Link to Occupy Fort Lauderdale Event

Occupy Fort Lauderdale Event

I hope to see you there!

Where is My Voice?

I believe in the Living God. I know, surprising statement coming from a priest and I know what you are thinking! “Of course you do, you wouldn’t be a priest if you didn’t believe in the Living God. So what is it you are saying?” I believe in the Living God, a God who is intimately involved in Creation…A God who is not constrained by the imaginations of what we expect God to be…A God who works to bring Creation to order, to reconcile all of Creation to the God’s Self. A God who, if we allow, works through the Church, but is not regulated to working through the Church to bring about God’s Kingdom on Earth; A God who, paraphrasing the Great Anglican Richard Hooker, reveals Wisdom through Scripture, through nature, through inspiration by spiritual influence, and through worldly experience and practice; A God who invites all to join in the Creation of God’s Kingdom. It is through this lens that I have been watching the people protesting in New York and have watched as this movement to “Occupy” our country has been spreading to other cities throughout the nation. It is through this lens that I began to ask myself, where are the clergy? Where is their voice and my voice? As I watched it became clear that the Occupy Wall Street movement, along with the sister movements that are springing up throughout the country, wants to open up a conversation about the social injustices that are prevalent in our society as we have allowed our society and its institutions to be taken over by corporate and individual greed. I had to ask myself again, isn’t this a conversation that the Church wants to be involved in. Now, I should say, I realize that the Church is not the structures that we have built nor is it the hierarchy of the institution we call the Church. The Church is, in reality, the people that God has called together to join in Creation and to help bring about the Kingdom of God. I realize that there are probably church-people who are part of this movement and part of the conversation, but I also believe that there is a use and a purpose for the institutional Church and that we must be part of the conversation that is taking place in parks and city squares or we run the risk of the Spirit of God moving without us[the Church] to bring justice to the world. Isn’t that part of our calling as ordained leaders of the Church? When I look back on the vows taken at my Ordination to the priesthood, I am reminded that I made a vow to pattern my life in accordance with the teachings of Christ; in order to be an example to the people I am called to serve. I made a vow to endeavor to minister the Word and the sacraments so that the reconciling love of Christ may be known and received. As a priest it is my task to proclaim by word and by deed the Gospel of Christ. I also made a vow to support the doctrine and teachings of the Episcopal Church which through the theological writings of some of its greatest minds such as Richard Hooker, William Temple and Frederick Denison Maurice, to name but a few, has inherited a tradition rooted in social justice. So I sit and wonder how I am called to react to this movement and know that I have to look to Christ to receive my answer. In the Gospel of Matthew, chapter 22, vs. 1-14, which happen to be our readings for this coming Sunday we are presented with a king who throws a great wedding feast. Those who were invited make light of the invitation and continue to go about their business or worse, so the King tells his servants to go out into the streets and gather all they find to the banquet causing the banquet to be filled with guests. The king, arriving at the banquet, sees one man who is not wearing a wedding robe and asks the man how he got into the banquet without the proper dress and the man is unable to answer, he is in fact speechless, and is taken and bound and thrown out from the feast. And there is my answer; those of us who accept the invitation to follow Christ, need to change the way we “dress” we need to dress ourselves in Christ and to dress ourselves in Christ means we may not remain speechless. We must speak to the Kingdom of God, we must speak for justice and equality, we must stand with those who do and we must be part of the conversation. In order to live out my vow of ordination, I must pattern my life around the precept that I must be one to speak out, not only from the pulpit on a Sunday morning, not only through conferences and quiet gatherings of people discussing what it means to be a Christian in the world today, but I must be an example, willing to walk where Jesus walked out in the streets, keeping the conversation of Justice open to those who are willing to listen. I need to be where the Spirit is, and I believe that the Spirit is there, God is there in the movement we are witnessing…and if you wonder where Jesus would be if Jesus were alive? He’d be there too, oh wait, He is there…for we are his body in the world today, so what am I waiting for…I need to be there too.