Larry Rasmussen

Network Conference
November 3, 2005
Memphis, TN

As part of its evangelism program, a Lutheran church in Denver canvassed its neighborhood to determine the churched and un-churched.  The canvassers went door-to-door.  Among the first questions was “Are you a Christian?”  As they approached one house, the occupant was leaving, apparently in a hurry.  The canvassers said, “Can we ask just a couple questions?  We won’t take much of your time.”  He replied, “I am late.  But what do you need from me?”  They went directly to: “Are you a Christian?”  He reached for their pad and pencil and wrote.  “This is my name,” he said.  “Go up this side of the street and down the others and ask my neighbors.  They are the ones who can answer what you’re asking.” 

This is the public face of discipleship.  But of course one anecdote does not the whole story tell.  So get comfortable and pay heed.

The public face of discipleship and its churchly character will corner our attention.  What kind of shared discipleship is needed in this time and place will share it.  For both, we draw upon the dimensions of “righteousness,” a key term of the Hebrew Bible.  Righteousness is deeply personal and, at the same time, the Way expected of a People of God across the whole of their life together.  Righteousness includes character structure and social structure, personality and public policy, piety and socio-environmental justice.  Its reach is deep inside, to what the Hebrews called the “bowels” (compassion is a gut reaction), the Latins called “heart,” Christians following Augustine called “will,” and we might call “soul.”  Righteousness goes to what makes us the particular persons we are, morally and spiritually, and asks how that critical formation happens.  Yet its reach is also about how lives are publicly ordered by the institutions that comprise “society”—how the economy is structured, governance organized, (homeland) security provided, sexuality and family life shaped and regulated, how race, class, gender, and culture fall out in the public order.  These are matters of what the Hebrew Bible deems binding “covenants.”  The prophets measure no less than Israel’s faithfulness to God by covenantal compliance; by, if you will, Israel’s collective discipleship. 

But righteousness is not only a strong biblical notion.  It is the name for the comprehensive goal of Christian ethics itself: namely, a good (or virtuous) life in just institutions. 

The point, however, is the meaning of righteousness for discipleship.  Righteousness means that discipleship is deeply personal and communal piety or it is nothing: no formative exercises and practices, no discipleship.  At the same time its domain is the whole of earthly life or it is not discipleship: no pathways into all the nooks and crannies of life, institutional life included, no discipleship, either. Walking the Way, then, is a journey inward tethered to a journey outward, and never the one without the other.

Initially, I intended to say little more than this by way of introduction.  I was set to plunge into public issues that convulse us and join the four questions I have for discipleship in our time.  Let me at least pose them so you know where we are tending.

1) Is there a non-imperial or an anti-imperial discipleship for us today?  Christian discipleship was initially forged in the context of empire and as an alternative way of life.  What does that mean for Christians carrying U. S. passports at a time when the nation is “noisy with believers” at home and feared and loathed abroad?  2) Is there a discipleship of the Spirit?  Discipleship is always associated with following Jesus.  But is this a proper reading if what Jesus himself does he does “in the power of the Spirit?” And if he says he must depart so that the Spirit might dwell among us, guide us, and produce in us the fruits of the Spirit as the fruits of discipleship?   Or if Jesus dares to say his followers will, in the power of the Spirit, do even greater things than he?  Are we sufficiently Trinitarian in our discipleship?  3)  Is there a “green” discipleship for a planet in jeopardy at human hands?  Addressing “Earth and its distress” (Bonhoeffer) is the moral assignment of our time.  What has discipleship to do with it?  What kind of discipleship honors the only covenant explicitly deemed “everlasting,” the covenant between God and earth and every living creature of all flesh (Gen. 9)?  4) Is there a worldly discipleship savvy about the play of power and human responsibility when privilege continues to reign, as it does, instead of rightly ordered relationships of mutuality?  What kind of power-savvy discipleship is wise as a snake while pure as lambs and doves?

Discipleship as “the Way”

My plan to engage those four questions straight-away was foiled by the need to say more about the basics of discipleship if we are to unearth its public character.  Thus I turn to “the Way,” “the Call,” and “Practices.”

New religions are not usually born of bejeweled emperors and a mass parade to and from the Coliseum.  They are born of a few undaunted, and usually poorly dressed, disciples.  These religions are not, on that count, modest, however.  They provide nothing less than a “cosmic” story to which we—and all else—belong.  They offer a grand narrative about the origin, destiny, meaning, and end of life, all of it.  And they propose a manner of life in keeping with that generous meaning.   They provide the practices, rituals and disciplines appropriate to the cosmic story.  They stipulate a “way,” a way of life.

The stories religious traditions tell are as diverse as the peoples and cultures who tell them.  Please note: you shouldn’t even try for one religion for all people—you’ll end up killing them in order to have your way as the mandatory way.  History is littered with the corpses of only-one-way religion and one true faith crusades.  Ironically, this well-intended imperial faith is an unfaithful faith.  The gracious God is a spacious God.  One-way religion is neither gracious nor spacious; it has no space for the “uncontained God.”1

The ways of life embodying the varied stories are similarly diverse.  Nonetheless there always is a story, a grand narrative threaded with familiar tales told innumerable times, often with new twists and turns.  And there is a way, a way woven of numerous paths tried and taken and argued about without end, sometimes ferociously.  We call this contested legacy “tradition,” and if it is the tradition of a living faith it is rich, varied, and changing.  Too, there is a key leader, a sage, a messiah, a guru who teaches a way of life that embodies the meaning of the grand story.  Moreover—and this is not a marginal point—the revered leader teaches a way and walks a path that is in tension, or outright conflict, with the conventional wisdom and currents of the age.  Death may in fact come early for such leaders.  Often it does not come gently, like it should, quiet as morning fog.  But whether death comes early by violence or as the peaceful end to fourscore years and ten, the life of the sage or messiah somehow triumphs on the precincts of the tomb itself.  Still, the point is that whether the leader’s way is weal, woe, or both together, his or her path is sufficiently askew of normalcy so as to appear as a new thing upon the earth.  This is Prince Siddhartha become the Buddha in fifth-center BCE India; it’s Lao Tzu in six-century BCE China; it’s Moses in Egypt, then out from Egypt into the wilderness; and it’s Jesus and his messianic movement in the Roman Empire. 

In sum, new religions are usually born in discipleship, they spring, mustard seed fashion, from small beginnings and they are led by a sage or charismatic healer who teaches and embodies an alternative way, a way taken up by the “disciplined” ones who think themselves wielding a power against which even the gates of hell, or the purveyors of empire, will not prevail.

Let’s not describe discipleship in generic terms only, however.  Let’s turn to the children of Abraham, Sarah, and Hagar and specifically to the public face of discipleship there. 

Discipleship is “public” in three ways in all three Abrahamic traditions.  (In the interests of both time and audience, I will illustrate with Christianity.) 

Discipleship is about a “people of the Way” and a community pattern of life.  This people is a “public” in its own right.  Tertullian calls the 2nd c. church a societas dei (a society of God); Paul calls the first c. churches a “body” that constitutes a new humanity; Peter calls this people “a holy nation,” “a chosen race,” “a peculiar people.” All these images are quintessentially “public.”  Like the polis itself, they are images of a structured social body where decisions are made, roles are assigned, and powers are exercised for life together in keeping with the commitments of the community.  The specific word, “church,” is also quintessentially “public.”  Ekklesia is Greek for a called meeting or an assembly, like a town meeting. It is a gathering to deliberate and discern, on behalf of the wider society, how the common life of its members is to be ordered.2 

Secondly, in the Abrahamic traditions, the Way is “public” in that it is lived across the whole of earthly life.  The Way is comprehensively righteous, or just, living, living in a manner that suffuses the whole and marks the meaning of the whole in its practices.  This whole includes what is poorly named “spirituality”; namely, a world within to match the world aspired to—moral, religious, and cultural dimensions aligned with technical and institutional ones.  Thirdly, the Way is publicly visible.  It is marked by rites and practices that are strong enough to form the next generation and assure that the faith has children and the children have faith; practices that are strange enough to arouse the curious and gather them in for initiation; and practices that are intelligible enough to provide compelling reasons for a faith that moves mountains and peoples. 

For Jews, Muslims, and Christians, then, discipleship is a righteous life in a community faithful to God.  Posting markers on this journey is a collective undertaking that is, at the same time, deeply personal.  There are hidden dimensions and quiet, even empty, spaces we hardly dare enter on our own.  But even these worlds within worlds are the internal recesses of a public faith intended to be no less than “a witness to the nations.”

Discipleship and the Call

For Christianity, at least, discipleship as “the Way” of a People is invariably associated with a call to follow.  The call is usually presented as a direct address demanding an unequivocal answer.  The reason, of course, is the “Urstory,” the founding story that became the foundation story; namely, Jesus’ calling of the disciples.  This is the story that hovers over all Christian discipleship.  In it Jesus’ call is direct, personal, and very public: a call to ordinary people in their work-a-day world to fold up the nets, or close out the tax accounts, and pack for a different future.

I came across a call passage by a consummately public figure, a past Secretary General of the United Nations that haunted me long enough to know I had to sit with it awhile.  I had to sit with it, in part, because it doesn’t conform to the classic call of the foundation story.  Yet it has all the marks of utter integrity as a call to Christian discipleship.  The Secretary General writes:

I don’t know Who–or what–put the question.  I don’t know when it was put.  I don’t even remember answering.  But at some moment, I did answer Yes to Someone–or Something—and from that hour I was certain that existence is meaningful and that, therefore my life, in self-surrender had a goal. 

From that moment I have known what it means “not to look back,” and to “take no thought for the morrow.”

Led by the Adriane’s thread of my answer through the labyrinth of life, I realized that the Way leads to a triumph which is a catastrophe, and to a catastrophe which is a triumph, that the price for committing one’s life would be reproach, and that the only elevation possible to a person lies in the depths of humiliation.  After that, the word “courage” lost its meaning, since nothing could be taken from me.

As I continued along the Way, I learned, step by step, word by word, that behind every saying in the Gospels stands one person and one person’s experience.  Also behind the prayer that the cup might pass from him and his promise to drink it.  Also behind each of the words from the Cross.

To walk in the Way was, for those first generations of Christian disciples, to follow this Jesus whom John calls “the Way, the Truth, and the Life.”  Similarly, to answer “Yes” to that Someone—or Something, as our text has it—inscribes life as meaningful despite all.  It is a joyous life and an abundant life, in imitation of Christ; a life that savors life, yet a life that also entails drinking the earthly cup to the dregs and taking up the executioner’s Cross.  “When Christ calls, he bids one come and die,” to remember Bonhoeffer in The Cost of Discipleship.

Practices

The passage I cited from Dag Hammarskjold is from Markings.  The English title is not quite right.  The original Swedish is Vagmarken, “Markers of the Way.”  The steady markers of the Way of discipleship, the reason the Way is not chaos or simple waywardness, are located in the same reality; namely, the practices of discipleship, its disciplines.  These practices, done over and again across eons and ages, are strikingly also the furnishings for the necessary improvisation discipleship requires in different settings and circumstances, when new things appear upon the earth.  In this splendid paradox, conserving allows reforming and reforming conserves.  Imagination plays nimbly, creatively, with well-rooted legacies.  But whether hoary with age or improvisatory, these practices supply a moral pattern and provide a moral guidance system even when the practices themselves are not explicitly moral or ethical in tone or formulation.  Indeed, apart from these practices, Christian moral discernment really has few markers at all, and little real substance.  Without formative practices, what is called Christian judgment is little more than an opinion poll of those who happen to be on the membership roles at the time.  This is not discipleship.  This is judgment devoid of the disciplines that create the alternative path of the Way.  This is judgment devoid of that which crafts the Christian life like the work of a fine potter, gardener, carpenter, teacher, or caregiver, none of whom invented their craft or mastered it at first, second, or third outing.

We can call the recurring core practices of discipleship its “focal” practices.  There are also ancillary practices, many of which are the stuff of necessary improvisation.  We will treat focal practices first—and briefly, so briefly I will consider only one in any detail.

First, however, this comment to all focal practices.  Focal practices embody dramatic distillations of the grand story, the foundation drama and narrative of the faith.  For Christians it is above all the drama of Jesus Christ in the power of the Spirit as the incandescence of God in a fully human and godly way.  These distilled disciplines take the form of repeated individual and communal actions.  They speak to something deep in human nature and they bear moral substance whether that is named or not.  They take place in the present but they bespeak a world longed for, a world in the making, the Kingdom coming on earth as it is in heaven, the “beloved community” (to remember Martin Luther King here in Memphis and Rosa Parks in Montgomery).  

Baptism, for example, is such a focal practice, so let’s ask about its public, moral dimensions.  How do the waters of life both capture and forge the Way?  How is being water washed and Spirit borne, and “remembering our baptism” as wet branches are waved over the congregation, a quiet formation of moral orientation? 

Consider this account.  Paul has to explain his innovative missionary policy of Jews and Gentiles in community together on terms that honor the outsiders as new insiders.  In 2 Cor. 5:17 he does so in these words: “If anyone is united to Christ, there is a new world; everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!”3   Baptism is the focal practice that celebrates this new world in which the previous ethnic identities and the inherited social definitions are transcended and eliminated in Christ.  Paul to the Galatians could hardly be more explicit about baptism initiating a new people (a new “public”) by crossing and canceling the boundaries that the world insists upon: “Baptized in Christ, you are clothed in Christ, and there is neither slave nor free, neither male nor female; you are all one in Christ Jesus.”4 This baptism of both Jews and Gentiles is itself an improvisation on a core Jewish practice. 

Yet the point is that it initiates what Paul deems a “new creation.”  It is one in which, according to Ephesians 2, enmity as the dividing wall between peoples is broken down and peace is made, now in the form of a new multi-ethnic community, here named “a new humanity” in Christ (Eph. 2: 14,15).  And don’t overlook that this reality of a new humanity is the church’s message to “the principalities and powers” of the way of God. (3:10)  In different words, baptism celebrates and effects a concrete alternative to empire and its rule by division.  Empires use differences (Jew/Gentile, male/female, slave/free) to separate people and set them against one another in order to rule them.  In baptism the new status is a new kind of social relationship that overarches social stratification in a new unity, an “oikumene” embodied as a “public” that contrasts with empire (which Rome, referring to the empire, also declared the “oikumene”).  A multi-ethnic, multi-linguistic, multi-cultural humanity gathered on equal terms, with shared leadership, but no army and little wealth, in contrast to hegemony, privilege, ostentation, and the fearsome projection of military and economic power.5 

Later baptism goes wildly wrong, as does much Christian discipleship, when Christianity turned itself on its head and allied its fate with empire.  It became a very different “public” and ended up mimicking empire.  Baptism, like eucharist, morphed into a core practice of exclusive membership in the only true imperial faith, Christianity.  We ought not make the mistake of idealizing the pre-Constantinian churches and demonizing the post-Constantinian ones; there is both compromised and authentic discipleship on both sides of that ominous shift of status to establishment power and privilege.  In any event, all I want is for us to sense the profound public moral substance of baptism as this practice of community-creating, inter-ethnic unity on egalitarian and nonviolent terms.  The distinctions that separate and set people against one another dissolve in the cleansing waters, yet the richness of differences of culture, language, art, and personal gifts remain as community treasure for life together.  Baptism is the creation of a new society by way of creating a new people.  Treating the “other” as alien is left behind in a new covenant of inclusiveness and justice.6 I hope you can feel how baptism in the early church is a moral pattern and guidance system for walking the Way and a focal practice for the discipleship of this new “public,” the ekklesia.

Yet even a new society joyously defiant of the principalities and powers by virtue of the structure and disciplines of its life together is not all that baptism is.  So I add this note, now in anticipation of a green discipleship for our time.  Often discipleship means improvisation and the development of ancillary practices.  Presently, we must of needs discern anew what the waters of life in the font or the tank or the river of baptism mean for a planet in jeopardy at human hands.  I can’t do the needed survey of the waters of life in Scripture, from Eden to the wilderness and desert narratives to Jordan and New Jerusalem, where crystalline waters flow from the throne of God, with trees of life flourishing along the banks.  Simply trust me that water is more than a handy metaphor for those writers and their people.  Nor, for that matter, would we consider baptizing with a handful of lint or dust. 

What is shocking is that we seldom connect the waters of life of baptism to the waters of life on which absolutely all life depends.  To dramatize this connection, I once proposed that we either call a moratorium on all baptisms until we have safe water for all children, or that, alternatively, we consciously baptize with toxic water.  (Neither got any takers.)

In sum, the focal practice of discipleship named “baptism” can be a powerful moral guidance system for the public expression and deliberation of societal and environmental life-and-death issues.  Baptism is about creating a new human world in Christ, from difference and on the home turf of enmity, and it is about planetary care of a creation element on which all life literally depends utterly. 

A fuller account, had we world enough and time, would take up other focal practices.  Eucharist and the hungers of the world, for example; or “binding and loosing,” (or “forgiveness and reconciliation,” or “nonviolent conflict resolution,” or whatever name you wish to give Jesus’ instruction to his disciples in Matthew 18—and can you think of a more important moral imperative today than a working ethic of enemy love?)  There is hospitality, feasting, fasting and foot-washing, all a far cry from fast foods and hardly even the family eating together, much less welcoming the stranger next door or across town.  There is saying “yes” and saying “no” in a simple life, discipleship’s stand-up answer to a global consumerism that is killing us spiritually and the planet literally.  There is testimony and witness, i.e., the power of proclamation and example.  The power of living testimony (martyrion) is the power to change the world.  Think of your own exemplars—their witness shaped you.   And there are, of course, certain fundamentals that are stated in straightforward moral terms: the Words of Life of the Ten Commandments and the “but I say unto you” instruction of Jesus (on the Mount or on the Plain, depending on your altitude).  All these shape our public living, they form a community of discipleship morally, and they provide a guidance system for the discernment we need to address day-to-day issues, small and large, old and new.

I have a coda of sorts, if you will grant a couple minutes more.  Presbyterians and Lutherans and others schooled in the tradition of faith-as-belief and revelation as creedal knowledge need to pay particular attention to how discipleship practices do their formation work.  Beliefs mean nothing apart from practices.  What sense would it make to have a richly articulated theology of baptism if the faith community never gathered around the font, never made the vows, and never took week-by-week responsibility for the life of the child?  What sense would it make if Christians claimed a rich, cognitive understanding of the eucharist as the real presence of Jesus Christ in the tangible touch and taste of bread and wine, but never broke bread together or shared the cup of blessing?  Apart from their practices, beliefs, creeds, and theology are utterly empty.

But we must go further.  Practices shape belief and give rise to theology and creed.  They are the “doing” that provokes reflection and gives rise to meanings that can reorder our ways.  As the practices change and develop, so, too, does the faith.  (I must say I missed this vital insight about discipleship in the Task Force work on peace, unity, and purity, where revelation is propositional and creedal.)  

I provide but one example of the power of practices to shape belief.  The African Association of Earthkeeping Churches in Zimbabwe is a network of 2 million Shona farmers whose churches are African-initiated churches (rather than the missionary-planted churches of European church bodies).  Chiefly for reasons of survival, their expression of Christian faith became focused on “earthkeeping”—reforestation, prevention of further erosion, improved soils, animal husbandry, village nurseries.  The cycles of the life of these farming peoples were all gathered up into the church year—tree-planting, seedtime and harvest became liturgical events, etc.  Waters of baptism were linked to the waters of life for themselves, their crops, and the animals.  Planting trees was done as part of a very long eucharist service carried out on the prepared soil, and was linked to the Tree of Life and the picture of trees as symbols of steadfast faithfulness in the Hebrew Bible, especially in the Psalms and in Isaiah.  Some of the tree-planters have even been given tree names as their nicknames, when there is a match-up of the qualities of the tree and the personality of the farmer.  Earthkeeping, via improvisation on core practices, became the shape of these farmers’ Christianity.  So I was along on Theological Education by Extension and listened to the questions of the faculty to the students.  “What did we used to believe?” asked the professor.  “We used to believe that Jesus Christ died for our sins.”  “What do we now believe?”  “We now believe that Jesus Christ died for all creation.”  Earthkeeping practices yielded new theology and new dimensions of an old creed about the atoning work of Jesus.

The same kind of transformation happened for both ecclesiology and theology when slavery was finally abolished and the struggle continued in Civil Rights and Human Rights campaigns.  It happened again when ordination practices came to include women.  And it is happening, and will happen, when baptized “glbt” Christian are joyously draped in ordination stoles at the altar and take vows of marriage at that same altar.  Discipleship practices, including exacting deliberation as a “process practice,” live into the new reality and folks go from there, humbly and with tenacity until peace, unity and purity come together.

“Tempus” has “fugited” yet again and I must simply close.  We have surveyed some basics of discipleship—the Way, the Call, the Disciplines—to find them all profoundly public as well as deeply personal.  Indeed, even the conclusive test of personal piety is a public one.  The canvassers asked, “Are you a Christian?”  The queried reached for their pad and pencil, wrote his name, and said, “Go up this side of the street and down that, and ask the neighbors.  They will have the answer to your question.”

1. Denise Levertov’s phrase, via Kathleen Norris

2. Yoder, Body Politics, ix, 2

3. New English Bible

4. Yoder’s trans. of Gal. 3: 27, 28, p. 29 of Body Politics 

5. Yoder, Body Politics, 30

6. Yoder, Body Politics, 32-34

 True Confession:

A Presbyterian Dissenter Thinks About the Church

 Address to the 1999 Covenant Conference
Covenant Network of Presbyterians
Atlanta, GA
November 6, 1999

Barbara G. Wheeler
President, Auburn Theological Seminary
New York

Excerpts from this address appear in Covenant Connection Vol. 2, #4.

I have a practical problem. I joined the Presbyterian Church as an adult, in significant measure because I admire this denomination’s theology of the church and its processes for making decisions. Today I find myself in strong disagreement with the Church about an important matter. How shall I conduct myself now that I think that my denomination has taken the wrong side on a serious issue?

The particular matter about which I disagree with the Presbyterian Church is this. The denomination has declared that homosexual acts are invariably sinful. I think that homosexual acts are morally equivalent to heterosexual ones. In some circumstances, both may be deeply sinful. Under other conditions, both may be used in God’s service.

Homosexuality is not my assigned topic this afternoon, but before I turn to my subject, which is how those of us who disagree with the church on any serious matter should behave, I want to add four brief qualifications to what I just said, chiefly for the benefit of a few members of this denomination who regularly twist honest statements of conviction into propaganda.

First, my views about homosexuality are not the position of the Covenant Network. The Network is a loose association of persons who would like to see Amendment B removed from the Constitution for a variety of reasons. Some of them–some of you–share my perspective on homosexuality and the firmness with which I hold it. Others hold different views or have not decided what they think about the issue. The Covenant Network welcomes all who, whatever their views about homosexual practices, seek openness and tolerance in the Presbyterian Church.

Second, I want to make clear that I hold my position because of the Bible, not in spite of it. In my best moments, when, as Paul says, I accept the grace to want “what I want” (Romans 7:14-20), what I truly want is to live my life in alignment with God. Since I like Paul am not naturally inclined to do that, I cannot imagine how it would be possible without scriptures that judge and contradict as well as comfort and affirm. I need scripture to say what it says, not to agree with me or confirm my preferences. In this case, I know that some passages put homosexual practices in a negative light, but these like the many precise Biblical injunctions that Presbyterians do not observe are overridden by much more blatant testimony. God rules everything. Through the whole history of God’s dealings with us, God has exercised God’s freedom to demolish categories we invent for our own convenience. I am convinced that God is doing this today, demolishing the categories of homosexuality and heterosexuality which we constructed for our peace of mind, not God’s glory. I want to testify here is that I did not learn about this deconstructive activity of God from some liberal political handbook. I learned it from the scripture that deconstructs me, freeing me, as Paul says, to delight in the law of God.

Third, I want to affirm that, as conservative Presbyterians emphasize, the Christian life is a disciplined life. On this matter, I am a conservative too. We follow Jesus Christ, who gave his life for the life of the world. If we want to live in his light and walk in his way, we too will be called to sacrifice, and among the things we are likely to be required to give up–some of our wealth, some of our power–are immediate sexual gratifications that would cause injury or pain to others. Foregoing something as pleasurable as sex is not easy. We need God’s help, through the church, to find the grace to do that. Far from helping, however, the church’s current teaching on sexuality militates against sacrifice and restraint. Homosexuals get no help at all in making moral decisions about their sexual behavior; all of it is simply dismissed as bad. Heterosexual relationships get off lightly too, if they are monogamous, because we think they are God’s favored form. I am convinced that the equal treatment homosexual and heterosexual relationships, including the recognition that marriage is God’s gift for both, would strike a blow, not for sexual license, but for much-needed sexual discipline.

My last qualification is addressed to those on all sides who say that the debate over homosexuality is not important enough to consume as much attention and energy as it does, that this is an academic matter (a phrase people use to minimize an issue) that does not affect the real life and mission of the church. I disagree. This is no small or limited difference. Presbyterian teaching about homosexuality shapes its current policies on ordination and marriage, which in turn shape and I think distort the church and the lives of its members. And I believe that this teaching does great harm beyond the Presbyterian Church. Non-Presbyterians are understandably unconvinced when we say that persons who are morally unfit for leadership in our organization should have rights of full participation in every other social undertaking. Because those outside our fellowship think that we judge all practicing homosexuals to be morally defective, we actively contribute to the hatred of homosexuals that is rampant in this society, hatred that leads to crimes of discrimination and violence. The Presbyterian Church’s teaching about homosexuality is not a matter of academic theory. It is a matter of life and death.

I have spelled out my views about homosexuality not to persuade–that is an activity for other settings–but to illustrate that I have a serious disagreement with my church, one on which I feel I must act. But how? Non-Presbyterian friends who know the distance between what I think and what the denomination teaches about homosexuality cannot understand why I continue to associate with a religious group that is wrong–dead wrong and deadly wrong in their view–on an important question. They push me pretty hard. One of them asked me recently whether I would join a club that admitted African-American members but would not let them hold office. At the same time, many Presbyterian friends push me just as hard, telling me that the only course for those who really love the church is to abide by its decisions and wait patiently as the whole body discerns where the Spirit is leading.

My guess is that most of you feel this same tension. You are here because you want the church to change, if not its doctrine on sexuality, then its policies on ordination, or its sometimes literalistic ways of reading the Bible, or its ethos, which seems to be increasingly inquisitorial and intolerant. All these are serious matters, and I would venture that you too feel you must do something about them. But what?

This dilemma is not ours alone. Those who don’t fit under the umbrella of the Covenant Network face it too. If Presbyterian News Service reports on the Coalition meeting in Dallas in September are accurate, Presbyterians on the so-called other side are beginning to realize that, as long as Amendment B remains in the Constitution, the issues it was designed to settle are not going to go away, because Presbyterians like us won’t let them. For some Coalition members, the prospect of investing major effort, every year, to preserve a law that is, as they see it, patently the will of the Presbyterian people and the will of God, is just as untenable as living in a church governed by Amendment B is for some of us.  They long for a church in which this matter is settled, as do we, and they don’t know any better than we how to achieve that. Shall we leave graciously, they are reported as asking, to search for such a church, or stay and renew the one we’ve got–a option that means, of course, facing challenges to Amendment B as long as it exists?(1)

When it comes to the topic of the church, the Covenant Network and the Coalition are in the same boat. All of us are steering through dangerous straits, with sirens on both banks luring us toward the toward the rocks and shoals with powerful arguments. The argument from one side goes like this: the Presbyterian Church is, after all, just a denomination, not the whole church. What finally matters is not our Presbyterianism but our Christianity. Therefore those who have honest and serious disagreements with the denomination may and perhaps should find or create another expression of the church that they believe is more faithful in its doctrine and discipleship. From the other shore, the song is equally compelling: the Presbyterian Church is, after all, an expression of the holy, catholic church. As such, it has authority from God. While working to repair any flaws in the church, we must not substitute our authority for God’s. Therefore, while we who disagree with the church try to improve it, we should abide by its laws and keep its peace.

So: how shall Presbyterians who disagree with the church about a serious matter (as it turns out, that’s a sizeable and very diverse group of us) behave? Ecclesiology–theories of the church–is Douglas Hall’s assignment, not mine, but I cannot make headway on my practical problem, how to act in and toward the church, unless I begin with some basic definitions of what the church, as reformed protestants understand it, is and does. In the next few minutes, I will review some reformed ideas about the identity of the church and its purpose, with sidelong glances at other Christians’ ideas in order to clarify ours. Doing this quickly will, of course, require a lot of generalizing and simplifying. I apologize for this, but it’s necessary, because I want quickly to return to the practical questions that weigh so heavily on our consciences and our hearts.

What is the church? There is remarkable unanimity among Christians of different stripes about the terms that best express the church’s fundamental identity. All of us affirm that the church is the community of those who through baptism become, in all their diversity, one body, and in all their human finitude and sinfulness, Christ’s body. Different Christian traditions, however, inflect these definitions–community of the baptized, body of Christ–very differently.

Our Roman Catholic colleagues, for instance, frequently speak of the body of Christ as mystical. Different strands of Catholic tradition mean somewhat different things by this. Hierarchically-minded theologians like Cardinal Ratzinger, as Miroslav Volf explains in his wonderful new book, After Our Likeness (on which I’ll rely at several points as I sort theories of the church) believe that the institutional church and especially the successors to the apostles who govern it are imbued with Christ’s own kind of power.(2) On some readings, this power extends even to salvation: “No salvation outside the church” means not only that the church is the location and mediator of salvation, but even its agent.(3) As the actual body of Christ, mystically empowered to function as Christ in the world, the church does the saving, or at least some of it. Catholic spiritual writers place a different weight on the word mystical. For them it signifies a realm above and beyond natural reality where the church is fully and truly itself. It is a mystical realm into which Christians are sealed at their baptism. What these views have in common is their emphasis on the church, as Volf says, “from above,” transhuman, Christ’s body risen, free from the bonds of earth and death, ruling in power.

Free church traditions define the church as Catholics and other Christians do, as the body of those baptized into Christ, but, in their view, the body is far from mystical. Wherever two or three are baptized into fellowship in the name of Christ, says the free church, there is the church. The church is not larger than, above and beyond any actual human gathering, but fully present in each one, in all its earthy reality.

Again, there are multiple strands within this tradition. Baptists emphasize the gathering in Christ’s name, the profession of faith that precedes sealing in baptism. If there is no profession, there is no baptism and no church. Congregationalists emphasize the gathering itself: the church is constituted as the Spirit brings two or three into community through baptism. What these and other free views have in common is their humanity. “We are the church,” exclaims Miroslav Volf, who himself stands in this tradition. God gives faith and the grace to gather in community, and the church can grow very close to God, but the free church is at its core a human reality, from below, not a divine reality from on high.

Where are we on this very rough spectrum? Reformed traditions seem to me remarkable less for their differences from these other Christian views than for their high degree of agreement with both. Calvin’s favorite term for what God accomplishes in baptism is engrafting. We finite and deeply flawed human beings are joined by grace and the faith it enables to Christ in his goodness and glory, joined to create a single organic whole, the body of Christ. In the event, we remain who and what we are–the grafted part produces its own kind of fruit, not the host’s. In this we join the free church: baptism does not set us on a course toward superhuman powers like infallibility or extract us from grubby human community to float above it in a mystical one.

But the grafted branch no longer lives on its own; it draws its very being from the host. The body of Christ for us is no mere metaphor for an organization with different but complementary parts, as it seems to be for some free churches.  We like the Catholics believe that in baptism we become part of a church that is Christ’s living body today. In baptism, says Bonhoeffer, “we are…set down in the midst of the holy history of God on earth.” (4) Our engrafting into Jesus Christ means that everything that has happened to him has happened to us. In reformed traditions, the church is both a fully human community–all churches, says Calvin, are “blemished,” and also Christ’s very body. (5) Holding these two dimensions together yields a rich, complex picture of the church’s identity, all the more mysterious for not being mystical, all the more compelling for not being fully explainable in human terms. I think this picture of the church is just right, and I became a Presbyterian to affirm it.

Let turn now to the second basic issue: what is the body of Christ called to do? What is its purpose? Here too there is ecumenical consensus. The purpose of the church is worship, the giving of thanks and praise to God. We modern activist Christians are tempted to say ministry or mission, but the root of ministry is worship: our chief end is to glorify God. At the heart of worship–on this Christians also agree–is eucharist.

As we all know, worship and eucharist look very different in different Christian branches. For the Catholics and others who emphasize sacraments, the meal is paramount: Christ’s delegates, with Christ’s own special, more-than-human power to make the bread and wine substantially different, are to feed the faithful. The whole ministry of church, including teaching, governance and mission, is an extension of this act of feeding: significantly, those who have special power through the apostles to prepare and serve the meal are usually in charge of the other functions as well.

In free church settings, eucharist not a transformational event so much as a reenactment. Someone once said that at the lowest end of the church spectrum eucharist is something like a patriotic play: it portrays an important historical event in order to instill values and foster loyalty. The free churches view the Lord’s Supper as edifying for believers. It reminds them that as Jesus Christ has claimed them, they have claims on each other. At the table, they are joined in even closer fellowship: the community of the saints becomes stronger and more accountable, and each of its members truer in faith, holier in living, more righteous in discipleship.

We, the reformed, again drawing from both sides, take eucharist literally. The word means giving thanks. The church is called out of the world for the purpose of giving thanks for what God is doing in the world. We have our own doctrine of real presence, Jesus Christ known surely enough in the breaking of the bread that we are impelled, in Christopher Morse’s graceful phrase, to “thank God for loving all the world.” (6)

In order to do this, to give thanks and praise for God’s accomplishments, it is necessary to discern the work of God–what God has done, is doing and will do. Hence the heavy reformed emphasis on confession, teaching the truth, and preaching, proclaiming the Word. For us, these are eucharist too. Avery Dulles, in his careful catalog of various Christians’ models of the church, identifies ours as “herald,” because, he says, we “emphasize faith and proclamation over interpersonal relations and mystical communion.” (7) The metaphor fits, though Dulles misunderstands, I think, when he concludes that we believe that the chief and maybe only purpose of the church is to talk. Some Presbyterians may have given that impression,(8) but most of us know that giving thanks through hearing and proclaiming the Word of God has, as Volf says, a performative as well as declarative aspect.(9)  Everything we do in gratitude to God–service and social action, prayer and sacrament, as well teaching and preaching–is true confession, the living word instantiated in our lives as much as heard from our lips.

Let me quickly extract two themes from this reformed picture of the church that I have sketched that will help us, I think, as we return to the practical problem of how we should behave when we disagree with the church.

The first is very obvious in reformed thought: God’s initiative. God gave the church–Calvin, a one-covenant man, says it was given to Abraham–and God continues to give it to all who enter the covenant. We human beings engrafted into Christ’s body make up the church, but we cannot unmake it. “Denials, betrayals and corruptions” of Christ’s body, as Christopher Morse puts it, cannot prevent its resurrection.(10) Christ is the head of the church. We can do terrible things in and to it, but we cannot remove its identity as the church.

The second theme is not often recognized in the famously chilly ethos of Presbyterian and Reformed churches: the importance of community. (Garrison Keillor says that Calvinists are people who think that warmth, comfort and having a good time with others makes you stupid.) Neither covenant nor confession is possible without other people. God’s love is more generous than ours, never exclusive. In binding us to God in Christ, God also binds us to others in covenant community. And because Christian truth is a person, writes Thomas Torrance, it is not something we can tell ourselves.(11) It must be communicated to us by other persons. Our confession is social too: if it is not spoken by others to us and us to others, it is no confession at all.

* * * * *

So: if I really believe these reformed affirmations, that we are engrafted at God’s initiative into the church, an all-too-human body of us and other persons that is nevertheless Christ’s own body, not ours; and if I really believe that our duty and privilege, as people called out by God’s costly effort, is to testify, in community and as a community, to the mighty and merciful acts of God: if I really believe these things, how then shall I prosecute my disagreement with the Presbyterian Church?

I think these convictions about the nature and purpose of the church require me to observe two principles.

First, tell the truth. If the church is, indeed, constituted by grateful confession of true faith, then we have no choice but to say what, by the power of God’s word and spirit, we deeply believe to be true. Humility is of course advisable. In the case of homosexuality, for instance, someone is wrong, and it could be me. But I’m pretty sure I am not wrong, and an increasing number of Presbyterians hold views similar to mine. Our identity as confessing Christians requires that we say so.

Not enough of us have been doing that. When Joseph Small visited the Coalition and Covenant Network conferences last year, he was struck by the apparent unwillingness at the gathering of this group to speak our minds about the issues that divide the church, especially homosexuality–the elephant in the living room, to use his image, that, he thought, we go to special lengths not to mention even though it’s sprawled on our ecclesiastical couch and will not go away. There is an historical explanation for what Joe Small accurately observed. The Covenant Network was created to promote Amendment A by people who had among them various reasons for wanting to see it pass. It made sense to focus on the common concerns, such as openness and tolerance, rather than our particular causes, and we have continued in that mode, emphasizing the generalities we share rather than the specifics over which we differ.

But meanwhile circumstances have changed. Immediate and decisive repeal of Amendment B seems less likely now than when Amendment A was before us. In this light, I have come to agree that a sabbatical period in which we refrain from legislative action and judicial confrontation is a good idea, though not for the reason most often given for standing-down: because the church is tired of debating homosexuality and associated issues and needs time out to rest. If the church lives by the truth of its confession, then we its members get no vacation from any issue in which truth and life are at stake. In fact, in my view the only good argument for this sabbatical period is to make time and conserve attention for the searching reflection and honest speaking that political fights often do not permit.

It is time for us, the Presbyterians who have been specializing in tact, to say what we think, civilly and reasonably–diatribes accomplish nothing–but also persuasively. We all do not think the same things. Those of you whose minds are not made up on the pivotal issues must frame your questions sharply. Those who have strong views about ordination and polity must state them with clarity and precision. And those who think, as I do, that homosexuality is the basic issue and that the church is in error when it teaches that God abominates homosexual acts committed in the context of covenant faithfulness while blessing heterosexual ones in the same situation–those of us who think that need to speak up, in clear, reasonable and inviting terms that stand a chance of changing the church’s mind. Unity-and-diversity conferences are an excellent start, but the church must be sure that it gets around to talking about the full range of issues that divide us. It goes without saying, I hope, that there should be no penalty in a teaching church for the candid exchange of theological views.

Will vigorous conversation about these matters unsettle the church and upset some of its members? Probably it will, but that is no reason to hold back. The peace of Christ is not a sentimental blanket in which we hide and smother our differences. It is genuine reconciliation, obtained for us at a very high price, and we must expect to sacrifice some of our tranquility to discover it among ourselves. A confessing church is a struggling church. Honest expression and careful argument are God’s work, and we should do more of both in the days to come.

A second principle for action also stems from reformed conceptions of the church: stay put. Separation from the body in which we have grown into Christ should be almost unthinkable. Calvin was adamant on this point. In one of his finest rhetorical passages he points to the church in Corinth, where “almost the whole body had become tainted…, where some hold the resurrection of the dead in derision, though with it the whole gospel must fall…, [and] where many things are done neither decently nor in order,” and then asks how Paul responded. “Does he seek separation from them…, discard them from the kingdom of Christ, strike them with a final anathema?” No, Calvin answers, “He not only does none of these things, but he acknowledges and heralds them as the Church of Christ, and a society of saints.”(12)

Calvin had very pragmatic reasons for his position: “By refusing to acknowledge any church, save one that is completely perfect, we leave no church at all.”(13) Press reports tell us that some in the Coalition came to a similar conclusion as they surveyed alternative churches they might join if they decide to leave this denomination: they too have concluded that there are no church bodies without serious problems and flaws.

On our side of the aisle, there are additional pragmatic arguments for staying put. The most compelling for me, given my concern about homosexuality, is the fact that this denomination, with its history, social status, and many influential members, has impact far beyond its own organizational boundaries. As I noted earlier, our condemnation of homosexual practices reinforces hatred of homosexuals throughout this society. Former moderator John Fife once said that every time a gay teenager commits suicide, there is a sense in which that goes on the Presbyterian Church’s chart. If a small group of dissenters with views like mine decamps to another denomination or starts a new one, that will have limited and temporary effect on the social tragedy we have helped to create. But if the Presbyterian Church (USA), changes its official teaching on homosexuality, it will go a significant distance toward changing the message that moderate religion broadcasts to the world. Maybe even homosexual teenagers will hear it, and think differently about the meaning and value of their lives. One important reason to stay is that the harm that the PC(USA) has done can only be undone by the PC(USA).

The theological arguments for staying if we possibly can are even stronger than the pragmatic ones. Being engrafted into the church is no ordinary admissions process. Baptism is not a chummy bonding with those with whom we would naturally gather in clubs. It is not an easy process, as our constant use of bland terms like inclusiveness sometimes suggests. I am one who thinks that inclusiveness is a concept with a rather short theological shelf life. We stand in a tradition that has emphasized not automatic inclusion but God’s choice. Granted, God chooses more generously and less conventionally than we do, but still, election is a strenuous and painful conjunction. Because of the price God paid to be joined with us, and because we are born into new life with God and each other as we are baptized into Christ’s death, baptism accomplishes what other initiations do not. It joins us in Christ to those with whom we have few if any interests, background characteristics, preferences or opinions in common. It breaks down the barriers that divide, making people who can’t stand each other fellow citizens and members of the household of God, because Christ died for all of them–and us.

If I want to testify, then, to what Jesus Christ has done for me, bringing me to him in this unique community that is his body, it follows that my chief reason for staying in this denomination is not my tie to people like you who share my taste for progressive ideas and moderate manners. I would hang out with you anyway, denomination or no denomination. My deepest bond, ironically, is not to you but to two groups with whom I am acutely uncomfortable but to whom, in Christ, I am inextricably joined.

One of these groups is those whom I have injured. My disagreement with one church policy does not change the fact that I have more power in the church because others have less. Homosexuals, minorities, and women not as lucky as I to find an institution that will accept their leadership are what Biblical scholar Ellen Davis calls our Ishmaelites, “the great nation less favored” of those to whom the church, by policy or practice, denies full benefits of membership and opportunities for ministry.(14) Sometimes, the less favored lash out in legitimate anger at the unfairness their situation. Much more often, sustained by the God who has saved their lives in the wilderness, those whom we have mistreated exercise amazing forbearance. They endure the prejudice and unjust laws we impose on them, sticking with us, who exercise power that should have been theirs, and struggling not only for their rights but also for our integrity. As long as they stay, as so many of them do, ministering in love and faith to me their oppressor, how can I walk away?

The other group with whom I am deeply enmeshed, not by my choice but by God’s sometimes puzzling providence, is my opponents, Presbyterians who hold some theological and religious ideas that are antithetical to mine. By “sheer grace,” says Bonhoeffer, we are joined in Christ as firmly to those who do not meet our standards of doctrine and piety as to those who do.(15) I have had the privilege of experiencing this connection first hand. Over the last decade, I have studied conservative protestants, including Presbyterians, hanging out in their groups and institutions and getting to know them. I have learned three things about my kinship with them.

First, though there are indeed people in this denomination who are bent on making mischief and doing harm, there are many more who are well-intentioned, and they are found in all parties and factions. I know because I have formed Christian friendships, which mean more to me than I can say, with some conservative Presbyterians.

Second, I have learned that liberal, moderate and conservative Presbyterians share a deep deposit of faith. In the course of my research, I have listened to dozens of sermons by evangelical Presbyterians, and most of them treat the scripture they proclaim in ways I would have had I been preaching or in ways I wish I had thought of. Our unremitting focus on issues that divide, to the exclusion of large numbers of theological convictions on which God has given us a common mind, is ungrateful. Perhaps God is judging our ingratitude by withholding further mutual understanding until we show some appreciation for the community of faith we’ve got.

Third, at the points we are irreducibly divided, and they are very real, my opponents still minister to me because they, unlike my allies, almost always see my faults and offenses and name them. Without this ministry of our opponents, Bonhoeffer reminds us, we can easily become “proud and pretentious,” cutting ourselves off from the work of grace by judging our faith and practice to be so correct that we don’t need grace.(16)

So: because I have opponents who care about me as a Christian, who share with me one faith, one Lord, and one baptism, and who help to save me from self-righteousness, I conclude that I should remain in a church with them for my own good.

Tell the truth and stay put. One footnote to these two principles, and one last word. The footnote: I said that separation from the part of the body into which one has been engrafted should be almost unthinkable. What would make it thinkable? One condition might be restrictions on the freedom and opportunity to testify to the truth. Some Presbyterians live under such restrictions. Unlike the rest of us, they cannot both lead reasonable lives and be ordained to positions of governing and teaching authority. As I just said, the generosity of those who stick with us even so puts us the rest of us in their debt. At the same time, others who make the painful decision to leave because the Presbyterian Church will not permit them to respond to God’s call deserve our support and admiration for their courage.

Are there other reasons to leave that might apply to those of us who do have full rights in the church? At those rare and dangerous moments when the church deserts its profession of faith on a wholesale basis–apostasy is the term for such moments–all Christians have to decide whether to separate themselves, either leaving or taking actions that will get them expelled. Without in any way minimizing the seriousness of our mistake about homosexuality–it is a deadly mistake; it must be corrected–I have to say that I do not think the Presbyterian Church is anywhere near that point. This is still God’s church. Our denomination presents to the world a true confession that contains some serious error. While working correct the error, we have ample foundation for worshipping and serving God together, with full and glad and grateful hearts.

One last word. It is a tall order–telling the truth, sticking together even though we disagree. It is easy to get discouraged. How can we sustain our spirits in this difficult time? Let’s try leaning on the promises of God. Last spring, I fell under the spell of an obscure passage of scripture on which I have now preached twice. It fits again here. In it, Zephaniah tells a familiar story: the political and religious leaders of God’s people in Jerusalem have made the usual mess. A wrathful Lord pronounces judgment on their crimes. Zephaniah quotes the Lord: I will pour out my indignation; in the fire of my passion all the earth will be consumed. But God’s plans and Zephaniah’s prophecy do not end there. Speaking again for the Lord, Zephaniah utters this remarkable promise, which seems to apply to the whole city, errant leaders and their victims alike:

I will remove disaster from you.
I will change the speech of the peoples to a pure speech,
that all of them may call upon the Lord
and serve him with one accord.
They shall do no wrong and utter no lies.
Then they will pasture and lie down,
and no one shall make them afraid.

It’s a promise to all of us. All of us–Covenant Network, Coalition, More Light Presbyterians and the great non-joining middle–all of us: With God’s help, we shall call upon the Lord and serve God with one accord. We shall do no wrong and utter no lies. We shall pasture and lie down, and no one shall make us afraid.

# # #

ENDNOTES

1. Alexa Smith, “Despite Frustrations, Presbyterian Evangelicals Say They’d Rather Fight Than Switch: 200+ Gather for Presbyterian Coalition Gathering IV,” News Briefs, Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), Issue No. 9926 (October 8, 1999), 8-11.

2. Miroslav Volf, After Our Likeness: The Church as the Image of the Trinity (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans), 1998.

3. Volf, After Our Likeness, 164, N. 29. Volf cites Lumen Gentium as a source for the view that the church is “a subject” of salvation.

4. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together: A Discussion of Christian Fellowship, trans. John W. Doberstein (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1954), 53.

5. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Henry Beveridge (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, reprinted 1998) Book IV, Chap. I, 14; Beveridge II, 292.

6. Christopher Morse, Not Every Spirit: A Dogmatics of Christian Disbelief (Valley Forge, PA: Trinity Press International, 1994), 297.

7. Avery Dulles, Models of the Church , Expanded Edition (New York: Image Books, Doubleday, 1987), 76.

8. Old School Presbyterians, for instance, gave pride of place to teaching the truth in propositional form. In an extreme expression of this view, J. Gresham Machen wrote, “Christian doctrine is not merely connected with the gospel; it is identical with the gospel” (quoted in Bradley J. Longfield, The Presbyterian Controversy: Fundamentalists, Modernists and Moderates [New York: Oxford University Press, 1991], 141-42). Dulles criticizes the emphasis on verbal witness over action in the theology of Barth and others who place priority on proclamation, the Word as event, kerygma as a happening.

9. Volf, After Our Likeness, 149.

10. Morse, Not Every Spirit, 300.

11. Thomas F. Torrance, “Introduction,” in The School of Faith: The Catechisms of the Reformed Church (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1959), xxxiii.

12. The whole passage, Book IV, Chap. I, 14, reads as follows: “They [who "look for a church altogether free from blemish"] exclaim that it is impossible to tolerate the vice which everywhere stalks abroad like a pestilence. What if the apostle’s sentiment applies here also? Among the Corinthians it was not a few that erred, but almost the whole body had become tainted; there was not one species of sin merely, but a multitude, and those not trivial errors, but some of them execrable crimes. There was not only corruption in manners, but also in doctrine. What course was taken by the holy apostle, in other words, but the organ of the heavenly Spirit, by whose testimony the Church stands and falls? Does he seek separation from them? Does he discard them from the kingdom of Christ? Does he strike them with the thunder of a final anathema? He not only does none of these things, but he acknowledges and heralds them as a Church of Christ, and a society of saints. If the Church remains among the Corinthians, where envyings, divisions, and contentions rage; where quarrels, lawsuits, and avarice prevail; where a crime, which even the Gentiles would execrate, is openly approved; where the name of Paul, whom they ought to have honored as a father, is petulantly assailed, where some hold the resurrection of the dead in derision, though with it the whole gospel must fall; where the gifts of God are made subservient to ambition, not to charity; where many things are done neither decently nor in order: If there the Church still remains, simply because the ministration of word and sacrament is not rejected, who will presume to deny the title of church to those to whom a tenth part of these crimes cannot be imputed? How, I ask, would those who act so morosely against present churches have acted to the Galatians, who had done all but abandon the gospel (Gal. i. 6), and yet among them the same apostle found churches?” Beveridge II, 293.

13. Book IV, Chap I, 17. Beveridge, II, 295.

14. Ellen Davis, “Sermon for Tuesday of 4th Epiphany, Year 2,” Marquand Chapel, Yale Divinity School, January 30, 1996, unpublished.

15. Bonhoeffer, Life Together, 25-27.

16. Bonhoeffer, Life Together, 27.

1999 Covenant Conference
Closing Worship, November 6, 1999

Sermon

WWPD?

Micah 6:6 – 8; Matthew 23: 1-12

Deborah A. Block
Pastor, Immanuel Presbyterian Church
Milwaukee

A child comes home from school, filled with the day, eager to show and tell. Elie Weisel recounts the memory of his mother’s words. She didn’t ask who he had seen, what he had done, what subject he had studied. She asked him, “Did you have a good question today?”

So just in case you have to go home and report to your mother– Did you have a good question today and yesterday? We’ve had lots of good questions. Tough questions. Probing the issues, provoking responses. In parliamentary procedure, calling the question is a move to close debate. In theological process, asking the questions is a move to open the conversation. Open our eyes and ears, hearts and minds.

So we’re talking, sharing, planning, covenanting and networking to do more of same. Where do we go from here, when we go from here? What is our estimated time of arrival? ( Or its Biblical variant, “How long, O Lord?”) What are the possibilities for unity and diversity in our beloved, beleaguered church? How to proceed? What do we do? WWJD? What would Jesus do? WWPD? What will Presbyterians do? Good questions.

What would Jesus do? — besides not abbreviating ethics to bumper sticker slogans and endorsing a full line of name brand products. Fourteen million bracelets sold to date! And now there’s the WWJD? New Testament, “created to be reader-friendly, easy to understand, conveniently sized, and only $9.99.” I’m curious, but not $9.99 curious, about the– as promoted– “special notes that highlight over 100 examples of how Jesus faced the same issues we face today.” Okay. WWJD? Re: G-6.0106b? Translated from the Greek, What would Jesus do about sexual orientation and ordination? What did Jesus do? What is the answer to Jesus’ silence on homosexuality? (Is that a blank page in the WWJD? New Testament?) — How do we practice what Jesus teaches? How do we “do” Jesus’ word and example of gracious and radical inclusiveness?

What will Presbyterians do?

Think it through, talk it over, fight it out, face it down, lift it up in prayer Shall we come with the usual offerings: thousands of programs, ten thousands of rivers of overtures and the fruit of our body for the sin of our soul? Sacrificing human lives on the altar of fear and ignorance. Our own brothers and sisters in Christ given up and given up on for our “wrong-doing” (Micah 6:7b REB, NJB). What Jesus would not do. What we Presbyterians must not do.

We listen to one another, when we’re feeling decent and orderly. Even listen to ourselves, when conscience calls. If we’re listening for mutual understanding, that’s good. If we’re listening for common ground, that’s good. If we’re listening for good questions, that’s good. In all of that, are we listening for what’s God? What are the God questions, the ones God asks of us? Do we have a God question today?

God has told us mortals what is good; and what does God require of us “but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?”

The wise ones say that these verses from Micah echo an “entrance liturgy.” One Professor Simundson suggests that “a religious official, probably a priest, responds to questions about who may approach the holy space, what one must do to please God and be acceptable. . . . The questions are all related to participation in Israel’s sacrificial cult” (NIB:1996). The acceptable offerings are hyperbolic, over the top. Who could possibly meet these criteria? What could a person do?

Again we incline an ear to the Old Testament Professor at Luther Seminary (perhaps we should be talking not only to “other Presbyterians” but to other Christians): “The answer changes the question. . . . The people’s questions were preoccupied with what they could do to please God” (1996:580). You know how we always say, “There is no such thing as a stupid question”? Well, Micah never said that. Our question of God is not exactly a stupid question. But it is the wrong question. The good question is God’s question of us:

What does God require? You. Your life. A life of faithfulness marked by justice, covenant love, humble and careful walking with God. Familiar words. And — was Micah a Presbyterian? What does the church require of you, but a life demonstrating the gospel: strong faith, dedicated discipleship, love of Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord. G-6.0106a. A familiar ring and a faithful resonance to an irrepressible prophetic witness. Do justice. Love kindness. Walk humbly. God has a good question for us and some high expectations of us. “Specific expectations [are] placed on God’s covenant partner,” is the way Walter Brueggemann puts it. “In biblical faith, the doing of justice is the primary expectation of God.” The people of God are “here commanded to attend to the very thing which God most values: Justice” (1986:5).

What will Presbyterians do?

Let’s try this for a good answer: Pay attention to this justice thing, the justice question, the justice expectation God has for us. Listen to God’s Word for us in scripture and through the confessions. Hear ourselves say, “In a broken and fearful world the Spirit gives us courage to work with others for justice, freedom, and peace.” What about that confessional standard?

Justice means different things to different people. And perhaps we prefer to leave it as elusive and nonspecific, because to nail it down invariably means that it will pry us out of our places and rearrange the furniture, and if we do it right we’ll be sitting someplace else with someone else. Mr. Brueggemann offers this as a way the Bible thinks about justice: “Justice is to sort out what belongs to whom, and to return it to them.” Sort out what belongs to whom, and return it. “So the work of liberation, redemption, salvation is the work of giving things back” (ibid.) That takes courage and grace. And Presbyterians can do that.

We can do that because God asks it of us and has empowered us to do it — by the Spirit, in our baptism.

Baptism is our “entrance liturgy.” Questions are asked and answered about participation and belonging. We come before the Lord with ourselves, with our firstborn, to be claimed by grace, to become a disciple, to begin a walk. We come to say Yes to God’s questions of us, to be covenanted to our Creator and Lord, commissioned for ministry to the world. We come remembering that “the disciples were empowered by the outpouring of the Spirit to undertake a life of service and to be an inclusive worshiping community, sharing life in which love, justice, and mercy abounded” (W-2.3002). We come united in the Body of Christ, confirming that “barriers of race, gender, status, age” — and, we are bold and faithful to say, sexual orientation — barriers are “to be transcended. Barriers of nationality, history, and practice are to be overcome.”

We come back knowing that “God’s faithfulness needs no renewal.” But ours does — for the living of these days in courage and in grace. All of which argues for a turning of our attention from government and discipline to worship! Barbara Wheeler made that point yesterday. “Worship is the purpose of the church” — where our good questions connect to some good answers. Where we are brought back to the grace of God expressed in Jesus Christ and sent “forward to that same Christ who will fulfill God’s purpose in God’s promised future”.

What will Presbyterians do?

Go back to the beginning. To our entrance ritual and its questions. “Let us remember with joy our own baptism,” we say. We don’t, really, most of us. Remember. And if we do it is not with joy but with sentimentality. And, as we heard yesterday, baptism is “not a chummy bonding”. We should come clean on baptism. It’s a cold shower and not a bubble bath. The waters are choppy, even dangerous. A small amount can effect a sea change. In these waters we die and rise with Christ. From these waters we emerge to new life. There is no holding on to these waters. They hold us. Through the Spirit, “claim us.” Free and forgive us. Tell us we belong and to Whom we belong. Member and re-member us, bonding us, ingrafting us to Christ. Not a “chummy bonding,” indeed. A uniting that is graceful. A unity that is just.

Justice is to sort out what belongs to whom, and to return it to them.

Claimed by the Holy Spirit in our baptism, we belong to God in life and in death. A good starting place for justice: To give ourselves back to the One whose we are and trust that Who to be the how we go from here. To trust in God to give us courage “to work with others for justice. . . .” To trust ourselves to live the faith we profess and live up to God’s expectation of us.

Ordination belongs to baptism. And all sorts of persons are baptized! How to sort out what sorts belong to ordination? Thin ice on the baptismal font! In baptism we give up what is making us out of sorts. Galatians 3:28 was a baptismal formula: fundamental divisions washed away. “No longer Jew or Greek slave or free male and female All of you are one in Christ Jesus you belong to Christ.” “Sort out what belongs to whom and return it to them.” Justice is to give back the covenant of grace and the call to all those baptized.

That’s where I first knew what Presbyterians would do. I learned it from the Sacraments. When women were called and excluded. In 1977 when my professor of systematic theology patted me on the back and said, “You’re very bright. It’s just too bad no presbytery in the country will ever ordain you.” And that was 20 years after the General Assembly opened the ministry of word and sacrament to women. I knew what he meant, but I wanted to hear him say it, to my face and preferably with his hands off my shoulder. “Not Barthian enough?” I asked. No: “The church just isn’t ready for you girls”. And that’s when I knew– that “girl” is a four-letter word. That the Pharisees did not practice what they taught. That baptism was not remembered — not with joy, not with justice.

Those of us who stayed in the church during those years argued that if you’re not going to consider us eligible for ordination, don’t baptize us. Oops! No confessional standard then affirming that the Spirit calls women and men to all ministries of the church. But there was baptism. And where there is baptism there would be the church. In the integrity of the Word, we would practice what we proclaim; in the power of the Sacrament, we would walk in new life.

Can’t Presbyterians be more faithful than “déjà vu all over again”? (I take a risk saying that, I know. When will it be safe to quote a Yankee in Atlanta — even a great theologian like Yogi Berra?)

It was a privilege to be asked to preach at this conference. It was a challenge to be the clean-up batter. We’ve already had one home run after another! It was a disappointment not to have this worship service in the beautiful sanctuary of Central Church. But, perhaps, it is as it should be. If God can prepare a table in the wilderness, God can set a font in a hotel ballroom. Especially in a hotel where the pipes loudly and all through the night flow and flush running water worthy of Amos’ rolling waters and ever-flowing stream.

So re-imagine this space. That beautiful wood font at Central — with a little stool next to it. (Short preachers notice those things.) Just a little reminder that we are called to step up to our baptismal covenant, walk tall in living it. My suitcase is always heavier than I can carry, so I didn’t bring the font from Immanuel Church. But imagine it: 700 pounds of gleaming white marble. For years forgotten, broken and piled in pieces in a dark corner of a dirty basement room. Recently given a new life. Restored and returned and, like the sacrament itself, a focus for the community “on what is essential”; as Placher has written, “a witnessing trust” to another reality. “ONE LORD + ONE FAITH + ONE BAPTISM” in large letters around the basin — the only words you see in that worship space. “One Lord, one faith, one baptism.” Imagine that font. Imagine that covenant. Imagine living that covenant.

What will Presbyterians do?

We have some good questions. And in Word and Sacrament, God is speaking some good answers. Take the plunge faithfully.

We go back to the beginning for our “exit liturgy”. To return to its promise and reaffirm its call. “Remember your baptism.”

Amen.

[The response to this sermon was the singing of "God of Grace and God of Glory" and the saying of the third section of A Brief Statement of Faith. The Reaffirmation of the Baptismal Covenant concluded the service.]