As an adult, overall, I’ve been proud to be an Episcopalian.  I enjoy the messiness of our process, the inconsistencies in our worship from place to place, the great clergy and lay people who have been doing peace and justice work forever and the incredibly sharp older people undercover in the guilds of the church. I have been in liberal city churches in Los Angeles and New York so my experience is limited, but on the whole I like who we are. 

I have understood my and most of my friends’ role in the church as sort of a Dorothy Day, and sort of an old-style parish priest.  Dorothy Day, who was a founder of the Catholic Worker Movement, is famous for joining the Catholic Church as an adult while maintaining a healthy suspicion of the church, firmly planting herself at the margins of the institution while defending and living alongside the poor and outcast.  I am like the parish priest in the old English sense, even though I am neither old nor English, in that the parish priest is called to minister to all those within the bounds of the parish, the physical boundaries of the area from which the church community should be drawn.  Walking the bounds is something like policing a beat, checking that everything and everyone is okay.  What logically follows is that the priest is not just responsible for the spiritual well being of the people who choose to come in on Sunday mornings, but also the general well being of the community, particularly those Jesus took up cause with-- those without access to power: children, the homeless, the poor, the despised, the outcast, the sick…you know what I mean.

When I was the chaplain at UCLA, my bishop, at a fundraising event, described me as completely Matthew 25.  Being me, and it being my community, we all looked at each other wondering what Matthew 25 said.  Two of the Episcopal Urban Interns grabbed a Bible, looked it up (while the bishop was still talking) and mouthed across the crowd to me, “vestal virgins.”  Matthew 25 begins with that story of preparedness but concludes, and I hope this is what the bishop meant, “I was hungry and you gave me food, I was naked and you clothed me, I was in prison and you came to visit me…whatever you have done to the least of these, you have done to me.”

The idea of a life of service is not talked about much anymore.  I was in college in the early 90’s and it wasn’t talked about then.  We talk more about satisfaction, of not wasting our time on the things that we watched make our parents unhappy, but trying to find meaning in our lives.  I think many of us, I know many of my friends, are just trying to figure out how to get out of debt accumulated to go to school and also have a decent quality of life.

Among my friends and colleagues, I think I have the best deal.  What I don’t have is a church career on track to make me rector of a massive church when I’m fifty.  I don’t have the kind of income that guarantees me the vacations, home and cars that my cousins and friends my age are beginning to accumulate.  I don’t have a plan to be finished with my monthly contribution to Salliemae for quite awhile.

What I do have is the opportunity to build a community almost from scratch, as the Episcopal Chaplain at Columbia, committed to real engagement of both the spiritual life and the incarnational, fleshy, brokenness all around us.  I am paid to demand much of myself in prayer and study, in careful consideration of and conversation with many wise lay people, deacons, priests and bishops and to decide for myself what God calls me to do.  I have the responsibility to proclaim what I discern, what I am compelled by, believing God works in us to build the church.  I have the interesting discipline as a young person to consider the overall good of the church, or my community, before shooting off at the mouth.  I have the responsibility of knowing that my words will follow me and might actually have impact, and so should be delivered with some care and consideration. 

I guess I’m describing being an adult in what is to me a truly authentic way.  Last night I read the theological statement on human sexuality from our bishops meeting in Kanuga.  For all of my sense of doing for others or calling all of us in the church to look at the systems we support and the hatred and oppression we can inflict in our naiveté if not our outright neglect, I am always surprised at how deeply I too am personally hurt by that insensitivity in my church. 

That is my real starting place. 

I have experienced the racist church, the sexist church, and the homophobic church.  I have seen my friends defeated and made hopeless by the ordination process, a weak or controlling priest or layperson on a Commission on Ministry or just some published message of hate a local church posts to prove their “orthodoxy.” 

The image of the hard wood of the cross brings to mind Matthew Shephard and lynching mobs for me this Lent.  This year I am closer to the image of the body of Christ beaten than I have ever been.  My meditation has been on the body of Christ as humanity, humiliated by those who see power and unity above humanity. 

The young clergy crew is a little notorious in our church for not being about issues but about mission.  I would like to be that way, except I don’t know how to welcome people in to a church that doesn’t really welcome them, that won’t risk for them, without myself publicly challenging that institution.  That “we’re here for you” crap should be taken down from in front of church headquarters in New York City today, unless they and we are really willing to take the risks that would prove to us, we that also do the work of this church, that they might actually be willing to be there for all of us.  Not in secret, pastorally, which is what got us into this mess in the first place, but out in the open (think the dusty hill where the body of Christ hangs tattered).  Today as a 30 year old priest I would like to hear a bishop say publicly that not just the pastoral, personal harm but the injustice of supporting the homophobic status quo that would have so many of the fine priests of this church around the country, in every diocese de-frocked, is sin.  It is just sin.  Oh yeah, and if you do church, you get to use those words.  Worse than what our silence says to clergy is what it says to all the people of God.  It is a tragic mistake to underestimate the harm as well as the good the church can do.  

I’ve digressed from the topic I was assigned:  Social Justice and GenX clergy.  Well, friends, that’s what it looks like to pursue social justice in the church.  The risk and the freedom of telling the truth as you see it, because who knows, maybe God causes you to feel it the way you do for a reason.  When I began the ordination process I was told by a few senior priests to go out and live a good, rich life and come back to the church when I had done what I wanted to do.  I think they meant well by it.  What I would ask of all of you, is to come into the church, live a good, rich life here with us.  Share the vision of the world and the church God has given to you, let us hear the unique voice God has given to you, and here among us do what it is that you are called to do, so that we may become the church that we are called to be.