wfn.org | Commentary

[ENS.parti@ecunet.org (ENS)]

September 26, 1997
Episcopal News Service
Jim Solheim, Director
212-922-5385
ens@ecunet.org

97-1968
Commentary                                                        
     The following comment was written by the Rev. Richard Jeske,
Lutheran co-chair of the Lutheran-Episcopal Coordinating Committee,
following a vote by the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America
rejecting the Concordat of Agreement that would have established full
communion.

A Love Letter to the Episcopal Church

     We Love you. That is the first thing which must be said, spoken
even in the midst of pain and sorrow, when things just didn't go, as they
should have gone. We love you.
     We love you because you happened to be there when we had one of
those family squabbles, those rounds of clan upheaval which can often
make the closest of kin act in the most inelegant of ways. It's like
bringing your betrothed home to meet the family, but one faction came to
the party already knowing they weren't going to like him. But
with time--you've seen it happen before--he could eventually even
become their favorite.
     The decision of 66.1 percent of the ELCA delegates to join with you
in full communion fell just six votes short of the required number to
make it official. We are embarrassed, chagrined, hurt, and in a time of
deep pain. However, that clear majority also speaks a message of faith
and hope and love to us and, we trust, to you as well.
     We love you because you embraced and welcomed and invited us to
join with you in mission and ministry. Some of our family, however,
came with scars deeply etched in their historic consciousness, wounds
which by your action you are seeking to heal.
     We love you because you are the ones who are making us look at our
own heritage and are asking us to rediscover who we always have been
and are. Don't stop doing that. We had to rediscover things which we in
America have lost, which other members of the Lutheran family
elsewhere in the world enjoy and treasure. Yes, we had the Scriptures, as
do all other Christians, yes we had sacraments and creeds, as do most
other Christians. But we shared with you in the Protestant tradition
something which not all other Protestants cared about, a witness to the
continuity of the church throughout the ages, the historic ministry of
bishop, priest and deacon.
     You helped us rediscover that our confessional writings treasure that
historic shape of ministry. You agreed with us that it was not necessary
for salvation, or for the validity of the church, or even for faithfulness to
the gospel, to maintain that historic shape of ministry.
Yet you helped us see that it was an important ingredient for mission and
witness in a culture which has little use for history, which holds up the
self as the measure of all things but which in its quiet, more introspective
moments hungers and thirsts for encounter with incarnational continuity
in space and time.
     You were the ones who asked us to rediscover in our heritage that
which you treasure as  a gift of God--episcopacy. It was an old issue
which still needed healing and you are the agent by which healing will
take place. Unfortunately, you have caught the flak from some who
didn't like the prescription. Do not fear, however, that your invitation to
healing has fallen on deaf ears. Two-thirds of us have spoken, and the
story is not yet over.
     We love you, and because of that love we are bold enough to ask
you to be patient with us. In the providence of God your conventions are
triennial and ours biennial. So we voted by a 98 percent margin to
commit ourselves for the next two years to a process of education and
rediscovery, and to aspire in 1999 to make that embrace which so
narrowly eluded us this time, and to begin our journey together officially
in full communion.
     In this interim period we ask you to pray for us. Our bonds will be
all the stronger for this interim, our mutual love will rest on even firmer
foundation, and our readiness for mutual ministry will be affirmed on a
much wider basis than could have been achieved at the present time. 
     Remember, we love you, and we thank you for your ministry of
healing and partnership with us, steep and uneven as the road at times
may seem. For all your gifts which you have shared and for those which
will be shared in the future, to God all praise and glory.

--Richard L. Jeske