Scripture: Acts 10: 44-48; John 9: 9-15
Sermon:
Last week I traveled east for a short visit with my mother in Ohio, and meetings at our
denominational headquarters in Louisville, Kentucky. Over 100 people had gathered from
around the country to prepare to lead the upcoming General Assembly of The Presbyterian
Church (U.S.A.) in Long Beach the last week of June. I will again be helping one of the
Assembly committees of 60 elders and ministers do its work efficiently and fairly, with
decency, order - and openness to the Holy Spirit.
When the General Assembly meets each year, with representatives elected from every
presbytery, it is, in many ways, like an enormous annual family reunion. You encounter
people you haven't seen in years, meet relatives you didn't know existed, hear about each
other's families and churches, talk a lot, eat a lot, and wait for the inevitable family
tension to escalate until finally Uncle Pete and Cousin Sue are in a full-blown argument
that other family members step in to mediate. One wishes the other and his ilk had not
come to the reunion, while the other wishes the first would divorce the family and leave
them in peace. But through-out the week, you break bread, pray and share stories together,
reminisce and dream together, cognizant that you are one family of God's choosing, not
yours bound together in love and struggle under one God, who, like a perfect parent,
manages to love us all.
The General Assembly has changed in significant ways since the first one I attended 25
ago. In the mid-1970s, the highest governing body of our denomination was still
predominantly Anglo, male and over age 60, and all committee chairs were white male
ministers.
The leadership team for the Long Beach Assembly is racially mixed, equally balanced
between ministers and elders, men and women and various ages. The four candidates for
Moderator of the General Assembly, our highest elected voluntary office, include two
Koreans, a Latina, and an African American - not an Anglo face among them. We are becoming
a new church that better reflects the rainbow of colors in which God created us.
Some things have not changed. The people who will gather in Long Beach in a few weeks
will be people of deep faith and commitment who care fervently about the strength, health
and witness of that portion of God's church known as The Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.).
There will be inspiring worship eight days in a row, fantastic display booths on every
subject you can imagine, two great bookstores, and (one of my favorites) an enormous
exhibit of crafts from around the world, at which 90% of the profit is returned to the
craftsperson. And of course there will be eight days of meetings - very Presbyterian!
Something else has not changed. As Presbyterians, we stand firm in our belief that
Christian faith has ramifications for every dimension of life. God is not sovereign only
when we gather on Sunday morning for worship and education.
Therefore, Presbyterians have always gone to meddlin'. John Calvin, our religious
grandfather, put in sewers and built a hospital in Geneva. John Knox, the father of the
Presbyterian Church, thundered from the pulpit regularly against Mary, Queen of Scotland.
So many Presbyterians were involved in the American Revolution that the King called it the
Presbyterian Revolt.
But we often disagree with each other on how to meddle. Presbyterians worked fervently
for and against abolition, for and against women's suffrage, for and against the Civil
Rights Movement, for and against legalized abortion, for and against international debt
reduction, for and against capital punishment, for and against gun control. Sometimes you
and I will also disagree on which side of the meddlin' we should take.
We Presbyterians are passionate people who care deeply about making this world what God
longs for it to be. We are not called to live in religious cocoons, manicuring our
spiritual fingernails. If Jesus had only preached about love, everyone would have thought
he was wonderful. He would never have been crucified. Jesus went beyond just speaking
about love, to doing love in ways that upset everyone's status quo and everyone's
expectations. He preached a prophetic witness and he lived a radical love. As
Presbyterians, we know that we are called to do the same. We cannot stick our heads under
the rug or in the sand. Our Presbyterian decency and order camouflages a deep gratitude
for the grace of God and a fierce passion for God's righteousness.
As Presbyterians, we believe that the Bible is the authoritative witness to Jesus
Christ and God's will for us. We also believe that the love of Jesus Christ - not the
literal words on the page or the cultural bias of when it was written, but the love of
Jesus Christ - is the lens through which we interpret all of scripture, from Genesis to
Revelation. And we believe that God's Holy Spirit did not stop working 2000 years ago. The
Spirit is still moving among and within us, opening up God's Word to us afresh,
proclaiming a prophetic witness to us who think we are the faithful, loving us with a
radical love, challenging us to live that love, and shedding yet more light upon the world
and God's will for us.
I love being Presbyterian, but it sure does get us in trouble sometimes. People of good
faith and character will differ. If even the scriptures debate with one another, why
should we expect unanimity? Studying scripture, seeking the will of God and trying to be
the Church of Jesus Christ with all our heart, mind, soul and strength means that we will
disagree with one another inside the church, and we will certainly disagree with the world
around us. Sometimes we bear faithful witness to the God we serve, and sometimes we must
grieve the heart of God beyond words. However, we believe that if we listen to one another
as fellow disciples, God uses our debate and our struggle as part of the process of
discernment and change. Childbirth is never easy--nor is birthing a new understanding of
God, or church or humanity.
Many issues will come before this General Assembly for debate: church school curricula,
the role of missionaries, retirement for ministers. My committee will deal with capital
punishment, gun violence, police accountability, gambling on Native American lands, and
the flying of the Confederate flag. Many Christians and non-Christians will wonder why we
bother to address such issues, but we believe we cannot be faithful Christians without
speaking a prophetic witness both to ourselves and to the land in which we live.
But these issues, controversial though they be, will not be the most passionately
debated, nor will they receive the largest amount of media coverage. This week the highest
court of our church ruled that Presbyterian churches may conduct services of holy union,
honoring a sacred covenant of love between two persons of the same gender. That issue, the
question of whether sexually active gays and lesbians can be ordained openly in the
church, and the recommendation from the most conservative segment of the church that
moderates and liberals should leave the denomination will claim a great deal of energy
and, with the Assembly happening just down the road, a good bit of news coverage in the
coming weeks.
It is my firm belief that everyone in the Presbyterian Church wishes the issues of gay
rights, open ordination of gays and lesbians, and the blessing of Holy Unions would just
go away. Some hope people would change or go back in the closet; others hope people would
change and accept them as they are. It is an agonizing debate and in our better moments,
we recognize the pain on all sides of the field.
On the plane to Louisville I read Jon Krakauer's book, Into Thin Air, the true story of
the struggle and life threatening risks experienced in climbing Mt. Everest in 1996. As
Christians and as a church, we have our own Everest to climb, with all its incumbent
struggle, risk, disappointments and joy. We are called to reach the summit of God's vision
of justice, love and wholeness for us, for the church and for the world.
I believe these debates are not going away for a God-given reason: they are part of our
climb up the mountain of God, or to use an earlier image, they are part of the birthing of
a new understanding of God's will for us. They are calling us to a new stage in Jesus'
message of radical love. As we, with God's help, try to discern our way up the mountain,
it helps to remember that we have cut similar paths through the forest before. I want to
give two examples this morning.
First: For centuries Christian leaders cited scripture and their experience of the
world to argue that God ordained the estate of slavery and that overthrowing it would be a
sin against the created order. One of the premier theologians of our church in the late
1800's, Robert L. Dabney, wrote against the ordination of African Americans, saying,
"Every hope of the existence of church and state, and of civilization itself, hangs
upon our arduous effort to defeat the doctrine of Negro suffrage." And later,
"The radical social theory" that asserts "all men are born free and
equal" is an "attack upon God's Word." (quoted in Reading the Bible and the
Confessions the Presbyterian Way by Dr. Jack Rogers)
In the late 19th century, our denomination split, largely over the question of whether
slavery was a sin. But God shed more light upon the church and in 1954, the same part of
the church which had endorsed Dabney's perspective 75 years earlier, adopted the following
statement: "That the General Assembly affirms that enforced segregation of the races
is discrimination which is out of harmony with Christian theology and ethics." We
became the first major church body in the United States to endorse the Supreme Court
decision, Brown v. Board of Education ordering desegregation of public schools. As Jack
Rogers says in Reading the Bible and the Confessions the Presbyterian Way, we reclaimed
the truth that Jesus Christ is the lens through which we are to interpret all of
scripture. Therefore, radical love is the touchstone of our faith and action.
Second: For centuries, Christian leaders cited scripture and their experience of the
world to argue that God made women to be subordinate to men. Even John Calvin, the founder
of our portion of the Protestant Church, said that it was permissible for husbands to beat
their wives.
Charles Hodge, who taught at Princeton Theological Seminary for 58 years, wrote,
"If women are to be emancipated from subjection to the law which God has imposed upon
them ... [if] in studied insult to the authority of God, we are to renounce, in the
marriage contract, all claim to obedience, ... there is no deformity of human character
from which we turn with deeper loathing than from a woman forgetful of her nature and
clamorous for the vocations and rights of men." (quoted in Rogers, pp. 102-103)
Samuel Johnson made my favorite comment about women preachers: "Women preaching is
like dogs standing on their hind legs. We marvel not that they can do it well, but that
they can do it at all." Just last week the Southern Baptists released a paper on the
role of women for their national assembly next month, affirming the views held by Hodge
and Johnson. Yet, here I stand, an ordained Minister of Word and Sacrament in the
Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) for nearly 20 years. God poured out the Holy Spirit upon the
church and shed more light upon our reading of scripture so that we discovered women are
actually named as teachers, preachers and even apostles in the New Testament itself. We
began to live in a new way, Paul's description of the Christian life, in which there is no
longer Jew or Greek, male and female, slave or free, for all are one in Christ. With God's
help we cleared a path up part of that mountain and saw a new vista of the reign of God.
The same boundaries the white male church set for African Americans and women, because
African Americans and women were thought to be particularly sinful and of a lower status
in the created order, we still maintain for those who are gay or lesbian. I believe that
just as God called the church to reassess its earlier positions, so too, God is now
calling us to take another step forward in prophetic witness to the world and radical love
for our sisters and brothers, our sons and daughters, our mothers and fathers, our friends
and neighbors who are lesbian or gay.
In the story, the conclusion of which was read from the Acts of the Apostles this
morning, the Apostle Peter had a troubling dream that ultimately led to two conversions,
of Cornelius and his own. Peter believed deeply and passionately that Jesus was only for
the Jews. Gentiles were unclean and mingling with them would lead to the decline and
destruction of the Jewish faith. In Peter's dream, God tells him three times to eat the
foods Gentiles eat and three times, Peter refuses. Three times God says, "What I have
made clean, you must not call profane."
At the same time, a Gentile named Cornelius has a dream in which God tells him to send
for Peter. Cornelius resists, but finally does so. When Peter arrives at the Gentile's
house, they each realize the meaning of their dreams. Peter shares the good news of Jesus
with Cornelius, who is converted. Through Cornelius, God shows Peter that his boundaries
are too narrowly drawn, and he is converted to a more radical vision of God's love for the
world. They eat together at Cornelius’ table in a house that had previously been
off-limits to Peter. The Jews are astounded to her the Gentiles speaking in tongues and
glorifying God. Then Peter says, "Can anyone withhold the water for baptizing these
people who have received the Holy Spirit just as we have?" He orders them baptized
and stays with them for several days.
As was Peter, I believe we, too, are called to reassess our understanding of who is in,
and who is out. We need to re-read and pray and struggle with scripture, and one another
just as previous generations have, knowing that although our scripture was written long
ago, its interpretation is not set in stone. Jesus himself set the model for us on how to
read and interpret scripture: he reinterpreted the Hebrew scriptures, what we often call
"The Old Testament," in the light of his life, which was, after all, the love of
God. The early church continued Jesus' pattern of dealing with scripture: they
reinterpreted all of it through the lens of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus whom
they and we believe to be the promised Messiah. Jesus is the lens through which we, also,
are to interpret scripture; in particular, Jesus' commandment that we love one another
with the radical love he lived and for which he died.
We no longer advocate slavery, or the subjugation of women, or the stoning of unruly
children, or circumcision or the keeping of a kosher kitchen all of which the Bible told
us to do. God has now placed before us another knotty question of biblical interpretation
and faithful discipleship: will we openly include and celebrate the gifts of gay and
lesbian people in the full life and ministry of the church?
Like Peter and his entourage, we too have been surprised and made uncomfortable and set
free by the ways, through history and in our own life, that God opens to us new
understandings of faith and faithfulness that were not possible before. Therefore, we
ought not to believe that God will stop such endeavors now, merely because it is
uncomfortable for us, or because we are afraid it will split the church, or will make our
neighbors angry. God is larger than any of us and has been about this church business
longer than any of us has been alive.
Let us show the world that we love God and each other enough to argue and debate with
one another, and we love the world enough to want to bring about God's purposes for it. As
God said to the people of Israel, "Come, let us argue together," you and I, and
all of us as the Body of Christ.
Like a family at a great union, let us remain at the table with one another,
reminiscing and dreaming together, singing and praying together, for we are the children
of a God who loves all of us, and it is God's table at which we sit. Let us trust that the
God who has set us on the path and seen us thus far on the way, will see us both to the
mountaintop and to our ultimate home. Amen.
