By Reverend Laurie DeMott

This was not a new battle. The Episcopal Church first voted to support the ordination of women in 1976, and in 2003, rocked the boat again by voting to elect a gay minister as Bishop of the New Hampshire diocese. As conservative churches have become more openly rebellious over these policies, the Episcopal Church likewise has become more insistent on enforcing their bishops to accept the inclusion of all people to ministry regardless of gender or sexuality. As a result, in the last few years, many conservative churches have chosen to defect from the denomination and place themselves under the juridiction of Anglican bishops in Africa and South America where ordination of gays and women is still forbidden. And so, four years ago, Reverend Joe Rees and a majority of his congregation declared that they would align themselves with the Anglican church of Bolivia and by the way, would be keeping the church building for themselves.

The Episcopal diocese took the pastor and congregation to court and it won: the newly declared Anglicans would have to find somewhere else to worship. Accordingly last Sunday, Reverend Joe Rees and his conservative allies moved to a new building while the members of the original congregation who had stayed true to the Episcopal diocese reclaimed their sanctuary. There must have been a lot of sadness mixed in with their joy, however, because less than a dozen people remained steadfastly Episcopalian while 225 members followed Reverend Rees to realign themselves with the Anglicans.

We live in an increasingly fragmented society where people identify themselves often by a single characteristic: gender, sexuality, color, political leaning, or religious belief. A few years ago, my son briefly dated a girl who was also the daughter of a minister. I met the girl's mother at a Parent's Day at his college, and when John introduced us, he said to his friend's mother, "This is my Mom, Laurie DeMott. I'm a preacher's kid, too, because my Mom's a minister, just like your husband."

The mother cooly shook my hand, and in an effort to make conversation I asked, "And what church does your husband serve?"

She said, "It was the Episcopal Church in Rochester but last year we voted to become part of the Anglican Church in Uganda."

And there the two of us stood, suddenly knowing everything we needed to know about each other: I am a woman minister, and she is a member of a church willing to defy an entire denomination in protest over my very existence as a preacher. Now maybe, in fact, the two of us had a lot of things in common -- maybe she loved music as I do or could identify an Eastern Kingbird from the way it flicks its tail as I can but I never found out because the rest of the conversation was short and very stilted. The identifying characteristic of my ordination as a woman and her protest of that very possibility formed an instantaneous chasm between us. (As a footnote, fortunately, John and this woman's daughter broke up soon after that over issues that had nothing to do with religion but I admit that for a few weeks I had some anxious moments trying to imagine Thanksgiving with the inlaws.)

We live in a fragmented society. We worship with people who share our particular set of beliefs right down to the translation of the Bible we prefer. We listen to news programs targeted to certain political persuasions so that we will not be discomforted hearing ideas we cannot share. We argue over who gets to wear the badge "Feminist", and whether the word "married" can be claimed by people of the same gender, wanting instead to reserve certain titles exclusively for our own use. We seek out like-minded people and others who share our experiences because it makes us feel less isolated in a confusing changing world but ironically the end result is that when we do so, we often end up even more alone. We grow less and less able to interact with those unlike ourselves because they have become too alien to us, and we slice our identities into smaller and smaller pieces until we feel we can only be friends with white male college-educated engineers who read the Wall Street Journal and drink pinot noir instead of merlot.

While we may think of this stratification as a modern phenomenon, in fact, the apostle Paul also lived during a time of social upheaval, especially in the relationship between church and synagogue. The Christian church began as an offshoot of the Jewish religion and the apostles and first adherents to Christianity were all Jews -- not only in religious practice but also ethnically and culturally. When Peter and Paul began introducing Gentiles to Christianity, they also introduced controversy. Church leaders asked, "How can we relate to these people who so different from us? They eat different food and practice an entirely different? Maybe we should make them all Jews first -- circumcize them and teach them to follow our dietary laws. How can they possibly understand us if they aren't like us?" This was the real question before the early church: can people of differing backgrounds and lifestyles be brothers and sisters, or is it necessary first to become all alike before you can be joined in brother and sisterhood?

Our society seems to have decided on the latter stance: in order to be my brother or my sister, you must understand me first and share in my experience. A radio journalist working for CBC interviewed a psychologist who calls that belief cultural narcissism. We are building a society, he claimed, that believes the only kind of relationship that matters is one which reinforces our love of self: the person I am, the values I have, my beliefs and my interests are of utmost importance and every relationship I engage in must feed that self-love. The narcissism of our culture, he said, has even changed our approach to courtship so that we only date people who share our interests; we marry people with similar attitudes and lifestyles; and when we "grow apart" -- when we become "less alike" -- we get divorced.

In a narcissistic society, people of different backgrounds and experiences refuse to relate to one another because there is nothing that the other can give you to feed your love of self.

Likewise, in a narcisstic faith, people refuse to worship with those whose beliefs do not reinforce their own, whose values challenge theirs, and whose experiences are alien from the life they find most comfortable. Battles that are couched in terms of theology are often no more than narcissistic tug-of-wars as people fight to elevate the beliefs that feed their own sense of self over those that challenge their sense of self. "I love who I am," we proclaim to the world, "and so you must all become more like what I love -- become more like me!"

The apostle Paul constantly battled the cultural narcissism of the early Christian movement. He reminded the Galatians that faith is not about making the world more like you; it is about making you more like Christ. In Christ, there is no Jew or Gentile, no slave or free, no male or female, because those differences become secondary to the unity we find in serving Christ. As people in Christ, we say to one another, "I cannot fully understand you but I will fully support you because I am in Christ and you are in Christ and in Christ we can cross the chasm between us." Faith is not about making the world more like you; it is about making you more like Christ.

Because the fact is that it is only in Christ that we can ever reach across our self-absorption and our limited individual experiences to become one. No matter how hard we try, we will never fully understand the other person, even those as close to us as our spouses, children, and best friends. We cannot get inside another person's head. We are not going to feel every injustice every other person suffers, or understand every struggle every person encounters. Not all of us will know the devastation of a cancer diagnosis; not all of us will have children who make stupid mistakes and get themselves into trouble; not all of us will face unemployment or have relationships fail; and to say to a person, "I know what you are going through," when honestly we don't know and can't know because we haven't gone through it is to put on a false sympathy that only widens the gap between us. But we can say, "I don't know what you are going through, nor will I try to make you face that struggle in the way I would face that struggle. But I can pray with you so that Christ may bridge that gap between us and you will not be alone."

Paul says that we don't need to experience injustice to fight injustice. We don't need to feel another's pain before we can have compassion for them. We don't need to know what another is thinking or feeling in order to listen to them. We don't need to change the other person to be more like us before we can stand with them. Faith is, after all, not about making the world more like us; it is about making us more like Christ, and in Christ there is no male or female, Jew or Gentile, slave or free, gay or straight, black or white, fat or skinny, college educated or college drop out, Republican or Democrat, or even Episcopalian or Anglican. In Christ, we are all one .... no matter how much that may make us squirm!