What I sent to the Wall Street Journal

I cannot believe I did this! I've never written a letter to the editor. But Jay Asakie's op-ed in the WSJ is just sooooo wrong! I really didn't mean to hit the send button, but I did.

In response to the diatribe by Jay Akasie:

The great church historian Jarislov Pelikan wrote:   “Tradition is the living faith of dead people to which we must add our chapter while we have the gift of life. Traditionalism is the dead faith of living people who fear that if anything changes, the whole enterprise will crumble.” Mr. Akasie's vitriol betrays him as a traditionalist, one who is able to view the world only through the lens in which life is a continuing struggle for power, for which he is afraid. One of the most-oft spoken phrases of the Gospel is "do not fear."

It is notable that nowhere in his essay does Mr. Akasie mention Jesus Christ or the message of the gospel, which has been a threat to the power structures of the world for two thousand years now. I am proud and humble to serve as a priest in this church. The vast majority of clergy, whom he seems to perceive as a privileged and elitist bunch with an agenda to increase their power at the expense of the laity, are extremely overworked and underpaid. Burnout is a very real threat. We see ourselves not as somehow above our flock but as their servants. Whom else would you feel free to call on their day off, their vacation, or at five o'clock in the morning? More often than not your pastor will drop anything to be at your side.

In our Baptismal Covenant, which we repeat on many occasions, we promise to respect the dignity of every human being. That includes Mr. Akasie and our sisters and brothers who do not agree with us on the issues presented at General Convention. It includes those who have chosen to leave the Episcopal Church. We take this covenant seriously.

But what it means to be church is not our infrastructure. It is how we serve the world in the name of Christ, who commanded his disciples to love each other as he loved them and to take that love and his gospel to the world. To my little parish, which is twelve miles south of Austin, Texas and worships only about 150 people a week, that means filling the shelves of food pantries, adopting four refugee families in the last two years, adopting an underfunded elementary school, driving for Meals on Wheels, teaching literacy in our local prison and taking care of each other and pretty much anybody who shows up on our doorstep with a broken heart. Jesus cares about that. He doesn't give one hoot what kind of cross Bishop Katharine carries. Nor does he care about the address of the building from which we do the business that must be done.

The Rev. Margaret Waters
Rector, St. Alban's Episcopal Church, Austin, TX