Proclamation – In consideration of the legacy of African-American women priests, in full acknowledgement of my theological heritage as a daughter of Africa, and in remembrance of the lens from which I experience the world – as an African-American woman – I declare acceptance of my call to the Episcopal church.
Using a headline from April 29th on Jennifer Baskerville-Burrow’s promotion as the first African-American woman seated as diocesan bishop, I share a personal journey of reckoning with a call to the Episcopal church. The focus of my proclamation is to declare my acceptance to this call and to claim my space as an African-American woman in this tradition. It is my way of claiming theological roots that center Africa in the very foundations of Christianity – with doctrine and expressions of liturgical life formed on African soil and using that knowledge to empower me to take my place within the tradition. With experience, practice and agency – I show up as myself.
I also use a theme from our coursework – God, as change – from The Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler, and consider the ways the Episcopal church now lends itself to a more authentic inclusion in its current treatment of and respect for women. I contrast this with the images of women featured in the articles we read highlighting Juanita Bynum, Paula White and Joyce Meyer. There, perception of and expectation of respectable female behavior is tightly reigned within certain limits. In this instance as victims, in the case of White and Meyers, who exemplify a respectable, sinless sexuality (p. 89), or as the wanton woman redeemed, as is the case with Bynum whose story played into the accepted image of black woman as Jezebel, the woman with an uncontrollable sex urge.
Jennifer Baskerville Burrow’s – the newest bishop in the church of God and the first black woman to lead a diocese in the Episcopal Church enters her role free to be her authentic self. At her ordination, her heritage is centered – she is honored as a woman of African descent and mindfully included without a narrative that ultimately disempowers women. The focus is who you are – not what you’ve done. In deference to a patriarchal society you aren’t obliged to be objectified through the use of your sexuality. It doesn’t have to be your story. There is no need for a narrative of abuse or suffering – to present as anything other than what you profess to be – a child of God.
I see the paradigm of God as change as something deeply rooted in the Episcopal church. The Episcopal faith has a long history of putting in the work to meet the demands and questions of a changing world and church in pursuit of Jesus.
In Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower – the heroine Lauren Oya Olamina develops the Earthseed theology based on the belief that change – the constant, assured shifting of things and time is God. God, she declares, is change. I see my acceptance of the call to the Episcopal church as a fully embraced change and turning towards the hope found in a new faith and tradition. I bring to the tradition my whole self and welcome the charge by crafting a faith that through experience, practice and agency – continues to grow. This perpetual becoming allows me to change and be changed by the doctrine, discipline and worship of the Episcopal church. Through it I harness my vulnerability in the face of God and in doing so, shape God anew. With God I make real, what is already true.
She writes –
All that you touch
You change.
All that you Change
Changes you.
The only lasting truth
Is Change
God
Is Change.
God is the connecting factor. It is God who connects our experiences to the transformational process and promise of reciprocal evolution. This, she says, is the only truth that lasts, the only truth we can depend on. For me, change manifested as both subtle and dramatic phases of growth. It is the everlasting love of an expansive God. I can trust the call of God in my life because of an eternal tethering to that shift. If my life is a text … then my life is part of God’s ever unfolding story – I am part of the long chain of history of Gods people seeking direction – trying to follow Jesus.
I am
Alabama and South Carolina
Baptist and Muslim … now Episcopalian
Batch-brewed in Bed-Stuy Brooklyn – God calls me child.
I first met Jesus as a flight companion.
Together we sky dived from the fire escape of a third-floor tenement to my best friend’s back yard.
When I stopped believing that could be true, Jesus found me on the second floor of a music studio in Hell’s Kitchen.
I found love and other tongues and a sacred dance that left me spent before the altar.
God made and remade me in the beauty of new birth
But this gathering held fast the doors of heaven
instead of flinging them wide
The us four, shut the door, no more theology
Discriminated. Oppressed. Othered.
And all with a smile.
Bending and leaning toward the Son
I grew.
In spite of. Because of
A God bigger than the ‘isms’ of division.
Because
God is change.
And each cycle of the sun found me – different.
It was inevitable.
The expansive, exponential, everlasting
Love I know as change
Grew me. As it does us all.
As it does us all.
You don’t have to understand it to know it’s true.
And I can’t explain my call to this space, this faith, in this time
But I’m here.
And faith isn’t done with me.
Faith isn’t done with me.
In this tradition, that resisted the faithful presence of African-Americans, that now stands to elect for the first time, an African-American woman as diocesan bishop.
I claim my space.
When and where I enter is here.
Now.
I’ll join Pauli and Barbara, Kelly and Jennifer
With God’s help … I will.
With God’s help, I will.
– Lisha Epperson
Click the link below to view a Power Point presentation based on this proclamation
Proclamation : images and text
Resources:
Link to articles about Baskerville-Burrows
Inspiring quotes:
“You are about to be ordained into a church that thrives on its English and colonial past,” he said, “a church which historically has sought to make its black congregations and churches invisible either by not admitting them to the councils or by trying to model them on the basis of English piety and English preaching.” – Dr. Hood, Prof. General Theological Seminary – (Recited at the ordination ceremony of Reverend Sandra Wilson in 1982)
The god in which I have faith does not speak to us as a static being. Rather, god speaks to us as a dynamic, restless force in our world. This, for me, is what god’s revelation in Jesus is all about. – Reverend Kelly Brown Douglas
By their very presence people of color affirmed into the ordination process and ordained are a prophetic presence, they are the sign of the sacramental, holy presence of God’s incarnation in all of humanity. – Angela Ifill – Missioner for Black Ministries
I have been enslaved, yet my spirit is unbound.
I have been cast aside, but I sparkle in the darkness.
I have been slain but live on in the river of history.
I seek no conquest, no wealth, no power, no revenge:
I seek only discovery
Of the illimitable heights and depths of my own being. – Pauli Murray
Click the link below to see the Power Point presentation.
Proclamation : images and text
Audio recording of the spoken word proclamation.
and planned a worship service based on the text. Our theme, “Water in the Wilderness” featured dance ministry by moi to ‘Take Me to the Water’ by Nina Simone.
My 
