We do not often use Eucharistic Prayer D, from the Book of Common Prayer, at this parish. It is long, and some of the music is complicated. But as a prayer of consecration, it is really elegant and we should probably give it more attention than we usually do.

We used it the other day, and two things struck me about it. The first thing I noted was that I often notice short lines in the prayers of the church’s liturgy. As I am saying the prayer on behalf of the assembled congregation, a line or a phrase will strike me almost as if it were written out in the kind of neon lettering which used to grace the signboards of restaurants and shops back in the fifties and sixties. The line will light up. And the second thing that I noticed was the precise line which lit up for me that day. It was this line: Grant that all who share this bread and cup may become one body and one spirit. (Prayer Book, page 375.)

I have not made an exhaustive survey, but I think we usually make this point in a different way. Like that old folk song, we usually sing something like “We are One in the Spirit, we are One in the Lord.” We usually act as if our unity was a foregone conclusion, a status already achieved.

There is a certain smugness about that, and smugness is not one of my favorite characteristics. To observe or to think or to pray that God has made us one makes it seem as if we were congratulating God on having done such a good job with us. That smugness has set uneasily with me but I don’t think that I have ever had a concrete, historical reason to help me state my unease with asserting that God has made us one. Not until now.

This fall, the Church in the United States has consecrated its first openly gay Bishop. I don’t think that anyone was exactly sanguine about this decision. Even those who were ardent supporters of Bishop Robinson’s ordination knew that this was going to be a pivotal moment in the life of the Anglican Communion. Many in the church knew that there had been gay Bishops before, but they were heretofore, discreet single gentlemen about whom one had been trained not to inquire too specifically. That was true of all orders of the ministry.

In my own parish, there are records of a rector back in the 1920s, a single gentlemen of a certain age, who in most years took his vacation with the equally single rector of a neighboring congregation. Now, this repeated recreational coincidence may have meant nothing—but maybe it actually meant something, but no one will ever know.

When I was in seminary, more years ago than I like to think, there were certain Bishops who were known to be receptive to the applications of gay men and later lesbians for the ordination process. And some of them were, themselves, single gentlemen—again, about whom one did not inquire too closely. So, the facts are these: There have always been gay bishops and gay clergy, but the difference now is that folks talk about it.

And, in fact, we have been talking about little else for the last few months. I recently heard our Suffragan Bishop, Catherine Roskam, give a talk about the last general convention which she began this way: “Contrary to what you may have thought, the Episcopal Church worked on other issues than sex this summer.” But, one would hardly know it.

A number of people have asked me what will happen now. That is a very difficult question to answer. There is little previous experience to guide us into the future as we face this issue.

Briefly, two things seem to be happening. Within the United States, some jurisdictions, such as the Diocese of San Joaquin in California and the Diocese of Fort Worth in Texas have made some rumblings about withholding their financial support of the Episcopal Church. Within San Joaquin, there is now a counter movement of parishes who do not wish to strain or sever their ties with the Church. And some Bishops, who are given to making pronouncements about this sort of thing, have said that they are no longer in communion with Bishop Robinson and the Diocese of New Hampshire which ordained him. So, the decision is straining relations within the Church in the United States.

And then, there is the International situation. The American Church is virtually standing alone on this. Opposition to the Episcopal Church in the United States has centered on West Africa, particularly Nigeria. The Church in this area was evangelized by, appropriately enough, Evangelicals. And their approach to issues of sexuality is distinctly fundamentalist. And, when it comes to the Church in the United States, these folks are not smiling. I had wondered what steps these parts of the church may take to expel us from the Anglican Communion. Since there are no standards for membership in that communion, it seems difficult to determine how one might be thrown out.

But there is another movement afoot. Actually, it began a number of years ago, when two American priests were ordained Bishops by foreign Bishops in order to continue their work here in the US, but as agents of a foreign, conservative branch of Anglicanism seeking to make inroads into the Church here. And there are a number of parishes which are talking about affiliating with foreign jurisdictions whose attitudes about sexual morality more nearly match their own.

So, this is a divisive time. And, the welter of divisions facing the church is what came across my mind when I prayed that Eucharistic Prayer—with its powerful line about becoming one in body and spirit.

I do not look forward to the coming months and years as the structures of the Church are strained or rent by divisions about sexuality. But in fact, the Church in the United States has been moving in the direction of including gay men and lesbians. And that has been, for us at least, the right direction. For the first time we are telling the truth about the way this church is and has been for decades—if not generations.

You see, I think that we can only become one in body and spirit, as the prayer book put it, when we take that first step of telling the truth about who we are and what we believe about the nature of the church to which we belong. How can a person become one with another while concealing the true nature about who he is?

The possibility exists now that we might achieve a unity based upon honesty, and I think that that is the best kind of unity—and in the long run the only genuine unity worth seeking. Unity based upon less than truth is the unity of mendacity. And if we don’t tell the truth about our religion, it does not matter a damn how much truth we may try to telling other arenas of life, because in the most important area of all, we are liars.


So, the unity of the Church is not a present reality, it is a part of the saving activity of God. We don’t see that unity yet, because God is still working on it. And that process of working on our unity may call the Church in the United States to face some uncomfortable, and painful truths about itself. In order to achieve that unity which is in accordance with God’s will, we may be called to change, to repent, to renew ourselves. But we cannot even begin to be a part of the process until we tell the truth. And what happened in Concord, New Hampshire on All Saints’ Sunday is a first step in telling that truth.

The Rev’d Lloyd E. Prator, Rector
Saint John’s in the Village
Episcopal Church, New York City