Mark Achtemeier’s plenary address at the 2010 Covenant Conference continues to contribute to denominational discernment and our work for full inclusion of all God’s people in the life of the church.   During his presentation in Cleveland, Mark referenced a talk he gave at Austin Seminary’s 2007 President’s Colloquium.   His thoughtful and scholarly struggle with Unsettling Questions can assist many who journey alongside him.

A simple declaration by the Special Committee to Study Issues of Civil Union and Christian Marriage in response to the question “What is the place of covenanted same-gender partners in the Christian community?”:  

“The members of the PC(USA) cannot agree.”   

Hardly a startling conclusion.  [Fortunately, the report goes on to "affirm that individuals in same-gender relationships, no differently from any persons in the Christian community, are to be welcomed by the church ..."]

However, three committee members chose to submit a minority report, which also acknowledges that “there truly exist variant interpretations of Scripture, which in turn dictate different pastoral models and advocacy models,” yet proceeds to absolutize one of these and attempt to impose it upon all: 

It is the intent of this report to represent the church’s biblical, historic, and confessional position that, among all varieties of sexual relationships, only marriage between a man and a woman is ordained by God and blessed by our Lord Jesus Christ. 

It is common for adherents of this position to appeal to a theory of “complementarity” derived from a particular interpretation of Genesis 2; as the minority report states: 

In Genesis, God says it is not good for man to be alone.  A woman is made who completes Adam and the two of them become one flesh.  Adam’s joy knows no bounds as he embraces Eve and cries out, “This at last is flesh of my flesh, bone of bone” (Gen. 2:23).

However, the presumption that “bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh” refers only to monogamous heterosexual union ignores the use of variations of the phrase in other passages, such as Genesis 29:14 (Laban greeting Jacob), 2 Samuel 5:1 (all the tribes of Israel to David), and 2 Samuel 19:12 (“You are my kin, you are my bone and my flesh,” David to the elders of Judah).  

As Frank Moore Cross writes in an essay describing the biblical “continuities between the institutions of kinship and of covenant”:

In Israel… the legal compact of marriage introduced the bride into the kinship group or family.  This is the proper understanding of Genesis 2:24…  Flesh refers not to carnal union but to identity of “flesh,” kinship, “bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh.”  Obviously offspring of the marital union will be of one flesh;  what is asserted is that the covenant of marriage establishes kinship bonds of the first rank between spouses. [i]

This is why the Old Testament practice of polygamy is not inconsistent with becoming “one flesh” – because the man and all his wives were “one flesh,” kin to one another.  (The Special Committee’s report does not discuss polygamy but does cite passages that presume it;  obviously this is but one example of how “biblical values” about marriage have changed.)

Same-gender partners are as capable as heterosexual partners of being kin to one another, and of creating a nurturing family together.  Many Presbyterians rejoice with two men or two women when they experience the unbounded joy of intimate companionship and commitment, for “it is not good that the human being should be alone”  (Genesis 2:18).

Janet F. Fishburn has written more about the history of the theory of “complementarity.”   For further exploration, see the articles by Patrick D. Miller and Mary McClintock Fulkerson in the Covenant Network publication Frequently Asked Questions About Sexuality, the Bible, & the Church: Plain Talk About Tough Issues.

- David H. Jensen

For Presbyterians the primary resource for understanding marriage is Scripture. The creation story implies one purpose of marriage, companionship: “it is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper as a partner” (Gen. 2:18). This purpose is connected, though not synonymous, with the earlier injunction for humanity to be fruitful and multiply. The subsequent forms of marriage recorded in the Old Testament are surprisingly wide. Many OT writers, for example, assume polygamy as part of God’s blessing for humanity. Some marriages occur as the result of morally reprehensible actions, such as abduction (Judg 21). And, in the longest sustained passage of human relationship in Scripture, the Song of Solomon celebrates the sexual love between a man and a woman without referring to marriage directly. These varied depictions suggest that God’s blessing is not confined to particular forms of marriage, but extends across culture and redeems fallen relationships whenever persons live in faithfulness to God’s covenant together. As God redeems humanity, no one cultural form of marriage emerges as normative for all others…

Read the whole essay.

- Christine Roy Yoder

The destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah is the first text that many people think about when we talk about homosexuality and the Bible. This is striking because the narrative is not, in fact, about homosexuality, and certainly not about private, consensual acts of same-sex love. Rather, Genesis 19 illustrates the sin of Sodom and Gomorrah as sexual violence against men and women, as brutality against persons the community ought to protect. Such behavior reveals a society that no longer observes “the way of the LORD” – namely, righteousness and justice (Gen 18:19) – and thus receives God’s judgment…

Read the whole essay.

- Patrick D. Miller

The first three chapters of Genesis do not directly address the church’s questions about sexual relations between persons of the same sex. But the creation narratives do say much about God’s hopes and purposes for the world. And they do begin to suggest the shape of faithful human responses to God’s great, generative act of love in creation – especially when read as part of the whole canon of Scripture.  In particular, they describe the centrality of relationships between men and women in the created order. These crucial chapters of Scripture therefore offer important relations. But what do they teach?

Read the whole essay.

Eily Marlow
Lilly Project Program Associate
Macalaster College

Genesis 32:22-33:4 ; Hebrews 6:9-12

When told that the theme of the conference was covenant, to be honest my first thought was back to my ordination exams.    There is much talk in seminary about this extraneous hoop we maneuver.  But there is an equally universal experience when you’re actually confronted with the four session members who all misunderstand the most primary concepts of baptism.  You don’t need to be in ministry long before you encounter your ordination exam question in real life and see your worship professor mouthing ‘I told you so.’   

Well, I passed my ordination exams writing on covenant, but this morning to my theology professors’ chagrin, you will probably hear little of my answer.  With great theologians and biblical scholars in our midst, I thought it best to stick to my greatest knowledge base – the realm of the pastoral and how covenant is uncovered amidst fresh challenges faced by this new generation.  In our achievement-based culture, today one’s place in God’s chosen community fights for relevancy with one’s position in society’s chain of command.   Within this new generation there exists “a vulnerable but promising self” that is being fought for daily.   Beyond the place where integrity wrestles with the will to win, there is a self that is ever searching for a fitting home.  

 This might be why I was so drawn to the story of Jacob.  Throughout this conference we will surely hear of the great patriarchs and matriarchs who were the earliest recipients of the promissory covenant.   The covenant made before Sinai where God first performed the very radical act of choosing a people.  It was here a stoic Abraham and unwavering Isaac faithfully respond to this divine gift.  Jacob, though, is the new generation.  Equally chosen, his life is riddled with conflict, uncertainty and betrayal.   Jacob is this new generation living with great vulnerability and promise.   He holds onto an immense calling laden with moral choices that will brand him faithful to some and to others seriously depraved. 

One of these vulnerabilities is Jacob’s precarious place within the tradition.  As you will recall, in contrast to his brother Esau who is described as “a hairy, skillful hunter and a man of the field,” a sort of Todd Palin kind of guy,  Jacob is “a quiet man with soft skin.”  Not a man of the fields, but a man “living in tents.”   Just as many cultures organize public and private spheres by gender, “tent space” in the ancient near east was domestic space dominated by women.  A Presbyterian homiletics professor suggested naming a sermon based on Jacob, “Not a God for Sissies.”  But Jacob is a sissy of sorts.  The text suggests that he does not conform to traditional gender roles. 

Though even beyond this cultural taboo, Jacob knew that it was not just his fundamental nature that might keep him outside of the promise;  categorically it was beyond his reach.  Human life at this time was structured so that the older child received the blessing, and his brother Esau was that child.  Walter Brueggemann states that j“primogeniture is not simply one rule among many.  It is the linchpin of an entire social and legal system which defines rights and privileges.”  Jacob has two strikes against him.  Perhaps if he was not “a man of the tent,” he would be able to prove he was the stronger son.  Or, if only he was born first and was older then Esau, then even if he was not masculine he would be given the privileges bestowed by society.  But neither scenario is real, and therefore Jacob must live with this great insecurity that he is sitting on the margins of something great.  At the bottom of his gut he worries he sits just outside of God’s inheritance.  
  
Humans will go to ridiculous extremes to receive others’ affirmation, but we will go to even greater ones for confirmation that we are blessed by God.  At his mother’s pleading Jacob dresses up as his brother, using animal fur to rough up his skin in order to steal the blessing from his brother.

In the GLBT community, we call this trying to pass. 

And whether you identify as gay or straight, many of us have attempted this in our own lives. Allow me to use an example from my own.   The day before my examination on the floor of Presbytery, I went to get my hair cut.  For the very first time I walked into this expensive salon in my neighborhood and luckily there was an open chair.   As the hairstylist was washing my hair, I shared with him why I was getting a hair cut.  I explained what happens in an ordination examination, and why as an out lesbian I needed all the confidence I could get.    Now as he sat me in his chair, this gay man took one look at me and shook his head as if to say, “You are not going up there like that.”  What was first a hair cut ended up being my first ever eyebrow trim and an on-the-house head of $100 highlights.  The day of my examination my mother dressed me in her prized Norwegian sweater, pewter buttons and all, and laced me in my grandma’s pearls.  In back of all our minds was the unspoken idea that maybe even though I would say the word ‘lesbian,’ somehow like Isaac the Presbytery would be tricked by the disguise.  I would look enough like one who is traditionally chosen that the word would soften to the ear in favor of what the eye confirmed. 

Jacob’s own passing does not really pan out for him.  Although he receives the blessing, his brother is totally outraged and vengeful; Jacob becomes estranged from his family and lives a life questioning his own credibility.

Jacob discovers what many of us do when we end up playing the part of the other brother.  To prove this point, let me go back to my Presbytery meeting.   At the end my successful examination, my friend and mentor Janie Spahr and I were playing back the examination and she told me that I had used “he” for God!  We looked at each other in great horror!  Having worked in the denomination’s office of women’s advocacy educating the church on inclusive language – I betrayed my own understanding of God and had absolutely no recollection of having done it.   The danger of passing is that we not only become estranged from the self but from our deepest understanding of the divine. 

So Jacob does not receive resolution and must continue to live with an insecure blessing.  Has my family really chosen me, or is this just a loop hole?   Does God really see me as a recipient of covenant, or am I just a trickster with a bad case of entitlement?  Am I following God’s will or manipulating people and things for my own power?

Jacob ends up estranged from his family, and it is only when he is now totally bewildered and alone that God intrudes onto a scene which has until now been humanly orchestrated.

We know from the biblical narratives that there are very few encounters with God outside of messy lives and subsequent human heartache.   Perhaps God realizes that when we are most vulnerable, there is greater probability we will open to the promise.  And at these moments when we are in total anguish, God knows that we are to be approached with great care.  Thus God often comes to us in the darkness, when the shock of God’s intrusion is absorbed by the night.

God first meets Jacob in a dream as he sleeps at Bethany, gifting him with a vision of a ladder to heaven, assuring him of his lineage. He is a grandchild of Abraham, an unquestionable heir of the covenant.  There should be no doubt that the promise is extended to him.   “I will keep you,” God says, in intimate language almost more persuasive than lineage talk.  “I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you.”  

And after this encounter with God, Jacob does go on to live into the wealth and family promised to him.  But the covenantal promise does not end there.  Years later the time comes when he must finally return to his homeland to fulfill the promise, and this requires a meeting with Esau.   And even though Jacob has now encountered God like Isaac and Abraham before him, nothing can stop him from fearing this reunion.  Jacob is still vulnerable to a belief that covenant assurance and blessings reside in the human sphere.  His fear and insecurity are palpable as he divides up his family and sends ahead of him great gifts for appeasement.  He knows that Esau could very well kill him for what he has done; and in the midst of his anxious preparations Jacob remembers the glorious and tender assurance of promise God bestowed upon him when estranged in Bethany.  Again feeling totally bewildered, those divine memories show him where to go.  He crosses over the river away from his family to once again sleep alone.  Before meeting his brother, he goes searching for God, something experience has shown comes most easily in the cover of night.

And God does not come delicately approaching Jacob, knowing he is a frightened soul, but instead a stranger arrives assaulting him with unrelenting force.

The night before having to meet my session, after getting called back for yet another meeting because the church had been in great turmoil over the support of my candidacy, I had a dream.

I was hiking with a group of people; all with big backpacks, we walked in a line through a beautiful field.  As I looked around me I started to feel a sense of familiarity.  I realized I knew this place!   I was with a woman and I ran up to the man leading the hike and asked if I could take her to some near-by small towns I knew.  The guide said “No, two women are not safe going alone.”  We continued walking and we approached a church where we would stay the night.  As we entered the front hall there on the ground were the boots and clothes of two women piled up as though the women had combusted into thin air leaving just a mound of clothes behind.  I asked the pastor what had happened and she simply said, “It is not safe for two women to go alone.”  As our group shuffled into the church, the pastor explained how the perpetrator of this crime was unknown but that he would be among those welcomed into the church.  As people flooded in to greet us, I became terrified.  Not knowing what to do, I quickly hid under a table as each individual entered the fellowship hall.  Then there he was, this stranger, this antagonist.  In sheer panic a system deeper then fight or flight kicked in; I came to understand I would be safer if I was to stand.  With every ounce of energy in my body I stood, and as he turned around I put my hand out smiling as though my life depended on it.  Our hands touched.  Our eyes met.  And I woke up.

After wrestling all night, Jacob finally prevails.   He looks this antagonist in the eye and says, “I will not let you go unless you bless me.”  And whether this stranger is the Holy One or not, I believe that Jacob, after years of wrestling with humans, now thoroughly believes he is wrestling with God.  This divine force looks at Jacob and instead of giving him a blessing asks him his name.   Jacob’s life long question – blessed or unblessed – is set aside by this One who seeks to address the core concern.  In my mind’s eye, here is God crushed by Jacob’s weight, and that of his struggle, taking Jacob’s face gently into the palms of God’s hands.  God looks him in the eyes, face to face with God’s chosen one and tenderly asks, “What is your name?”  I would guess this is the moment Jacob comes to believe he is a bearer of the covenant.  He does not say ‘Esau,’ ‘grandchild of Abraham,’ ‘tent sitter’ or ‘wealth maker.’  Jacob does not say ‘betrayer of Isaac’ or ‘undeserving one.’  For the first time, the human drama is peeled away and he looks at God and simply says, ‘Jacob.’  He sits in front of the one who has been for him both antagonist and promise bearer. He sits completely in his vulnerability and promise, and all that exists is pure blessing.

I was sweating and terrified when I woke up from my dream.  And it was then that I too recognized God’s emergence.  An experience we can not often put into words, but it was here in this unfamiliar dawn that all was changed.  As I had equally felt that terrorizing dream, it was balanced with an equally powerful confirmation of God’s presence.   This was not an imagined presence but a very physical one.    My body at once hot and tense suddenly felt cool and fluid.  In my mind, there was an image of a fountain, the water flowing up through my body, and then covering me.  Soothing and consoling, I knew beyond a doubt that I was being bathed in the very water of my baptism.  I had encountered God, and I knew at the depths of my being that my encounter with the church, in which at times I had felt so estranged, could not endanger me.  It was baptism that confirmed my place in the covenant community.  And it was to be with this assurance, I was to face not the enemy but my brother in what was not a heavenly struggle, but a very human one.

God then says to Jacob, “You shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with God and with humans and have prevailed.”  Only when Jacob stands in front of God as pure Jacob does God verify that he is not only a part of the covenant community, but one of its truest reflections.   The sun rises upon him and he immerges into an unfamiliar dawn, never again having to resort to meeting God in dark places, having now a faith that no longer distinguishes day from night.  

It was the same sun that rose upon Jacob that surfaced this summer at our own reunion at the General Assembly in San Jose.  And it was with this same resilient knowledge of being God’s chosen that 15 young adults of this new generation came to G.A. with That All May Freely Serve.   Even as co-moderator, I was at first a bit skeptical with our organization’s idea to pour all our funds into bringing young people to G.A.   In my work as a college chaplain I often hem and haw about bringing youth, especially GLBT students, to the Assembly.  As they listen to the debate and experience distressing votes, it can be a time of deep estrangement.

But what occurred at this Assembly was an in-breaking of God’s abundant light.   This welcoming generation came to G.A. not preparing for a clash, but focused on the ministry they could bring to this reunion.  Protected by a deep security in their place within the covenant, they welcomed commissioners with hospitality.  Morning and evening, they stood at the convention hall doors handing out coffee and cookies, supplying commissioners with a vision of what living into God’s promise might actually be like.  

And as the sun continues to rise on this new generation – and we have seen it do so this week – so it does on Jacob.  Jacob humbly stands before his brother with all of his imperfections enmeshed with God’s delight.  And though Jacob in the spirit of hospitality brings extravagant gifts, ultimately it is Esau whose move towards reconciliation is reminiscent of God’s very own grace.  Esau, with his own undeniable experiences of pain and betrayal, kissed his brother conspiring with God in shedding even more light.  

So as we go out into a crucially important moment in Presbyterian history, let us heed the wisdom of Hebrews and be “imitators of those who through faith and patience inherit the promises.”  Let us walk with Jacob and Esau into unfamiliar places.  Let us rest assured we live a shared covenant that is beyond human meddling if we in fact believe in God’s abundant light.

Amen.

The Rev. Richard E. Spalding
Chaplain, Williams College
Williamstown, Massachusetts

Sermon – November 4, 2004

Genesis 2:4b-9, 15-23
Colossians 3:12-17
John 1:1-5, 10-13

In the beginning God named things into being out of darkness. Light first; then sea and sky, then earth… The pieces of the world we know were uttered into reality by the speaking of their names. The Speaker was One who, in naming, exercised both power and gentleness – One who, in being articulate about how things are also intimated how things might be. And it was so. And it was good.

We weren’t there, of course. Our time was – not yet. So how do we know that word was the medium of creation? Because in time Word acquired a name itself, took flesh and dwelt among us, and in time made us a new creation by naming things about how we are and how we might be. You are light… You are salt… Blessed are you poor… And we have come to believe that in our telling of this story about God, God is telling us the story of ourselves. In time we have come to recognize this power to name at work in us – wielding light or, sometimes, kindling darkness. We‘ve held it in our own hands, on our own lips: sometimes the things we speak to each other do suddenly seem to acquire blood and sinew and nerve endings. What we make out of word is relationships – uttered into being in the volatile chemistry of God’s breath and ours in con-spiracy. And in naming the relationships we make by speaking words like “I promise” …or “Don’t be afraid” …or “you are different” …or “I forgive you” …or “this is war” …or “I take you” – we too have the power to articulate how things are and how they might be. Word wields us to change the shape of the world.

If you read your Covenant Network mail carefully, you may have noticed that a year or so ago when the first fliers began to utter this conference into being, the working title was “Speaking of Sex: Exploring the Theology and Expression of Human Sexuality.” But it seems that in the time since then the design got refracted through a Presbyterian lens – because now this gathering has been renamed “Thinking Theologically about Sex.” Talking about sex, as has been said over and over again, is something that ruffles that time-honored Presbyterian suave. (I know I was predestined to be a Presbyterian, for instance, because when I was 10 or 11 and it was time to learn those things about how this flesh actually works, my parents … gave me a book to read. I guess it bought them some short-lived safety from the need to speak certain names. And if not really talking about sex was intended to get me thinking about sex – well, it succeeded, though probably not in quite the way that they were hoping for.) Thinking about sex – in the sense of the deployment of equipment – is what we’re given to believe everyone’s doing more or less all the time – with help from the media, certainly, and also, of course, from certain politicians, and from the wings of various religious communities (including ours), all doing what they can to make sure that sex is making lumps just under the surface of the conversation. Maybe it’s true that the less we talk about it, the more we think about it.

But thinking before speaking is probably the right order to proceed in, especially when we’re talking about creation – because not everything we utter into being does what we hope it will do (G6.0106b, for instance), and because thinking wins us at least a little more time to consider what it is we want to create. Of course, quite a few years later, I now realize that offering a book to this task of understanding ourselves is not necessarily a cold, clinical thing to do – or a safe thing to do. Maybe there’s one book in particular that we don’t give enough. That book – this sacred book of Word – is pretty frank, when you get right down to it, and even graphic in spots, in talking about sex. It’s also pretty clear that the deployment of the equipment is one way of offering the deepest and widest truth of yourself as a gift of love to a person whose living helps shape your living to its deepest beauty. But, as usual, it leaves the thinking to us.

Last year at this conference, doing some of that thinking together, we were honored by the presence of two people of remarkable integrity and faithfulness, Barbara Wheeler and Richard Mouw, who modeled the kind of respectful, authentic conversation about our different ways of thinking theologically that seems our only hope of surviving the disagreements we know so well. You couldn’t see the common ground they stood on so much as you could feel it: the hunger to know each other as brother and sister in Christ, the leaning together toward a deeper unity and wholeness than we have yet been able to name into being as a church. That Richard Mouw, in particular, was willing to stand respectfully and graciously in a roomful of people most of whom disagreed with him was a gift of the Holy Spirit to us. But there was another gift of the Spirit, too, not so much in what he said as in where he said it – an ironic gift, maybe even a little playful. Dr. Mouw started his piece of the point/counterpoint dialogue with clear, straightforward words: “I believe that genital sexual expression between persons of the same sex is wrong”. That’s where most of those who don’t share the Covenant Network’s vision start: with the deployment of equipment. But Dr. Mouw was upstaged by the room itself. Maybe those of you who were there remember how, at the New York Avenue Presbyterian Church in Washington, DC, when you speak from the chancel you stand in the warm embrace of a wide expanse of beautiful wood behind you – into which are inscribed, in strong gold letters, the only real permanent adornment of that room, which is the words,

Beloved, let us love one another,
for love is of God,
and one who loves is born of God
and knows God.
[I John 4:7]

That’s where we start. That’s where thinking about sex had better start – or else it isn’t theological at all.

So let’s return to the beginning…

In the beginning God named things into being. Word was there from the beginning – without Word nothing could have come into being. The pieces of the world we know were uttered into reality in the speaking of their names by One whom we recognize by the gentleness of power, by the power of gentleness. One who, in speaking the truth of the world into being, named not only how things are but also how things might be.

We enter the story at about this moment; maybe we first recognize ourselves in the telltale appearance of the dust of the ground, in which we see a certain family resemblance. But for the first time something is named “not good”: the Adam (1), the creature of earth, the earth-ling, is alone. So Word begins to imagine a way of being to assuage the aloneness of the humus human. But this time, oddly, the cosmic Artist is speechless as the work proceeds. God is certainly capable of instruction about the uses of creation – what and what not to eat, and so forth. But now instead of guidance there is silence so that the human can speak relationships into being. “So the Lord God…brought [every creature] to see what the earthling would call them. And whatever the Adam called every living creature, that was its name.” The making of the bonds that reconfigure loneliness is the responsibility of the human being. The earthling has to live with the names bestowed – to live up to them, to live among them.

But among the names bestowed, the name helpmate, partner, companion is still undiscovered.

The deep sleep which ensues is one that you probably also recognize. With more than enough of someone else’s work to be done … and weighed down by instructions that come with costs whose rationale and scope have not been fully explained and are not readily apparent … and now surrounded by a cacophony of voices each clamoring for acknowledgement of its particular relationship to you and claims upon you … and still, essentially, alone… All this heaviness induces the sleep that still hungers for rest.

And if you should wake from such a heavy sleep to find yourself looking at a creature in whose eyes you recognize the family resemblance to dust – someone whose voice speaks so gently as to drown out the clamor of the rest of creation, whose company offers a depth that is both terrifying and exquisite – if you should find yourself looking at someone in whose stature you recognize the strength to join the work that needs to be done as your equal and to make it your own, together – someone in whose bearing you recognize a common understanding of the stakes of what lies ahead – one in whose presence you feel the essential loneliness of your existence transfigured… If you should wake from such a sleep to find yourself in such a presence, then perhaps the living breath God breathed into you before ever you knew who you were might rise to your lips, there to be formed into words by which you might again utter relationship into being. But this time the speaking of the name will be an exercise of cosmology – not mere taxonomy. This time all of you will speak: your eyes, your stature, the bearing of your spirit, every atom of your body. And the words you speak will change the shape of creation: This at last is bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh. And though you are naked together, you are not ashamed – because the recognition, the call from the depths, the naming of the bond, the power in gentleness, all of it reveals the unspeakable beauty God molded and breathed into you both before ever you knew who you were, or why.

You will blink once or twice, and years will have come and gone. One rainy night you look up from the dregs of the newspaper to see your beloved there, dozing over his book, or balancing her checkbook, and just for an instant the mystery of life itself is present in the room, in the very particular form of a love you barely ever deserved for one full day of your life but which is right here across the room from you, of all places in God’s green earth – yours just in the act of breathing. And there again are the words by which you named this truth floating on the breath God gave you for speaking the name: this at last is bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh.

Or there will be an ordinary day on which doing other people’s work will have so exhausted you that, on your way home, you can scarcely remember your own name, let alone rise to the challenges of supper, so absolutely certain are you that you have not one blessed thing left in you today to give anyone. And waiting for you at home there will be a piece of news, for you or for the partner whom God found to help you live – news of the family, perhaps, or news from the world, that will tear open the flesh of your flesh – news to weep over, or to stir anger, or to siphon the hope from your heart. You will realize again that you stand naked together in this life, with all the elements of time raging around you. Because there is no deeper sanctuary to go to, you will find yourselves holding each other as the storm of whatever has happened breaks over you – and in the most elementary moment of touch you not only give a love you couldn’t imagine you’d have any more of to give right then, but you receive something that’s beyond the reach of words to ask for. And there, leaning against the kitchen counter with the radio going in the background or the scribbled phone message still in your hand, the words of the name you once bestowed are there on the breath again: this at last is bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh.

There was a night at what began as an ordinary supper when the ones sitting at the table suddenly knew that they were in the presence of the love that had uttered them into being. Perhaps the tip-off was some change that came into Jesus’s eyes by the light in that room with the powers of death and hatred breathing in the shadows all around them – or perhaps it was only some change in their own eyes. He took bread and blessed it, and broke it, and named them. This is my body, he said. You are my body. You are light. You are salt. You are the blessed poor. I no longer call you servants, but I call you friends… Whatever the words were it was Word speaking them again, uttering a new creation into being, a relationship which, as it turned out, no death could ever kill. It woke them from a deep sleep, at least momentarily – long enough to remember how it felt, and to tell us the story and to teach us to tell it too. This way we hunger to know each other as brother and sister, and to lean together toward a deeper unity and wholeness than we have yet been able to name – this body, this communion, this at last is bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh.

In time we have come to believe that in the telling of these stories about God, God is telling us the story of ourselves. They’re all in the book we have to give. We read them carefully, thoughtfully. We think theologically about the details. That the Adam in the story was undoubtedly a heterosexual, for instance. That God’s consummate gift of partnership to the Adam was a partner whom he called “Ishah”, wife. We think about the nakedness – and about how things they chose to do, realities they spoke into being, changed how they looked at each other. It’s not a very good story to tell if what you want to do is explain about how certain equipment of the flesh came to be deployed in certain ways. The destination of this story is not the bedroom, and the holy words by which we create and recreate the most essential relationships of our nature are not a come-on line. Those words speak the name of the way things are and the way they might be. This at last is bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh.
And when things happen that remind us again that we stand naked together in this life, with all the elements of time raging around us, and the storms of feeling raging within us – what then?

Then it is the beginning, again. Word reminds us of the responsibility to speak relationships into being – and the names we bestow cover our nakedness. With power and with gentleness, the creator says, “as holy and beloved creatures of earth, put on compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, patience. Above all, clothe yourselves with love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony.” The words aren’t fig leaves to hide sexuality or disguise it or obscure it or apologize for it or to make it harder to get to. They are words to consecrate and redeem sexuality, to rescue it from the gutter of shame and prurience where those who believe themselves to be of surpassing righteousness have dragged and abandoned it.

So we begin. And that longing to offer the deepest and widest truth of ourselves as gifts of love to those whose living helps shape our living to its deepest beauty… and that leaning together toward a deeper unity and wholeness than we have yet been able to name into being… and that yearning to stand together in our nakedness, and to not be ashamed… these are the marks of the image of God that is our family resemblance. These faithful dispositions are the light, the salt, the bone and flesh that we have to offer to the world. When we speak the name Word planted on our breath – this at last is bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh – then behold, a new creation. We return to the beginning. Again.

Note

1. The version of the text from Genesis 2 used in the service reproduced the generic quality with which the narrative refers to the first human: “…the Lord God had not sent rain on the earth and there was no Adam to work the ground – then a stream came up from the earth and watered the whole surface of the ground – and the Lord God formed from the dust of the earth, the Adamah, an earthling, an Adam, and breathed the breath of life into the nostrils, and the Adam became a living being. Now the Lord God planted a garden in Eden, in the east, and there put the Adam who had been formed…”

The Rev. L. William Countryman

Good Shepherd Berkeley
Seventeenth Sunday After Pentecost
October 5, 2003

Proper 22B: Gen. 2:18-24; Ps. 8/128; Heb. 2:9-18; Mark 10:2-9

The Rev. L. William Countryman, Sherman E. Johnson Professor in Biblical Studies at the Church Divinity School of the Pacific (The Episcopal Seminary of the West), is a well-known biblical scholar and teacher as well as a gifted preacher. He is the author of many books, including Gifted by Otherness: Gay and Lesbian Christians in the Church (with M. R. Ritley) (Morehouse, 2001); and Dirt, Greed, and Sex: Sexual Ethics in the New Testament and their Implications for Today (Fortress Press, 1988).

***

Jesus, in this morning’s Gospel, is caught up in a religious conflict about sexuality with some people who quote Scripture at him. Does this sound familiar? Maybe it’ll be worthwhile to watch and see how he deals with that.

To start with, it’s worth noticing that people in the first century were already fighting about the meaning of the Bible. Even then it was hard to figure it out. On the matter of divorce, the Torah actually had very little to say. It only mentions it once in passing, while dealing with a related issue (Deut. 24:1-3). And we know from other sources that first-century Jewish experts disagreed about the grounds of divorce. Could a husband divorce his wife just because he felt like it? Or only if she had committed some serious fault? Jesus was being asked to take sides in that argument. That way, one side or the other—or both—could find fault with his answer. Academic communities—the more they change the more they stay the same!

But instead of just wading into the argument in the way they expected, Jesus does something shocking. He says ‘Moses only allowed divorce in the first place because of your hardness of heart.’ Yikes! What is he saying here?! He’s saying that you can’t assume that, just because it’s in scripture, it’s the will of God! Some Bible verses express nothing more than the stupidity, the sullenness, the bigotry, the hardness of heart of the people who received them in the first place—and, who knows? maybe of the people who read them now.

After all, Jesus talks to them about ‘your hardness of heart.’ Now he’s not talking to the scum of the earth. He’s talking here to the particularly good people. They pay close attention to religion, they fulfill its demands, they’re the respectable pillars of their communities. And they’re all male. I suspect that that’s the particular issue in this case. They’re all male. The Torah is addressed to males. In that world, males were the public persons; women were private persons who were supposed to keep out of the public eye.

And it was males who made the decisions about marriage. Marriage wasn’t the sort of thing we tend to assume—young people falling in love and deciding to create a new family together. Marriage was a contract between the parents’ families: the woman’s family gave her away (you recognize the language) to bear a new generation of children for the husband’s family. She never even became a member of her husband’s family. If she bore a male heir and if she and the boy both lived long enough, she would finally have a secure place in it when it became her son’s family. But if she was divorced and sent away, the son remained with his father and she just had to hope that her natal family could and would take her back.

This may be hard for us to imagine, since it’s so foreign to our own mores. But it was the norm of the time. Marriage was something men did to women; and so was divorce. And divorce was usually a disaster for the woman. There were some exceptions. We know that women from influential families sometimes had the right to divorce their husbands; but that right had to be written into the marriage contract. It was sort of like the legal work-arounds that gay and lesbian couples today have to use in order to secure some of the basic rights that come to heterosexual married couples in the normal course of events. Basically, divorce was for men.

So Jesus takes this accepted cultural practice and the Scripture that was seen as backing it up. And he says: That’s not what God meant at all. That just reflects the mean-spiritedness, the hardness of heart, that’s treated as normal in our society. And he puts his questioners right on the spot with it: Moses said this because of your hardness of heart.

But you notice that Jesus isn’t in fact discarding the Scriptures, even though he is rejecting one particular text. Sometimes, when we’re looking for an easy way to understand these arguments, we distinguish between religious conservatives who take Scripture really, really seriously and religious liberals who don’t take it seriously at all. Is Jesus here being a conservative or a liberal? The system of classification doesn’t work, does it? Yes, he’s pitching one text out. But he’s also calling another one in and making quite a big deal of it and interpreting it in a way that nobody had ever understood it before.

The text he introduces, of course, is the last part of our Old Testament reading this morning:

A man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.

And then he adds his own commentary: ‘Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.’ God, he says, has created something good here; you men can’t just use it for your human convenience and then discard it when a better match, a better family alliance comes along.

The Torah preserved the power that men had in a patriarchal society to abuse women. Jesus abolished divorce in order to protect women. [Incidentally, Jesus wasn’t the first person to notice that divorce was a bad thing. Some centuries before, the prophet Malachi had already claimed that God hates divorce (2:13-16). And Jesus grounds his changing of Scripture in Scripture itself: God didn’t intend to authorize hardness of heart; God intended to teach us how to love one another and do one another good.

Of course, some later Christians turned Jesus’ own statement into yet another license for hardness of heart. In Eastern Christianity, it was held that Jesus was establishing an ideal of lifelong marriage, a goal. But Western Christians long held that Jesus was establishing a rigid new law: no one can be divorced; if they are, they cannot remarry. Does that condemn you to spending the remaining decades of your life with an abusive spouse? Well, we’re terribly sorry, but that’s the rule. Hardness of heart sneaks in the back door again.

But what Jesus is really doing in this story is turning the whole use of Scripture on its head. The Scriptures, he says, are not a book of statute law to protect the powerful. They are a book of astonishing insights into God’s extraordinary generosity. The purpose of God all through Scripture is the well-being of God’s beloved human creatures. If you find things in the Scriptures that seem to speak otherwise, consider who benefits from that. Whose hardness of heart caused that blemish in the sacred text? Whose hardness of heart is maintaining that interpretation even now?

After all, one thing hasn’t changed. When religious people (that’s us) read Scripture, we’re still quite capable of using it to support and affirm our own hard-heartedness. White Christians in the early nineteenth century justified slavery by the Bible. After the Civil War, they justified discrimination against blacks by the Bible. Christians have justified wars by the Bible. Christians have justified Inquisitions by the Bible. Christians have justified the subordination of women by the Bible.

Hardness of heart is something that just keeps on cropping up. It wasn’t unique to the Pharisees in Jesus’ audience. It’s not specifically Jewish. It’s an equal-opportunity sin. It’s the property of the whole human race. You can’t escape it just by being religious; but you can’t escape it by ceasing to be religious, either. And if you quit reading the Scriptures, you not only lose the passages that cater to your particular kind of hard-heartedness; you also lose the ones that might wake you up and suddenly let you see how really big and generous God’s love is.

The people in our own world who like to wield the Bible as a weapon—they like to claim that they’re just reading it all literally. They’re not. They pick and choose what they will take seriously, just as Jesus did in this morning’s Gospel story. They just prefer not to notice what they’re doing. The big difference is that Jesus knew what he was doing and said it straight out.

Jesus wasn’t a biblical conservative. But he wasn’t a biblical liberal, either. He expected something important from the Scriptures; he expected to be challenged and surprised by God. And he also expected that when you are challenged and surprised by God, some of the details enshrined in the sacred text will be revealed for what they are, as concessions to hardness of heart—and they will have to go.

But how do you decide which ones to discard? That’s still the scary question for us, isn’t it? Well, you know, this passage does one more thing for us. It actually gives us a principle for making those decisions. I’m going to conclude with that because I hope you will take it away with you.

When Scripture seems to confirm your own hardness of heart, it’s wrong. Ditch it, just the way Jesus did. Conversely, when Scripture breaks your world open and makes it bigger and more loving, it is achieving its true goal.

Hang onto that principle. It may not be the whole story, but it’s a great place to begin and it will take you a long way. Hardness of heart is a dead giveaway that we’ve got it wrong. Only generous love can open the door to God’s truth.

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.