Originally posted at My Left Wing
The other day, as planned, I attended the ordination and consecration of Bishop Thomas E. Breidenthal. Well, I didn’t attend all of it–sort of left at “half-time”. But I was there to see them “do the deed”, as it were. Having attended the youth event, where Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori was a special guest, the night before, I didn’t really think I needed a whole ordination on top of that. Bottom line, I was tired, and I needed some “sabbath” in my weekend.
But I stayed long enough to hear the sermon, and that’s been on my mind today as I think about the goings-on in this corner of blogtopia (y!sctp!). In particular, Rev. Epting talked about the tension that sometimes exists between doing justice and maintaining unity. Sometimes those principles seem to be at odds with each other, but they are both part of the vows our new bishop was about to take–and they’re part of the baptismal vows of all Episcopalians as well.
Now, I know that we vary here in our beliefs, and it’s sometimes a challenge to convey the essence of some truth without the actual words I choose managing to obscure my meaning. But there are some commonalities that I think go beyond labels–at least the labels we’re used to using. Maryscott, for example, does not describe herself as a person of faith, while I do. And yet, there is something we have in common. You know what I think it is? I think it’s that we’re both “believers”. We don’t believe in all of the same things, but we believe in something, and that something is more important to us than just “winning elections”. So, I’d like to share an excerpt from the sermon
The important thing to remember, my dear brother Tom, and my dear sisters and brothers, is to try to keep the main thing the main thing. Try to keep the main thing the main thing in the midst of all our busyness and our confusion and even sometimes our near-despair, nothing must get in the way–
Okay, that wasn’t the best place to cut that sentence, but it got pretty explicitly Episcopalian at the end of that sentence, and I didn’t want those words to become the focus. Rather, I wanted to point out the similar struggle we sometimes deal with–in fact, we could pretty much use the same words. From the sermon:
We often hear said, “You’re sacrificing justice for unity!”
Hmm…yes. I have heard something like that–but not just in the church. We’ve also struggled with this issue in the world of political activism. Calls for “unity” are sometimes used in an attempt to silence any criticism of the current Democratic leaders. Yet we often feel that we must make these criticisms when we see that someone or some group is being denied justice.
Tonight, I don’t really have a conclusion, but wanted to put this out there for reflection. What is the “main thing” for you? And how do you keep from being sidetracked by petty crap, or from getting too discouraged?
