I haven’t been able to engage deeply so far with what’s going on at General Convention.  Mostly, I’ve been focusing on connecting with people.  But I did listen carefully to the sermon at the Eucharist this morning, preached by the president of the House of Deputies, Bonnie Anderson.  I don’t have a verbatim transcript of what she said available to me, but the excerpts below are accurate to the best of my ability:

The expression of unity in Christ is a powerful experience—difficult to describe but recognizable by the effect on our hearts when we touch it and live it. Unity is about being transformed in community.

Unity is not about getting along, although that would be nice. It is not about the absence of conflict or the expectation that we can all believe the exact same thing, except of course in our Savior Jesus Christ. It is not about buying the world a Coke and teaching it to sing. I do not think it is about a utopia that we ourselves construct and maintain. Rather, unity is a spiritual practice that we need first to understand and then spend our lives doing. It is an action and an intention, something we practice over and over again. The practice of unity has tremendous potential. Unity can change us and enlighten us and bring us closer to God. Unity is about inviting others to be in community with us in the hope that we will be changed by those whom we invite. We are called to understand and practice unity in this way.

Henri Nouwen said true Christian community is a collection of people who otherwise would not choose to be together.

I invite you to consider taking on unity as a Christian practice. I invite you to look at those outside our Episcopal community and wonder how if they were invited in they might change us. How can they be brought into the center and direct our hearts and minds toward God in new ways. Unity is the receptivity to be changed. Our practice is to open our hearts to the unexpected, to ease our rigidity in our ideas about how things ought to look and open ourselves to the Spirit and the way the Spirit moves. In the words of Mother Theresa: “If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong together.”

I appreciated Ms Anderson’s emphasis on the relational nature of unity and that it is grounded in a set of practices.  That is, unity is something we live into and out of, not something we create or maintain based on our own criteria of who is “in” and who is “out.”  Her homily was by necessity short, so I didn’t expect her to draw out how the spiritual practice of unity was possible within the context of General Convention, but I do wonder whether the very nature of Convention itself actually militates against the spiritual practice that toward which she rightly points.

In the context of her sermon, the spiritual practice of unity “is about inviting others to be in community with us in the hope that we will be changed by those whom we invite.”  She used the proposed communion with the Moravian Church in America as an example, asking whether we were willing to invite the change that such communion would entail.  I agree that this vision of hospitality as mutually converting is a part of the spiritual practice of unity, but to what are we being converted ultimately?  Ms Anderson’s hope is that we will “open ourselves to the Spirit and the way the Spirit moves.”  Yet therein lies the central question of our common life:  How do we know that what we are opening ourselves to is in fact the Spirit?

I loved the quotes from Henri Nouwen and Mother Theresa.  The mystery of the church is that by nature we would not otherwise choose to be together but that by grace we belong together.  As Christ says, “You did not choose me, but I chose you.”  The key is in accepting that Christ has chosen others whom we would never have chosen ourselves.  The image I get in my mind is of school kids choosing teams.  Jesus is the Team Captain, and we can be disappointed with the Captain’s choices, but it’s not up to us.  Our alternative, to rebel and to split up into other teams, playing other games, isn’t any alternative at all.

And yet, we lack peace precisely because we lack commitment to each other.  And this lack of commitment exists on all sides.

This General Convention seems a bit more sedate—at least on the surface—because almost all of the conservative “troublemakers” are conspicuously absent.  Does this make the spiritual practice of “unity” easier?  Or infinitely more difficult as a result?

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