So allow me to offer my unsolicited opinion: Rite I must stay. And here’s why.
According to the landmark 2014 Pew Religious Landscape Study , The Episcopal Church is 89% white; 82% are not recent immigrants (third generation or earlier); and 68% make more than $50,000 a year (36% of them make more than $100,000 a year) which makes us the richest mainline Protestant denomination in America. Over half of the Church has a college education or higher, which again, is tops in the country. So we are the richest, most highly educated Christian denomination, and we’re almost all-white. This means we are the people for whom the game of life–in this country–was made. For all our progressive social stances, we remain a very aristocratic church. Now to be fair, this latest election has revealed that “whiteness” is not the monochromatic identity it was supposed to be. With “white, educated, urban, liberal elites” clashing with the “non-college educated whites” to the detriment of both. However, based on the above statistics, the Episcopal Church is probably full of more of the former “whites” than the latter. But not exclusively, I hope.
However, for people who fall into the demographic categories that most of the Episcopal Church does, odds are that the feelings of lowliness and marginalization that our Christian tradition speak so powerfully to, are hard to come by. It can be a challenge for such people (and I include myself squarely in that demographic) to see how they might need God in their lives. It can be easy to start believing we’re as deserving of all the material successes we enjoy as the world wants us to think we are. After all we have the means to live comfortable lives without the need to regularly suffer through the kind of powerlessness that acquaints one very quickly with their need to rely on something larger than themselves to survive.
This is why we still need Rite I in our church. Because Rite I does an excellent job of helping us rediscover our wretchedness—personal and corporate. And this rediscovery is the key to our theological and social salvation.
In the Episcopal Church, there has been a lot of focus in the past generation on each person’s “belovedness.” We are all creatures of a benevolent creator who loves us, accepts us, supports us and wants good things for us. This has been an especially powerful message as our Church has rightly sought to expand the boundaries of the Gospel, opening up the Church doors and altars to many marginalized peoples. This is good and holy work and should continue, now more fervently than ever.
But emphasizing belovedness without the counterbalance of “wretchedness” is spiritually unwise. Our sinfulness—our misuse, abuse and disregard for our belovedness and the belovedness of others—is a very, very close second to our human identity. That’s Genesis 1-3. No sooner is our life given to us and declared “good” than we break from that goodness in pursuit of our own glorification. It’s been a long road back ever since. And we’re nowhere near home. For a Church as overwhelmingly affluent as ours, that’s an important reminder to get on a weekly basis.
Now for a Church that is also struggling to keep people in the pews (like all churches are), emphasizing our wretchedness is not exactly crowd pleasing. In an age of the consumerist parishioner, making people feel a little bad about themselves, their over indulgent lifestyle, or their tacit complicity in structures of sinfulness is tricky territory (more about the theological troubles of the “parishioner as consumer” mindset in a forthcoming post). And we certainly shouldn’t be preaching wretchedness without the antidote of forgiveness and redemption offered to us in our loving Savior, Jesus Christ.
But still, understanding how much we fail to live up to the vision God has for us, understanding how much our world fails to live up to the vision God has for it, is essential to our transformation—personal and communal. It is the theological equivalent of being “woke.”
If the Gospel is meant to comfort the afflicted, and afflict the comfortable it seems we have been doing more of the first than the second (more on the incentives to blunt the affliction of the comfortable in another forthcoming post on the questionable relationship between the Church and money). As a predominately affluent Church, we need to be particularly well-acquainted with why and how we are sinful beings because the sins of our particular race and class perpetuate sins at a structural level, since so many of the structures of our society are designed, implemented and maintained by people of our demographic. “After all,” we like to boast, “almost a quarter of our Presidents were Episcopalian.”
One of the best ways to know our inescapable sinfulness is to say it. Maybe then we will start to believe it. And it is there that Rite I provides a particularly important service to our Church. It is in the extremity of the Confession (and the warmth of the words of comfort), the humility of the prayer of Humble Access, and the explicitness of the Eucharistic prayer that our sinfulness is hammered home (in admittedly sinful, gendered language). Over and over during the Rite I liturgy we are reminded of the breadth and expanse of our sin. We are also reminded that the only thing broader and deeper is God’s love and forgiveness. In comparison with Rite I, the stakes of the Rite II liturgy feel too low to really convert anyone in heart and mind to deep, personal repentance. We are none of us righteous, not one {Romans 3:10}. We are all redeemed. We are all beloved. But we are all broken.
As with any ailment it is only when we accept and articulate the brokenness, confront the illness that it can be healed. It is only when a Church that is so overwhelmingly white and privileged can understand how fundamentally sinful they are—individually and collectively—only when they rediscover their wretchedness, that the wounds of division and discord that ail our nation and our Church can be healed. Knowing ourselves to be wretched and redeemed, sinful and beloved at the same time, should provide us with the necessary brokenness to be healed. And that’s a gift Rite I can still give us.