Diocesan
Life Columns
Bishop Paul V. Marshall
Bishop Paul's writes a monthly column for the Diocesan Newspaper, Diocesan
Life, edited by Communication
Minister, Bill Lewellis.
For more features from the life of our diocese, check Diocesanlife....ONLINE; and Bethlehem
News.
When
does help become control?
Bishop Paul V. Marshall
Diocesan Life, July/August 2004
She looked at me with her steady black eyes and said quietly, "Have you
ever
thought that wanting to help can be a form of control?"
It was one of those moments one is grateful for without enjoying them - like
having adhesions broken on healing tissue or a bad tooth finally out.
The gospel lesson the day before had been "He who would
save his life will lose it." The epistle had been Paul's struggle with
the church in Galatia about what freedom really is. Helping and controlling.
"Before faith came," St. Paul says, everything was about control -
he saw Law as a pedagogue, that ancient slave whose sole job was to control the
behavior of children and make sure they learned their lessons. You could make
yourself be good in this world before faith. You could in fact make God like
you - or so Paul thought.
Jesus had exploded that myth by telling the rich young man that if you want
to make God like you, you must sacrifice everything; to another he said you
must have unlimited love of neighbor-if you want to make things come out all
right, the burden is infinitely heavy. He also said that if you feel the burden,
come to him and he will give you rest.
St. Paul had learned something about putting the burden down. He wrote about
resting in Christ, complete reliance on God. Faith with a capital F.
He understood the universe to be moving towards its completion in Christ, and
urged both patience and excitement as the Spirit moved everything toward its
completion.
About his own work, which we now see as the creation of global Christianity,
he would only say that he planted seeds and let God worry about the level and
timing of the harvest.
There is a line between witness and manipulation. There is a line between sharing
our vision and nagging others to accept it. There is a line between offering
to help and insisting that our help be received.
That line defines the area in which we allow other people their freedom. It
defines the area in which we allow the Spirit to work according to God's timetable.
As perceptive and corrective as our insights may be, others may not yet be
in a time or place where they can fully hear them. So we plant seeds and wait
for God to give the harvest.
Besides allowing God and other people time and space, such an attitude gives
us freedom from that desperate need to effect change in other people that can
rob the joy and peace of our own lives.
What it boils down to, I think, is that I will love you and care about you,
but I will not take responsibility for how your life turns out, because our
lives are in God's hands. I can no more control the outcome of your life than
I can of my own!
The fundamental attitude of faith in St. Paul's sense of trusting God for outcomes
has something to say to our life together as Episcopalians.
We can be obsessed with managing the outcomes in our present tensions to the
point where our parishes become more about themselves than about sharing Christ.
Frankly, I would be heartbroken to see more people leave the Episcopal Church,
and I hope they don't, but I also know that groups have been leaving - over
this issue or that - since the middle of the 1800s.
I will do everything I can to make sure that every member of this diocese knows
that they are loved and valued for who they are, and I will be as clear as
I can about how we understand the organization and life of the community we
call ECUSA, and I will do the tasks the constitution and canons make it my
responsibility to do.
What I will not do is make our life together about anything more than it is:
learning and doing the work of Jesus Christ, telling what we have seen and
heard at his feet.
Christ calls us to be his Body to each other and for the world. In my very
first convention address to this diocese I spoke of the need to share Christ
with entire generations that stumble through life without God. We have done
what we can to make that emphasis real for parishes year by year. Most recently,
all of the clergy and many vestries have studied and discussed Reclaiming the
Great Commission, the story of how an entire diocese gained an understanding
of itself as a body in mission.
Here is where the control issue comes in. Reclaiming the Great Commission is
the story of what happened in Texas. It is not a "program" to be
imposed on any diocese or parish. We will through the coming year be again
holding before the diocese, as we did in the "Share the Bread" years,
the goal of each parish understanding itself as a mission outpost of the Kingdom
of Christ, and the Evangelism Commission will do what it can to provide resources
for those ready to move more deeply into mission.
I write this because there are those who are concerned that our efforts in
telling good news will be coercive of parishes and clergy.
We do not have the luxury of contending over whether or how any given parish
intensifies its sense of mission. But nobody will impose anything on any parish.
Jesus has already done that: Matthew 28.
What many of us will do again and again, is to try to keep the seeds sown,
praying that in God's time the Episcopal Church will reach its potential to
witness and share its unique perspective on faith, worship, and life. But the
outcome is in God's hands.
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