Henry Kissinger, Richard Nixon's pick for Secretary of State during the waning years of the Vietnam War put into words one of the first important lessons from my years as a professor and department chair, when he said: "University politics are vicious precisely because the stakes are so small."  And with a level of truthfulness that was unintended during the Nixon administration, he once quipped: "The illegal we do immediately.  The unconstitutional takes a little longer."

It’s not national politics, however, that makes me think of gravely voiced Henry this morning, but our church’s politics of unity and division.   Recalling Kissinger’s most famous single line:  “Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.”  What is being masked for public consumption as a virtuous struggle for doctrinal purity and church unity in the Anglican Communion is a bloody-nosed schoolyard-bully fight over power – and those who want it at any cost.  Power is the performance-enhancing drug that makes mediocre priests from obscure parishes in suburban Virginia capable of swaggering into a Ugandan or Kenyan Cathedral and taking on the mantle of Bishop so they can come home to our backyards to tell us that a church full of faithful gay and lesbian Christians and their supporters and friends is an abomination in God’s sight.  Power and the desire for more of it has seduced embittered Bishops in our church seek full entitlement to define who is and is not part of Christ’s church.

There is a bully on the Episcopal Church playground and its name is UNITY at any cost, PURITY at any cost, POWER at any cost as long as someone else is paying the tab.  POWER is the ultimate aphrodisiac and the unbridled desire for power drives our church closer and closer to the brink not of division, but the loss of our very soul. There is a “manner of life” that  “presents a challenge to the wider church” --that is dangerous, that is destructive-- the love of power and the desire for more and more of it.

Church history reminds us that EVERY member of our community began as outcasts.  Every follower of Christ was first an outcast from the “Roman empire” – one without power, without privilege, entitled to nothing.    Our historical identity as Christians is OUTCAST.  The good news was “good” for the outcast –-because the new word on the street was that God is not on the side of the powerful.  God is on the side of those who seek to love as God loves, not by loving power, but by loving the outcast.  And Jesus knew that it takes an outcast to know how to love an outcast.  Desmond Tutu put it this way in preaching to the starving outcasts of South Africa during the darkest hell of apartheid:  “Full belly child cannot say to empty belly child, Be of Good Cheer!  Only empty belly child can say to empty belly child, Be of Good Cheer” …  and be understood and believed.