I cannot begin without saying how disappointed and dismayed I was to learn that Dr. Fran Toy would not be with us.  She was to have been our celebrant today and she and I were looking forward to teaming up together for this closing Eucharist.  Fran and I go back a long way.  She was a member of Executive Council and we worked together on a number of projects.  She served as Council’s liaison to the Social Responsibility in Investments committee which I staffed in part, and Fran once hosted that committee in her home in Oakland.  I’ve known her also through her work at the Church Divinity School of the Pacific, of which I am an alum. I know that she and Art are fixtures of EAM, and the loss of her presence here has to be deeply felt.  She is a pioneer who has paved the way for Asian leadership in our Church. She has been quoted as saying “prayer under girds everything we do.”  Today, I hope Fran knows that our prayers are under girding her.  God bless you, Fran.  We miss you and we love you.

Let me also take more time than I should to thank all the leadership of EAM, the many people who have brought vitality and direction to this work: my former colleague Winston Ching who provided so many years of nurturing the growth of EAM, his successor and my current colleague, Winfred Vergara, who always challenges us to use our intellect and our hearts to carry out our ministry and mission. There’s Peter Ng, one of the most revered members of the Episcopal Church and long time chairman of EAM. And there’s Angie Cabanban, who serves this Church so faithfully in so many quiet and humble ways.  I’m delighted to have met Canon Soh Chye Ann last week in New York and to have had the opportunity to read his stimulating papers presented to this conference last year.  It is a great honor to be in the company of communion partners from various parts of Asia, especially Bishop George Ninan from the Church of North India, and our celebrant today.  Finally, I regret that the Supreme Maximo of the Philippine Independent Church could not be with us.  I remember a visit to the headquarters of IFI when Bishop Alberto Ramento was prime bishop of IFI.  His successors now carry on the legacy of prophetic witness of Bishop Ramento, a martyr of our faith.  And I’d better stop there, or I’ll start acknowledging the many people in this congregation with whom I have shared various experiences, including Cecily Longid, whose presence here invokes another memory of a great prophet of the Church, the late Bishop Robert Longid.   But with airplanes to catch, I’d better move on.

Bishop Ramento is indeed a modern day martyr.  He was killed in the dead of night in his own home, rousted out of his bed, and stabbed and bled to death.  The police want to say that it was an act of burglary gone wrong.  But we know that Bishop Ramento was a threat to those in political and military power in the Philippines, because he promoted human rights and economic and political justice for all people. And he is one of hundreds of religious and community leaders who have been killed or disappeared through suspected government or para-government forces under the Arroyo administration for wanting to build a more just society.  The shocking news of his death was known throughout the world in just a few short hours because of the advance of globalization.

The same was not true for the first martyr of Britain, St. Alban, who we remember this day.  Alban is said to have been beheaded in 304AD but some scholars think it was more likely around 209, a difference of nearly 100 years.  Others say it was probably 283 AD.  The reason we have such discrepancies over the date is because the historical records about him did not surface for at least 100 years after his death, and the reports are very skimpy.  There was no Google in those days to surface his story.  There wasn’t a printing press, a radio station with NPR, nor CNN or FOX (I wish there was no Fox today, but that’s just me) nor even a telephone, with or without land line.  There was probably just a town crier who extolled the day’s headlines in the town square. 

Yet Alban and Bishop Ramento are fundamentally connected to one another because they insisted on adhering to the values of their faith and both died as martyrs.  Alban had been a Roman soldier, and he befriended a Christian priest, and gave him a place to hide in his home.  This was in the days before Constantine and so Christianity was still a rogue religion, which threatened the Roman elite and the various gods they worshipped just as Bishop Ramento threatened the power elite in his day.  So the authorities were looking for this priest to arrest and eliminate him. Alban converted under this priest’s tutelage, and gave himself up to the local authority pretending to be that priest.  When he wouldn’t recant of his new found faith, he was beheaded, thus being the first known martyr in Britain.  The man who was to execute him was also beheaded because he was immediately converted by Alban’s witness and refused to carry out the execution, and so became the second martyr.  And then the priest, who it is said rushed to the scene to save Alban, was also beheaded, and became the third martyr in Britain.

EAM has been looking at doing mission and evangelism in this so called age of globalization.  I will not attempt to provide an in depth analysis such as you have received from Soh Chye Ann except to say that for me, globalization is a neutral term filled with both an incredible capacity for good, and an equally incredible capacity for evil. In the case of Bishop Ramento, we were able to use the technologies available to us, to publicly put a spot light on this dreadful murder and bring it to public attention both in the Philippines and here in the U.S. In an age of globalization, we have new tools for mission that makes it harder for the forces of evil to hide in the shadows of oppression, torture and killing. We need to harness and use the emerging technologies to promote the Gospel for these times. Look at how information about a growing revolution in Iran is reaching the rest of the world, through social networking, especially twittering. Whoever heard of twittering as recently as a year ago. The oppressors can no longer act with impunity. 

One of my seminary professors, Dr. Massey Hamilton Shepherd, who I am fond of quoting, once said, “Jesus didn’t come to start a Church. He came to usher in the reign of God.”  The vision of the reign of God was problematic for the leaders of the Roman Empire in the days of St. Alban, and that same vision roils the power elite in many parts of the world still today. 

John says in his first letter read today that we should not be astonished that the world hates us. He says we know that we have passed from life to death because we love one another.  This love is such a threat to the world’s power structures that we continue to see in our midst new martyrs being raised up. Martyrdom isn’t just about what has happened in the past, but is a present reality today as Bishop Ramento’s death makes plain. Jesus says in today’s Gospel reading that he has “come not to bring peace, but a sword.”  That sword is the sword of God’s reign of love on earth. When Jesus says he has “come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother”, we see a clarion call to be his followers.  Our fidelity is to be to Christ, always and above all other relationships, even if it results in a family feud.  Jesus knew about the threats to his own life.  He knew that his vision of the reign of God was a threat to the elite of his own faith and to the political order of his time.  Indeed, if Alban was the first martyr of Britain, Jesus was the first martyr of our faith.  Jesus saw the victims of injustice, poverty, suffering, oppression. He saw the sick, the disabled, those imprisoned, those who were despised and unclean, and he embraced them all, to the shock of everyone. He embarrassed his own religious leaders, and he spent his entire adult ministry fending them off.  He made enemies and they plotted against him, and ultimately his blood was shed, and became the seed of our faith.  There would have been no Resurrection without Christ’s blood first being shed.

Your theme for this conference calls us to see two sides of the same coin – mission and evangelism. For as many years as I have been at Church Center, there has been a debate about whether ethnic ministries is best described as an evangelistic program, or should be focused on  justice and advocacy.  This is a debate about whether we should build congregations and growth among our ethnic membership, or whether we should promote justice for those left at the margins who are denied full inclusion in the Church and in society at large, because of the color of their skin, and because of cultural differences.  And language differences. 

But there should be no debate.  For surely we must build healthy and vital congregations in this Church. And surely we must promote human dignity and human rights for every member of the human family.  We don’t choose to do one or the other. We do both. At Church Center, Father Fred’s office is part of the Evangelism and Congregational Life Center.  But another ethnic office, Indigenous Ministries, is part of the Advocacy Center.  To me, the problem is one of structure.  Ethnic Ministries have a foot in both centers, and must work together for the vision of the reign of God. Simply put, we must build healthy and vital congregations so that we can be equipped to carry out our mission in the world.  

If Bishop Ramento had only been concerned with congregational life and stayed within the boundaries of church buildings, he might be alive today. But he looked beyond the walls of the Church, and held up the vision of the reign of God that Jesus held up, and so he died.  Now we must nurture congregations that are strong, alive and vital, so that we might make a witness that he did not die in vain.

Our mission is the same as it was for Jesus.  For all the change in the world - for the development of the internet, the world wide web, global positioning systems, media technology - our mission has not changed. Retired Archbishop of Cape Town, Njongonkulu Ndungane, is quoted as saying “Jesus didn’t come to save the Church.  He came to save the world.”  That is our mission: to join God’s mission by building God’s reign on earth, as it is in heaven.

The ministry of EAM is desperately needed for the health and well being of our Church, because we need prophets and leaders to be engaged in the witness of our Church to the world.  I’m grateful to Father Fred for his book, “Mainstreaming: Asian Americans in the Episcopal Church.”  He challenges you to share your gifts with the whole Church, and he reminds the whole Church that our Asian members want to be fully included and integral to the total life and mission of the Episcopal Church.  We are becoming more the face of God as we embrace our diversity.  We struggle with this diversity, and we fail at full inclusion sometimes, and we hurt one another through our ignorance of one another’s cultures and languages.  But we have also strived to look more like the vision of God’s reign that Jesus held up to us.  It took nearly 2,000 years, but we finally figured out that we shouldn’t leave half the human race out of the ordained ministry. We were slow learners on that one.  But thank God for women like Fran Toy who showed us the way.

I love our Church because it’s willing to seek what God is calling for in our present context.  The Anglican Communion is struggling mightily and we have discovered that the Holy Spirit is interpreted differently in some parts of our Communion than in others.  But in our context we are embracing “differences”, and as Jesus embraced those who were “different”, so we are building a community of diversity so that we might better reflect God’s creation and help usher in that reign of God for which Jesus, Alban and Alberto shed their blood. 

The theme of this conference is about evangelism and mission in the era of globalization.  But the theme begins with these words: “Go in Peace to Love and serve the Lord.”  I praise you for your witness in this conference, and I join you in the hard work ahead to be the Episcopal Church in the age of globalization.  Thanks be to God.

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The Rev. Canon Brian J. Grieves is director of Peace and Justice Ministries for the Episcopal Church, USA, and the convener of the international Anglican Peace & Justice Network. The EAM Consultation was held on June 18-22, 2009 at DaySpring Episcopal Conference Center in Parrish, Florida.