Walk in Love: Episcopal Beliefs and Practices

by Scott Gunn

A homily is not a eulogy. Whereas a eulogy is a speech in praise of a person, a homily is a reflection on the scriptures that have been read. This is an important distinction, because while the homily can and should be personal, it is not focused exclusively on the person who died but on the connection between that person's life and the passages from the Bible that have just been read.

We are reminded that the deceased was not perfect but is beloved by God even so, just as we are.

our prayers reflect our belief and our feelings in the face of death: a combination of joy and grief, celebration and sadness.

As Christians, it is incredibly important that we show up to funerals, to love and support those who are grieving. Even now, decades later, my father remembers every person who came to his mother's funeral.

as Christians, we are called to be honest about death. Jesus talks about death a lot, and our liturgies acknowledge the reality of death.

the creeds focus on the divinity and humanity of Jesus Christ. They focus on God the Father as creator of all that is. And they articulate the nature and role of the Holy Spirit.

To echo Saint John's words, "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was God..." (John 1:1) is to see Jesus not just as a person who lived in the Holy Land 2,000 years ago but as the crux of God's salvation history for all creation and for us.

By repeating Pilate's name every week, we are reminding ourselves of the historicity of Jesus Christ. Pilate is a real person whose identity and existence are archeologically verifiable. Pilate is a real person, tainted by the same sin and fear that inhabit us all. We invoke his name week after week, grounding Jesus in historical reality and exposing the painful gulf between our sins and fear and God's love and hope.

Righteous judgment may look very different for those who endure more evil than most of us can imagine.

The creeds are somewhere between rules of faith, doctrinal statements, poems of belief, and aspirational articulations of what we hope all Christians will confess as their faith.

From the liturgy, ordination vows, and Catechism, we see that Episcopalians take the Bible seriously. But that doesn't mean that we read the Bible literally.

It is important, as much as we are able, to try to hear the words rather than read them from our bulletins or Bibles. Reading is an individual activity, each person individually focused on her own paper. Listening is a communal activity, the entire community focused on one voice, proclaiming aloud the Word of the Lord.

paper that we might have missed in hearing

We shouldn't just skim over the Bible in order to check off "read the Bible" from our to-do list. Instead we are called to give close attention to what we are reading and to notice things that are interesting or confusing, uplifting or upsetting.

It would be all too easy to hear or read the Bible, say to ourselves, "Huh, that's interesting," and then to stop there. But we are called to more than that. We are called to learn, to change, to grow in response to what we hear and read in the Bible.

To inwardly digest the Bible, we are called to be changed, to be transformed, by it. When we read the Bible, we cannot merely ask ourselves, "What have I learned?" We instead must ask ourselves, "How am I being called to change?"

Jesus saved me from believing that I had to be or ever could be "good enough" to warrant salvation. Jesus saved me from believing I had to (or even could) earn God's love by always being perfect.

Being freed from expectations of perfection allowed me to grow more deeply in my faith, to discover the love of God that knows no bounds, to begin to serve God, not out of obligation or fear but out of joy and gratitude. Realizing

God's grace isn't about us or about our actions at all—God's grace is about God's goodness, God's love, God's favor. Grace is about God, not about us.

Grace is the promise that God's love is a free gift to us, regardless of how badly we screw up or how often we fail to do the good that we intend.

It seems that our very participation in life—and in systems of commerce and oppression—can lead us to sin.

The gift of God's grace is active and powerful; grace works in our minds, our hearts, and our wills to enlighten, stir, and strengthen us. There is an expectation that the power of God's grace working in us will change us, enliven and inspire us, so that we can work on behalf of God's kingdom in the world.

The gift of God's grace allows us to become who we were created to be and to do what we were created to do.

We are saved for abundant life, saved for service to God and God's people, saved for the building up of the kingdom of God on earth as it is in heaven.

Salvation in the Bible is about fullness of life.

The salvation of Jesus Christ is about eternal life in heaven, but it's also about eternal life that begins now.

"Keep" reminds us that we have already begun experiencing everlasting life—right here and right now. When we are nourished with the Body and Blood of Christ in the eucharist, it is keeping us, sustaining us, in our eternal life, which is already underway.

Any response to God, whatever form it might take, is a kind of prayer.

adoration is less about a specific kind of action or a certain set of words and instead about an attitude, an orientation of our hearts and minds rooted in the enjoyment of God's very presence.

Praise is simply expressing admiration and awe for who God is. "We praise God, not to obtain anything, but because God's Being draws praise from us"

Intercession is not merely praying for our family and close friends who have asked for our prayers (though that is important); our intercessions should extend to the welfare of the community and, indeed, the whole world.

We don't have to say anything or do anything; we can simply sit in comfortable silence and be together. That's a bit like adoration.

Meditation

am overwhelmed with gratitude that he is in my life. That's a little like praise.

that I tell my spouse thank you on a regular basis.

Sometimes I step in and help without even being asked. I offer myself for support and assistance, however I can. That's kind of like oblation.

often the support I seek is advice, reassurance, comfort, and strength in the midst of a struggle. Seeking help from my spouse, whatever form it might take, is akin to intercession and petition.

Prayer isn't about one kind of interaction with God; it is about relating with God in the richness of adoration, praise, thanksgiving, petition, oblation, and intercession. Prayer is a conversation that takes place in relationship.

When we reach out to God in prayer, does it actually do anything? Does prayer matter?

If we believe that prayer is like a vending machine, where we put in our money and receive a product in exchange, then we become disillusioned when we don't get what we "paid for." If we think that prayer is an assignment at work—something we do in order to earn money or status or acclaim—then we become frustrated when we aren't rewarded for our hard work and good behavior.

Prayer works because it is important, in any relationship, to be honest, to say what we really want and really hope for and really need, and the act of approaching God in prayer, of naming what we yearn for, in itself builds relationship.

The prayers in our Book of Common Prayer reflect the reality that we believe God does intervene with mighty action in the world, and we can and should ask for God's presence and power among us.

But just as prayer takes a lot of forms, the outcome of prayer can take many shapes.

Prayer is powerful, but it is also mysterious. We should approach any moral certainties about prayer with fear and trembling. We can do a great deal of damage to ourselves and one another if we pretend to know precisely how prayer works—any beliefs or assertions that "it must have been God's will" or "if only I'd prayed more or harder" move prayer out of the context of a conversation in relationship and into the context of an obligation or exchange—a deeply flawed context that damages our ability to relate to God.

Prayer, like any spiritual discipline, is a matter of practice.

whatever method you use for prayer, the important thing is to engage in the relationship, making time and space to meet God in prayer. And there are some specific things that you can do in order to improve your relationship with God in prayer.

The church should be central to our lives. When we have thanks to offer or pleas to cry out, we would do well to come to church.

Differences that we might imagine (race, gender, political persuasion, sexual orientation, economic status) fall to the wayside in baptism, as we are grafted into Christ's body, the church.

even though denominations have many differences, the vast majority of Christians recognize each other's baptisms and acknowledge other Christians as part of a universal church.

To say that the church is apostolic means that it continues in the tradition of the apostles, that its faith and practices are rooted in those that Jesus' own followers taught and practiced.

to be restored to unity, we must be reconciled. To be reconciled, we have to know who we are and why we are not already restored to unity. In reconciliation, as in recovery, the first step is admitting we have a problem. In order to be reconciled to one another and to restore the unity that God intends for us, we must first acknowledge the ways that we have fallen short of being the people that God has called us to be.