By a 7-2 majority, the Permanent Judicial Commission of the Synod of Lakes & Prairies has upheld John Knox Presbytery’s decision in February 2010 to approve for ordination as Minister of the Word and Sacrament Scott Anderson, a partnered gay man.  In his ordination examination, Mr. Anderson declared a “departure” to any interpretation of G-6.0106b that would exclude persons in committed same-sex partnerships from ordained service in the church.  In an “Affirmation of Conscience” presented to the Presbytery, Mr. Anderson said in part,

I affirm the authority of Scripture and our obligation as Christians to follow its teaching in all aspects of our lives, including our sexuality. I believe that all Christians are called to lives of holiness and faithfulness that glorify God and give concrete expression to our calling as followers of Christ. . . .

But I also believe that the categorical prohibition contained in G-6.0106b represents a grievous misapplication of biblical teaching in the case of gay and lesbian believers who are in faithful, covenanted, lifelong partnerships. . . . I cannot in Christian conscience support it.

The SPJC found that the presbytery acted constitutionally in considering and accepting Mr. Anderson’s stated “departure.”  The SPJC based its decision on the Authoritative Interpretation of G-6.0108 (“the Knox AI”) adopted by the 2008 General Assembly, which requires governing bodies “to give careful and prayerful consideration, on an individual, case-by-case, basis, to any departure from an ordination standard in matters of belief or practice that a candidate may declare.”

The Presbytery of John Knox was represented by Covenant Network director Doug Nave, a member of the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church in New York.

Mr. Anderson’s ordination continues to be stayed, pending an expected appeal to the GAPJC.  This case, as well as the challenge to San Francisco Presbytery’s decision to ordain lesbian Lisa Larges, is likely to be heard by the General Assembly Permanent Judicial Commission in spring, 2011.

Doug Nave
Covenant Network Convocation Dinner
General Assembly – Minneapolis
July 2, 2010

They call it “coming out” – the process of discovering and accepting who you are, and then sharing that identity with other people.

“Coming out” always starts as a conversation with yourself.  It took me many years to come out to myself as a gay man.  There were years when I didn’t believe that I was really different from most people – that my attraction to men was transitory, and would fade with time and experience.  Eventually I realized that that wasn’t true, that I belong to a small and rather unpopular minority – a realization that was a bit jarring to me as an economically prosperous, white male who had come to accept privilege without even thinking about it.  I spent a number of years reflecting on what it meant to be gay – discovering new ways to see the world, learning the rules of this new community, and grappling with the values that help us relate to one another as gay men.

But that wasn’t the only “coming out” experience I’ve had.  Shortly after I came out as a gay man, I attended a Roman Catholic service that was held mostly for GLBT people.  The experience was jarring because I had simply assumed that I would fit in, and I suddenly realized that I didn’t.  I didn’t know the liturgy.  The leaders asked for some volunteers to help serve communion and I volunteered without thinking, only to realize – once I was up front with the rest of the group – that I didn’t have a clue what to do.  At the coffee hour, I remember the look someone gave me when I told him that I was a Presbyterian, not a Catholic.  Suddenly, I didn’t fit in.

This really shouldn’t have been a surprise – I knew my church history.  But somehow I never connected with that history at a personal level.  I never really understood that for many in the Christian family, being a Presbyterian places me somewhere at the margins of the true church.  Many believe that Presbyterianism is the very embodiment of error, in its rejection of church authority, tradition, and teaching.

Having stumbled out of a closet I never realized I inhabited, I began the odd process of coming out to myself as a Presbyterian.  I began to take more seriously than ever before what it means to be Presbyterian.  Why are we different?

One of the things that makes us Presbyterians is a belief that God speaks to individual believers in that sacred forum we call the conscience.  We were born in the Reformation protests against the rule of popes and bishops.  We believe that requiring someone to disregard his or her conscience, in favor of man-made rules, is the sin of idolatry.  We declare our Reformed identity in our Historic Principles of Church Order, a core part of the Constitution that remains sacrosanct in the new Form of Government.  There we declare that “God alone is Lord of the conscience,” that “there are truths and forms with respect to which [people] of good characters and principles may differ,” and that in those areas, we have the “duty . . . to exercise mutual forbearance toward each other.”  And we do that because, at the very core of who we are, we know that we can’t be anyone else.

So let me ask you:  Have you come out?  Have you really accepted what it means to be Presbyterian?  I ask the question because many in our community, it seems, are struggling with that today.  Some seem determined to preserve a certain view of orthodoxy, to bind the consciences of a great number of Presbyterians to their own way of thinking.

We have spent the last 30-odd years arguing about sexuality – at least, that’s what we think we are arguing about.  But over the years I have come to believe that the crux of the issue is not what it means to be gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgendered.  The crux of the issue, for us, is what it means to be Presbyterian.

Let me stop here for a moment, because I mentioned sex, and that’s always fun to talk about – I’ll come back to Presbyterians, who are much less fun, in a minute.  If we are going to talk about GLBT people, it seems to me that we need to get our terms straight.  We need to acknowledge that what’s really at issue here is not sex, but love.  Our society is coming to understand that as never before, in our debates about same-sex marriage.

Gay and lesbian people may be denied the formal recognition of marriage in many places, but we are married nonetheless.  Our relationships emerge out of the countless little, implicit promises that we make to each other, day after day, until one day we wake up and realize that in fact we are married.  It’s not as much fun as parties, perhaps, but certainly as real and often more enduring.  Anyone who doesn’t know that by now simply hasn’t been paying attention.

My favorite definition of the love that I share with my partner of twelve years now comes from a Broadway show, courtesy of Barbara Streisand – clichéd, I know, but true nonetheless:  “His is the only music that makes me dance.”  Or we can look to the assessment offered by David Nimmons, a gay activist in New York:  “We are gardeners of each other’s hearts.”[1] And if that doesn’t do it for us dour Presbyterians, perhaps we resonate to the views of Law & Order’s Jack McCoy:  “Let ’em marry.  Why shouldn’t they be as miserable as the rest of us?”

We know that there is a hard practical reality, and a deep theological truth, in McCoy’s remark.  Living in committed, lifelong relationship is in fact a means of sanctification – the daily discipline of learning, in ways large and small, to find the understanding, patience, compassion, and support that can help another person to flourish.  It is a life of generosity and self-denial that enables each of us to grow more fully into the people God intends us to be.  When we deny marriage to any group, we deny them a powerful means of discipleship.

Gay and lesbian people know this.  I was in New York City earlier this week and walked by St Vincent’s Hospital, a bulky brick fortress looming over a neighborhood of historic brownstones and tree-lined streets.  St Vincent’s became the epicenter of daily life for many of us who lived in New York in the 1980s – the place where friends with a frightening and fatal disease went in search of care, when no one really knew what to do.  All of gay life was there – the horror of men wasting away in their prime, and also countless friends who came to offer comfort and companionship, to grieve, and to love.

St Vincent’s is where Dylan Thomas, the famous Welsh poet, died some years earlier.  He wrote these eloquent words that comforted many of us in that dark time:

“Though lovers be lost, love shall not;
And death shall have no dominion.”

When his wife, Caitlin, was taken to the hospital where Thomas died, she was so overwrought that she had to be taken away in a straitjacket.  Love often defines the heights of our hopes and the depths of our despair – the richness of life as it is given to us.

It is always jarring to me when I attend a Presbyterian gathering and find the church reducing the extraordinary richness and challenge of committed relationships to a tawdry fixation on sex.  That kind of “pegs and holes” theology reminds me of the games we played with wood blocks when we were children.  We outgrew those games, and the church really should too.  Maturity comes in the recognition that sex is an indivisible part of that deeply human, and humanizing, experience called love.

Some of us have learned that.  And some of us cling tightly to more restrictive views.  And that brings us back to what it means to be Presbyterians.

Kathryn Schulz has just published a wonderful study of human error called Being Wrong – I wish every Presbyterian would read it.  In it, she says:  “You might never have given a thought to what I’m calling wrongology; you might be the farthest thing in the world from a wrongologist; but, like it or not, you are already a wrongitioner.  We all are.”  She acknowledges the comforting illusions of certainty:  the sense that our world is stable, that we are safe, that we are informed, intelligent, and powerful.  But despite those attractions, we are all wrongitioners, and she calls on us to “foster an intimacy with our own fallibility.”[2]

It is a lesson we Presbyterians need to relearn from time to time.  But in fact the church has changed its views on a variety of issues over the years.

Church understandings of the natural order have changed over time.  We now appreciate that the earth is not the center of the universe, but revolves around the sun – Galileo was right, and the church’s condemnation of him was wrong.  We have come to increasing appreciation of how organisms grow and evolve, insights that ground many of the great medical advances of our day.

The church’s understanding of a just social order has changed over time.  We no longer defend slavery, or the segregation of the races.  We no longer preach hatred of the Jews.  We have rejected old condemnations of capitalism and usury.  We have departed from the early church’s commitment to absolute pacifism in favor of just war.

In governance of the church, we have rejected centuries of rule by bishops in favor of collective discernment by councils.  We have come to appreciate the importance of history and context in understanding Scripture.  We have endorsed the separation of church and state.  We have repented the hostile sectarianism of the past, and embraced calls to ecumenical dialogue.

The church in many areas has reformed its understandings of gender and sexuality.  In our tradition, we have embraced women’s equality with men, and women’s fitness for service as ordained leaders.  We have rejected an age-old requirement that clergy be celibate.  We have come to appreciate that marriage can be a means of self-giving, even sanctification, rather than simply a way to produce children.  We permit the use of birth control.  We have come to more compassionate understandings of divorce and remarriage.  We have come to appreciate that chastity does not require the total renunciation of sexual pleasure, and that married couples can even have sex on Sunday – all those conservative marriage manuals that tout the importance of good sex don’t seem to appreciate how radically they depart from centuries of Christian teaching.

In light of such changes, over such a wide range of issues, it is remarkable that some among us bring such an entrenched sense of certitude to our historic understanding of homosexuality.  In fact, we Presbyterians are almost evenly divided on this question, and perhaps we should be honest in acknowledging that there is no single, Presbyterian view on it today.

The early 1600s were a time of religious turmoil in England.  This was the age of Queen Elizabeth and King James.  (I have to digress, and note that the man who brought us the King James Bible is also an early figure in the history of men who loved men.  Those who think the King James Version was dictated by God personally might find that a worthwhile point to ponder.)  The English Parliament had outlawed the practice of Catholicism.  Protestantism was the law of the land.  But the population was divided, with many rejecting what they saw as “heresy” and adhering to the traditional (Catholic) faith.

One place this conflict sometimes played itself out was on the gallows.  Criminals in those days were hanged in groups, by the wagonload, and Protestant clergy would try to obtain public confessions of faith from them before they were executed.  Princeton historian Peter Lake writes that these efforts were not simply about vindicating justice and restoring social order.  He says:  “Souls were at stake and the power of true religion and God’s grace were on display, even in some sense, on trial.”[3] Some confessed fidelity to the Protestant church before they were hanged.  Others stoutly resisted.

In 1610, a Roman Catholic priest, John Roberts, was sentenced to death under a law that barred priests from ministering in England.  He was brought to the gallows in a wagon full of common criminals.  As they waited for the hangman to put the nooses around their necks, the priest encouraged his companions to embrace the Catholic faith, and they began praying aloud together.  Another group was also being prepared for execution nearby, under the care of a Protestant pastor.  When the pastor heard what was going on, he organized the condemned men in his cart to start singing hymns, loudly, so the priest could not be heard.

My imagination is captured by that picture:  two groups of convicts, one praying, the other singing hymns – each trying to drown the other out.  If souls were at stake and God’s grace was on display – even on trial – grace and souls almost certainly were lost.  Somehow I think we know they could have done better.  Even if they disagreed on points that in their time were regarded as earth-shattering, they could have found some true “essentials” to rally around – faith in Jesus Christ, hope in the providence of God.  They could have extended some fellowship and comfort to each other, and they certainly could have offered a more compelling witness to the gospel message of reconciliation for those who stood around watching.

And so it is now – but not for the first time.

We Presbyterians have had a number of deep divisions in our history — in 1729, 1758, 1869, and 1927, to name a few.  Each time, after a period of rancor and debate, we resolved our differences through a return to the founding principles that I mentioned earlier:  an acknowledgment that God alone is Lord of the conscience; that there are many things which, important as they are, are not so essential they justify a rupture in our communion; that we owe each other the duty of mutual forbearance in such matters.  This should all sound very familiar, because it is the solution that the General Assembly offered to the church in our debates about sexuality, in 2006 and 2008.  This solution is in our history, and in our DNA.

Some say that this solution is simply caving in to compromise – that the church can make no place for same-sex relationships so long as even a slight majority is unwilling to do so.  Now, these may be very fine Christians, but they’re not very good Presbyterians, because they are ignoring the very principles that have helped to define Presbyterianism for hundreds of years.  Certainty can be had in many Christian fellowships, but not in the Presbyterian Church – we trust too much in the conscience of our fellow Presbyterians, moved by the guidance of the Holy Spirit.  And we are too suspicious of authoritarian impulses that may achieve uniformity at the price of error.  We are the church Reformed, always being Reformed – it is what makes us Presbyterians in the first place.

We sing the old hymn, “Amazing grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me” – but I think we have it wrong.  Were we to really be honest, we would have to admit that what’s really amazing about grace, to us, is that it saved a wretch like him, and him, and him – people with whom we have nothing in common, who we wish would just go away.  So how are we to be church together?  Perhaps we can take our inspiration from two of Jesus’ first disciples, Matthew and Simon – the tax collector and the Zealot, right-wing conservative and leftist guerilla.  Somehow they found themselves fellow travelers and, despite all their differences, formed a Christian community.  Perhaps we can make them our patron saints.

Let us go out this week and remind each other what it means to be Presbyterians.  We have work to do, in preserving the last two Assemblies’ affirmation of our core traditions, and still more work to do in correcting exclusionary rules that have deeply hurt GLBT people and their families.  Let us hold fast to the gospel of grace and reconciliation, to conscience and mutual forbearance.  When people want to point fingers at gay and lesbian people, want to debate what it means to be like them, let us bring the focus back to ourselves, and remind each other want it means to be Presbyterian.  Let us believe that a sovereign God will exclude whom God wills, and that we risk grievous harm, to the church and each other, when we arrogate the task of exclusion to ourselves (surely Jesus’ parable of the wheat and the tares teaches us that (Matt. 13:24-30)).  Let us remind each other that we see in a mirror dimly (1 Cor. 13:12), but that our brothers and sisters in the Presbyterian Church love Jesus as surely as we do, and that we owe each other mutual forbearance where we do not see eye to eye.  That is not caving in to compromise, that is living together in conversation – sharing insights so that we who see dimly now may help each other to perceive the truth more clearly in years to come.

And what if we’re wrong?  There we have Paul’s magnificent affirmation:  “Neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Rom. 8:38-39).  And that’s for sure.

[2] Kathryn Schulz, Being Wrong ( New York: Harper Collins 2010), pp. 9-10, 23, 169.

[3] Peter Lake and Michael Questier, The Antichrist’s Lewd Hat: Protestants, Papists and Players in Post-Reformation England, 215, 220 (New Haven: Yale Univ. 2002).

What General Assembly Called Us To Be and To Do

A Plenary Dialogue Between
Cynthia M. Campbell,
President, McCormick Theological Seminary,
and Douglas A. Nave, Esq.,
Member of Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church, New York 

Covenant Network Annual Conference – 2006
Broad Street Presbyterian Church
Columbus, Ohio

November 10, 2006

Cynthia

We are very grateful to be here today and to talk with you about living, in these new days, into what we are called to be and to do as church.

Our Moderator has just spoken with great eloquence about who we are called to be:  to be the church of Jesus Christ, the community of Christ’s body in the world, witnessing to the reconciliation that God gives the world in Jesus Christ, and demonstrating – by our lives, as individuals and corporately – the gospel of God’s love for the whole of creation.

It is our conviction that one of the ways we demonstrate the gospel is by our commitment to unity and community and fellowship, out of season as well as in season. Many in this world contend that religion in general, and Christianity in particular, are forces for division, destruction and even evil. We are committed to the opposite, that God has called us to be forces for life and hope. Our vision of church is a place that welcomes all in the name of the One who welcomed all. That’s what we think it means to be this church.

Doug

One of the great privileges of being a lawyer is being able to listen to wonderful speakers like Cynthia and our Moderator and then bring everything down to a dry, technical level that sucks all the life out of it.

We all know that one of the major subjects of discussion in the church these days is what was known at General Assembly as “Recommendation Five” – the fifth recommendation of the Theological Task Force on Peace, Unity and Purity. That’s the one that clarifies how we conduct our ordination examinations, and the one that has been the focus of our conversations in the months following G.A.

I would like to start this presentation by calling us back to the first four recommendations that came before Recommendation Five. In fact, The Outlook has set up a table out in the narthex, and they’ve got a new issue that talks about these very points. I’d encourage you to pick up this issue of The Outlook and read it. One of the articles in it was written by Blair Monie and Kate Kotfila, who chaired the Ecclesiology Committee, and they call these first four recommendations “the forgotten four.”  The forgotten four.

It’s important not to forget those four, because as we move to Recommendation Five, “we can’t get there from here” unless we go through Recommendations One, Two, Three and Four. So just briefly to remind you what those are:

• Recommendation 1:  We need to stay together. We need to witness to the reconciling power of Jesus Christ in our lives as the church.
• Recommendation 2:  We need to build community together. We need to worship together. We need to study together. We need to undertake projects and collaborative work together.
  

  By the way, I’m calling these “recommendations,” but they were adopted overwhelmingly by General Assembly, with 91% voting for them as “strong urgings” to the church. So again:  Stay together, build community.

• Recommendation 3:  Find our common ground. Find our common ground. You know the story:  What the members of the Theological Task Force realized as they worked together over five years – people from the far left, people from the far right, and every place in between – was that they had these profound points of agreement about the nature of their faith and the role of Jesus Christ in their lives. Find our common ground.
• And finally, Recommendation 4:  Pursue dialogue in joint discernment. We’ve been debating for a long, long time. These days, we get into rooms and we just holler at each other. We’re like a dysfunctional radar. You know how a radar works:  It sends out a signal, the signal bounces back, the radar receives that signal and interprets it. We’re all real good at transmitting, but not very many of our radars are receiving. We need to figure out how to be working radars – to work together, to listen to each other, to discern and dialogue together.

Those are “the forgotten four.”  I can’t think of anything more important.

Cynthia

Those “forgotten four” highlight the second half of the theme of this presentation:  What we’re called to be and then what we’re called to do. Those four recommendations are four of the things we are called to do together. We’re called to live together and to make a life together in the midst of difference and similarity.

We think one of the places where this comes together is around decisions about candidacy, ordination, and installation. These critical moments are the intersection, where our values, who we say we are called to be by God, intersect with how we will actually live together in community.

I want to back up for a minute and suggest that this whole process of discerning who has the gifts for ministry, examining candidates – that is, talking with them about their understanding of the Christian faith and of leadership and service, making a judgment about their fitness and readiness – is not a twenty-first century problem. It’s not even a twentieth-century problem. It’s not a sixteenth-century problem. It is an issue that began with the very life of the church itself. Discerning who would lead and serve is as old as this form of religious faith and faith community. Examination for ordination is a process that the community goes through under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, to discern who God would have lead and serve within the life of the community. It is the responsibility of the community – the sacred, precious and very difficult responsibility – to make those decisions year in and year out.

In the Presbyterian Church, we talk about examination as having essentially three parts.

First of all, the larger church, whether it is through the voice of a session or of a presbytery, is to discern the character of the individual. Is this person a person of character, whose life itself gives witness to the love of God and the grace of Jesus Christ?

Second, we are to examine. We are to discuss, with persons presenting themselves with a sense of God’s call, their Christian faith and their views. This is particularly clear with respect to the ordination of Ministers of Word and Sacrament. Presbyteries are to discuss someone’s views with respect to theology, Bible, sacrament and governance.

And finally, the governing body is to discern fit. Is this individual rightly called to this particular place? Not all of us are called to every place in ministry, and it is the job of presbyteries and sessions to discern the fit between this particular call and the individual.

Now, our constitution sets standards by which these examinations, these moments of conversation and discernment, will be conducted. And it is our commitment as a denomination that those standards are set by us as a whole, by the General Assembly and the presbyteries, through writing and amendment of the Book of Order. It is important to remember that it is not up to local governing bodies to set standards, or to impose their own unique standards in their region. It is rather to our collective life as a whole that we look for these standards that will shape and form our life together.

Doug

Okay, down another level of legal technicality. I’m reminded of the story of the visitor to the parochial school who was going through the lunch line, taking things off the buffet, and got to the dessert section. There was a nice bowl of apples and a sign that said, “Please take only one. God is watching!”  This person went a little bit further down the dessert line, and there was a nice plate of cookies. And somebody had put up a sign that said, “Take all you want – God is watching the apples.”  We can get so wrapped up in technicalities and rules that we miss the big picture, can’t we? But it is important to think carefully about what makes up the picture.

General Assembly reminded us that the whole church establishes our standards for ordained service, and then sessions and presbyteries apply them. Applying our standards is a two-part process. The first part is deciding what the standard means – we’re going to talk about that a lot this afternoon. The second part is deciding how that standard applies to the individual being examined for office. Interpretation and application. Now, there is some conversation between General Assembly and the presbyteries and sessions when they interpret our standards, because ultimately if there’s an interpretive issue – “What does this standard mean?” – General Assembly can issue an authoritative interpretation that binds the church. But as a general rule, every time a candidate comes up to be examined, the ordaining body itself must consider a question:  If this standard is being applied, what does it mean? What does it mean in the context of this ministry, and what does it mean given the manner of life and the statement of faith of this individual?

Standards are important. The church sets them, presbyteries and sessions apply them . . . and candidates sometimes depart from them. Candidates depart from them for two reasons. One, they fail them because we’re all fallible human beings. Our standards come from scripture, so we have very high standards as a church. We take them very seriously; but we also recognize, given the depravity of human nature, that none of us meets our standards perfectly. General Assembly focused on a second way candidates depart from our standards, which is through the assertion of principled objections – that is, scruples. What happens when we’ve agreed on what a standard means and the candidate says, “I can’t comply with that”? We’ll be talking about that a bit later.

So there are two parts to the examination process. Part one is standards – what are they, what do we need to consider, and what do they mean? And part two, where the interpreted standard is being applied, may involve scruples. Standards and scruples. It’s very important to remember both of those words, because right now many in the church are talking only about “scruples” and they don’t really understand what that means, but they know it sounds bad. It’s not even really an English word, when you talk about somebody “scrupling” – scruples aren’t supposed to be a verb. Nobody knows what this means. But let’s start back and recognize that we have two things, standards and scruples.

Cynthia

This leads us to a question, more specifically, what are the standards? I must say, since General Assembly I’ve been working my way through this question, and coming back to it again and again. I’m curious as I read overtures or actions by presbyteries that say, “All of the standards in the Book of Order will be mandatory, and there will never be exceptions.”  That leads back to the question, exactly what are the standards?

Some of the standards I think are spelled out in G-6.0106a, which says, “In addition to possessing the necessary gifts and abilities, natural and acquired, those who undertake particular ministries” – now parenthetically, we are talking about all three ordained offices – “should be persons of strong faith, dedicated discipleship and love of Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord. Their manner of life should be a demonstration of the Christian gospel in the church and in the world.”  That’s essentially the core of the standards, the definition of what is required, the overarching standard for ordination. G-6.0106b, which we’ll talk about in a minute, goes on to further define that; but it is within the context, I would argue, of G-6.0106a.

There are other requirements for ordination that have to do with education, with passing certain examinations, and the like. They’re all found in Chapter 14. Those I take to be somewhat different than standards.

The other standards for ordination, I think, are the ordination vows themselves. That’s the other critical place where we ask people in good faith and conscience to answer in the affirmative. Four of them have to do with theological affirmations. We ask, do you trust in Jesus Christ as Savior, do you accept the scriptures of the Old and New Testaments to be the unique and authoritative witness to Jesus Christ and God’s word, and then:  “Do you sincerely receive and adopt the essential tenets of the Reformed faith as expressed in the confessions of our church, as authentic and reliable expositions of what Scripture leads us to believe and do, and will you be instructed and led by those confessions as you lead the people of God?” [G-14.0207c, G-14.0405b(3)]

Now, the verbs that seem especially important, as I think about these standards, are  “receive,” “adopt,” “instructed” and “led.” It’s important to notice what they do not say – they do not say “affirm,” “believe,” or “hold without exception.”  They say, “receive” and “adopt” (that is, take into one’s understanding and one’s life), and then be “instructed” and “led” by them. They become guides. That is what one is to affirm:  that you understand yourself to be “instructed” and “led” by this large constitutional and confessional history as you lead the people of God.

The question that is coming up in the life of the church relates to the “essential tenets” to which our ordination vows refer. It’s worth pausing and noticing that for some time now, the church has resisted an attempt to spell out a specific list, to say, “Okay, here authoritatively are the ten essential tenets.”  There’s perhaps a guide to that, early on in the Book of Order [G-2.0500], but it is a suggested way of expressing the Reformed faith.

The Adopting Act of 1729, when this language actually came into our life, said that those things are “essential” which, when violated, would mark a disagreement so fundamental that we would not be able to share Communion with each other. To say something is “essential” means that disagreement about it would make it impossible for us to share the Lord’s Supper, to be in communion with one another.

In my own theological judgment, the “essentials” of the Reformed tradition that are most important are those that are the “essentials” of the Christian tradition. We are Reformed Christians, a form of Christianity, not a religion unto ourselves. That is why the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds are the fundamental foundation upon which all the rest of the Book of Confessions rests. The standards really begin with these very big-picture statements. Given those, we live within a community of discourse and interpretation and faith that is the Book of Confessions.

We’re going to talk about what happens when one has a disagreement with those texts.

Doug

While Cynthia was reading the Book of Confessions and the Book of Order, I was reading lesser things. One of them actually was a very interesting sociological study by Michelle Wolkomir – I’d recommend it to you. It’s called Be Not Deceived. It came out earlier this year from Rutgers University Press. Michelle Wolkomir is a sociologist. She’s not a Christian, she’s Jewish. She’s not gay or lesbian. But she is really intrigued by the existence of the Metropolitan Community Church, which is a predominately gay and lesbian church, and Exodus, which is a program to try to “bring people out of” homosexuality.

What intrigued Michelle Wolkomir are the commonalities between these two groups. She noted that they both come from conservative evangelical roots. They both address themselves to the same problem, which is the meaning of homosexuality in Christianity. They both address themselves to the same people, gay and lesbian people and their families. They both use the same kinds of methodologies to address this question – they have small group meetings, they share their faith experiences, and they study scripture together. And interestingly enough, both of them tend to locate their problems in a church that is unjustly hostile:  the MCC says that scripture has been interpreted in unrealistic and hostile ways, while Exodus tends to say that the church imports a unique gravity of sin against homosexuality which is not warranted.

So they’re very similar programs. Yet with all of these commonalities, they come out in diametrically opposed places. The MCC says, “God made you gay or lesbian, and that’s good – celebrate, worship and live as faithful GLBT Christians.”  And Exodus says, “Faithfulness as a Christian means leaving the gay part behind.”  Now how do they do that? That was Michelle Wolkomir’s question. She doesn’t come out with quite so interesting a solution or analysis as she has in pointing out the basic, interesting contradiction here.

What I took away, of most interest to me, was realizing how much similarity there is in the faith experiences of these two groups, faithful Christians all, and how differently they land on this one issue that can split the church if we’re not careful. When we start thinking about our standards for GLBT people, it may be helpful to think about the MCC and Exodus, and remember that faithful Christians can come out in very different places on this one issue.

Now why is that important? Well, that’s important for several reasons.

One is because we’re trying to decide whether our disagreements about sexuality are “essential”. That’s what Cynthia was talking about. Are they so important that they render us incapable of Communion with each other?

A second reason is because part of the debate we’re having in the church today is misplaced. I hope you all know – if you don’t, please, please, please focus – the church has always, as long as we’ve been talking about this, has always welcomed GLBT people into ministry. Always welcomed. Our debates are about sexual practice, not orientation. And the question is:  Do GLBT people need to be celibate?

If you ever feel like the church is too hostile, that it rejects persons, it’s important to go back to the 1978 statement that started all this. The 1978 General Assembly said that GLBT people can bring special gifts of ministry because of their life experiences. We welcome GLBT people in the ministry. But we do have this hang-up about practice.

One of the big questions that you’re going to see debated for the next couple of years in this church is:  Assuming our standards prohibit same-sex practice – it’s a big assumption, we’ll talk about that, but let’s assume that for the moment – and somebody says, “I’m a gay Christian, I believe that my sexuality is a gift of God. I live responsibly in a life-long partnership and I will not comply with that standard, I don’t believe it’s right” – can the governing body nevertheless ordain that person? The question, if you want to put it in its starkest terms, is:  While we all agree that we can disagree on matters of belief, can we disagree on matters of practice? Or do the people being ordained have to agree to comply with our rules of behavior?

Now, there are differing views in the church on that. It’s a very important question. But I would like to hold up three things as you think about that question.

The first is from our Historic Principles of Church Order, grounded in the Westminster Confession. Section G-1.0304 of the Book of Order – please write it down – says, “There is an inseparable connection between faith and practice.”  If you believe something, you practice it. If you’re not practicing something, you don’t really believe it. John Calvin said the same thing. He said, “We have a doctrine not of the tongue, but of life.”  We live what we believe. And Jesus Christ said the same thing: “By their fruits you will know them.”  It is theologically bankrupt, in my view, to say that you can separate belief from practice. If we respect freedom of conscience in matters of belief, we must respect freedom of conscience in matters of practice.

Now, there are limits. You will hear about a case relating to women’s ordination called the Kenyon case. Walter Kenyon presented himself for ordination as a minister to the Pittsburgh presbytery in the 1970s. He told the presbytery, “I will not participate in the ordination of women. I won’t do it.”  And the presbytery said, “Okay, welcome into the fellowship.”  Some pastors of churches sued, and the matter went up to the General Assembly Permanent Judicial Commission. The GAPJC ruled that Mr. Kenyon could not be a minister in the Presbyterian Church. And that happened again in another case several years later, in the southern stream of Presbyterianism, known as the Hambrick case.

(By the way, while I’m talking about cases, let me do a quick pitch. There’s a CD out in the lobby – you notice I’m holding up things for you to look at, because we need resources, we need informed people; there’s a lot of misinformation out there. Please pick up a copy of these legal resources. They have all the cases people keep talking about, and if you read the cases, you’ll learn a lot.)

You have these two cases where the GAPJC said, “If you’re not going to ordain women, you can’t be a minister.”  Well, there were two other cases that people forget to cite, the Huie case and the Simmons case. The last one is the Simmons case, from ’85. In those two cases, the pastor said, “I don’t think women should be ministers, and I intend to continue teaching that women shouldn’t be ministers, but if my presbytery instructs me to ordain a woman, I will participate in that service.”  The presbytery said, “Welcome aboard,” and people sued. But the GAPJC said that this person – the same minister in both cases, Rev. Ellis – could be a minister.

What was the difference? The difference, as the GAPJC said, was that it is a function of the ministerial office to participate in services of ordination. It is a function of the office. If you want to have the office, you must be ready to perform the function. It’s not a matter of personal practice; in all four of these cases, the individuals were going to teach that women should not be ordained. They were acting on their beliefs. However, in two cases, the individual said that he would do what the ministerial office required in its functions, while the other two individuals said no. And that’s the distinction that we draw. You can declare a scruple, in our view, as to matters of both belief and practice. But if you’re standing for office, you must be prepared to perform the functions of the office.

Cynthia

In thinking about this matter of declaring a scruple, it’s helpful to reflect on the way this has been practiced in other parts of the life our church. I first met this concept when I was doing my intern year in Little Rock, Arkansas in the early 1970s. I went to a congregation and the pastor of that congregation, a man by the name of Donald Campbell (no relation) told me this story of his examination for ordination before the Presbytery of Arkansas.

Back in those days, the southern Presbyterian Church (like the northern church, actually, at that time) was governed by the Westminster Standards. The ordination vows were really quite specific: Do you affirm that the Westminster Standards “contain the system of doctrine taught in Holy Scripture?”  It was customary to ask candidates to express their faith and then to ask them, “Are there any places where you feel you depart from the Westminster Standards?”  And Don said, “Yes, there is a place where I depart, and I declare a scruple. The Westminster Standards forbid praying for the dead, and I believe that they’re wrong. I have always prayed for my grandmother, and I will continue to do so. I declare this as a scruple.”  Now, he acknowledged that when the Westminster Standards were written, that article had to do with the then-prominent idea within Catholic Christianity of prayer being a vehicle of moving the souls of the deceased from purgatory into the blessed state. But nonetheless, the prohibition remained, and he declared a scruple about something we now would not have a particular debate about, I think, in the life of the church. It’s an interesting example for me as to what exactly that has meant in our tradition.

Another example, frankly, if we had been using this as a way of understanding how to live with our confessional tradition, is that we would have required most of us, a large majority of us, women especially, to express scruples with the entirety of the Book of Confessions before the Brief Statement of Faith was written. Why is that? Well, that’s because both the Scots Confession and Second Helvetic Confession make it clear that women are not to function in the ordained offices. It is only with the Brief Statement of Faith, which clearly says that women and men are called to all ordained offices of ministry, that the need for the expression of a scruple was removed.

So departures from parts of the confessions should not be seen, I think, as a particularly unusual thing. The process of scrupling, in fact, may demonstrate the movement of the church with respect to our understanding of the status of different doctrines.

Doug

Okay, getting down to brass tacks, let’s look at G-6.0106b, “Amendment B.” 

The GAPJC reminded us in a case several years ago that every single person in the Presbyterian Church is in violation of G-6.0106b. That’s the provision of the Book of Order that requires everyone to live in obedience to scripture and conformity with the confessions, or to repent. And none of us lives perfectly in accordance with scripture and the confessions.

G-6.0106b is commonly thought of as the “anti-gay” provision in the Book of Order; the only place G-6.0106b has ever been applied, in any of the PJCs, is in cases relating to gay and lesbian persons. But let’s think for a minute about how it might apply. Here again, just to point out some resources – I hope you’ll read them on the flight home, or when you get home – we’ve made available Guidelines for Examination of Church Officers. We’ve included (in Chapter 6, I think) some cases as to how people might be out of compliance with our standards.

We start with the woman who drives the SUV because she thinks it’s stylish. The question is, is that a faithful reflection of our standard that we’re to protect the environment and act in a manner that doesn’t reflect greed or self-interest?

Cynthia

She unrepentantly drives the SUV.

Doug

She unrepentantly – she bought it! And we have other examples. And in raising up examples, we don’t mean to suggest the answers; we mean to suggest how many questions there are.

You know, you can leave from Ohio or Kansas, fly a bomber over to Serbia, deliver a bomb load over a city, and come home for dinner. So there may be Presbyterian churches here that have bombers on their sessions – that is, people who have chosen to exercise this practice in their jobs. Well, does that comply with our Confessions or not? I can’t tell you the answer, and none of us can tell anyone else what the answer is. We have to search our consciences.

What about people who believe that the war on terror validates torture? What about people who believe that bank officers serving on our sessions should adopt certain lending rules, rules on interest? What about those of us who are divorced and remarried? What about of those of us who enjoy playing the lottery, or going to the casino on occasion? We don’t mean any harm by it; it’s like going to the movies or having a sport or hobby. We spend money entertaining ourselves; why can’t we go to the casino and play a little poker? What about those of us who golf on Sunday morning? “Mental Health Awareness Day,” Sunday morning golf. Is it essential for church officers to be in church every Sunday morning? Is there a difference if the officer is working at his job on Sunday morning to support his family, as opposed to golfing? What do our standards require? Are those standards “essential”?

If we put this kind of thought into what G-6.0106b really means, we see that the gay and lesbian “issue” is in one tiny corner of the many, many things that we should be concerned about as Christians today.

But it is an issue, it’s the one people are focused on, and it’s an interesting issue. You know, there are presbyteries out there who are saying – I love this – “If you’ve got any scruples, you’ve got to declare them.”  I can just envision the first examination. The candidate gets up and says, “How many do you want?”  Somebody was talking about the person who took the Book of Confessions on their vacation. This is going to be one long presbytery meeting, and they’ve only gotten through Candidate #1!

That’s not really how our process works very often. What happens is, our examiners come with certain concerns and ask about those. But it is helpful and important to remember that what might be of concern to me is not necessarily what’s of most concern to God, or should be of most concern to the church.

How do we approach G-6.0106b? I gave you two words; do people remember them? Standards and scruples, and they come in that order. Our standards say that our officers are required to live either in a faithful heterosexual marriage or in chastity in singleness, and any person refusing to repent of any practice the Confessions call sin shall not be ordained to the office of elder, minister, or deacon. There’s a lot of stuff to unpack there if we’re going to take it at all seriously. (Another thing I love is these proposals that “everything in the Book of Order shall be required,” as if it’s all black and white.) 

For example, what’s “chastity”? Is it celibacy, or is it monogamy? What is it? If you read these Guidelines, you’ll see we’ve got several pages on chastity. The answer is not clear, as a matter of history or of polity in the Presbyterian Church.

Or what do the Confessions call sin? You know, there are only two passages in all of the Confessions that potentially talk about homosexuality. One of them condemns “homosexual perversion”. Well, I assume we condemn “heterosexual perversion” as well, but that doesn’t mean we condemn all heterosexual relations. The other passage condemns “sodomy”. But if you go back and read the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, where that word comes from, you realize we’re talking about rape, or inhospitality, or injustice, or oppression. The scriptures never say that the sin of Sodom was same-sex relations in a loving consensual relationship. So what practices do the Confessions really call sin?

If you, the candidate, or the examining body (session or presbytery) decide that these provisions really do outlaw all conjugal relationships in a same-sex couple – let’s assume that – and somebody comes in and says, “I’ve been in a 20-year relationship, it’s monogamous, and I believe that I cannot live in compliance with this standard because I believe the standard is wrong” – is that person “refusing to repent”? What is repentance? Is it just saying, “I don’t agree with the majority”? Well, the Confessions don’t say that. The Confessions say that repentance is a God-given sense of inward conviction about the wrongfulness of our acts. You can look it up, it’s in there. If this person is not convicted of the wrongfulness of his or her acts, is she really “refusing to repent”?

There are lots of questions, and those are just some of them, in G-6.0106b. It’s important to think through all of those issues and decide what the standard means, to decide if you have a disagreement with the standard. You don’t know if you disagree with the standard until you know what the standard means. It’s only if you’ve determined that the standard creates a problem that you might declare a scruple.

It’s interesting to me that the definition in the 1700s of “matters that can’t be scrupled” is “matters on which disagreement makes us ‘incapable of communion.’” You know, 45% of the Presbyterian Church, or more, believe that G-6.0106b is wrong. Are we saying that 45% of our members really aren’t Christians, that this is so “essential” we can’t possibly be in communion with each other? I don’t think so. In fact, I know that’s not right, because we’ve had this disagreement for a long time, and we haven’t excommunicated that 45%. Many of them are still serving as officers and ministers in the church. So we need to understand what the standard says, and then we need consider scruples, and what’s really “essential” in our life of faith.

I had an interesting conversation before the conference with somebody who said, “Isn’t what we’re really talking about here fidelity to our covenant together to live by the rules?”  And I said, “Absolutely.”  But the question is, “Which rules?”  We can talk about a sexual ethic as a rule, but we can also talk about our historic, fundamental, defining belief that God speaks to the conscience of each of us, and that we owe each other mutual forbearance in matters of conscience. If we try to cram down one understanding of a sexual ethic, we’re being unfaithful to much larger values in Reformed Christianity.

I’ll wrap up with this:  I was listening to Jon Walton comment a little bit before this session started about the fear in the denomination today, the fear. You see it in presbyteries and sessions:  What is going to happen? Do we have to adopt resolutions to make sure that what GA did doesn’t create anything bad? It’s fear. Jesus told us the answer to that. Jesus said, “Perfect love casts out fear.”  And that’s what we’re called to do.

Cynthia

I get a lot of grief from friends of mine because I was known in the church I served for always beginning a discussion, “On the one hand . . . but on the other hand. . . .”  I actually deeply believe that’s the right approach, as a principle of theological engagement. That is the heart of what it means to be Presbyterian, but is also a part of the reality of Christian tradition. Another way to put it is resisting the temptation to say there’s only one answer. Or resisting the temptation to see one value and not affirm others.

There are those in the life of our church who feel very deeply about personal holiness and the lifestyle of a leader in the life of church – elder, deacon, or Minister of Word and Sacrament – that our lives should be different, that we are called to a form of life, to disciplines relating to all kinds of choices, in economic, political and religious terms as well as in terms of our relationships. This concern about personal holiness is deeply embedded in the biblical tradition, as well as in our Reformed tradition.

There’s another side of that, and that is that holiness is always something that is conferred; it is not earned. I was doing some research on something else and was reminded that the first time the word “holiness,” or “to make holy,” ever appears in scripture is on the seventh day. When God rested, God made the seventh day holy. It’s the first time anything was made holy. The day wasn’t holy in and of itself until God made it that way. What was holy was not a person or a place, but time. Holiness is something we receive from God as a gift, as a grace that we are then enabled to live into. Yes, holiness matters, and yes, so does understanding that it is a gift of God to live into as imperfect people.

What we’re talking about here is in the best of the Reformed tradition:  having standards, rules and policies – principles, if you will – that shape our life as perhaps a boundary, a large boundary, but also being clear about what is our core, which is our common faith and trust in Jesus Christ. It is about applying those standards but looking precisely to the individuals and the situations in which we are called to discern the meaning and applicability of those standards.

In order to do this, we have three places where trust comes in:  trusting one another and freedom of conscience, understanding all of us to be enlightened by God’s Spirit; trusting in the sovereignty of God, who reveals truth in its season and walks with us through our journey as community; and trusting in the grace of God, that even if we’re wrong about this, God will not let us go, from God or from each other.

Thank you very much. We’re ready now to take questions, and David will manage those questions.

Question:

Our assumption is that all seek the guidance of the Holy Spirit. Why is it that the Holy Spirit opens some Christian minds to new understandings of the faith and not others?

Doug

That’s a terrific question. Who would like to answer it?

One of the things I find helpful in thinking about this – there’s so many ways to answer it, the great theologians have written books and spent careers on it. One of the things I think most interesting is when we look at the four gospels, we see that they were written to different audiences with different focuses. Sometimes they seem to be inconsistent with each other. And you wonder why that is. I think that reflects an acknowledgement and a witness in scripture that God speaks to different people in different ways. We see that also in our Book of Confessions. We recognize that the church hears the Holy Spirit in different ways in different times. God is so big and our understanding is so small that often we need to hear the message in many different ways in order to even begin to grasp an essential truth. That’s one answer.

Cynthia

Another answer to that is in an analogy I sometimes use when I’m teaching theology. It’s related to the example of the four gospels. One can think about the work of doing theological reflection – that is to say, trying to love God with one’s mind, to let our faith seek understanding and expression – as much like a group of people around a piece of sculpture or, for example, that baptismal font. My vantage point on that baptismal font is one thing, and it’s another thing for those of you who are sitting in different locations. You see different things. Some of you can see that there’s a bowl inside of that, and some of you cannot. I can see that from here, so I would describe it with that recessed bowl inside of it, but back in the back row, I’ll bet you can’t see that. You don’t know it’s there. You perceive it from a different vantage point. That is part of what accounts, I think, for real theological difference:  our place within the tradition, and our own experience, that we bring when we stand before the mystery of God, which none of us will ever comprehend. So we live under the guidance of God’s Spirit, trying to move around and expand our angles of vision.

Doug

Can I add one other thought that occurred to me? I’d have to go back and look at the story to think if I’m using it correctly, but there is the story in the gospels about Jesus being tempted to throw himself down from a high point, to demonstrate his sovereignty and power. And that just isn’t the way God has worked in the biblical accounts. If we believe in free will, then we believe that God, for some reason, has felt it is important that we have choice and faith; and perfect revelation almost makes choice and faith impossible. Perhaps there’s something in the created human nature that makes it important not to have complete and true and absolute revelation, because then we wouldn’t have the free will and choice to worship God, we would simply be automatons and serfs.

Question:

How does a governing body work with the “shall” language? Can something mandatory be deemed non-essential?

Doug

Yes. What’s the next question?

The “shall” language – there are lots of ways to address that. I think the short answer is that we have lots of different rules and hierarchies and levels of rules, and it depends on what level you’re looking at.

We have a rule that says people “shall not be ordained” – that’s where this comes from, let’s get to the agenda around those claims that, under G-6.0106b, people “refusing to repent of any self-acknowledged practice which the confessions call sin shall not be ordained.”  That’s the “shall” word. If you believe all of that – “people refusing to repent of any self-acknowledge practice which the confessions call sin” – if you believe all of that means “persons engaged in unrepentant, same-sex conjugal relations,” then the “shall” might have some bite. But when we [the Church] wrote G-6.0106b, we wrote into it the need to interpret and grapple with our confessional heritage. What do our Confessions call sin? What is “refusing to repent”? What is “chastity”, which is in the sentence before? That “shall” word doesn’t have one meaning. You have to understand the whole sentence, take it apart and understand what it means.

Some have said, “Oh, that’s all legalisms; everybody knows what General Assembly meant to do when it adopted G-6.0106b.”  Well, if that’s what they meant to do, the question is, why didn’t they do it that way? We had language we’d been working with since 1978:  “self-affirming, practicing homosexuals” cannot serve. Real clear. Why didn’t its supporters try to put that into the Book of Order? Because they didn’t believe it would command a majority in the presbyteries to pass. We had to have language that provided flexibility and that was truer to our confessional and biblical understanding of human agency. When you hear that “shall” question, it’s important to note that it’s coming from a lot of assumptions about G-6.0106b that simply aren’t true.

The other point I would make is that you have the hierarchies of rules. You have sexual ethics at one level. You have other rules that say freedom of conscience “shall” be respected. We have a “duty” to show mutual forbearance to each other. We have those requirements too. I find it hard to believe that a sexual ethic that is so contentious today can be deemed as important as the guiding principles of our Reformed heritage for 400 years.

Question:

Some sessions have brought motions that presbyteries should not allow any scruples concerning G-6.0106b for candidates for ordination. What suggestion do you have for opposing this motion?

Cynthia

I’m going to toss that back over to Doug, because I must say, I find this immensely perplexing. I frankly don’t understand how it could be legal for a presbytery to say in advance that no one may disagree or have a principled objection to something. Now maybe there’s something about the polity, which is essentially what’s being said by an action like that.

The ones I’ve seen are even stronger; there are a couple of presbyteries that have affirmed statements saying they will not allow anyone to state any scruples about anything. I find this frankly incredible, a misunderstanding of what it means to be Presbyterian, which is to respect, in a give-and-take, the way in which we understand ourselves to fit within a Book of Confessions. That’s why we have a Book of Confessions and not just the Westminster Standards. In fact, we draw a wide circle, or an arc of a tradition, not a laundry list of specifics. That places the judgment, in the discussion between a governing body and an individual, on how that person’s views fit within that arc, or that trajectory, of the interpretation of the Christian faith. To say up front that no one may have any disagreements seems to me to be somehow out of sorts with the whole nature of our tradition.

Then again, I could be wrong about that. There are probably better polity people here than I, so let’s let you answer that.

Doug

I think it’s a perfect answer, I really do. I think what General Assembly did is remind us what it is to be Presbyterians. It wasn’t about gays, it was about Presbyterians. We’ve got to go back to the “forgotten four” – recommendations 1, 2, 3, 4, now “strong urgings” from GA 1, 2, 3, 4 – about how we live together as Presbyterians.

You know, there are lots of Christian communions in the world, and not all of them have our system of collective discernment with respect for conscience. If you want to have very, very clear rules, there are Christian fellowships that offer those. We don’t. What we offer is the ability of faithful Presbyterians to come together and to grapple seriously with their consciences and with collective discernment to try to find the way forward as the Holy Spirit leads us into a continuing understanding of what we’re supposed to be and to do.

One of the things that GA did, that didn’t get much press, but really was wonderful – you know, we talk about ourselves as “Ecclesia reformata, semper reformanda,” which is Latin, and it’s translated in our Book of Order as “The church reformed, always reforming.”  It’s our tradition, or we’d all be Roman Catholics. The church reformed, always reforming. General Assembly this year said that’s not the right translation. In the next edition of the Book of Order you’ll see a footnote that says what those words really mean is that the church is always “being” reformed. We don’t reform because we choose to; we reform because the Holy Spirit reforms us. It’s these processes where we come together and act like true Presbyterians, grappling with questions of what scripture really means, what our confessional heritage really means, what we’re learning from our lives as faithful Presbyterians together, that allow us to be “Ecclesia reformata, semper reformanda.”

Question:

This is along those lines. How can we dialogue with people who don’t even agree with the process of the first four parts of the Task Force report on the basis of the Task Force not using Robert’s Rules of Order for decision-making?

Cynthia         

Well, let’s remember that all the Task Force did was to suggest was that maybe, occasionally, a governing body might want to consider having a conversation about something in a way other than the American version of Robert’s Rules of Order.

Now, I’m the moderator of a faculty. I thought sessions were interesting. There’s no rotation in faculties, we’re just there forever. We don’t ever move to a formal voting session unless I sense that we’ve gotten to a place where we really need to slow down and make sure we can hear a variety of sides before we make a decision. Most of the time what we do is work through something until it’s clear that we’re satisfied with it. Now, this sometimes takes awhile. But it’s perfectly effective, and it’s not illegal as long as eventually we note that these actions have been taken. That’s essentially what the Task Force recommended might be considered sometimes. I think it’s important to just go back and say what this means, as we engage in that conversation.

Doug

One of the great things you might like to read, I strongly recommend you read it, is a paper that was prepared for the Task Force by Stacy Johnson, a professor at Princeton Seminary; it’s on the Task Force website. It’s about the different views people in the church have adopted over time about homosexuality, and there were seven. Interesting:  this is not a black-and-white question. Seven different views that faithful Presbyterians and Christians hold about same-sex relationships – from the strict “prohibitionist” to the “celebrationist,” or something, I forget the precise words he used – faithful Presbyterians all.

What the Task Force members learned in their life together, from the far right to the far left, was that they had the important things in common. They believed in Jesus Christ. They issued a theological reflection that they urged people to study; that’s forgotten Recommendation Two. If we come together and we start talking about the important things we have in common, that can provide groundwork for discussion of the things we don’t necessarily agree about, but that we can help each other understand.

It seems to me that the biggest impediment here is the fear, it’s “We have to do something, let’s pass a statement outlawing scruples or something.”  And by the way, folks, we’ve done it too. Remember those “statements of dissent”? When G-6.0106b was passed, we had a lot of congregations, even a few presbyteries, who felt they had to say something, and they adopted statements of dissent. Some of them were legal, some of them were found to be illegal, but they had to give witness to what they believed. And we’re seeing that now on the other side. We believe it’s problematic. But perhaps some of this is venting, and people just need time to cool down. We need to give people time to cool down, and then remind each other why we’ve chosen to be Presbyterians in the first place.

Cynthia

If I could follow on to that for a second. I think one of the things that’s going to need to happen, presbytery by presbytery, is for people to sit down with each other, whether it’s the Committee on Ministry or a separate examinations committee, and begin to think through how we will conduct this part of our life together. A lot of you here that I’ve run into have said, “I’m on a COM in my presbytery.”  My strong recommendation, what I would urge you to do – rather than take the San Diego Presbytery approach, which is to write a manual of do’s and don’ts, and adopt a set of questions that shall be asked – is rather to take the first four parts of the report, these recommendations that the church has been commended to receive, and to use those within the COM to talk about, “What is it that we share in common, what do we understand together to be the core of our faith? On the basis of that, then, we’re going to go into these conversations with individuals.” 

Does this make the work harder? Yes, it does. But I don’t think it is wrong for us to assume that this is an important practice of discernment that we should engage in together, and then be ready to question ourselves:  “So where is the mutual forbearance of someone who maybe doesn’t express the faith in all of the ways that I would, but is enough within the family that I can recognize the Reformed faith in that person?”

Question:

Well that sounds good. But someone wants to know, since the PUP Report called for us to move away from battling toward discernment, after all of the discernment aren’t we going to have to re-engage in the battle and then vote?

Cynthia

We don’t know that yet. It depends on what “the battle” means. Will we continue to make decisions? Yes. Can we imagine another way towards the decision rather than battling? That’s what I think the PUP Report asks us to imagine.

Doug

If we do the “forgotten four,” five is irrelevant. If we do the “forgotten four,” five is irrelevant and we don’t have to have the fight, because we’ve learned how to live with each other and we’ve grown in a new appreciation of all the commonalities we share, and we respect and trust each other enough to respect and trust each other’s ordination decisions.

I don’t want to be misunderstood. That’s not to say that we don’t at some point want to change our standards. We do. I think that a big part of the church thinks our standard is wrong. But we’ve been fighting legislatively for thirty years, playing Capture the Flag, and so far there’s just a lot of blood on the floor. This is an invitation to say, maybe if we do the “forgotten four,” next time we’ll have a parade instead of a fight, and we will see a common truth about what our standards should be.

Question:

Since the Book of Order states that church members and officers differ only in function, does prohibition of GLBT persons for ordination imply prohibition of GLBT persons as members?

Doug

No, no –

Cynthia

No!

Doug

– and no! First of all, GLBT people are not prohibited from serving in ministry. That’s what we keep asking people to remember, and it’s so hard for folks to really let that sink in. We do not prohibit people from serving in any office of the church on the basis of orientation. Our rules relate only to practice. And when it comes to membership, our Book of Order says that everyone can be a member on the basis of their statement of faith alone. Now give something better, but that’s the legal answer.

Cynthia

Section G-4.0403 of the Book of Order says that:  “The Presbyterian Church shall give full expression to the rich diversity within its membership” – and we wish it was greater – “and shall provide means which will assure a greater inclusiveness leading to wholeness in its emerging life. Persons of all racial ethnic groups, different ages, both sexes, various disabilities, diverse geographical areas, different theological positions consistent with the Reformed tradition, as well as different marital conditions (married, single, widowed, or divorced) shall be guaranteed full participation and access to representation in the decision making of the church.” 

Now that’s one of those interesting points of tension – how does that piece of the constitution shape and inform our practices of ordination? That is the tension within which we live as a church.

Question:

Some people contend that being a practicing gay or lesbian person is in opposition to “a demonstration of a Christian lifestyle,” and they don’t even use G-6.0106b to come up with their condemnation. How does one respond to the question of what a demonstration of a Christian lifestyle looks like?

Cynthia

I think one looks among other things to some of the definitions that Paul uses of the fruits of the Spirit:  patience, self-control, kindness. One looks to the model of Christ’s life of welcome and of service. One looks to words such as the exhortation to do justice and to love kindness or mercy, and to walk humbly with God. One looks to Paul’s statement that love does no wrong to the neighbor, and therefore it’s love that is the fulfillment of the law. And then one asks, how does my life interact with those kinds of fruits? How does my life give witness, give evidence of that? The answer for all of us to that is, by the grace of God, better some days than others, and for all of us, never completely, because that’s the nature of our human life. Christian discipleship, if it’s anything, is the prayer that our lives continue to be conformed to those values, rather than an assumption that the only time you can be an ordained officer is once you’ve achieved all of them, or some level of perfection.

Question:

A colleague of mine, a gay pastor, took his life last week after a TV reporter planned to expose him. I’ve wondered awhile now about coming out on the floor of presbytery to be honest about who I am and what and whose I am. Is now the time to stand up and call light to the dark and poisonous atmosphere that continues to devastate even the gifted faithful?

Doug

Well. That will be a question that has to be answered by every person in their conscience, given their context and what they want to accomplish.

You see this when you counsel people about their upcoming examinations for office. Sometimes they say, “I simply want to serve the church. Why are they talking about sex? I don’t want to have that conversation, I don’t want to talk about my relationship with my partner, I want to talk about my relationship with Jesus Christ.”  Our rules allow people to decide not to self-acknowledge practice, and some decide to do that. There are others who say, “It is important to change this injustice and error” – and you can add twenty words, it’s a horrible, horrible misunderstanding in the church – “and the way you change that is to witness, so I’m going to go to the presbytery with this.”  And we had a case of a gentleman who did that, who said, “I’m not in a relationship today, but I intend to participate in a fully human, sexual relationship in my ministry.”  Or there are people who go and say, “Yes, I’m in that kind of a relationship today.”  Their call is to witness in that way. And there are lots of things in between.

One of the things that we progressive groups consistently try to live out in our lives together – More Light, TAMFS, Covenant Network, Witherspoon, all of the groups that are working to make the church more inclusive – is to respect the many different choices that different people make within their own contexts and with their own calls. That kind of respect is very important. Sometimes you see some tensions between the groups about whether all strategies work at General Assembly. That’s a legitimate question to ask. But I don’t think there can be any question, when you’re talking about individuals’ witness, that there is no one answer, there’s no one straitjacket. There are many, many ways to be a faithful witness to your life and experience and call.

Question:

I was on the ordination track in the Presbyterian Church. While I was in seminary, I began my coming-out process while discerning my call. I grew tired of leading a double life, so I’ve recently left the denomination and am now under care in the United Church of Christ for ordination as a minister. When I speak with GLBT people who are considering entering seminary, they ask me if they should do this under care of the PC(USA). I tell them that is up to them, but that the PC(USA) is not a denomination that is open to GLBT people serving in leadership. Why would a GLBT person want to go through the burden of ordination in the PC(USA)?

Doug

I think the short answer is because the Presbyterian Church desperately needs faithful witnesses. We call ourselves Christians because Jesus Christ took the hard way, not the easy way. He wasn’t exactly welcomed with open arms in his own religious establishment; he was considered a heretic and he was killed for it. We Christians today believe that ministers are often called to follow the way of the cross. The question again comes back to how you think you can best minister to a hurting church and a hurting world. Some will believe that they can best witness by righting this wrong, by witnessing on this issue, even if it means that they will not be ordained in the Presbyterian Church (USA). There are others who believe that they can best minister to a hurting church and a hurting world by using the process to become ministers and then witnessing from the inside, to help grow a loving, better, more just understanding of grace and the gospel, which is frankly what this whole misunderstanding is about.

Philip Yancey wrote a great book – he’s more conservative than I am, but he wrote a book whose title I love:  it was What’s So Amazing About Grace? Wonderful title. Ultimately, I think we can address the gay/lesbian issues in this church by addressing the gospel, because if the church really understands grace and the gospel, we won’t be able to exclude gay and lesbian people the way we do today.

There are a lot of different choices as to how you can minister. Some will feel compelled or called to follow the way of the cross, knowing they make a witness and probably won’t be ministers in the PC(USA) but then may move to the UCC or to other life calls. Every person has to figure out how they’re called and how they can best serve the gospel.

Cynthia

I want just to add on a word to that, to take it another step. We’ve spent a number of years worried about a lack of, especially, younger people feeling a call to ordained service in the life of mainline churches in general, the Presbyterian Church in particular. A lot of us have spent a lot of time and enlisted a lot of help from people like you, identifying young adults with the gifts and graces for ministry and getting them into seminary and supporting them. I spend a lot of time with these people. I am frankly amazed at the talent and energy that is coming into the life of the Presbyterian Church from young adults who have been lured by God and the voice of the church and people like you into considering ministry. They are terrified, as we speak – straight, gay, whatever – they’re terrified of what they’re going to face in presbyteries.

One of the things we need to go home and think about is whether or not we want the beginning of ministry for some of our brightest and best to be a terrorizing experience, or whether we want it to be part of their discernment along with us and their growth in faith. I think most of us here would like to say that in fact our faith and our theological judgment have grown over the life of our ministry from when we were ordained. It’s the sign that there is a God. I’m not where I was theologically thirty years ago, and I’ll bet a lot of the rest of you aren’t either. It’s part of our job to discern and to deal gently with those in whom we have invested a lot of time and energy. That doesn’t mean that we don’t hold people to high and important standards. But it does mean that we want to recognize that we have people of very, very good will who are offering themselves to us, for our future, and to walk with them through this incredibly important time in their leadership.

Thank you.

Sermon

Doug Nave

Covenant Network Conference
November 3, 2005
Memphis, TN

The next day John again was standing with two of his disciples, and as he watched Jesus walk by, he exclaimed, “Look, here is the Lamb of God!”  The two disciples heard him say this, and they followed Jesus.  When Jesus turned and saw them following, he said to them, “What are you looking for?”  They said to him, “Rabbi” (which translated means Teacher), “where are you staying?”  He said to them, “Come and see.”                                                                           (John 1:35-39)

Peter turned and saw the disciple whom Jesus loved following them. . . .  When Peter saw him, he said to Jesus, “Lord, what about him?”  Jesus said to him, “If it is my will that he remain until I come, what is that to you?  Follow me!”  So the rumor spread in the community that this disciple would not die.  Yet Jesus did not say to him that he would not die, but, “If it is my will that he remain until I come, what is that to you?”                                                                                   (John 21:20-23)

 

They say that the average young adult thinks about sex at least once every five minutes.

It’s true.  Researchers interviewed 4,420 people, at various times of day, and asked if they had thought about sex in the last five minutes.  Roughly half of all people between the ages of 14 and 25 said yes.  Think about it:  That’s not even enough time for a high schooler to finish a simple algebra formula.  No wonder my math scores were so low.

I don’t know what the research shows about older adults.  But do me a favor:  Glance at your neighbor from time to time, and if that person is smiling too much, please give them a nudge and tell them to get their mind back on the sermon.

Something that’s that important to people – that people in their most formative years think about every five minutes – is obviously something that the church needs to think deeply about as well.  And no one can accuse the Presbyterian Church of shirking in this regard.  We’ve spent at least the last 30 years thinking, debating, obsessing about sex.

But sometimes it’s good to return to first principles.  We need to remember what we’re really about.  The culture may be obsessed with sex, but we in the church are about infinitely more.

Our text this evening is from the Gospel of John.  John, that master of the declarative sentence, who opens his book with the magisterial statement, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was God.”  This was someone who didn’t mince words.  He said clearly and forcefully what he believed.  Isn’t it interesting, then, that when John tells us what Jesus said, he chooses as the first word and the last word . . . not statements, not grand declarations, but questions.

The very first time Jesus appears on-stage as a speaker in John’s gospel, we hear John the Baptist proclaim, “Look, here is the Lamb of God!”  John’s disciples follow after Jesus, wanting to know more.  And then Jesus asks them a question:  “What are you looking for?” 

It’s a curious opener for the star of the show.  It’s a moment when one would think that Jesus would acknowledge his importance, give a speech.  But he deflects all the attention back to the people who trail after him:  “What are you looking for?” 

Well, if the opening line isn’t dynamite, we certainly expect that the closing line will be.  Jesus will come through with something really big now!  But remarkably, John’s Gospel – in fact, the entire Biblical record of Jesus’ life – ends with another question, a request for someone else’s point of view. 

From the little the story tells us, it sounds like there’s some politicking going on, like Peter and John are informal rivals jostling for position, at least from Peter’s point of view.  Peter finally asks Jesus point blank, “Lord, what about him?”  Where does he fit in the scheme of things?  And Jesus responds with a question:  “Peter, if I have something special in mind for John, if John has a role to play here, what is that to you?”

And those are the last words that Jesus speaks in the Gospels.

I believe that John deliberately began and ended his account with these two questions for a reason.  In some sense, they point directly to Jesus – in each case, the question is closely joined with an instruction to “Follow me.”  But for John, the questions seem to take pre-eminence. 

What are you looking for?  What is that to you?  The answers seem obvious from the stories.  The disciples of John the Baptist, in response to Jesus’ question, surely said “We’re looking for the Saviour!”  When Jesus asked Peter “What is that to you?” Peter almost certainly thought, “Why, it’s the future of the church!”  But the questions call us to reflect, to go beyond easy answers and unchallenged assumptions.  They call us to examine ourselves, to think about what it really means to be disciples of Jesus Christ.

We will be thinking together over the next several days about what it means to be disciples in community.  “Disciples” and “community” are loaded words these days in the Presbyterian Church.  We find ourselves divided into opposing camps, each of which seems to question whether folks in the other camp are really true “disciples” at all.  And we obviously are concerned about how to build and maintain a sense of community that seems to be sorely lacking today.  We heard and shared deep pain in our conversation this afternoon, pain that has lasted so long it’s hard to remember when the church filled us with joy.  Yet we know that it did, once, and that it will again someday.

Much of what has brought us to this place is sex (it’s been five minutes, I can mention it again).  We continue to be almost evenly divided about whether persons in same-sex relationships may offer ordained service to the church.  Our Constitution currently contains a very controversial provision, Amendment B, that effectively bars many from serving.  In fact, it’s interesting to think why we have Amendment B.  The only time that provision has any relevance at all is when someone feels called to serve, and a congregation believes its life in Christ will be enriched by that person’s ministry.  Then we step in with Amendment B, and say that that person, and that congregation, are wrong.

Many claim that Amendment B simply acknowledges the truth, that Scripture condemns all same-sex relationships.  As a gay man with a same-sex partner eight years and counting, for whom I thank God every day, the falsity of that seems self-evidently clear to me.  But in any event, if Amendment B really were motivated by a concern for Truth, it should bar ordained service not only by partnered GLBT people, but also by the many heterosexual Christians who are working to make the church more inclusive than it is.  That would include, for example, roughly half of the Bible faculty in our seminaries.  Clearly, such people aren’t excluded from office.  So it seems that Amendment B is not motivated by a concern to uphold an essential belief.

The other claim one frequently hears from proponents of Amendment B is that it affirms the life-changing power of Jesus Christ.   In fact, the claim is usually made in more provocative terms:  that the GLBT “lifestyle” reflects an implicit denial of Christ’s transforming grace.  The argument simply sidesteps the crux of our disagreement, that many see the workings of Christ and grace in same-sex relationships.  But there is a more fundamental problem here – a problem of discipleship.

Scripture tells us that when Jesus called the first disciples, he had a very simple ordination exam.  He applied one test of fitness for those he called to build the church:  Whether those he called would immediately rise up, leave their other involvements, and follow him.  That was the test.

Things are not quite so simple today.  But still it seems to me that the church is left with a fundamental choice.  Does it follow Christ, rejoicing whenever anyone leaves their current preoccupations to rise up and serve?  Or does it adopt a controversial, culturally conditioned belief – the prejudice of an overwhelmingly hetero-centric society – and apply its own standards of suitability?  I believe that Jesus Christ is asking the Presbyterian Church today, “What are you looking for?”  The Christ whom you can follow . . . or a supposed sinner whom you can judge?”  And if someone whom the Spirit calls to service lives differently than you do, “what is that to you?”

This kind of controversy isn’t new.  In Apostolic times, many Christians were fairly orthodox Jews who believed that Jesus was the risen Messiah.  They remained in Jerusalem, under the leadership of Peter and James, and they held to the traditional Jewish laws regarding circumcision, food restrictions, and purity. 

But they were a community on edge, challenged and unhappy with the apostasy they saw in a man named Paul.  Paul taught that the Christian was justified by grace in Jesus Christ, that it was unnecessary – in fact, undesirable – for Gentiles to comply with the legalisms of the Torah.  To many in the church at Jerusalem, Paul was undermining the faith.  He was leading people astray with his sordid example and false teachings, an enemy of the true faith.

There were several high-level meetings in Jerusalem to iron the matter out.  Compromise and political jockeying led to different outcomes from one meeting to the next.  (Sounds a bit like our General Assemblies!)  It appears that eventually some agreement was reached – probably that the Jewish Christians would continue to treat the Torah as binding on themselves, but would not try to force it on the Gentile Christians. 

It was a difficult resolution for some to accept, then as now.  Tensions ran high.  In his letters, Paul sometimes refers to the other side as “dogs” and “evildoers,” and it seems likely that Peter and James harbored similar views about Paul.

But Paul also recognized the need for unity despite disagreement.  The New Testament tells us that he embarked on a major project to collect money for the Christians in Jerusalem.  These were his adversaries, but at the same time he wanted to build them up, to develop community with them. 

The plan seems to have ended badly.  While the New Testament writers treat the matter with some tact, we can deduce what probably happened.  Paul arrived in Jerusalem with his gifts, and was greeted by the religious leaders with a stern rebuke for his failure to follow traditional religious rules.  A short time later a mob tried to kill Paul, and he was subjected to a lengthy legal ordeal.  There is little evidence that the Christians in Jerusalem made any effort to intervene on his behalf. 

Most importantly, Scripture makes little mention of the collection that Paul had worked so hard to put together and bring to Jerusalem.  Scholars suggest that this is probably because the Christian leaders in Jerusalem ultimately rejected Paul’s gifts.  To accept them would have been at least implicitly to approve of Paul and his ministry.  Can you imagine the heartbreak and humiliation that Paul felt, after so many years of effort.  (I have to imagine that this sounds familiar to those who have offered their gifts of ministry to the Presbyterian Church, and been refused.)  The rift between Peter and Paul was in all likelihood a deep and bitter one, grounded in bedrock convictions on both sides that the other’s view of the faith was wrong.

Well, what did Paul discern from all this?  I believe he discerned the critical importance of nurturing his own faith and allowing others to do likewise – even if they took different views about how they should conduct themselves under the law.  In the words of Paul, “Those who eat must not despise those who abstain, and those who abstain must not pass judgment on those who eat; for God has welcomed them.”

This was not simply taking the easy way out.  Paul tells us that the Christian is governed by a standard, established by God in each individual’s conscience, that is higher than what any temporal community might impose:  “The faith that you have, have as your own conviction before God. . . .  Whatever does not proceed from faith is sin.”

This should have a familiar ring.  In our Protestant parlance, we would say that Paul taught the early Christians to look first and foremost to Jesus Christ, and to show each other mutual forbearance in matters of conscience.  “Christ,” he says, “is the end of the law so that there may be righteousness for everyone who believes.” 

You know, sometimes I think that for all of our sophistication, we never really progress beyond the lessons we learned as children.  I think of the third-grade Sunday School teacher who asked her class, “What do we need to be to have eternal life?”  The class was silent, so she prodded a bit:  “What do we need to be – honest, loving, obedient?”  Finally, a little boy raised his hand and the teacher said, “Yes, Billy, what do we need to be to have eternal life?” And Billy said, “We need to be dead.”

Sometimes that’s about how we look at things, isn’t it?  We turn away from the Living Water, the life and witness of Jesus Christ, and embrace dead duties and legalisms. 

A smaller, but telling incident from the Gospels reinforces the point.  Luke tells us that Jesus visited the home of Mary and Martha.  You know the story.  Mary came to sit at Jesus’ feet and listen.   Martha welcomed Jesus into her home, too, but Luke tells us that then she “was distracted by her many tasks.”  Eventually she went to Jesus and complained that Mary was not helping as she ought.  And Jesus issued that gentle rebuke:  “Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted by many things; there is need of only one thing.”

So we come back to our questions.  What are you looking for?  If Mary – or others – are not serving as you think they should, what is that to you?  I wonder if many of our difficulties in the Presbyterian Church today arise because we have forgotten the experience of grace in the exercise of judgment.

There is danger here not only for those in the church who would exclude others.  Can I say it gently?  I believe there is also danger for those of us who would be excluded. 

Some of us may become so focused on our hurt and anger and sense of betrayal that our entire life of faith revolves around our claim to better treatment.  I remember being in the sanctuary of a progressive church a few years ago.  It was ringed with beautiful stained glass windows depicting scenes out of the Bible.  But next to the pulpit the congregation had removed an old window and replaced it with a modern stained glass depiction of two same-sex symbols.  Part of me was glad to see this clear affirmation of the congregation’s commitment to inclusivity – we see it so seldom, it’s wonderful when we do.  But somewhere in the back of my mind I also heard a small, worrisome voice, warning that if we’re not careful, we can allow what should be a life-changing engagement with Christ to become simply an affirmation of self.

What are we looking for?  If people mistreat us, what is that to us?  Will we take our eyes off Jesus Christ?

The biggest risk I see, in all our controversies in the Presbyterian Church, is the risk that some may lose their faith entirely.  We may lose our focus on Jesus Christ.  I work hard on these issues because when I contacted the New York City spokesperson for a gay Presbyterian group many years ago, he bitterly told me that he was no longer a Christian at all.  And sometimes I can understand that.  I look at the church, at our adversaries in the debate, and all I see is fear, denial, and rancor.  I see an inward turning, an unwillingness to consider the world as, at least, I think it really is.  I see arrogance, rather than humility, exclusion rather than embrace.  And I wonder who would want to be part of all that.

I remember getting on an elevator at General Assembly several years ago, in Columbus Ohio.  An older gentleman got on with me, and we began to chat easily.  We felt an immediate warmth toward each other because we knew that we shared a mutual commitment to Jesus Christ.  But suddenly he started to look at me differently.  He hesitated, and said “I feel like I know you from somewhere.”  I watched as his expression darkened, then froze, and he said, “You’re the fellow in that video” – the one we were circulating in favor of ordination reform.  Suddenly the air was thick with hostility.  He turned to face the door, and didn’t say another word as we went down the last eight floors.

On bad days, when I see some on the other side of our debates – people who claim to have a faith so much deeper and more substantial than mine – I wonder if Christ really does have the power to bring grace into our lives.  If this is what Christianity produces, can Christianity really be true?

You see the danger in looking to others . . . instead of to Jesus Christ.

I had my first theological experience of grace when I was about eight years old.  I was raised the son of a Presbyterian minister.  Like all good preacher’s kids, I thought my job description required me to raise a little hell in church.  One Sunday morning, while my father was in the sanctuary leading worship, I was in the Sunday School chasing a friend around the halls.  We had a wonderful indoor playground, a labyrinth of rooms separated by doors made with large glass windows.  My friend ran through a door and pushed it shut to slow me down, but I didn’t see that in time.  I charged head first through the glass.

Somehow I didn’t cut myself very badly, but folks were concerned that I might have a concussion.  My mother rushed me home and put me to bed.  That gave me a fair amount of time to lay there and get deeply concerned about how my father was likely to take to his son destroying church property in such a spectacular breach of Sunday decorum.  Finally I heard him come in the front door, then climb the long staircase up to my room.  I was filled with trepidation.

That is when my father taught me one of the great theological lessons of my life.  He came in without any of the anger I expected and deserved, and instead brought me a gift – one of those little cards they handed out in Sunday School those days, maybe four by six inches.  The lower half of it had a cross made of phosphorus, which would glow in the dark.  And the upper half had a picture of Jesus Christ.  Receiving a gift rather than well-deserved punishment taught me, in ways no words could, what grace is all about.  I actually think my father had a different lesson in mind:  The picture of Jesus on the card was taken from Revelation 3:20, “Behold, I stand at the door and knock.”  But it didn’t matter.  I mounted that card on the wall beside my bed with a thumb tack, and it remained there for years until I left home for college. 

I still have it.  And in my mind’s eye, whenever I think of Jesus Christ, I see the picture on that little card, and remember the profound lesson of grace that it taught me.

Much has changed in those years since I charged through the glass door.  The warm church family I knew in my childhood is long gone.  Once I was surrounded by loving grandmotherly types who gave me hugs, encouraged me to excel, showered me with an extravagance of unearned love – a love that modeled what I thought the church was called to be.  Today I see little grandmotherly ladies, and I know there are at least even odds that their gentle smiles and twinkling eyes disguise a deep animosity.  Where once I had a warm feeling whenever I passed a Presbyterian church, I now make a mental calculation about how likely they are to welcome “my kind.”

The faces in the church have changed for me – all but one.  “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever.”  As the writer of Hebrews tells us, “We have this hope, a sure and steadfast anchor of the soul.”  “Let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus the pioneer and perfecter of our faith.”  Runners who look to each other, instead of the goal, are distracted.  They risk colliding with others on the track, or may stumble and fall.  We must run the course set before us with our eyes on Jesus Christ alone.

That brings me to the last thought I’d like to share with you this evening.  When things appear most dark, when we’re most discouraged, or in doubt, when we’ve lost our way or believe the church has lost its way and taken us with it, perhaps it becomes difficult to see Jesus, or even want to look for him.  Scripture promises us that, in those times, Jesus comes looking for us.

In the twentieth chapter of John, we find the disciples in a locked room.  Their leader, Jesus, had been brutally humiliated and tortured and murdered on a cross.  He died, and the disciples’ hopes died with him.  There were tensions in the group.  You can hear them now, Bartholomew berating Philip because he had persuaded him to come hear Jesus in the first place.   “I left my family and lost my job, and now what?  What was it all for?”  “What ever deluded us into thinking there was any promise in all this to begin with?”  (How many of us have felt that way after a General Assembly?)

But they hung together, because they were really the only friends they had left.  They were now outsiders from the religious establishment, so outside in fact that they feared for their very lives.  They hid, and locked the door.  And then Jesus, the leader whom they deserted, the one who sacrificed everything for them on the cross, Jesus came looking for them.  Came looking for them in their doubts and discouragement, came looking without reproach for their easy abandonment of what had been earned so dear. 

It’s not the first time we read this kind of story.  We read earlier in John (Chapter 9) about the blind man, healed by Jesus.  The man testified before the religious leaders, rapturous in his praise of the grace he had received, and the church turned a cold shoulder.  His healing didn’t conform to the law, he didn’t have the learning the religious leaders had, his experience of grace didn’t count.  The man’s own parents refused to stand up for him, they were so intimidated by the religious establishment.  The man must have gone away despondent and doubting.  Then Scripture tells us that Jesus went looking for him, and found him.

That’s the comfort we have when things seem most dark.  That’s the very thing that makes discipleship possible, because let’s face it, we’re really not made of very stern stuff.  We become discouraged, we start to doubt, we decide that we have better things to do, and then Jesus comes looking for us.  If we’re hurting, Jesus comes to us in the Spirit with sighs too deep for words, and hugs us close as a parent comforts a hurt and crying child.  If we’re doubting, Jesus finds us and invites us to put our hand in his side, to explore his wounds and believe again.  If we’re just fed up, discouraged with the prospects for success, Jesus comes to us with the witness of his entire ministry and reminds us that a single, solitary man changed the world.

The great 20th-century theologian, Karl Barth, wrote shelves of books about Christian theology.  His Dogmatics alone – unfinished when he died – totals 9,138 pages.  But when he was asked what the essence of the Gospel is, he was very clear:  “Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.” 

Jesus asks each one of us, every day, What are you looking for?  If you’re unhappy about how others act in the church, what is that to you?  We are finally called to place our trust and hope, not in the Presbyterian Church, or its laws, or other Presbyterians, but in Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of our faith.  Jesus alone can make us disciples, and only Christ can give us community.  And when we falter, as we all do, we can rely on his comfort and assurance – the loving parent who picks us up, dusts us off, gives us a hug, and tells us to try again.  Those are the foundations of discipleship as I know them.  Thanks be to God.

At the 2001 General Assembly, Overture Advocates from 26 presbyteries collaborated on a presentation to the Committee on Church Orders and Ministry, explaining why the deletion of G-6.0106b is faithful to Presbyterian tradition and necassary for the health of the PC(USA).

Read the presentation, or view the PowerPoint slides.

Friday night worship service, 3 November 2000

Scripture That Speaks to Me

Douglas Nave
Trustee, Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church, New York City

Good evening. It’s good to be here.

I come from a family of Presbyterian ministers — my father retired after 32 years as the senior pastor of a large Presbyterian church in the Northwest, my twin brother and his wife are co-pastors of a Presbyterian church in California, and my sister is married to a Presbyterian minister on the coast. I became a lawyer, to give my family something to worry about. Having grown up in a Presbyterian family, graduated from a Presbyterian college, and served as an officer in my local Presbyterian church, I take the church and our faith very seriously. I am also a gay Christian, and spent many difficult years learning to accept and integrate that with my faith. My own family is not of one mind on this issue, and I know from personal experience how painful such disagreements can be.

Consistent with the theme of this conference, I would like in the short time available to share with you two passages from Scripture that I identify with as a gay Christian, and as a person who seems to be a source of controversy in my church.

The first is the story of the woman caught in adultery, whom the religious leaders brought to Christ for judgment. The story is in John 8. The elders reminded Christ that under that Mosaic law such women were to be stoned. But Christ dispersed them by reminding them that no one is without sin. Let me be clear: I believe that sometimes homosexual conduct is sinful, and that sometimes it’s not. The woman here clearly had sinned. But Christ refused to condemn her, sending her on her way with the instruction to “Go, and sin no more.”

Often the liberals among us like to cite the fact that Christ refused to condemn the adulteress, while the conservatives among us like to cite the fact that he instructed her to change her ways.

I find a different meaning in the story. Christ did not tell the woman to “Go, and stop committing adultery” — he gave her the far more challenging instruction to “Go, and stop sinning.” I hear in his words the echo of God’s promise in Jeremiah 31: “I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts. . . . No longer shall they teach one another . . . for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest.” When we meet Christ, we are profoundly challenged to eliminate sin from our lives. But we also are given great hope: that we may look beyond the accusations of the crowd, deep into our own hearts, for the truth of how we must live.

A second story in the Bible from which I have always gathered great strength is the story in Genesis 32, where Jacob wrestled with the angel of God. We all know the story: Jacob was fleeing his vengeful father-in-law, and was being chased back into the arms of the brother whom he had cheated out of his inheritance. Jacob faced a hostile world. He camped out, and an angel of the Lord attacked him during the night, wrestling with him until daybreak. Then the angel said, “Let me go, for the day is breaking.” But Jacob said, “I will not let you go unless you bless me.” And the angel gave Jacob the new name of Israel, and blessed him.

I take three lessons from this story:

• First, not all of God’s blessings come easily. The Scripture tells us that Jacob was hurt, and that he limped into the sunrise after a long night of struggle.
• Second, we need to remember that even our adversaries may serve the purposes of God. We cannot harbor ill will or impute bad motives to those on the other side of our debates.
• And finally, the hardest but most important lesson in the story for me is, to hang on! We must make sure that our quarrels with the church are lover’s quarrels, that beneath the conflict lies a greater measure of commitment. When Jacob hung on, he won his blessing, and went on to play a central role in the community of faith.

My mother is a warm and loving Christian. But I will never forget a conversation we had one morning at the breakfast table, when the debates over then-proposed Amendment B were raging and my parents did not have much of an inkling yet that I might be gay. The debates had been long and wearying, and my mother said in a moment of exasperation, “I just wish those people would go somewhere else.” I wonder if perhaps we haven’t all felt that way at one time or another. But we all know the answer: we can’t do that, because this is home, and we’re a family.

I’d like to close with another of my favorite passages in Scripture, the very first chapter of the gospels, Matthew 1, the genealogy of Christ. Many of us skip over the passage, dreading the executor’s drone that “So-and-so begat so-and-so who begat so-and-so.” In fact, it’s a passage of great power and promise. In the genealogy of Christ, we find:

• Women, long despised in the ancient world as second-class persons;
• Foreigners, who were held under the ancient laws of Judaism to be far outside the family of God; and
• Persons who engaged in sexually and morally questionable conduct.

Matthew 1 teaches the great lesson that everyone — everyone — has a place in the family of Christ, and in the plans and promises of God. Friends, I believe it with all my heart: that’s the first word — and the last word — in the gospel of Jesus Christ.