Cuba: Presiding Bishop's sermon affirms reconciliation
Thursday, March 02, 2006
[Episcopal News Service] The importance of World Mission Sunday --
observed February 26 across the Episcopal Church -- was underscored as
Presiding Bishop Frank Griswold preached in Havana, calling for
reconciliation between the people of Cuba and the United States.
The Most Rev. Frank T. Griswold
Presiding Bishop and Primate
The Episcopal Church
February 26, 2006 Cathedral of the Holy Trinity - Santisima Trinidad
Havana, Cuba
Grace and peace to you my brothers and sisters. My thanks to your
bishop, to the dean, and the clergy and people of the Episcopal Church
of Cuba for your wonderful hospitality.
The Episcopal Church in the United States shares a deep bond with La
Iglesia Episcopal de Cuba. This goes back to 1871, when Bishop Henry
Benjamin Whipple of the Diocese of Minnesota in the United States
stopped in Havana en route to Haiti. When he returned home Bishop
Whipple persuaded the Episcopal Church to send its first clergy and
missionaries to Cuba. This began a relationship that led to the founding
of the missionary Diocese of Cuba as part of the U.S. Church. The
close friendship of our two Churches has continued for 135 years. My
Church is deeply committed to accompanying the Church of Cuba in our
common witness to Jesus.
During my visit here I have been moved greatly by the faithfulness and
vibrancy of your Church. Also, I have been saddened to see the
suffering caused by the policies of my country’s government. The
Episcopal Church in the United States strongly opposes the Blockade
against Cuba. In the four decades of its existence, the Blockade has
done little except exacerbate the suffering of the Cuban people.
Reconciliation must begin, and people of faith must lead the way.
In that spirit, I find myself affected and challenged by this morning’s
Gospel account of the Transfiguration of Christ. Jesus leads Peter,
James, and John to a high mountain to pray. For a moment the disciples
see a vision of Christ’s divinity. They are able to see Jesus as he
truly is: the Incarnate Word of the Living God. Then, the voice of God
pierces through the heavens – “This is my Son, the Beloved.” This
echoes words spoken at Jesus’ baptism. (Mark 9:7) At the moment of the
Transfiguration, just as in the moment of Jesus’ baptism, those present
encounter God’s sheer delight, God’s pleasure, God’s joy.
The story of the Transfiguration points back to the story of Jesus’
baptism because it is in baptism that Jesus – like each of us – most
intimately encounters God’s outpouring of unbounded love. Baptism
marked for Jesus, as it does for us, the beginning of active
participation in God’s work in the world. But Baptism is not about
taking up of an agenda. Rather, baptism is about giving up our own
agendas and giving of ourselves so that God’s plans may be worked in us
by the power of the Holy Spirit. “My food is to do the will of the One
who sent me, and to complete his work,” Jesus declares at the outset of
his public ministry. (John 4:34) For us too, then, by virtue of our
Baptism and God’s love poured out upon us, we are called to engage God’s
work in our world.
This is made clear by Jesus on the mountain of the Transfiguration. The
disciples who witness God’s declaration of love were not allowed by
Jesus to linger in their awe or contemplation. Instead, he brings them
back down from the mountain, back to the work of the baptized in the world.
And what is that work of the baptized? What is the mission of the Church?
The catechism of the American Prayer Book says: “The mission of the
Church is to restore all people to unity with God and each other in
Christ.” (BCP, p. 855).
Or, as St. Paul says, the mission of the Church is to proclaim – in both
word and deed – that “in Christ, God was reconciling the world to
himself, and has entrusted to us the ministry of reconciliation.”
Because of our baptism we, like Jesus, are proclaimed beloved by God and
called to be fellow workers in God’s project of reconciliation.
The ministry of reconciliation strikes a particular chord for me in Cuba
as I witness the devastating effects of the Blockade. My country’s
policies have driven wedges though your country, wedges that are
profoundly at odds with the Scriptural call to unity among all people in
Christ. The U.S. embargo has helped fuel inhumane poverty among your
people, brought large parts of your magnificent cities and
infrastructure to ruins, and cut off Cuban families from the support –
financial and otherwise – of their loved ones in the United States. On
occasion, the embargo even has put distance in the relationship between
our two Churches. American dioceses and parishes are hindered or
blocked entirely from providing financial and logistical support for
their brothers and sisters in Cuba, and my Church has been prevented
from paying the pensions rightfully owed to the clergy of your Church.
This division and separation of people from people is scandalous to a
Church which claims the ministry of reconciliation as its work in the
world. The strongest supporters of the Blockade in my government
frequently make the claim that until Cuba changes its political
structures, Americans and Cubans cannot even come to the same table and
together explore avenues toward healing. Such thinking – in which the
responsibility for repentance, restoration, and healing falls
exclusively on one side of a disagreement – is not the way of
reconciliation laid out for us by the Scripture. Reconciliation
requires each of us working for the re-ordering of all things on earth
according to God’s passionate desire for justness and righteousness. No
one is exempt from this process.
And so, the question is how can we – the Churches of Cuba and the United
States – re-dedicate ourselves to the ministry of reconciliation? Also,
how can we offer an example to others in both of our countries?
The first step must be repentance. We must acknowledge that we have
failed to live into God’s transforming love. As we enter into Lent this
coming Ash Wednesday we are called to think deeply about the ways in
which our actions cause division and pain. We are called to confess
those sins to our merciful God. This process involves letting go of our
own narrow and self-serving views. As Archbishop William Temple said,
repentance means seeking to adopt God’s point of view in place of our
own. In this way, the divine compassion breaks into our lives and shows
us the truth of who we are – not as we would like to be known – but as
God knows us and loves us.
For my country to repent, we must acknowledge that we bear a great deal
of the responsibility for the suffering and pain endured by your country
over the last forty years. Such repentance must include – indeed it
should be led by – the Church. We in the U.S. Church must acknowledge
that, while we long have opposed the embargo, all-too-often we have
accepted it as a fact of life and allowed it to hinder our common
mission with the Episcopal Church of Cuba. I fear we have not spoken
vigorously enough against the embargo.
Some of your clergy have described feeling abandoned by your Mother
Church, and for this, I offer my Church’s repentance and plea for
forgiveness. We must look for creative ways to remain in partnership
with the Diocese of Cuba despite the embargo’s legal restrictions.
Working together, I believe we can move forward in companionship.
To that end, I will return home from my trip to Cuba with four specific
challenges to the Episcopal Church in the United States.
First, I will ask all Episcopalians in the United States to rededicate
themselves to accompanying the ministry of the Church of Cuba in
whatever way they can, certainly through daily prayer.
Second, I will ask my Church – at all levels – to rededicate itself to
advocacy against the Blockade.
Third, I will call upon dioceses and parishes of the Episcopal Church in
the United States to intensify and expand companion relationships with
the Diocese of Cuba.
Fourth, I will ask the national staff of the Episcopal Church and the
Church Pension Group to continue pursuing ways to make full payment of
the pensions owed to Cuban priests who were ordained by the American Church.
The Episcopal Church in the United States is committed to reconciliation
between our two nations because we are limbs and members of the body of
Christ, the Church. By virtue of our baptism we are bound together in
what Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams describes as “solidarities
not of our own choosing.” Each of us is an indispensable member of
Christ’s risen body. When one member of the body suffers, we all suffer.
“This is my Son, the Beloved,” thunders the voice of God on the mountain
of the Transfiguration. That same voice likewise proclaims that each of
us is beloved of God. God sent his only Son among us to embody that
love. God’s saving embrace enfolds all history and can contain all the
complexities, struggles, divisions and difficulties which challenge and
afflict us.
Even the wide gulf of the embargo can be made small by God’s love; even
years of separation can be undone by the saving embrace of our God, who
“in Christ was reconciling the world to himself.”
Amen.
http://www.episcopalchurch.org/3577_72442_ENG_HTM.htm
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