"No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the reign of God." Luke 9:62

"Lift your drooping hands and strengthen your weak knees." Heb 12:12

We Anglicans have set our hand to the plow, as it were, with faith in God's informing grace as our guide. We have had confidence that in a variety of ways God has given us instruments of guidance, chief among them being what we refer to in a short-hand sort of way as scripture, tradition and reason. Yet these days many Episcopal Church members and other Anglicans are grasping for safety in past sureties or present comforts in ways that question that confidence. In looking back to a fiction of a surer faith, to the equal fiction of a Jesus uncorrupted by the Church and its agendas, or in looking down for the normality of the church as usual, we betray our lack of confidence.  Perhaps we are not fit for the reign of God.

This is not an observation about the various crises supposed in the Episcopal Church in these days. There is no advantage to hand-wringing exercises in "ain't it awful" crisis production. Alerting everyone to the impending doom brought on by either forgetting our rootedness in orthodox faith or by our adherence to outmoded pre-modern ideas is already work well in hand.

Still, I read with great interest the alerts that are sounded. People from all ranges of the ecclesiological spectrum raise them, people who love the church and wish it well. I too have contributed odds and ends to those efforts. The almost universal assumption is that these alerts are about deeply divisive matters, perhaps even crises, for which the Church must find consistent, coherent and faithful response. Too often, however, responses have accented existing divisiveness and furthered a crisis mentality.

Yet there is a question that these alerts raise which is not so much about the arguments within these alerts but about what lies behind them. Given the highly disruptive alarms that are raised these days, is it the assumption that the Episcopal Church is having a mental breakdown or physically ill? Is it a sufficient counter to these assumptions to state that the Episcopal Church is basically healthy and simply dealing with difficult issues as well as it can?  What is going on with the Episcopal Church?

Supposing a breakdown or illness, two very different diagnoses and treatment plans have been offered in recent years. The one proposes that there is a physical illness, a cancer, one in which the body is diseased by apostasy and heresy. Those offering this diagnosis suppose the only remedy to be either radical surgery within the body of the Episcopal Church excising the cancer, or the disjoining of two bodies that have existed together, one healthy the other deformed.

The second diagnosis proposes that there is no physical problem; rather it finds a crisis in developmental growth. In this reckoning parts of the church have simply not matured to the point where they can live with decisions about religious matters made in a democratic and rationally informed context, while other parts have.  Here the remedy, if one can call it that, is to encourage democratic involvement and developmental growth, and as wide a consensus as possible on solutions for the church. The cure, say these physicians, is for the Church to grow up. And if growth for some within the Church is arrested, the rest of the church must nonetheless go about its work, loving and caring for its immature members, but moving on.

 There are those on the other hand who claim that the Episcopal Church is basically healthy, who believe that the Episcopal Church is growing, that all growth is filled with problems, and that God's Holy Spirit will prevail, and all will be well. Their best counsel is to keep on keeping on, to be patient, and to avoid getting pulled into the negativity of the detractors.

 Although to some extent overstated, I believe the forgoing is a more or less accurate description of major positions taken in the Episcopal Church in the last few years of the twentieth century and into the first months of the twenty-first. They describe ecclesiological conservative, liberal and centrists positions: The Church is either broken by apostasy, hampered by immaturity or simply impatient in troubling times of uncertainty. These all seem efforts to cast the state of the church in terms which serve other ends, ends which are as mixed as the intentions of their proponents.

 Spokespersons for all three positions can be found in Episcopal Church circles. It is unnecessary to name them. Their efforts are well represented in the wide range of essays, notices, proclamations, meditations, media releases, and interviews, all available on the World Wide Web. Their efforts are known in their actions. Many have acted in the face of much criticism with remarkable courage, if not always with forbearance.

But what if the right focus for diagnosis is not physical health or developmental processes, or about maturation, but about the ability of the Episcopal Church to identify the basis for its own confidence in self? Perhaps we are having a panic attack about our identity -- not the mundanely talked about crisis in self identification, of knowing 'what it means to be an Episcopalian or Anglican' -- but a time in which we are fearful because we don't know how to identify ourselves with the future for which we plow.

I would suggest that what is distressing about the Episcopal Church is that it is close to losing its nerve. By that I mean the Episcopal Church appears to lack the confidence that the future of its life is indeed hidden in God who will meet us as we plow. Instead of confidence in the future in to which God would have us move, the Episcopal Church, or at least many of its members, invoke a defensive posture in which the past or the present constitutes a place of retrenchment and safe harbor. Rather than facing our future with confidence, we find ourselves looking back, or down for a place of safety.

 It would be unfortunate if the reader of the many notices of Episcopal Church crises were to conclude from the assemblage of documents related to the issues of the day that the primary elements of this failure of nerve directly concerned the issues they address. The essays, memoranda, memorabilia and other markers, so widely available on the internet, of the ongoing struggle in the Episcopal Church and in the wider Anglican Communion concern the effort to bend the course of developments in the Episcopal Church to certain conclusions vis-à-vis several issues of the day, most notably those involving the intersections of church polity, gender issues and the determination of what counts as moral sexual expression. Of course addressing the issues of the Church is of great importance. But our failure of nerve is not in any way to be addressed by finding better arguments for particular courses of action vis-à-vis the issues of the blessing of same sex unions or the orthodoxy of faith statements, about women in the episcopate or the ordination of persons of this or that classification, or any other matter.

Our failure of nerve consists entirely in a lack of confidence in the present tense engagement (by which I mean the present conjunction of experience, reflection and action) of a future hidden in God. The failure of nerve being experienced by the Episcopal Church and the wider Anglican Communion is grounded, I believe, in our profound loss of confident faith and belief in, or experience of, God's incarnation in the world, in the world into which we plow at every turn.

In our longing for stability in hard times we have turned to a God well defined, contained and settled in anciently determined formularies or more recently established practices of Church life. God known in the incarnational present and future seems less helpful than God revealed in past performance. Yet I suspect that God, who seems restless in the cages we built, continually shakes free of all things religious. God is not bound by our retrenchment. But we too often are. So when God breaks free from our cages we become nervous and unsettled. We lose courage.

My concern here is that we not only consider these materials as markers of great struggles, but also find in these materials the beginnings of an understanding of just what ails the Episcopal Church and where remedies are to be found.

That ailment, I suggest, is that the Episcopal Church is sick at heart because it longs for an easier, surer and safer time. But no dosage of ancient orthodoxy or modern interpretation of faith will deliver the cure for that longing. Indeed what we long for in that longing is death disguised as life.

If we are to set our hand to the plow, our hands and hearts must take courage in God's presence, always both present and going before us giving us clues of the Way. The only cure for what ails us is to renew our confidence in the plowing, in the belief that with all its struggles, God is working a new thing, and at the same time the oldest thing of all, the making of creation. If in God we are a new creation, then why are we surprised to be called beyond our old confidences into new life?  I believe, as Anglicans, that our recovery is in practicing what Professor Fredrica Harris Thompsett happily calls Courageous Incarnation.

The suffering that comes of giving up all that surety and safety is real, but, as Paul says, "I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us." So it is time as the writer of Hebrews admonishes to lift our drooping hands and strengthen our weak knees. It is time to set our hand to the plow.

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