President Ferlo on Reconciliation
♦ March 6, 2015 ♦
As I write this I am preparing for a week at Kanuga (the Episcopal conference center in western North Carolina) to spend time with six Old Catholic bishops from Europe who are visiting the U.S. as guests of the Episcopal House of Bishops. Although I suspect that very few Episcopalians are aware of it, the Episcopal Church has enjoyed a long friendship with the Old Catholic churches in Europe — progressive congregations whose disapproval of the pope’s declaration of infallibility in 1870 moved them to break away from the Roman church, adopting a polity of dispersed authority similar to our own.
What is on the minds of the Old Catholic bishops during this visit is what is on many minds here in the States — the diminishing role of the Christian church as an arbiter of values in an increasingly secular culture. We live in a paradoxical time. European culture especially is beset by a postmodern mistrust of any religious “meta-narrative” (to use a favorite post-modern phrase) that claims universal acceptance. At the same time, in France, in Denmark, in the Netherlands, there is a resurgence of a new and violent meta-narrative spreading among disaffected young Muslim men — the jihadist dream of a universal caliphate, better known as the nightmare of ISIS. This resurgent Islamist meta-narrative breeds, no doubt by intention, a troubling xenophobic and racist reaction among people who should know better.
In all this, the Christian churches in Europe seem less and less relevant. The stakes are high. In spite of claims to the contrary — including those made by people who call themselves Christians in this country — the Gospel is a gospel of peace and reconciliation, where xenophobia, institutional racism, anti-Semitism and Islamophobia have no place. Whether American Episcopalians or European Old Catholics, our temptation is to focus on our institutional survival. But face it, institutions — even institutions as old as ours — come and go. Europeans know this from their own experience, perhaps better than we Americans. The Gospel, though, is built to last.
The question we will ask at Kanuga — and the question we all must persist in asking ourselves — is how churches like ours can look beyond our own survival, to embrace instead God’s mission of reconciliation in a time, in both Europe and the United States, when the urge for self-protection and retribution is everywhere to be felt.
We know that in Christ, the agents of death — and the fear of death — in the end had no dominion over him. That’s what the resurrection was all about. The challenge for us now is to act as if we believed it.