Religious Left?

Let’s say one thing clearly: it’s about us and not about the ECUSA! In our view the Episcopal Church is a broad and comprehensive Church and certainly not a leftist club. But it is a ‘proud member of the  Christian left’ that we are trying to be. This is not easy for people born in a post-communist country, where most of the associations with ‘left’ are pretty bad. We are, nonetheless, convinced that Christianity has very much in common with the leftist point of view. From the early Church Fathers, through Sir Thomas More to the best theologians and Church leaders of our time (including the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Patriarch of Constantinople) the major Christian writers have been presenting views that the left find agreeable. We do not claim the Bible or the Christian Tradition for the purposes of an ideology. We are aware of the multitude of views and ideas in the Bible and in the Church and we don’t want to call those Christian who have more conservative political and religious convictions ‘heretics’. On the contrary, we would like to find people with various ideas in the Church. We are not afraid of difficult questions and the confrontation with the opinions of the others. But we consider ourselves a part of the long tradition of the social Gospel, religious socialism, Liberation and Feminist theology. In our opinion the contemporary ‘Queer-Theology’ is a new form of Liberation theology. Therefore it is not just the case of the LGBT persons. It can open everyone’s eyes for the new liberating dimension of the Gospel. The Salvation ‘from above’ can be a totally abstract term if it doesn’t become alive and concrete in the world. ‘Come Holy Spirit and renew the face of the earth’, said Pope John Paul II in Warsaw, during his first visit to Poland. But he added two new words to this ancient prayer: ‘this earth’. And that was a very important message to the people in Poland. A religious one, but with very important political, social and cultural dimensions. Christianity is not (only) about the ‘above’. It is about this earth. On this earth we have to live with each other and with the whole creation: in peace and harmony. Heaven and earth have to become one: in God ‘in whom we live and move and have our being’. This is the way we experience the reality of the Eucharist. During almost every Liturgy in the Eastern churches the Cherubic Hymn is sung, one that stresses the unity between the Liturgical action in the church and the perpetual spiritual Liturgy in heaven. That is why the Eastern Christians are bold to call the Eucharist a DIVINE Liturgy. And in Western Churches a priest breaking the Host in half makes an exclamation: ‘We break this bread to share in the body of Christ’ to which people respond with the words of 1 Cor 10:17: ‘Though we are many, we are one body, because we all share in one bread’. In the Holy Communion we receive the bread and the cup that are the communion with the Body and the Blood of Our Lord. Therefore we are united with others who are standing with us around the Holy Table, but also with the whole humanity of all ages, with the whole creation and with the Creator and Redeemer himself. In the Eucharist we are doing something very strange, really at odds with our daily experience: we are celebrating something we’re ‘just’ hoping for: the renewal of the Earth and the fulfillment of the eternal dream of God: on Earth as it is in Heaven. And perhaps this is the heart of our Christian leftism…