God's Dream

The dust is settling but we still have a long way to go to live together with so many things changing around us.  Horrible events in Charleston's Mother Emmanuel church, all the cries to remove confederate flags from all sorts of venues, rulings from our Supreme Court that will have lasting effects on many of us, and our own church in General Convention responding to the ruling by the Supreme Court and fashioning a standard for marriage that no longer regards male AND female as necessary distinctions.  We have voted to divest from fossil fuels.  We elected our first African-American Presiding Bishop. Heady days for what once was known as the Church of the Frozen Chosen.  Whew!  

One clergy opinionator and friend wrote in a Florida newspaper that we were experiencing a revival in the Episcopal Church.  Rev. Fishburne closed his column saying, “Bishop Curry says we are called to be evangelists to spread that hope: 'Jesus has shown us the way out of our nightmare into God's dream.' There is no reason this dream cannot be realized in Tallahassee and in Charleston.”  

Bishop Curry was talking about the hope that his father experienced in first worshipping with the woman who would become Bishop Curry's mother.  

It's a great story that speaks from a level greater than all the legislation of General Convention, greater than all conversations about change, greater than all the ways we have chosen to respond to the a troubled world around our beloved denomination.  

It is important for us to continue to let the dust settle and when our turn comes to start telling our own stories about how we have found something precious in this house of God's.  Maybe even better, to learn the story that tells how we were found instead of our doing the finding.  

What happened in Salt Lake City, Charleston, Washington DC and Columbia these past weeks will bring about many changes in the lives we share officially, canonically, structurally, nationally.  But it will likely not match the story we are called to tell the world about our part in this dream of God's.