s mate tied a rope around his waist and had himself lowered into the hold.  He went down into that hell so he could train a fire hose on the bombs, lest they be set off by the heat.  He stayed there for hours, helping to set others free.  Freedom lets us choose the life abundant meant for all.

Freedom, Paul says, invites us to become the loving servants of others.  Just before I left New York, a group of the Church Center staff gathered to discuss and strategize around the referendum in Sudan next January.  The people of Sudan will vote on whether or not southern Sudan should become a separate nation, and there is great concern over the violence that may erupt around that election.  Read more…