DWTX from Anaheim – The 76th General Convention can regard challenges as opportunities for “ubuntu” or togetherness, or can choose “business as usual” and fail, Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori told a joint session of bishops and deputies Tuesday, July 7, in the Anaheim Convention Center.
Ubuntu, the theme of the 76th General Convention, is from an African concept that means, “I can only become a whole person in relationship with others,” Jefferts Schori said. “There is no ‘I’ without ‘you,’ and in our context, you and I are known only as we reflect the image of the one who created us.”
In addition to inclusivity and poverty, she cited as crises the financial meltdown and the “great Western heresy — that we can be saved as individuals, that any of us alone can be in right relationship with God.” In some quarters it occurs through “insisting that salvation depends on reciting a specific verbal formula about Jesus.”
“That individualist focus is a form of idolatry, for it puts me and my words in the place that only God can occupy, at the center of existence, as the ground of all being. That heresy is one reason for the theme of this convention,” she added.
“If we want to be faithful we need to be continually rediscovering that my needs are not the only significant ones. We are our siblings’ keepers and their knowers, and we cannot be known without them — we have no meaning, no true existence in isolation. We shall indeed die as we forget or ignore that reality.”
The economic crisis underlies “all the conversation and debate. That we do not have the same kind of financial resources to address them as we had three years ago — that is another kind of crisis both local and global,” she said.
The temptation for deputies and bishops will be to see “one small part of God’s mission” as the overarching reason for the church’s existence, she said. But she added that: “the structures of this church are resources for God’s mission but are not God’s mission in themselves.
“We will fail if we choose business as usual. There will be cross-shaped decisions in our work; but if we look faithfully, there will be resurrection as well. This is our moment of judgment, our crisis. We can make our decisions in hope, and we can speak the love of God through this church. And we can do it together.”
Source – Episcopal News Service
Tags: Presiding Bishop