Two things happened last Saturday.

Early in the day I got into an internet discussion (in a Facebook comment thread) with a friend about the “distinctives” of the Episcopal Church and (as the context broadened) Anglicanism in general. It started as a joke when I made a snarky comment that what sets us apart from other parts of the Christian world is that we are a “place” where people can argue about such important things as candles on the altar or processional crosses or the theology of bread with vile, soul-crushing vehemence and still claim to be loving brothers and sisters. My friend responded, I answered, and as things progressed I realized he was being serious while I was trying to be sarcastic. I shifted gears and we ended up agreeing that the Anglican distinctive is difficult to put into words, it almost defies definition.

And, yet, there is something! We had both commented during the give-and-take that there is a je-ne-sais-quoi about our tradition that we miss when attending worship in another church , that if the Episcopal Church did not exist we would have to invent it.

Years ago, in the Supreme Court case of Jacobellis v. Ohio, Justice Potter Stewart said of the term “hard-core pornography”: “I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that.”[1]

I have toyed with the thought that I could paraphrase Justice Stewart and that I say cannot define the “distinctive” of Episcopal Church Anglicanism, “but I know it when I don’t see it.” I know when it’s missing from a worship service, from a sermon, from an article published in the religious press.

The second thing that happened was that later in the day I attended a wedding. A work colleague of my spouse got married at a local “venue,” one of those lovely, never-intended-to-be-a-wedding-site places that have learned they can make money by engaging in that inappropriate-to-their-situation business. (Yes, I’m very biased against this sort of thing!) In this case, it was a pasture on what had been a working farm but has now become a historic display center within the local park system.

A white wooden trellis surrounded by potted chrysanthemums stood in from of nine rows of sixteen flimsy folding chairs each, the rows divided by an aisle to allow the procession of family members, wedding attendants, and the bride escorted by her father. My ever-curious spouse wondering how many guests there might be multiplied the figures and computed that there were 144 guest chairs. A gross of guests! We refrained from making jokes about a “gross wedding.”

It was not a gross wedding, but it was not an Episcopal-Anglican wedding, either. In fact, it wasn’t much of a wedding, at all. All those folks mention above entered as you would expect, the audience (I hesitate to call us a “congregation”) stood as the bride and her father made their way across the grass, the ankle-endangering mole holes, and the cow-pies, and in less than ten minutes (during which we were never again seated) it was all over.

The officiant (who claimed to be some sort of pastor, although I later learned that he claims no current affiliation to any church) said something about Jesus, asked to the two persons standing before him if they would “live together until God separates you” (they both say “yes”), and then said that in the eyes of Ohio law they were married. A long walk back to the park visitor center, and the party commenced. It was much, much longer than the “ceremony.”

I’m sure (because the “pastor” told me) that this was precisely what the couple wanted. I am also sure that they will look back on this day with joy, that they will remain husband and wife until the first of them dies, and that God will sustain them in times of tribulation and adversity as well as in times of joy and prosperity. At least, I hope and pray that’s the case! On the way home, though, my wife and I did as we often do when driving together after worship services and other ceremonies: we critiqued the liturgy. And our biggest criticism was that there was no public affirmation of those hopes and prayers, no commitment by either new spouse to work and live together with those outcomes in mind, and no assurance by the gathered community of family and friends that they will support them as they do so nor that the larger community has any investment in the success of this union (other than, of course, the cost of a wedding gift and the time spent in the evening’s partying).

I was particularly struck by the absence of those familiar words from the Episcopal-Anglican blessing of a marriage, “until we are parted by death.” And as I thought about that, words from the Burial Office bubbled up to the surface of my troubled mind: “In the midst of life we are in death.”[2]

“That’s it!” I thought. The Episcopal-Anglican distinctive is balance, the constant recognition that there is both life and death, joy and sorrow, prosperity and adversity in everything we do. In the wedding service, the happiest moment in two people’s lives, we remember that one of them is going to die before the other and that everything celebrated in the marriage liturgy will end. In a baptism, when we celebrate the incorporation of new life into the community, we recall that “the evil powers of this world … corrupt and destroy the creatures of God,”[3] and we acknowledge that baptism is, itself, burial.[4] At the end of life in circumstances of deepest sorrow, we petition God for “joy and gladness”[5] and proclaim that the dead are “happy” and at rest.[6]

We do this not only in the words of our worship and our theological writing, but in our liturgical actions, in the use of colors, smells, sounds, and movements. The light and the dark of existence are both present, the soaring high notes and the soul-crushing lows, the tip-of-your-toes jubilation reaching for the heavens to fly with the holy wind and the down-on-your-knees abjection trying to dig through the cathedral’s marble flooring. It’s all there. It’s balanced.

I’m not suggesting that these acknowledgements and understandings are absent in other religions or not found in other forms of worship, but I am asserting that we Episcopalians make this balance central to our religious experience. And it occurs to me now that this may be why social justice is central to our public witness: remember that Lady Justice carries those scales.

It’s all encapsulated in one petition at the end of the service of Holy Matrimony: “Bless them in their work and in their companionship; in their sleeping and in their waking; in their joys and in their sorrows; in their life and in their death.”[7] That distinctive Episcopal Anglican commitment to balance is what I wasn’t able to put into words in the Facebook chat with my friend and it’s what wasn’t there at the wedding. I may not have been able to define the “distinctive” of Episcopal Church Anglicanism, but I knew it when I didn’t see it.

[1] Jacobellis v. Ohio, 378 U.S. 184 (1964)

[2] The Burial of the Dead: Rite Two, The Book of Common Prayer 1979, page 492.

[3] Holy Baptism, The Book of Common Prayer 1979, page 302

[4] Ibid., page 306

[5] Ministration at Time of Death, The Book of Common Prayer 1979, page 463

[6] Burial: Rite Two, op. cit.

[7] The Celebration and Blessing of a Marriage, The Book of Common Prayer 1979, page 430