The Episcopal Diocese of East Tennessee,
meeting in convention Feb. 10, 2007, in Gatlinburg, Tenn.

---

Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori's address to the East Tennessee convention

It is a great joy and delight to be with you. What a beautiful place this is. … I bring you greetings from all the staff at the Church Center in New York, and on behalf of the rest of the church, I want to thank you for your faithful stewardship, your full participation in and contribution to the budget of the General Convention is vital to the mission and ministry of the church, and I am grateful for your increase this year. It is a sign of solarity with people across this nation and in the 15 other countries where the Episcopal Church is present. As the church together we can do far more and do it more effectively than any of us alone. Part of the mission of the Episcopal Church includes our covenant relationships with other parts of the Communion, like the dioceses in Mexico and Central America that are formerly part of the Episcopal Church.

Last weekend I visited the Episcopal Church in Cuba , a diocese that until the late 1960s was part of this church, but at present does not belong to any province. We still have a covenant relationship with Cuba , even though our interactions are severely limited by our governmental policies. The province of this church and of Canada and the West Indies oversee the church in Cuba and appoint its bishops. I was there to participate in the metropolitan council and the annual gathering of their diocesan synod.

Despite the language differences, you would recognize the same passion for mission and ministry in that place, which is bigger than the state of Tennessee . They have one bishop at present. They remain quite isolated because of the embargo, and I would encourage you to reach out to them in any way you can – at the very least, offer them your prayers and your solidarity. You might also speak to your elected officials; there is energy in Congress to remove the barriers of trade and exchange with Cuba , but the administration the last time that was discussed threatened to veto.

Cuba is but one example of our interconnectedness in the body of Christ. This very gathering here in Gatlinburg is a celebration and recognition of the interconnected body that is the Diocese of East Tennessee. You work together year by year to make mission and ministry possible in this part of Tennessee , and I gather in a small part of Georgia . How we work together is a making evident, a sacrament, of the greatest reality that is this part of the body of Christ.

Our mission as Christians is the healing of the whole body … to restore all people to unity with God and each other in Christ. That means all people – not just East Tennessee, not just Episcopalians, not just Christians – it means the whole family of God … that includes all of Creation, not only the human part.

We work toward healing the body of God's creation in a variety of ways. The General Convention last summer identified a series of priorities for our common mission support, and you're probably familiar with at least the first one: justice and peace work, framed by the Millennium Development Goals. But they also identified priorities having to do with ministry with youth, young people and children; reconciliation and evangelism; the transformation of congregations; and partnerships, both within the Anglican Communion and with ecumenical and interfaith groups. All of those are particular ways of teaching God's mission in reconciling the world.

The mission of the church reconciles the whole body of God's creation and can also be spoken of as building the reign of God. That vision of a healed and restored world is what you and I are charged with doing and being in this world. That dream of God reverberates throughout a long history of encounter with God in key revivals and in the second covenant with Jesus: coming home again to Eden, leaving slavery in Egypt, entering the promised land, drawing all nations to into Zion, building a city set on a hill, the great banquet set on a hillside to which all people are invited – those are all images of a world restored to right relationship. Jesus himself acts out those images when he feeds the multitude, when he heals people and then invites the people around them to be their friends and restore them to community, and when he has the final supper with the disciples, to provide them with the great dream of God. His resurrection appearances include several about food and feeding people, and all are about restoring the community to health and wholeness.

The last part of Matthew's gospel, starting in chapter 25, brings a call to that kind of service of healing and reconciliation. "I was hungry, and you gave me food; I was thirsty, and you gave me something to drink; I was a stranger, and you welcomed me; I was naked, and you gave me clothing; I was sick, and you cared for me; I was in prison, and you visited me." The Millennium Development Goals are a contemporary illustration of the work that Jesus did himself, and of the work to which he continues to call his followers.

Some people understand the mission of the church to be primarily about the Great Commission, which comes later in Matthew's gospel: "Go therefore and make disciples of all nations." But both of them are part of loving God and loving our neighbors as ourselves, and one cannot be divorced from the other. I don't imagine that God has any patience with arguments over whether evangelism or social justice ministry is more important. In order to love God and neighbor, we have to do both. Evangelism has to be understood in the sense of our baptismal covenant, as sharing the good news of Christ in both word and deed. And we would do well to recall that we cannot love God whom we cannot see, if we do not love our neighbor, whom we do see.

The world is not reconciled, as long as some live without: without food, without good news, without adequate housing, without peace or clothing or justice. The work of this church is to build a world of shalom. That dream of shalom includes all of those other versions of God's dream – about adequate streets and food and housing and employment and health care and education and equality and the peace that comes only when justice is present and available to all.

The Millennium Development Goals are a vision of that kind of shalom for the world. They focus on extreme poverty – the kind of poverty that prevents children from developing their full mental capacity because their bodies and brains are malnourished, and the kind of poverty that makes people far more susceptible to disease and to shorter life spans.

The goals begin with the fact that one-third of the world's people do not have adequate resources to maintain the stuff of life, and that every day a billion – a billion – people go to bed hungry. The first of the goals aims to cut that number in half by the year 2015, eight years from now. The other goals move on from hunger to include maternal health care – like what you just heard about – so that healthy children are brought into this world. The goals include primary education for all children, both girls and boys; gender equity and the empowerment of women. Many of these goals focus on the anawim, the little ones, on whom Jesus' own ministry focused: widows, orphans, those with infirmities and communicable diseases, women in general … those who labor at occupations labeled "unclean"– and I reflect on the fact that your resolution this morning dealt with people who work in occupations within the nuclear energy and weapons industry that is in our society often considered unclean.

Sociologists and anthropologists know that when women are educated and empowered, their families and communities reap the benefits. The larger community becomes healthier and develops a greater capacity for life, and that is the beginning of the kind of abundant life that Jesus said is the birthright of all human beings. Where the least among us are served, the whole community begins to flourish.

The Millennium Development Goals also include drastic reductions in preventable diseases like AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria, and they include halving the childhood mortality rate. Did you know that 10,000 people die every day from diseases that can be prevented or treated?

The last two goals have to do with environmentally sustainable development and the development of global partnerships, especially partnerships around trade and debt reduction and initiatives to provide development.

These goals mean profound change, even catastrophic changes, in that sense of gospel overturning. They're looking for change in the way the world works, or more accurately, in the way the world doesn't work. But the reality is that they only go halfway. The first goal is to halve the number of those who face abject poverty by 2015; it's an achievable goal if we're serious about doing the work involved, and it's certainly not easy work. But we can't ever sit back and say, "we've done it, we've met the goal," not until every human being – every human being – has a full and adequate diet, not just half the starving people in this world. Not until every child is born into this world with all the adequacy of health care for him and for his mother. Not until every child has the full expectation of equal education, equal rights and equal access to the necessities and blessings of this world. Not until every person has the full opportunity to use all her God-given gifts and truly know a life of abundance. …

The Millennium Development Goals have caught the imagination of this church in a way that is quite startling. I first heard about them in 1998, when Bishop Bob Ladehoff of Oregon then came back from Lambeth, and we talked about Jubilee and 0.7 percent. I understood the part about Jubilee, but where did that number come from? It literally took me years to discover that the 0.7 percent number came out of calculations … nearly 40 years ago. They recognized that if the developed nations of the world were willing to commit a relatively small percentage of their annual income to the needs of the developing world that global poverty could largely be eliminated. That number is at the centerpiece of the push by Episcopalians for Global Reconciliation in a growing awareness of the MDGs. The number is based on governmental giving. As a sign of solidarity, more than 70 dioceses, including this one, have indicated that they too will give at least that percentage of their annual budget for international development and will encourage congregations to do the same. Your diocese is a shining example of how awareness is beginning to change your understanding of mission.

There's an untold or unrecognized challenge in this story, however. The scale of funding required will not be reached through the giving of individuals or dioceses, however generous. Giving by members of this church is an essential and prophetic act, one that challenges others, especially governments, to join in the work. But the MDGs can only be met by governmental generosity, and it will be here that the next work of the MDGs is going to have to focus. You and I as Episcopalians, and all the other like-minded folks we can muster, of whatever faith or denomination or none are going to have to lobby our government to raise the level of aid we give to 1 percent of the annual budget.

Currently, the U.S. gives about a quarter of what's needed. The Scandinavian countries meet the goal, but it should be obvious that their economies are a lot smaller than ours. England and France and some of the other EU nations are also giving increasing portions of their budgets. Yes, this country is generous. But if we're going to build a reconciled world, we're going to have to be even more serious about it.

If you take nothing else home from this gathering, I hope you'll carry away the message that advocacy is essential. That means the willingness of all our senators and congressional representatives to make international development a priority. That means being willing to write letters and call Washington to say that children are starving in Bangladesh or dying of AIDS in Zimbabwe , that we care; we want our government to do more to put a stop to it. Remember, they work for you.

As Christians, we believe that the world is not supposed to permit girls to be excluded from school or to allow mothers die in childbirth because no one will go to help. We believe that malaria is largely preventable; we believe that all people should have clean water to drink and adequate food and shelter. We take seriously what Jesus said, that whenever you did not do this for one of the least of these, you ignored the presence of God in your midst.

Now, the protest I most often hear is that the church is not supposed to meddle in politics. Well, my friends, politics is the art of living in community. It doesn't have to be a dirty word. Spanish even has two words for it: politica means politics; politicacia means dirty politics. The kingdom of God is about a society of peace and justice. The goals won't be achieved without the willingness to use all the gifts at our disposal, including politics.

All of Jesus' preaching and teaching about the kingdom of God is a pointed way of saying that God is in charge, and not any human government. Our task is to challenge those governments to live up to a higher standard, one that is worthy of God's devotion.

Working on the MDGs is not just a matter of identifying a place to send your money. It is about developing truly giving relationships and listening to and learning from other people's experiences. How many of you have gone on a mission trip or helped to build a house here, or fed the homeless? You have some sense of how one's own heart is transformed by that experience. It's only when we can bring that kind of change that comes when you and I have our hearts and minds converted that the world around us will begin to be transformed. The basic message of Christianity is about that kind of transformation – that a relationship with God has and does begin to change us; that the power of the resurrection can overcome the desert all around us and within us; that Jesus shows that how love our neighbors can transform the society in which we live by giving all we are and have to God's purposes. And the message tells us over and over again that the kingdom of God will prevail, over all the petty kingdoms of this world.

Transformation can begin with partnerships, through building up the body of Christ in interpersonal relationships. Those partnerships can begin to move us away from an approach to the suffering of this world that is merely putting band-aids and charity on the problem, and move us forward, transforming the systems of this world that permit the ungodly and inhumane suffering and poverty and violence that are so rampant.

Our full communion with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America is an example of the partnership that globalized how we approach the MDGs. Our own Office of Government Relations and the ELCA' Washington office have collaborated to produce a study guide on the MDGs called, "God's Mission to the World." It's designed for parish use, it's just been published, it would be an excellent Lenten study and it's free for downloading. You can order multiple copies from Episcopal Books and Resources for a $7.50 charge for shipping.

You can also join ONE Episcopalian, the ONE campaign to make poverty history. You can learn about all of this on the Web site of the Episcopal Public Policy Network, and I'm sure there are resources out in the hall about all of these.

You and I are meant to build a society of peace with justice. That will not happen without challenging the structures of this world, whether city or state or national level. Systems of injustice do not change only through prayer, though prayer is essential. Prayer comes in many forms: the words we pray week by week in church – words that convert our hearts and our minds; the kind of prayer of presence and companionship; the kind that's shouted from the housetops; the kind that gets our hands dirty and strengthens our hearts.

Prayer is involved the other kind of transformation as well – the prayer that prepares and empowers us for writing a letter to or calling our senators; the prayer that undergirds conversion of hearts in conversation with our families and neighbors and fellow parishioners and even strangers.

Justice calls us daily to use all the gifts we've been given – the power of prayer, the power of the vote, the power of persuasion and the power that comes to transform relationships. We have the ability to transform this world, to realize the vision of the reign of God, in Appalachia as well as in Africa and Asia .

Human communities are meant to be sustainers and empowerers of life, not slues of despair. Together, we have the ability to live out that vision of hope, to help this country become reconcilers and healers rather than bearers of war and violence.

It is long past time to beat our swords into plowshares, to lay down our weapons of destruction and to build an open city of truly human relationships, rooted in the radical freedom and friendship of God.

May God bless that work; may God bless each one of us; and may God bless our ability to continue to dream that dream of shalom until the entire Creation once more is whole.