Katherine Jefferts Schori - A Voice of Reason
Posted: October 1st, 2007 at 3:36 pm
Averel Wilson
In this day of religious exclusionism, couldn’t you just hug the Most Reverend Katherine Jefferts Schori, the new presiding bishop of the U.S. Episcopal Church? Yesterday, in response to a demand by Episcopal church leaders to roll back support for same-sex unions, she said unequivocally that the U.S. church would do no such thing.
Conservative bishops such as the Right Rev. Robert Duncan, bishop of Pittsburgh, believe that Anglican leaders in Africa have a truer understanding of Christ’s teachings, and that the church in the West “has lost its way”. So, is that “truer inderstanding” one of exclusionism, of marginalizing those whose life’s path is a little outside the mainstream? I don’t know the Bible intimately (or, truthfuly, very well at all), but I’m quite sure that the spirit of what I learned in Sunday school was about reaching out, bridging differences, and making life easier for those on the margins. We didn’t parse the Bible in order to exclude people from the big umbrella of the church. And I don’t remember Jesus looking for ways to throw people out either…except for those money lenders, and they did require some reeducating..
At the end of the day, this very narrow reading of the Bible, or, for that matter, the Torah, or the Koran, accomplishes nothing that couldn’t be accomplished with a broader, more inclusive interpretation. It simply foments conflict. And those who insist on a focus of exclusionism within their religion, who feel that they alone have a corner on religious truth, have an awful lot to answer for. Behaving in a “Christian” manner used to mean something positive, and could be applied to anyone of any faith (or of no faith whatsoever); taken as the Anglican communion would like us to, it’s not an adjective I’d want affixed to me.
