- Jack Rogers

… I had often said that I could not change my position on homosexuality unless I was convinced by Scripture. By studying the Bible in its historical and cultural context and through the lens of Jesus’ redeeming life and ministry, I have now been convinced that Scripture does not condemn, as such, the sexual expression of contemporary Christian people who are LGBT…

Read the whole essay.

FROM RICHMOND TO RICHMOND

A Gathering of the Covenant Network

March 28, 2004

Stephen R. Montgomery

It’s good to be back home. There’s a part of me that is surprised that I would say that– for two reasons. There’s the “home” part.  Though my formative years were only two blocks away from here, over on the corner of Brook Road and Confederate Avenue, my parents moved to Atlanta when I was in college. (Fortunately, they let me know of the move!) But since I spent 16 years in Atlanta before moving to Memphis three years ago, whenever people have asked me where home was I’d say, “Well, I was born in Texas and grew up in Richmond, but Atlanta is home.”

And so I come back here for only the second time since 1974, expecting to feel somewhat alien, strange…I mean, that was 30 years ago! But I am amazed at how quickly the feeling of home came back. Part of it is simply in driving around this community and seeing how little has changed, knowing that much has changed. But the bigger part of it is seeing so many of you who were so formative in my emotional and spiritual development. Seeing one of my best friends from high school and then seminary, Steve Dalle Mura, for the first time in about 25 years. Seeing Izzie Rogers who was a shining light at PSCE back when my mother worked there, long before the rest of the denomination got to know her shining light as Moderator.

And being back in this presbytery, albeit with a different name, is being back home. The earliest recollections I had of the mission work beyond the local church was going on an “Operation Mexico” caravan during the summer of 1968 – 10 weeks of work camps sponsored by Hanover Presbytery, which of course was led by John Ensign. It was Grace Covenant that nurtured me and led me to appreciate excellence in church music and Christian Education. It was Ginter Park that opened up its softball team to allow a few vagabonds like my brother and me to play on their team. It’s home.

But I was also surprised to hear myself say “It’s good… it’s good to be back home.” My high school years were wonderful in so many ways, but difficult in so many ways. This was, after all, Richmond in the 1960′s! I was ready to leave, and back then all sorts of young people were rebelling in all sorts of ways….some rebelled by doing drugs, some by alcohol. I rebelled by going north. Spent some time at Wooster, and then some time at Yale, but it was through those experiences that I began to appreciate the fact that these were my people. This was my home. And I’ve been in the south ever since. It is good. I only hope your response to my talk will be a little kinder and gentler than the reception that another preacher received when he went back home for the first time to speak about 2000 years ago. (See Luke 4!)

But what I would like to do this afternoon is speak somewhat personally and share a little of that journey from Richmond, back to Richmond, to let you know why I think the most faithful and hope-filled movement in the Presbyterian Church (USA) is found in the Covenant Network of Presbyterians. I had actually agreed (and promised my wife) not to accept any more speaking engagements outside of Memphis, but I would jump over the moon for Janet James, and my wife would too! And I would do anything to introduce good people (you) to good people (in the Covenant Network.)

This journey actually begins in another church in this presbytery….All Souls.  Back in the late 1960′s there was a small but vibrant youth group there called “Nogapsallowed.” (That’s “no gaps allowed” without any gaps.) It was probably the only integrated youth group in the entire city back then, and they would form little groups to go to speak to other youth groups, with role-playing and such, and try to heighten the awareness of racism among young people, to help people understand people of different races. They were all friends of mine so I would drop in from time to time. But I’ll never forget one discussion we had. I don’t remember all the details, but somehow we started talking about how different people read the bible in different ways, and how their experience often shapes their reading. The discussion was being led by an older African-American man and we were talking about the birth narrative in Luke. He said, “Now when you hear ‘there was no room for them in the inn,’ what do you think that means?”

Well, just what it says. “There was no room for them in the inn. The inn was full.” And he said, “Now let me read it and see what you think it means.” “There was no room (he paused) for them in the inn.” And it hit me. Here was a man who had grown up in the south in the 1940′s and 50′s and had gone by many an inn that had rooms available, but not for them. And later on when I went to seminary and studied scripture in a little more depth, lo and behold, there was no less a scholar than Raymond Brown in his The Birth of the Messiah saying that Mary and Joseph were a part of the “anawim,” the poor ones, the lowly. There was no room “for them” in the inn.  It made me thankful that we have African-Americans in the Presbyterian Church (USA) to bring their eyes, their experience to the reading of scriptures, for it is through their experience and their honesty and their reading of scripture that my God became a lot bigger and a lot more just. It was hard to believe that for years they couldn’t even sit next to us in a sanctuary. And when our eyes were finally opened to what was already there in scripture–the equality of all God’s children– we were not abandoning the authority of scripture. Rather, we believed that the Spirit of God was moving in our midst.

Several years later when I was at Wooster I had the privilege of serving on an associate pastor nominating committee for the church there on the campus. We came up with a job description and started pouring over the resumes, and you’ll never guess what happened. We narrowed the list down to three names, and all three were women! Now, that doesn’t sound radical today, but I had never heard a woman preach up until that point. And all three of these just blew us away! (One of those, incidentally, is now the current moderator of our Presbyterian Church (USA). Another is a president of one of our seminaries. Neither one got the job, which says something about my wisdom and insight!)

It was hard to believe that only a few decades earlier, we would take verses from the bible, out of context, with a disregard for the greater themes of scripture and throw them around as though they were the gospel truth. “A woman should be silent in church.” Says so right there in the Bible. That settles it.

And since I served on that PNC, my ministry has been influenced as much, if not more by women, as by men. I shudder to think of where I would be without the gifts of women in ministry, or where the Presbyterian Church would be without the gifts of women in ministry. My God is a bigger God, a more tender God, a more just God, a more hospitable God, a more motherly God, as a result of women’s eyes and experiences that they bring to their reading of scripture. And when we opened the doors of the church more fully to women, there were those who cried “We are abandoning scripture!” Yet we believe that it was the Spirit of God moving in our midst.

There was another experience I had once I got out in the field and was serving a church in Atlanta. I was invited to be a part of a group to go down to Nicaragua during the height of the contra war. Most of you might remember that?  Well, we spent some time in what was called a base community. These were little communities that would get together and just read the bible and talk about it. That’s it. They didn’t have seminary educations, or even college for that matter. A few were even illiterate. But they knew their bible. And they gave me an education that I couldn’t have received at Yale.

One of their favorite stories, of course, was of the exodus. They knew all of the details. And I was right with them. “Way to go, Moses. That’ll show ol’ Pharaoh a thing or two.” But once we got beneath the details, they started bringing their experience to this story, about where they stood in the story, who they identified with, and about who Pharaoh was in their lives, about their desire for freedom. And you know what? In their eyes, I represented Pharaoh! I couldn’t believe it! I always thought I was on Moses’ side! They began to talk about their suffering under Somoza, who was supported by the United States government. And I knew all of this was true…I was a Latin American history major, but I had never had applied all of that to scripture. It took some people with totally different eyes, totally different experiences for me to see my own complicity in the bondage of the Israelites! I didn’t like what they said, but when I got home and did some more bible study, I found out that they were speaking the truth.

God loves us all, but I saw in a new way that God has a special place in God’s heart for those oppressed, those suffering, the poor. And I couldn’t see it without the help of my Latin brothers and sisters.

Now I’m not going to say that the Presbyterian Church has closed our doors to Hispanics like we have with women and African-Americans (although we do a rotten job of partnering with them!), but I do hope you can see a theme emerging. My spiritual growth (and I hope what little wisdom I have) has been at its greatest when people with different eyes, different experiences, and different cultures, and especially people without power, have spoken the truth in love with me about what they see in Holy Scripture.

You can guess where I’m leading, so let me fast forward several years. It was in about 1986 or so. I was in my study in my church in Atlanta when I got a phone call. “Steve, my name is Connie, and John Storey gave me your name and said you’d be a good person to call.” “Well, thank you. What can I do for you?”

“Well, I am in my final year at seminary here and the only remaining requirement I have is my SM210, my summer internship. In order to graduate I need it, but they won’t let me interview with everyone else and won’t let me post my resume on the board.”

“Now, why is that?” I asked.

“I’m a lesbian who is out of the closet, and I’d like to know if I could come and work for you this summer.”

I had to do some quick thinking. “Listen, Connie, we’re a small church and there’s no way we could afford an intern.”

“I’ll work for free.” We talked some more and like any good Presbyterian pastor trying to pass the buck I said “Let me take it to the session.”

I didn’t know the session well since I was fairly new there, and this was all before we had to vote on all those lettered amendments that we love to hate and have to choose sides on, so I honestly didn’t know what they would say. This wasn’t a radical church. I wouldn’t even call it liberal. But I learned that if there is one thing stronger than Presbyterians’ fear of homosexuals, it is our desire to get something for nothing. And so the session unanimously voted to hire her (for free) for the summer. (We actually came up with a little stipend, which was supplemented by donations from members of the faculty at the seminary.)

We’d take a look at Leviticus. After all, it says right there that a man who lies with another man is an abomination. (I heard that thrown at a gay person just last week. Remember, I live in Memphis, Tennessee!) But with Connie’s help, I looked at other parts of that same Levitical code. I found out that it was also an abomination to eat shellfish. I found out that if I had a son who disobeyed me, I could stone him. I found that I could possess slaves, provided they are purchased from neighboring nations. (I wonder if that applies to Mexicans, but not Canadians.) I found out that if I were bound to the code, I could not be a minister, because it said that one could not approach the altar of God if I had a defect in my sight. Plus, I wore clothes of different threads.

We looked at Sodom and Gomorrah, which I had been raised to believe was an open and shut case. But Connie helped me to see what I had learned in seminary but hadn’t applied to stories like this. I had learned that Presbyterians let scripture interpret scripture, and that all of our interpretation must be in the light of the centrality of Jesus Christ. And so we looked at what the rest of scripture said about Sodom and Gomorrah, and there was nary a word about homosexuality. Rather, in Ezekiel, and Jeremiah and Isaiah and even Jesus all claimed that the sin of these two cities were inhospitality and violations of rudimentary social justice.

We went on to Romans 1 and 2, which has been considered by almost everyone to be the central biblical text regarding homosexuality. Paul wrote this from Corinth and from what we learned in our study about Corinth was that it was a seaport town that boasted just about every kind of bizarre and corrupt sexuality. Jack Rogers says that when you stand at the place where Paul was tried by the civil court, you can see the AcroCorinth, the mountain on which there was a temple to Aphrodite, a bisexual god/goddess. There were probably 7,000 prostitutes there, male and female. You paid your money, had sex, and you had been to church. [1]

And Paul felt that was the worst example of idolatry he had ever seen. He wasn’t talking about homosexuality per se, but idolatry, worshipping false gods. He was talking about idolatrous people engaged in prostitution. To single out gays and lesbians and apply this judgment to them would be like using Howard Stern and Hugh Heffner as the norm for heterosexual males and saying that all of us are just like them. [2]

Paul goes on to say that we are all guilty of sins just as bad as the idolatry that goes on up in the temple, and he lists about 15 sins that cover us all, including envy, gossip and foolishness. I’m not sure I’d have a session at my church or we’d have a presbytery in Memphis if we enforced a limitation there. I know I couldn’t be ordained.

And then, Connie would read to me Paul’s conclusion: “Therefore, you have no excuse, whoever you are, when you judge others; for in passing judgment on another you condemn yourself, because you, the judge, are doing the very same things.” (Rom. 2.1) It was Connie who first pointed out to me that both Martin Luther or Karl Barth, who wrote arguably the two greatest commentaries on Romans, discussed this passage without even mentioning sex.

Then Paul summarizes the issues: “Since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God; they are now justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus.” Listen again to Jack Rogers:

“Justification comes by grace received through faith. That is the central insight of the Protestant Reformation. To turn Romans 1 into a law, condemning, not the pervasive idolatry to which every one of us is susceptible, but only the sexual expression of one group of people, is to misrepresent Paul’s point. It turns the Protestant Reformation upside down.” [3]

Now we could debate some of these texts until we are blue in the face. I have to admit that even professors in Presbyterian seminaries are divided in their interpretations. But I want to make two points here. First, I began to see, with Connie’s help, how inconsistent I was with my biblical interpretation. If, for example, I would hear a Southern Baptist quote Titus 2, in which wives should be submissive to their husbands, I wouldn’t know whether to laugh out loud or burst out into a self-righteous fury. (I heard a preacher say that just a few weeks ago. Remember, I’m from Memphis, Tennessee.) But then we Presbyterians would take a look at Romans 1 and take that to be gospel. Why Romans and not Titus?

Or, we have made peace, thankfully, with some of those difficult sayings by Jesus on divorce and remarriage.  They seem fairly straightforward, even more straightforward than the biblical assertions concerning same-sex intercourse. Yet we have moved beyond that graciously as a denomination. And one of the reasons we have is because more and more of our members, our elders, our pastors, had been through the pain of divorce, and we were able to look at those texts anew through their experience, their eyes, and see something of a bigger God, a more gracious and just God than we had ever imagined. We would also relate those texts with the larger themes of scripture as well as the rest of the life and ministry of Jesus.

William Placher asks the question why is it that we take some of these hard texts as gospel, and have made peace with other texts. He especially points to Jesus’ judgment that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to get into the kingdom of heaven. Have we ever made peace with that!!! And, he writes, “my sad conclusion is that if a given group is powerful enough, then we ignore the passages that criticize them. And that has become our interpretive rule.” [4]

And that relates to the second point I want to make about my bible studies with Connie. Like my studies with African-Americans, or women, or base community Central Americans, she helped me recover the classic Reformed practice of interpreting the Bible which begins with the Bible, and not with the powers and prejudices of our culture. It took someone with a different experience, a different world view, different eyes, someone out of power to help these texts come alive to me in a new, more graceful way. We lost Connie, one of the brightest, most biblically literate interns I had in over 20 years, to another denomination.

So I’ve struggled with these texts ever since, but I have always done it in the context of simply being a pastor of a local church and not a biblical scholar. And it is in that capacity as a pastor, that the deepest transformations have taken place in me.

As a result of that summer, I became one of the “go to” Presbyterian pastors when there were pastoral needs for people with AIDS. Remember, this was in the mid-80′s when AIDS was pretty much a death sentence; research on causes and cures had just begun, and the stigma of AIDS was unparalleled. I did a lot of funerals and provided a lot of pastoral care for gay men. I’ll never forget the first funeral I led. Sam had committed suicide. His body had been deteriorating for several years, and he knew the end was approaching and simply did not want to burden his partner Lee, who had cared for him night and day, any more. They had been together seven years. It had been Sam’s wish to be cremated, but when he died the funeral home would not release Sam’s body to Lee. It could only go to the next of kin, a family in Kentucky who not only had never accepted Sam’s homosexuality, but did not believe in cremation because, as they said, “How could the rapture take place if the body’s not in the ground?”

We were finally able to work something out, (one part of the journey I left out was that I spent four years in Appalachia, and I could “speak their language.”) but I’ll never forget that memorial service. I went to the front of the church and looked out and saw something there it was… a glimpse of the kingdom of God. They were all there: blacks, whites, old, young, gay, straight, men, women, some obviously working class, some obviously quite well off. A few dressed rather flamboyantly. A few little gray haired ladies. (Come to think of it, a few little gray haired ladies dressed rather flamboyantly!) Some obviously “in,” that is Presbyterian-looking; some obviously “out.” And during the prayer, I asked God to be with Lee in his grief, and thanked God for the way Lee cared for Sam. This was nothing exceptional.  I always try to make a point of mentioning by name those closest to the deceased, so it seemed to be a natural thing to do.

The next day, Lee came to my office. He had tears in his eyes as he told me that that was the first time that anyone in a church had ever acknowledged the relationship they shared in a positive way. “And,” he said, “it was beautiful. If the church keeps this up, maybe there will be room for me some day.” I of course assured him that there was, but I never saw him again.

There was one more part of the story. I have a friend who had graduated from Union Seminary right here who was gay and thus never ordained, but he moved out to California and became active in a little Presbyterian Church in Los Angeles. Two of his friends were moving to Atlanta, not too far from my church, so he told them to come and visit. Tom and Steve had been together 17 years, and to this day, I still think they have one of the most beautiful relationships that I have ever seen, gay or straight. Tom had been transferred, so Steve moved with him, of course.

Tom and Steve were rather conservative. They lived in cul de sac in Dunwoody, an upper crust suburb of Atlanta. But they fit right in to our church, and soon joined and got involved by ushering, coming to work days, teaching church school, serving on committees, Tom even was installed as an elder, and made one of the best elders I’ve ever had….organized, gracious, headed a committee to upgrade facilities and got done what we had been talking about for 8 years! He even served on a task force for our presbytery. The 1993 General Assembly, to which I was a commissioner, had voted to make a concerted effort to study the issue of sexuality for three years, with a particular emphasis in bringing to the table those who had felt hurt by the policy of exclusion. Tom put himself into that with grace and diligence. And then 1996 came along.  That was the year the General Assembly handed down Amendment B, the so-called “fidelity and chastity” amendment.

I had moved to another church in Atlanta, and got a call from Tom. “Steve,” he said, “I just can’t do it any longer. I’m tired of fighting. You know me,” he said, “I’m not a banner carrier, I don’t march in parades. I mean, I voted for Ronald Reagan! I just want to be in a denomination where I can just be a member of a church and use whatever gifts I have for ministry.” We lost Tom and Steve. It still hurts.

Well, it was that amendment that led to the formation of a group called The Covenant Network of Presbyterians which brings me back here to Richmond. Far from being on the fringes of the church like so many of our organizations on the right and the left, this is a movement started by large church pastors, former moderators of our denomination, to try to claim the “radical center” of our Reformed heritage.

What do we affirm? 1) We affirm faith in Jesus Christ. 2) We affirm that the church we seek to strengthen is built upon the hospitality of Jesus. 3) That the people of God are called to be “the light to the nations.” 4) That the words of scripture provide life and nourishment…embracing gifts of scholarship, research and dialogue as we seek to understand the Bible’s relevance to the ever-changing needs of the world; and 5) we seek the gift of unity among all who confess the name of Jesus Christ as Lord.

Because we affirm those principles, these are the things we covenant together to do:

- Welcome, in the name of Christ, all whom God calls into community and leadership in God’s church.

- Reach out in solidarity and compassion to all who are wounded or excluded by recent legislative actions of our church;

- Continue to be faithful to the Presbyterian Church (USA), supporting its mission in Christ’s name to God’s world;

- Reaffirm our denomination’s historic understanding that “God alone is Lord of conscience” both for ourselves and for those with whom we disagree.

- Trust session and presbyteries to ordain those called by God, through the voice of the church, who are “persons of strong faith, dedicated discipleship, and love of Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord” and whose “manner of life demonstrates the Christian gospel in the church and the world (G-6.0106a);

- Seek pastoral and theological solutions to division in the church; (not legal solutions!);

- Maintain dialogue, study and prayer in the spirit of Christ with those with whom we differ, seeking to understand the deeper roots of our disagreements;

- And to seek God’s will for the church through the presence of Christ, the study of scripture, the guidance of our historic confessions, and the dynamic work of the Holy Spirit.

That’s the covenant. It’s not, you notice, a litmus test for orthodoxy. It’s not an attempt at a new confession. It is a call to covenant community, and it, more than anything else I have seen in the Presbyterian Church (USA), is what has given me hope that God just might not be through with us yet.

So let me close with just a few observations or reflections on my journey from Richmond to Richmond.

First, from my pastoral experience with straights and gays and lesbians, I have come to see that being gay is first and foremost about being a human being made in the image of God, not about having sex! Tim Hart-Andersen, a pastor of a large church in Minneapolis and a member of the Board of Directors of the Covenant Network and dear friend, I might add asked the right question recently: “Why is it that the church is so focused on the sexual activity as the central defining quality of the life of a person who happens to be gay or lesbian, while for the rest of us sexuality – if it is considered at all – is viewed simply as a piece of the whole, or as a healthy expression of love between two people?” [5] We need to work on that question.

Second, there are times when I, and perhaps you, get so tired of the struggle, tired of the constant wrangling. What has it led to? We have driven from the leadership of the church good and faithful leaders. We have become intolerant of one another. We have disillusioned a whole generation of young people who learned that song “They’ll know we are Christians by our love” and now have turned away in frustration. And we have resorted to taking difficult biblical, theological, and pastoral issues and made them a political football… “judicial cannibalism” someone called it.

Add to that the fact that 6 million children die each year, mostly from hunger related causes. 12 million children in this country alone have to skip a meal to make ends meet. [6] And we are fighting two wars right now. There are times when I think God has more important things on God’s mind. Shouldn’t we be about the “real” business of the church?

Let me respond in two ways. First of all, any issues of life and death are indeed a part of the “real” business of the church. Fully 1/3 of all teen-age suicides occur because of issues pertaining to sexuality. If that’s not “real” business, I don’t know what is.

But secondly, well, I like the way Jon Walton put it: “resolving this issue may in fact be precisely the business that God has given us to do, which is why it will not go away. In fact, if we cannot solve this with God’s help, then what do we think God will help us solve? This ordination issue is not on our plate by accident, nor is it an interruption from our other work. It is precisely the issue God means for us to resolve, for heaven’s sake, and for the sake of the gospel.” [7]

Third, God has not left us alone to solve this. God has given us each other as the means by which it shall be resolved. Not by outvoting one another, or out-shouting one another or calling each other names. But by hanging in there together calling the church to a rigorousness of Biblical integrity and a faithfulness to theological depth which all of us, conservative, evangelical, moderate, and liberal aspire.

When I moved to Memphis, it became obvious that the presbytery was highly divided. Secret strategy sessions, tense debates, even rumors about opponents. So I called one of the leaders of the evangelical wing in the presbytery and suggested that he find five pastors on “his” side of the issue, and I find five on “my” side of the issue and covenant together for three gatherings over lunch. I was a part of such a group in Atlanta that we called “Common Ground,” and thought it might be worth a try in Memphis. Several evangelicals said there was nothing to talk about, but we did it…10 pastors gathered for lunch at Idlewild. We prayed, ate, and simply shared our faith stories that first time. It has now been going on for 3 years. Sometimes we talk about stewardship, about personal concerns, sometimes we read articles together, sometimes we address this issue.  Not one mind has been changed. And it has been at times one of the most frustrating, anger-producing experiences I have had. “Why am I doing this?” I ask.

And yet, through the breaking of the bread, the praying, the bible study, the sharing, the laughing, and yes, the crying, something has happened. I have been transformed. No, they haven’t changed my mind on this issue, as a matter of fact, they have unwittingly forced me to sharpen my arguments and through them I have been more convicted than ever to give voice to those who do not have voice. But I have found that we hear the same gospel, loud and clear. I have found that we have a lot more in common than we don’t have in common. I have found that so many of my stereotypes that I have carried about evangelicals turned out to be just that…stereotypes.

And I began to see that just because one disagreed with me that did not necessarily mean that they were homophobic. And I hope I have helped them to see that just because I am for the full inclusion of gays and lesbians into the life of the church, I have not abandoned scripture. I also quit calling them names. I became convinced that the Presbyterian Church will be better off – more faithful – if we in it hold on to one another.

Fourth, and finally, The Covenant Network is more than simply a single issue network. Far from it. It is about the kind of church that I want my children, one of whom is Hispanic, and one of whom is Asian, to grow up in. A church that believes in a BIG God, a church which can show and tell the world that submitting body and soul to the Lordship of Jesus Christ means giving up all pretense of power and privilege, and that walking with Jesus means listening to and walking with the poor, the marginalized, the voiceless, the grieving, the sick.  A church which is composed of manifestly Bible-believing Christians, yielding priority to no one in our fidelity to this book. A church which is joyfully evangelical, big enough and diverse enough to include us all – conservative and liberal and every point in between, gays and straights, single, divorced, and partnered, young and old, certain believers and confused seekers, abled and disabled – all the varied children of God who can help us change and grow and become more together than we can ever be apart.

I suppose the most beautiful and poignant glimpse I have ever had of that kind of church took place in a Presbyterian Church…St. Andrew Presbyterian in San Marin California. It was told by Anne Lamott, who shared a story about a man named Ken Nelson, who was dying of AIDS and had started coming to the church and finally joined. His partner had already died of the disease, and he had a totally lopsided face, ravaged and emaciated, but, she said, “when he smiles, he is radiant. He looks like God’s crazy nephew Phil.”

There was woman in the choir named Ranola, large, beautiful, jovial, black, and as devout as one could be, who was always a little standoffish towards Ken. Anne said she had been raised in the south by Baptists who taught her that his way of life – that he-was an abomination. It was hard for her to break through that. She might have been afraid of catching the disease. Ken was getting weaker and weaker and would start to miss a few Sundays, but when he was able to come, he would still, before the prayers of the people, talk joyously of his life and decline, of grace and redemption, of how safe and happy he was these days.

On one particular morning, Anne writes, “for the first hymn, the so-called Morning Hymn, we sang “Jacob’s Ladder,” which goes “Every rung goes higher, higher,” while ironically Kenny couldn’t even stand up. But he sang away sitting down, with the hymnal in his lap. And then when it came time for the second hymn, the fellowship hymn, we were to sing “His Eye Is on the Sparrow.” The pianist was playing and the whole congregation had risen – only Ken remained seated, holding the hymnal in his lap – and we began to sing “Why should I feel discouraged? Why do the shadows fall?” And Ranola watched Ken rather skeptically for a moment, and then her face began to melt and contort like his, and she went to his side and bent down to lift him up – lifted up this white rag doll, this scarecrow. She held him next to her, draped over and against her like a child while they sang. And it pierced me.” [8]

That’s just a glimpse of the vision that I think the Covenant Network is working towards. And for me, we’ll get there when Connie, and Lee, and Tom and Steve, and a whole host of faithful, gifted children of God will come into a Presbyterian Church and say “It’s good to be home.”

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid.

[4] William Placher, “Struggling with Scripture,” Address to the 2000 Covenant Network Conference, November 3, 2000. 

[5] Tim Hart-Andersen, “This Is Our Time,” Covenant Network GA Address.

[6] Bread for the World website.

[7] Jon Walton, “Is Anything Too Wonderful for our God?” Covenant Network G.A. Address.

[8] Anne Lamott, Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith, New York: Pantheon Press, 1999, p. 64-64. (Yes, I do read things besides the Covenant Network Website!)

“I wish that I had been one of the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus.” These, alas, are not my words. They are the opening sentence of The Making of Late Antiquity by the great historian Peter Brown, and they begin a paragraph that, of all the paragraphs I have not written, is the one I most wish I had. Brown continues: “These Christian brothers had been walled up in a cave in the middle of the third century, during the pagan persecution of the Emperor Decius (249-51). They were awakened in the early fifth century, in the reign of Decius’ direct successor, the Emperor Theodosius II (408-50), in order to enlighten that most Christian monarch on a point concerning the resurrection of the dead. Imagine their surprise when, on entering the city, they saw the Cross placed above the main gate, heard men freely swearing by the name of Christ, saw a great church and the Christian clergy busy with repairing the walls of the city, and found that the solid silver coins of a pagan emperor caused amazement in the market place. This book is an attempt to enter into their surprise.” (1)

A meditation on surprise is what you get when you ask someone trained in history, as I am, to talk about what anything, including the church, is called to be and to become. Peter Brown and Yogi Berra have probably never appeared quite this close together before, but there is clear resonance between the historian’s attempt to enter into the surprise of the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus and the baseball catcher’s observation that “the future ain’t what it used to be.” I do not go as far in support of Yogi as the radical critic Alfred Loisy, who one hundred and one years ago famously wrote that Jesus announced the kingdom and what we got was the church(2). But I think there are more theological puzzles than solutions lurking in the theme of this conference. The theme is not generic—What is the church to be and to become?—but personal and specific—The church we are called to be and to become. Is it presumptuous of us to think it’s we who are thus called? How do we recognize a call? There are people who hear God calling in very different tones from those I am familiar with. What is the connection between what the church is and what it is to become?

For starters, do we have any warrant for saying that our account of what the church currently is bears much resemblance to its actual state? It’s a pity that the question about what the meaning of is is will forever be associated with President Clinton’s evasiveness, because it is really a very good question, especially for churches. Can we make productive, non-defensive use of the perspective that outsiders have on us? I was both amused and abashed by a recent Washington Post story about the banning of a United Methodist Church advertisement from the electronic billboard in New York’s Times Square. Because Reuters wants to preserve its reputation as an unbiased source of information, a spokesperson said, the billboard does not carry ads that are “pornographic, political, religious, libelous, misleading, or deceptive.”(3) It is instructive, if unnerving, to learn what rhetorical company we keep in the popular mind. We have some perceived entangling alliances to extricate ourselves from. Actually, the extrication has already begun. I am pleased to report a bit of late-breaking news. The National Council of Churches web site says that the CEO of Reuters has reversed the company’s decision. The head of the United Methodist Communications Office sums up the story: “They took us seriously and have responded in a reasonable and balanced manner.” (4)

I am 10% of the way into my talk, and already I have confused issues more than I have clarified them, and compiled a catalogue of questions that could constitute a semester’s syllabus. At this point we, or at least I, need to take a deep breath and clear the mind. I will say three things that I hope will dispel some fog, then we can proceed.

First, I am more agnostic than many theologians about history’s direction. For me, the jury is out on whether history is a decline from a golden age, a story of progress, a circle, a spiral, or just one damn thing after another. A friend of mine says the bottom line of her faith is that God knows what God is doing whether she believes in it, approves of it, agrees with, or likes it. Calvin would not have put it quite this way, but there are parallels with his conviction about God’s sovereignty. Moreover, even if time’s arrow is moving in a particular, divinely ordained direction, I am suspicious of my, or anyone else’s, claim to be able to trace it definitively. The eschatological tension between “the already” and “the not yet” doesn’t solve anything, because there is such dispute about what that’s going on right now is “already” and what that’s going on right now is “not yet.” I, and many of you in this room, believe that the consecration of Bishop Gene Robinson last Sunday is encouraging evidence of an eschatological “already,” but there are many Christians, probably more than there are of us, for whom that event is a sacrilege, definitive evidence of an eschatological “not yet.” Here we have two competing convictions about what the future will be if it ain’t what it used to be. I’m certainly willing to fight hard for my convictions, but my convictions on many things have changed over time (for instance, I am appalled to remember what I used to think God’s opinion of Pentecostals was), and I see no reason to suppose that what I know about God is going to stay put.

So, first, I’m agnostic about history’s direction. Second, I am agnostic about its goal. I certainly find the Messianic Banquet more appealing than the Battle of Armageddon, but I know that the movie Babette’s Feast has a lot less cultural clout these days than the Left Behind novels by Tim Lahaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, with their sales in the dozens of millions of copies. I remember somebody once telling me that for a long time she missed the point of the Last Judgment image of separating sheep from goats because she thought goats much nicer animals than sheep. And even if there is a fixed goal, I have the same problem as with the “already” and the “not yet”—I’m suspicious of claims, my own or anyone else’s, to know for sure what it is.

Theology can learn something from the discipline of science. Cosmologist Brian Greene recently said this about how science advances: “I like to say things more than one way. I just think that when it comes to abstract ideas, you need many roads into them. From the scientific point of view, if you stick with one road, I think you really compromise your ability to make breakthroughs. I think that’s really what breakthroughs are about. Everybody’s looking at a problem one way, and you come at it from the back. That different way of getting there somehow reveals things that the other approach didn’t.”(5) Breakthrough by indirection is a better way to a goal than “damn the torpedoes full speed ahead,” especially if you think your chances of being initially mistaken about the goal are good. And maybe the goal is fixed, maybe it isn’t, and if it is, it might not be our responsibility to decide, or even guess, what it is. It could be that the last scene of the historical show will be some sitting on a hilltop enjoying the Messianic Banquet while others engage in the Battle of Armageddon on the field below, like the picknickers who went out to Bull Run to watch the Union and the Confederacy tear into each other.

I don’t want to be taken to be quite so skeptical as I might sound, however. I believe the goal is God, and God is love—but love is really mysterious as well as patient and kind. I believe God can be trusted but not taken for granted. Brian Greene is once again instructive: “The universe,” he says, “in a sense guides us toward truths, because those truths are the things that govern what we see. If we’re all being governed by what we see, we’re all being steered in the same direction. Therefore, the difference between making a breakthrough and not often can be just a small element of perception . . . that puts things together in a different way.”

So, first I’m agnostic about history’s direction; second I’m agnostic about its goal. My third agnosticism is perhaps the most heretical of all, but I have to inform you about it to complete the context for my further reflections. I’m agnostic about the indefectibility of the church. That’s a fancy word you don’t hear every day. To believe in the indefectibility of the church is to believe that God won’t let the church finally go entirely off the rails; it is to take literally Jesus’ promise that the gates of hell will not prevail against the church. But even if the gates of hell won’t prevail, the church could decay from within. I suspect the church could really lose it—and a seminary president friend tells me that Presbyterians have no trouble believing that the church is thoroughly defectible! But even if I were to believe in the church’s indefectibility (which maybe I do; remember, I said agnostic, which means simply that I don’t know), it doesn’t follow that I know for sure where the church God is protecting is—there are places where two or three or two or three hundred or two or three thousand are gathered together in Jesus’ name and I have serious doubts about whether Jesus is there in the midst of them, and there are places where Jesus’ name isn’t spoken at all that I suspect he is. Remember that Jesus warned us (Matthew 25): Our saying “Lord, Lord” doesn’t mean he’ll come running, and chances are good that we won’t recognize him when he shows up.

At this point I imagine you understand why Yogi Berra’s aphorism is so attractive to me; “the future ain’t what it used to be” captures both my agnosticism about the future and my hopes for it. We’re not stuck, but we have no guarantees. We’re in a state where we can take to heart the most ecumenically fruitful words I know, some advice given by Folly in Erasmus’s great encomium to her: She proposes for the smooth functioning of human communities that we “make mistakes together or individually, . . . [and] wisely overlook things.”(6) If the future ain’t what it used to be, then we need not be paralyzed by fear that we might not get it right. We can make mistakes and wisely overlook things without automatically being branded as wishy-washy hypocrites. Maybe history is like what film director Jean-Luc Godard replied when someone said to him, by way of implied rebuke, “Movies should have a beginning, a middle and an end”—“Certainly, but not necessarily in that order.” (7)

The next rhetorical move I make may give you mental or even spiritual whiplash, but even if I don’t know where history is going, I know where this talk is going, so bear with me despite what may seem a derailment.

A few weeks ago I read about a new publication called Revolve. It offers the complete New Testament in a fashion-magazine format, replete with images of stylish, smiling young women, quizzes, and celebrity birthdays, designed to appeal to girls between the ages of 12 and 17. A Nashville 15-year-old voiced a marketer’s dream: “My friends, they don’t like to read the Bible, but once they saw it they were like, ‘I’m going to have to get me one of those.’”

It might seem a stretch from Revolve to pondering the church we are called to be and to become, but the connection was suggested to me in praise the managing editor gave the firm that created the layout: “They’re great because they don’t make things look churchy or Christiany. They have a real fresh perspective on Christian products.”(8)

I wince, as I suspect you do too, at the notion of “Christian products,” but my purpose is not to criticize the merchandising of the gospel. The editor’s distaste for things “churchy” and “Christiany” is instructive, even bracing, and I want to make the case that we are called to be and to become church and Christian, but on the way we should avoid being either “churchy” or “Christiany.”

A friend of mine in her early 20s, when I told her about the editor’s remark, immediately said that when she’s in her car scanning the dial she can tell within the first couple of seconds, just from the quality of the sound, whether it’s a “Christian” station. There’s a cloying earnestness, optimism that pretends to be hope but is really warmed-over American triumphalism, a Jesus-as-cheerleader boosterism that has little resonance in the Bible and most of Christian tradition. Things that are “Christiany” offer us saccharin when we need sugar, and things that are “churchy” make us drag though we’re designed to dance. “Churchy” and “Christiany” certainly don’t inhabit the same rhetorical stable as “pornographic, libelous, misleading, or deceptive”; maybe they don’t even cohabit with Reuters’s other allergy, “political.” But I would not consider myself complimented if someone called me “Christiany” or “churchy.”

I have been privileged through much of my life to hear preaching of the highest order. My father, who was pastor of the same Disciples of Christ congregation in Dallas for 41 years, was among the best-read people I’ve ever known—more novels and poetry than biblical commentary, although he had plenty of that too. My preacher when I was in college was George Buttrick, in graduate school Bill Coffin. And for much of my teaching career, Barrie Shepherd was my pastor. I’m not a preacher, this is not a sermon, but what I have learned from all these mentors is an appreciation for the surprises in the Bible, the places where the word skewers us or comforts us though at first glance it appears to have little or nothing to do with us at all.

And I find much light cast on the question, What is the church we are called to be and to become? by two unlikely passages of Scripture, ones that provide a compelling alternative to a life that is either churchy or Christiany or, God help us, both, and ones that remind us the future ain’t what it used to be. The first, from 1 Samuel, is the story of the last night of the life of King Saul (1 Samuel 28:20-25), before he is killed in battle with the Philistines the next day. The second, from Mark, is about dogs eating crumbs that fall from the table (Mark 7:24-30).

The story of Saul and the woman of Endor is neither Christiany nor churchy, but is a clue to the Christian gospel and to the nature of church. It’s all about hospitality, which is not, I suppose, a sufficient condition for church, but is certainly a necessary one—and I’d say there are times when it in fact suffices. Saul is desperate. The standard ways of consulting God are giving an “unexpected error” message, and there seems to be no way to reboot. Saul asks his aides to find a soothsayer. Imagine the bind this puts them in: Previously they have been ordered by the king to eliminate all such practitioners from the realm, so if they find one, they are admitting they did not do their job. Erasmus’s Folly says “Let’s make mistakes together”; Saul’s aides must wonder whether the boss will see it that way. Saul persists, they take him to the woman, she calls up the shade of Samuel—and then she is terrified, for the masks are down, and she realizes it is the king who is consulting her. She has to think it’s a trap, a sting operation. But Saul grants her immunity.

Then comes a reversal, an upending, an episode of last-shall-be-first and first-last that is resonant with the heart of the gospel. Saul hasn’t eaten all day, and the woman says to him, “I’ve risked my life in speaking to you, now you listen to me”—remember, she’s an outlaw speaking to the king—“I’m going to give you some food and you need to eat it.” He refuses, but the woman and his servants prevail on him, “and,” the text tells us, “they ate. Then they rose and went away that night.” The next day was grim indeed.

The church we are called to be and to become is about this sort of welcome, where rank and status blur, where motives mix and don’t all have to be noble, where happy faces aren’t required, where the tragic is not denied and the comic is appreciated (the scene is actually pretty funny; I can imagine Woody Allen having a field day with it). The bread and wine at the communion table are for those who are really hungry—in any time zone, at any latitude. We have betrayed Christ over and over again—as Peter did when he denied Jesus, as the disciples did when they all forsook him and fled. Still, Christ makes a place for us at the table, for all of us, and says “Eat, that you may have strength when you go on your way.” The woman of Endor is a type of Christ—and she is neither churchy nor Christiany. And Saul’s future ain’t what it used to be. In outline, to be sure, it is; Samuel told him that God had withdrawn favor, and Saul died as the prophet said he would. But in those last few hours of his life Saul knew the warmth of welcome and the liberation of giving up control—“Now you listen to me,” the woman said, and he listened.

The story from Mark’s Gospel of Jesus and the Syrophoenician woman has features similar to those of Saul’s encounter with the woman of Endor. There’s something clandestine. Just as Saul’s cover is blown when he asks the woman to summon up the shade of the prophet Samuel, Jesus enters a house, doesn’t want anyone to know he is there, and “yet,” as Mark tells us, “he could not escape notice.” The Syrophoenician woman hears where he is, comes immediately, and begs Jesus to heal her daughter. Jesus says No, as Saul had initially said to the woman of Endor when she urged him to eat something.

Actually, Jesus’ response is quite harsh, certainly neither churchy nor Christiany: “Let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” Those of us who cut bits off our steak to give to our dogs even before we sit down to dinner may not fully appreciate the imagery of “throwing food to the dogs,” but in first-century Palestine the words of Jesus would have had a hard edge, and the woman could have gone off raging, or at least sullen. What she does, though, is beat Jesus at his own game, turning an image of exclusion into one of inclusion: “Even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.”

I wish people who ask “What Would Jesus Do?” would pay more attention to this sort of interaction between Jesus and others. He acknowledges the challenge and praises the woman for it: “For saying that, you may go—the demon has left your daughter.” There is no better evidence of the Jewishness of Jesus than this kind of repartee, which is neither churchy nor Christiany. The Jesus we think keeps others out is teasing us to invite them to the table. The breakthrough to true ecumenism is made by this Gentile woman, whose riposte to Jesus is a hinge on which history turns and the future certainly ain’t what it used to be—we might even say that this day of our conference on the church we are called to be and to become is her feast day and that of the woman of Endor.

Here we are at another fork in the road, and I will follow Yogi Berra’s advice, “When you come to a fork in the road, take it.” We move from Endor and the region of Tyre to Los Angeles and the Academy Awards ceremony.

There is much about that event that is easily forgettable, but I will long remember the story Bill Cosby told when accepting the Bob Hope Humanitarian Award. Cosby characteristically deflected attention from himself, and paid homage to Fred Rogers. On January 1, Cosby recalled, Art Linkletter, Rogers, and he rode as marshals at the head of the Rose Parade: “The one thing that I still remember is people waving and saying, ‘Mr. Rogers, welcome to the neighborhood.’” (9)

I consider today the feast day not only of the woman of Endor and the Syrophoenician woman, but also of Fred Rogers, arguably the most influential Presbyterian minister of the 20th century. Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood is a place where all are welcome, and where fears are acknowledged and not belittled. In 2003, a year full of cultural and political discouragements, the most heartening thing I’ve seen is the overwhelming sense of loss our country felt when Fred Rogers died in late February. People who had probably made fun of him because he was so un-hip, so low-key, so utterly unlike the celebrities who get all the attention, came out of the woodwork in magazines and newspapers and on radio and television to wonder, without apology and without shame, how we are going to get along without him.

Carol Zaleski of Smith College, a regular columnist for The Christian Century, sums up the significance of Fred Rogers in a way that puts him right in the middle of what we are talking about today: “It’s clear,” she writes, “that this gentle and canny minister saw himself as offering through television the biblical hospitality that makes pilgrims and strangers welcome.”(10) And his hospitality is like that of the woman of Endor for Saul, like that of Jesus for the Syrophoenician woman. Zaleski again: “The disciplined, courteous, loving attention which he gave to each person, as a marvel of supreme worth, was what made Fred Rogers a source of endless comfort for his young viewers.” And, we might add, for all of us, young or not. I’m sure it wasn’t just kids shouting “Mr. Rogers, welcome to the neighborhood” on the streets of Pasadena. Fred Rogers was Christian and he loved the church, but he was neither churchy nor Christiany, and I suspect that because he lived among us, the future ain’t what it used to be.

You might appreciate a brief interlude here, to connect the dots. We began 17_ centuries ago, with the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus who woke up 150 years later to find that the future most definitely wasn’t what it used to be. That surprising future was partly good—Christians could practice their faith openly—and partly bad—to keep a shaky empire together, Christian emperors were treating heretics the way pagan emperors had previously treated Christians. I outlined my three agnosticisms that follow from the Sleepers’ surprise and Yogi Berra’s aphorism: history’s direction, history’s goal, and the indefectibility of the church. In face of these agnosticisms, I called to witness Erasmus’s Folly, who says we “must make mistakes together or individually . . . [and] wisely overlook things,” and Jean-Luc Godard, who says a movie “should have a beginning, a middle and an end—but not necessarily in that order.”

I then turned to what, with all my agnosticisms, I am quite sure the church is not called to be and become—that is, churchy and Christiany. To illustrate non-churchy and non-Christiany ways of being and becoming church, we heard the stories of Saul and the woman of Endor, Jesus and the Syrophoenician woman, and Fred Rogers and the neighborhood.

Now I want to make a point that you may find initially weird, but I hope to persuade you that it makes sense. In fact, I want to take back something I said near the beginning—that “there are more theological puzzles than solutions lurking in the theme of this conference.” Often when people reveal their agnosticisms, they then tell you how they get around them so as to maintain some semblance of belief, some connection to the tradition, if only hanging on by fingernails. But my agnosticisms are not something I need to circumvent or subvert; I go right into them, in fact, and they are my clue to the church we are called to be and to become—the puzzle is the solution.

I second the motion of Justin Martyr, who in the middle of the second century said that Socrates was a Christian, because I want to claim as a Christian theological principle Socrates’s admission, “The one thing I know is that I know nothing.”(11) If, thank God, the future ain’t what it used to be, then my uncertainty about history’s direction and goal, and my sneaking suspicion that the church could go wrong, provide a resilient grounding for confidence, for hope, and for hospitality. Most important, Socrates helps spring open the box in which we would try to lock the God of surprises. To some observers of the church it might appear that a robust, unquestioning faith—“The Bible says it, I believe it, that settles it”—is the ideal toward which Christians should strive, and my effort to justify my less sure faith could seem a desperate rearguard action by a spiritual weakling who just can’t manage a no-loose-ends conviction and a no-second-thoughts commitment. But I am not talking about a second-best way of being and becoming church. To borrow a phrase that the Apostle Paul uses in another context, I think it is actually a more excellent way.

A few paragraphs back I quoted cosmologist Brian Greene, and I want to reiterate what he said about the way science moves forward by indirection: “From the scientific point of view, if you stick with one road, I think you really compromise your ability to make breakthroughs.” Notice that you don’t go outside the system to survey it from some detached distance. Greene’s prescription for scientific advance implicitly acknowledges the fundamental truth of Gödel’s theorem, that any logical system contains propositions that cannot be proven true or false by the axioms of that system. In other words, you have to try out different roads and see where you go; there is no complete map to guide you. We’re like Lewis and Clark; we can’t click on Mapquest.

The Christian tradition is full of stories of people trying what Greene calls “different ways of getting there.” Narrow “faithfulness” of the “I have a hammerlock on the truth and to hell with you” sort is out of phase with the tradition through time—the tradition that includes Peter and Paul, Justin and Tertullian, Origen and Augustine, Bernard and Abelard, Luther and Erasmus, Tillich and Barth, and of course all the women, both those dead and those alive, whose voices we are now hearing as never before. And faithfulness through time, through the past that is in fact many futures that weren’t what they used to be, has implications, one theological and one both ecclesiological and anthropological.

First, the theological implication of faithfulness. God is out ahead of the church—that is, God is already at work in the world, and one of the church’s responsibilities is to discover where God is acting. The Bible is not a blueprint for the world, but a set of clues suggesting where to look, and the clues can go out of date. The church is as susceptible as is the academy to what F. M. Cornford a century ago called “The Principle of the Dangerous Precedent”: “Every public action which is not customary, either is wrong, or, if it is right, is a dangerous precedent. It follows that nothing should ever be done for the first time.”(12) The church is not a fortress, from which Christians who have God all figured out take God to the world that doesn’t know God. Every theology is of a particular kind: There’s not some generic “theology” over against which particular theologies, for example feminist or liberation or narrative, are judged. Theology really is the search for God, not the delivery of God. The Spirit that we are promised will lead us into the truth operates within a historical indeterminacy like that of Gödel’s theorem in mathematics—we can find the truth, the future that ain’t what it used to be, only by exploration, by trying things out, by taking roads less traveled, by making mistakes individually and together and wisely overlooking things.

The ecclesiological and anthropological implication of faithfulness is grounded in the conviction that the communal body of Christ is real, and even primary for Christian identity. From this it follows that none of us is entirely responsible for the whole faith. The church is a place where my own ups and downs—some days my faith is hot, some days cold, and usually it’s somewhere in between warm and cool—are understood to be perfectly natural and faithful. Dark nights of the soul are of the soul. The church, recognizing that we are all moving targets, has a place for Peter who denied Jesus and became the first pope, for all the disciples who forsook Jesus and fled and then turned the world upside down, for the father who cried to Jesus “I believe, help my unbelief,” for those who on the mount of the Ascension, according to Matthew 28:17, doubted what they were seeing with their own eyes. The church we are called to be and to become remembers that Job’s “comforters,” who mouthed all the conventional theological platitudes, provoked God’s wrath.

There may be people for whom the faith once delivered to them has remained unchanged and unchanging, but I am pretty sure that such strict adherence to the principle of the dangerous precedent is not characteristic of the church we are called to be and to become. A grand old hymn says we’re standing on the promises of God, but I don’t think that gets the image right. The promises of God are more like a springboard, or like the wardrobe through which the Pevensy children enter Narnia. Some Christians say that Jesus’ claim to be the Way, the Truth, and the Life shuts doors. The chorus at the end of W. H. Auden’s For the Time Being comes at it, as Brian Greene would say, “from the back” and sees it differently—indeed, opens the door:

He is the Way.
Follow Him through the Land of Unlikeness;
You will see rare beasts, and have unique adventures.

He is the Truth.
Seek Him in the Kingdom of Anxiety;
You will come to a great city that has expected your return for years.

He is the Life.
Love Him in the World of the Flesh;
And at your marriage all its occasions shall dance for joy. (13)

The church we are called to be and to become is, I believe, a place where we will see rare beasts and have unique adventures. And it is a place where we will do these things together. I come, finally, to what I consider the most persuasive answer to the question posed by this conference. The church we are called to be and to become is a place where we tell our stories and listen carefully to those of others, where we all, as Carol Zaleski says Fred Rogers did, give “disciplined, courteous, loving attention to each person, as a marvel of supreme worth.”

When I was first studying the Bible, more than forty years ago, Martin Noth’s theory about the organization of ancient Israel, and hence about the formation of the Pentateuch, was all the rage. As with most scholarly fashions, its fifteen minutes of fame is long past, but his speculation is useful as a model for the church. According to Noth, the various pieces of the story of Israel’s formation—the promise to the patriarchs, the slavery in Egypt, the Exodus, the wilderness wandering, the conquest of Canaan—were not originally all experienced by the same groups. But when, in a variety of ways and over a stretch of time, the tribes found their way into Canaan, they formed a league of a sort known at Delphi in Greece, called an amphictyony (“those who dwell around”), and gathered annually to recite their various stories to each other. Eventually the narratives wove together in such a way that members of a tribe who had not taken part in the Exodus could say, with conviction, “we were there when the waters parted.” Everybody’s story became part of everybody’s story.

Two recent documents offer most persuasive accounts of storytelling as a way for the church to be what it is called to become. Last month Jack Rogers spoke to the Covenant Network Northwest Regional Conference on “How I Changed My Mind on Homosexuality.”  Everyone who knows Jack knows how careful a thinker he is, so there can be no suspicion that his movement is quixotic or a bending to some shifting cultural wind. And the first influence he points to is getting to know people: “I have known many homosexual people as colleagues and friends. In every instance these were people who did not fit any of the stereotypes of gays as lustful, idolatrous trouble makers. They were uniformly normal, deeply Christian, and desirous of helping the church to be its best self.”(14)

And Barbara Brown Taylor, in a stunning essay in The Christian Century called “Where the Bible leads me,” makes the same point. “I do not have a position on homosexuality. What I have, instead, is a life. I have a history, in which many people have played vital parts. When I am presented with the issue of homosexuality, I experience temporary blindness. Something like scales fall over my eyes, because I cannot visualize an issue. Instead, I visualize the homeroom teacher who seemed actually to care whether I showed up at school or not. I see the priest who taught me everything I know about priesthood, and the professor who roasted whole chickens for me when my food money ran out before the end of the month. I see the faces of dozens of young men who died of AIDS, but not before they had shown me how brightly they could burn with nothing left but the love of God to live on. . . . Other people have other stories, I know, but these are the stories that have given me my sight. To reduce them to a position seems irreverent somehow, like operating on someone’s body without looking him in the face.”(15)

That’s the key: Looking people in the face. And when you see the image of God there, you then carry what you now know back to your reading of the Bible—that is, you come at the Bible from the back, as it were, and things are revealed that your earlier approach blinded you to. Both Jack Rogers and Barbara Brown Taylor testify to the way the Bible itself becomes an agent of a future that ain’t what it used to be. Here is Rogers: “I often said that I could not change my negative attitude toward homosexuality unless I was convinced by Scripture. I have now been convinced. I had to learn to be consistent in a gracious interpretation of Scripture, not just for myself, but for all people. I should not treat individual verses as universal laws, but understand them, as Calvin recommended, in their historical and cultural context. I had to learn to apply the perspective of Jesus’ life and ministry in interpreting Scripture.”

And here is Taylor: “I love the Bible. I have spent more than half of my life reading it, studying it, teaching and preaching it. While I do not find every word of it as inspiring (or inspired) as some of my fellow Christians do, I encounter God in it reliably enough to commit myself on a daily basis to practicing the core teachings of both testaments. When I do this, however, a peculiar thing happens. As I practice what I learn in the Bible, the Bible turns its back on me. Like some parent intent on my getting my own place, the Bible won’t let me set up house in its pages. It gives me a kiss and boots me into the world, promising me that I have everything I need to find God not only on the page but also in the flesh. Whether I am reading Torah or the Gospels, the written word keeps evicting me, to go embody the word by living in peace and justice with my neighbors on this earth, whatever amount of confrontation, struggle, recognition and surrender that may involve.”

What Jack Rogers and Barbara Brown Taylor have learned is that the Bible is neither a Cliff’s Notes for life’s syllabus nor a crib sheet for life’s exam. If the Word of God is living, it’s alive, which means its future ain’t what it used to be. As Cardinal Newman used to say, “To live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often.”(16) Thank God the Word is alive; otherwise we’d still be justifying slavery, we’d still be requiring women to be silent in church — I could not respect, much less worship, a God who would not want us to hear Jana Childers [professor of homiletics at San Francisco Theological Seminary, preacher at the previous evening’s worship service in the Covenant Conference] — we’d still be declaring suicides like my father eternally lost, divorced and remarried people like me adulterers. Jack Rogers, taking his cue from the history of futures that weren’t what they used to be, declares, “When we finally accept Christian homosexual persons as full members of the church, as we will, we will be wonderfully blessed.” I, too, believe that we will, but we are called to be that church if we are to become that church. A dear lesbian friend of mine, at whose party celebrating her and her partner’s twenty years together I was privileged to pray, wrote to me recently: “It’s true that many of us are willing to risk our lives on our loves. I do too I guess. Today, I have come to a crossroads where I feel my faith is very deep but the practice of it is almost annoying. That may sound very conceited, and I would only dare to whisper those words to you. Still, I love the music, and I love the ceremony . . . but not necessarily the coffee. Today, I find that I am all faith, no religion.” The church we are called to be and to become includes the coffee, and is a place where Robyn and Ann can find resonance between their faith and religion, for their sake and that of their daughters, and for the sake of all of us.

Being the church and becoming the church takes practice. Some Christians at one extreme think the church’s job is to follow the score note for note, adhering meticulously to all the dynamic marks. Some Christians at the other extreme think the church’s assignment is to play aleatory music, “in which elements traditionally determined by the composer are determined either by a process of random selection chosen by the composer [e.g., throwing dice] or by the exercise of choice by the performer.” (17) Those of us in the middle, where the Covenant Network lives, are devotees of theological jazz, where you have to know everything you can, and practice tirelessly, in order to go, together, where no one has gone before. The church we are called to be and to become is a jam session. Indeed, while Covenant Network is a good descriptive name, it lacks a certain zing. Maybe you should reconstitute as a jazz combo and call yourselves “The Seven Sleepers of Ephesus.”

A friend told me that the best homily he ever heard was a single sentence, following a set of readings about God’s care for all that God has made. The homily was this question, nothing more: “And what part of all don’t you understand?” At a bare minimum, the church we are called to be and to become is one in which we understand all parts of all, where we are church and Christian, not Christiany and churchy, but hospitable, attentive to one another’s stories, and willing to make mistakes and allow others to make them too. Invoking saints is not traditional Presbyterian doctrine, but I conclude by asking the woman of Endor, the Syrophoenician woman, and Fred Rogers to pray for all of us and for all God’s children, everywhere and always, that we will see rare beasts and have unique adventures, and that we will all come, together, to a great city that has expected our return for years. The future ain’t what it used to be:

Thanks be to God.

Patrick Henry is author of The Ironic Christian’s Companion: Finding the Marks of God’s Grace in the World (1999; paper 2000) and editor of Benedict’s Dharma: Buddhists Reflect on the Rule of Saint Benedict (2001; paper 2002), both published by Riverhead Books.

Footnotes

1. Peter Brown, The Making of Late Antiquity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978), 1.
2. “Jésus annonçait le royaume, et c’est l’Église qui est venue,” L’évangile et l’église (1902 ; 2nd revised and augmented edition, self-published : Bellevue, France, 1903), p. 155. In context, Loisy is actually making an unexceptionable point (though he was excommunicated for it)—that no historical institution could pass the test of remaining in its original state.
3. Story printed in the Minneapolis Star Tribune, October 26, 2003, A7.
4 . http://www.ncccusa.org/news/03reutersbillboard2.html.
5. “The Future of String Theory—A Conversation with Brian Greene,” Scientific American, November 2003, pp. 68-73.
6. The Praise of Folly, trans. John P. Dolan, in The Essential Erasmus (New York: New American Library, 1964), p. 113.
7. Cited by Richard Corliss in Cinema section of Time, September 14, 1981, 90.
8. Religion News Service article, “Bible given fashion makeover to lure teen girls,” by Alexandra Alter, Minneapolis Star Tribune, August 30, 2003. 
9. Associated Press story, at http://entertainment.msn.com/news/article.aspx?news=134866. 
10. “Mister Rogers,” The Christian Century, April 19, 2003, p. 35.
11. Apology 1.46, in J. Stevenson, A New Eusebius: Documents Illustrative of the History of the Church to A.D. 337 (London: SPCK, 1960), p. 63.
12. Microcosmographia Academica: Being a Guide for the Young Academic Politician (Cambridge: Bowes & Bowes, 1908), p. 15.
13. For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio, “The Flight into Egypt, IV,” in Marvin Halverson, ed., Religious Drama 1 (New York: Living Age Books, 19578), p. 68.
14. Address delivered October 11, 2003
15. The Christian Century, October 18, 2003, p. 59.
16. John Henry Newman, An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, 1.1.7 (1845; New York: Image Books, 1960), p. 63.
17. http://www.infoplease.com/ce6/ent/A0803173.html.

The Church We Are Called to Be

Jack Rogers
Moderator, 213th General Assembly
Professor of Theology Emeritus, San Francisco Theological Seminary

 Address delivered to the 2001 Covenant Conference
November 2, 2001

I was in Louisville, at the Presbyterian Center on September 11. If I had to be anywhere at that time of tragedy, except at home, I was glad I was there. I want to tell you how very, very proud I was of the national staff and the volunteers in the building on that day of crisis. They immediately went to work to provide resources for our congregations and governing bodies. I became a spokesperson for the church in a way that I would not have been had I not been there.

Within minutes, the media people asked me to write a prayer which they put out on the internet. The Theology and Worship staff put together a service of hymns, prayers, and Scripture readings. I was there with two former Moderators working on the Task Force on the peace, unity, and purity of the church that has recently been announced. Together, the three of us, with others, led a service of worship in the Chapel at the Presbyterian Center. It was full. Wall to wall people, and spilling out into the hall. When Freda Gardner began to read the 23rd Psalm, everyone began to recite it aloud from memory. There was a sense of solidarity.

Afterwards I met the TV and print media who were there. An AP reporter asked me: “Why did you do this?” I replied that two things seemed clear: “We knew we needed God. And we needed each other.” It seemed the most natural thing to want to be together to share our shock and grief. We worshipped and witnessed. Then everyone went back to work. People were on the phones, and email, and fax, contacting the congregations in the hardest hit areas, offering assistance. Presbyterian Disaster Assistance was immediately brought into action. World Wide Ministries was in touch with our mission personnel overseas. Theology and Worship was responding to requests from pastors about how to interpret these events to their congregations and to parents about how to interpret them to their children. Before the day was over, Cliff Kirkpatrick, who was in Geneva, Switzerland, and John Detterick, and I, had issued a pastoral letter that went out to all of our presbyteries to be distributed to our congregations.

In a time of crisis we reach down deep inside ourselves to find the resources to meet the challenge. For me, and for many in our church, those resources are found in the wisdom of our Confessions. The Heidelberg Catechism, Question 1: “What is your only comfort in life and in death?” Answer: “That I belong – body and soul, in life and in death – not to myself, but to my faithful Savior, Jesus Christ.” We drew on that resource when we wrote A Brief Statement of Faith, the newest statement in our Book of Confessions, “In life and in death we belong to God.”

We have a strong, vital denomination, with committed and compassionate leaders. The first lesson of September 11 is that we must stand united. I preached for Joanna Adams at Trinity Presbyterian in Atlanta. She told that in those first days when we were all transfixed in front of our TV sets, there was a strip of announcements of canceled events running across the bottom of the screen. One from the law courts said: “Arguments canceled, today and tomorrow.” Would that it applied to the church as well.

I don’t know how the vote on Amendment A will come out. I have seen no running tallies of early votes in presbyteries. I wish that we would all take a September 11 pledge — not to put forth any more legislation nor initiate any more judicial action regarding ordination standards until the Task Force on the peace, unity, and purity of the church presents its final report in 2005. We need to give this representative group time to consult with the church and to help us understand the way forward into the 21st century. We need more education, not legislation.

I couldn’t leave Louisville, as planned, on September 11. I was there until Friday, the 15th when planes started flying again. I couldn’t get to Spokane, Washington, where I was supposed to be preaching. I couldn’t get back home to Los Angeles. But I could get to Omaha. I was to be there the following week, meeting with three presbyteries. My wife Sharon’s mother lives in the village of Bennington, just outside of Omaha, and she took me in. She is the matriarch of that town. At 93, she still drives her car and goes to two or three events a day. In Bennington, Nebraska, ecumenism is having the option to choose between being Evangelical Lutheran and Missouri Synod Lutheran. In deference to my limitations we went to Fremont to the first Presbyterian Church where I brought greetings. Then we attended a family gathering. When we got home, a neighbor was standing on the doorstep. She said: “Come over for pie and coffee.”

There were three couples, and Gretchen and I. We were talking about the tragic events of September 11. One of the women said: “What I don’t understand is how some of those terrorists could have been in this country four or five years and not realized that our way of life is better and changed their minds.” That is the second, painful lesson of September 11. There are people in every country and every religion that only see the dark side. America has many faults, and we have made many mistakes in our foreign policy. We know these things and we try to correct them, but we move on knowing the positive as well. When people only see the negative about others and then cast their attitude in religious term, they are called “fundamentalists.”

About 10 years ago Martin Marty, now retired Professor of Church History at the University of Chicago, got the American Academy of Sciences to authorize a “Fundamentalism Project.” Most people thought it was a waste of time. Who cares about fundamentalists? Now Marty looks like a genius! His team has compiled about 10 volumes of research on fundamentalisms worldwide. Recently in an article in the New York Times Sunday Magazine, Marty listed four common characteristics of all fundamentalisms. First, they grow on soil that has been conservative, traditional, orthodox. Second, they imagine that there was once an ideal community in the past and that the modern world is a defection, a falling away, a perversion of that ideal community. Many conservative people might share those first two attitudes of fundamentalism.

To be evangelical, or conservative, is not to be a fundamentalist. What distinguishes a fundamentalist is militancy. George Marsden, in his book, Fundamentalism in American Culture, defines fundamentalism as “militant anti-modernism.” Fundamentalists believe that they must react. They must fight a holy war against change. Those, of their own community, who do not support this holy war are called apostate. Their opponents are described as minions of Satan. Fourth, these militant fundamentalists usually select a few features of their imagined perfect past and make them absolute. This often is set forth as the necessity to believe a few precisely worded doctrinal statements.

What is most painful to say is that we have a militant fundamentalist group within the Presbyterian Church. The common fundamentalist themes can be found in the attitudes of the Presbyterian Lay Committee. It was founded 36 years ago to try to change the Presbyterian Church into a body that would not deal with social issues and that would interpret the Bible with a surface literalism. Growing on the soil of a denomination that is conservative and theologically orthodox, the Lay Committee idealizes the era in the 1920s when a fundamentalist party ruled the church. In that period, candidates for ministry were forced to conform to five precisely worded doctrines called the five essential and necessary articles. The Lay Committee has 3 doctrines to which everyone must adhere in their particular wording. They want their statements to become the basis for hiring and firing people in the church. They declared our 213th General Assembly “apostate,” unchristian.

Many other Moderators have had to struggle with issues that the Layman have blown out of all proportion to reality. Moderators have tried to bring about reconciliation with the Lay Committee. General Assembly committees have held hearings and issued reports indicating that the Layman is unwilling to work constructively within the denominational structures. This year the Lay Committee has gone further in their destructive course than ever before.

I went to Orlando, Florida, for the last day of a three-day meeting sponsored by the Coalition, an umbrella organization encompassing about 15 conservative groups in the denomination. The last morning session was to be an “open mike” at which anyone could say anything they wanted to. Without announcement, suddenly, the Chairman of The Lay Committee, Bob Howard, appeared on the platform and gave a half-hour power-point presentation on a strategy for making war on the denomination. “War” was his word, and he asserted that it was appropriate.

He outlined the strategy by which the Lay Committee plans to take over the Presbyterian Church. First, Howard announced that the Confessing Church Movement, a group of churches that have pledged adherence to the 3 statements of the Layman’s creed, is now the agency of connectionalism in the denomination. Howard described the Confessing Church Movement as a “shadow church.” The Lay Committee wants to radically downsize the denominational agencies. They hope to take the vote away from retired persons like me, anyone who is not an active pastor in a congregation, or elder. If they got control of the denomination, they would invite churches that do not agree with their version of “biblical ordination standards” to leave the denomination with their property. If these churches will not leave, the Lay Committee would threaten them with being disciplined. Howard encouraged congregations to withhold both per capita and mission funds and divert them to causes more to their liking.

Just as we must be very careful not to stereotype all Arabs, or all Muslims, as terrorists, so we must not characterize all conservatives, or evangelicals, as militant fundamentalists. There is a significant difference between evangelicals who want to change the church in a more conservative direction, and fundamentalists who want to tear down the church and refuse to work within it. I believe that most evangelicals and members of the Confessing Church movement want to affirm their faith and remain within the denomination. Why then align themselves with a potentially schismatic group?

What does the Confessing Church Movement have to offer? A hastily drawn up, rigidly worded, 3-point creed tied to a political agenda. We have as a denomination something far better: A Book of Confessions, representing centuries of wisdom from our forbears in the faith who have lived and died for the faith that they have bequeathed to us. We have something more: A democratic process, involving the whole church, by which we prepare and choose the creeds by which we will live. I had the privilege of serving on the Committee that prepared A Brief Statement of Faith. A representative committee, chaired by Jack Stotts, took six years developing a draft. Then 3 General Assemblies and a special revision committee had a part in shaping it. The whole church was given opportunity for input which the committees took very seriously. The result is a creed for our time that was approved by almost all of our presbyteries. Do we want to toss aside the wisdom of the church, and a democratic process, for the dictatorship of a special interest group with a self-serving political agenda?

People signing on to the Confessing Church Movement say that Jesus Christ alone is Lord of all and the way of salvation. The statement about Jesus Christ, “fully human, fully God,” is much richer in “A Brief Statement.” Jesus “proclaimed the reign of God,” followed by those wonderful gospel verbs– preaching, teaching, healing, eating with outcasts, forgiving sinners, and calling all to repent and believe the gospel. “Jesus was crucified, suffering the depths of human pain and giving his life for the sins of the world. God raised this Jesus from the dead, delivering us from death to life eternal.” Contrast that gracious statement with one whose primary purpose is to say that some people are excluded from God’s grace. Scripture says that “God our Savior desires everyone to be saved and come to the knowledge of the truth” (I Tim. 2:4). The Theology and Worship paper, and the Assembly, wisely say that “we neither restrict the grace of God to those who profess explicit faith in Christ nor assume that all people are saved regardless of faith.” We are not God and should not play God. Our task is to introduce people to the gracious Jesus of the Bible and the Confessions so that their lives will be transformed as they come into relationship to God.

The second article of faith proposed by the Confessing Church Movement is “That Holy Scripture is the triune God’s revealed Word, the Church’s only infallible rule of faith and life.” That only tells part of the story. A Brief statement draws on the language of many confessions in our Book of Confessions saying, “The same Spirit who inspired the prophets and apostles rules our faith and life in Christ through Scripture, engages us through the Word proclaimed.”

I’ve been reading the Bible every day since I was a small boy. Most of my study and writing during my adult life has been regarding biblical and confessional interpretation. I even wrote a five hundred printed page dissertation on the first chapter of the Westminster Confession on Holy Scripture. I can tell you with complete confidence that the real Bible is much deeper and richer and more challenging than the superficial literalism that passes for believing in Scripture in some quarters.

I try to read some of the Gospels every day, along with other Old and New Testament passages. I find no evidence that Jesus spent his time leading a moral crusade to support the status quo in society. I find no evidence that he was busy seeking out people who should be excluded from the church because they were different from the majority. The only people that Jesus continually was in conflict with were the people who were determined to uphold the law, as their culture defined the law. Jesus continually defied the norms of his culture. He interpreted the Old Testament to accept and include those who the religious leaders rejected as unclean — Samaritans, women, tax collectors, people with leprosy. The list goes on and on. That accepting Jesus is the Jesus of the Bible. We need to read it, and preach it, and share it with everyone that feels excluded by our self-righteous, religious culture.

Ah, yes. The 3rd and final point in this new abbreviated creed: “That God’s people are called to holiness in all aspects of life. This includes honoring the sanctity of marriage between a man and a woman, the only relationship within which sexual activity is appropriate.” I care about holiness. I believe that every person in this room does. If we didn’t believe that being a Christian made a difference in people’s lives, we wouldn’t be here. You know that line in A Brief Statement of Faith, “we strive to serve Christ in our daily tasks and to live holy and joyful lives.” “Holy” That’s my word. I suggested it late one hot August afternoon and the Brief Statement committee gladly accepted it. The church is called to holiness. It is not the private property of just people who use it to exclude others as unholy.

I care a lot about marriage. I’ve been married to the same wonderful woman for 44 years. We all ought to care deeply about marriage. Marriage is in trouble in this country. In the last one hundred years, the United States has gone from being the most marrying society in the world to the one with the most divorces and unwed mothers. The divorce rate has risen from 7% in the 1860s to 50% today. As recently as the 1960s, the rate of out-of-wedlock births was 5%. Today the overall rate of out-of-wedlock births is near 30%. Cohabiting, living together without being married, rose from 430,000 couples in 1960 to 4.1 million couples in 1997. We live in an era of family disruption that leads to talk of an emerging culture of “‘serial marriage’ and ‘nonmarriage.’”

None of these alarming trends has been caused by homosexuals who want to marry. None of these trends will be solved by denying same-sex couples the right to legal and church sanction for publicly committing to a life-long relationship. In a culture of non-marriage, it is very ironic that we are spending great amounts of money and energy in trying to prevent people from marrying who want to do so in a way that would contribute to the stability of society and the enrichment of the church.

Why are the sides so far apart on matters of human sexuality? We are still talking past one another. Everyone thinks that we are debating matters of principle, but underneath all the arguments from Scripture and tradition we are really differing on matters of fact. A recent book, being touted as the definitive study of what the Bible says on homosexuality, is actually not based on revelation, but on natural law. The author declares that we don’t need biblical revelation because the Old Testament writers and Paul said what they did because they could see that women and men were “anatomically complementary sexual beings.” So we are making assumptions based on our human evaluation. Another prevailing assumption among those opposed to full inclusion of homosexuals is that all persons are born heterosexual. To be homosexual is to have had bad childhood experiences. But to behave as a homosexual is to willfully, sinfully act against ones God-given nature. The cure is to repent and to submit one life to Jesus and thus to be changed. Persons supporting full inclusion of gay and lesbians people predominantly believe that affection for persons of ones own sex is for some people a given of their nature. Many homosexual people are deeply devout Christians who cannot and should not change to be heterosexuals but are living their lives in a faithful committed relationship to a partner just as heterosexuals are called to do. We are not really arguing about the Bible or the Confessions, but about prevailing assumptions in contemporary culture. How can we get past this impasse?

Sharon told me that she had read that in the week after September 11, in Houston, Texas, 400 couples that had applied for divorce, withdrew their petitions and decided to try again. If that was just to grin and bear it in a loveless marriage, that would not be a good model. But, if those couples try to discover again the love that brought them together in the first place, it holds great promise and hope. That is our task as the church. We need to remember that it was the love of Jesus Christ that brought us together in the first place. We didn’t chose each other because we agreed on every issue. God chose us and made us a part of God’s family, the body of Christ. Let us acknowledge and rejoice in our common commitment to Jesus Christ and find therein a basis for continued relationship.

You see, there is another, related, doctrine that the Layman’s creed doesn’t mention. I believe in the Holy Catholic Church. That is a doctrine we need to believe, and preach, and teach. There is a genuine danger of schism if the Layman cannot achieve its objective of tearing down the present church and putting its own fundamentalist church in its place. Calvin wrote: “There could not be two or three churches unless Christ be torn asunder.” My favorite seminary professor used to ask us, “If Christ is divided, who bleeds?”

I called my friend, Bill Pannell, one night from Atlanta. Bill and I taught together at Fuller, where he was professor of evangelism and preaching. His wife, Hazel, had had a back operation and I wanted to see how she was doing. Bill came on the phone and said: “Jack, people want to get back to normal. It is your job to tell them what is normal in the church.” What a good insight. Normal doesn’t mean the way we’ve always done it. A norm is a standard. I always told my students that the norm in our class was A+. The average was usually something less, but the norm was what we all had to work toward.

What is the Church that we are called to be? John Calvin had two marks of the church — where the word is truly preached and the sacraments are rightly administered. I see that happening all over the country in Presbyterian churches large and small. John Knox was a kind of radical student of Calvin, who went back to Scotland and added a third mark to the authentic church, “discipline.” We would call it spiritual nurture. It meant that during the week before communion, the pastor and/or elders went to the homes of members of the congregation to inquire about the health of their souls. If they were deemed in spiritual health, they got a token, wood or metal, the size of a nickel or quarter, that admitted them to communion. I see spiritual nurture going on as well, in congregations across the country, where pastoral work is being done to support people in their spiritual growth.

At the reunion in 1983 of the northern and southern streams of Presbyterianism, we got a new Book of Order. It has four new chapters at the beginning that give the theological underpinnings of our governmental practices. It begins with Christ as the head of the church, and gives the preliminary principles by which we function. Second is a wonderful chapter on “The Church and Its Confessions.” Then, there is a third chapter on “The Church and Its Mission.” It contains what I regard as two further marks of the church. The first mark of the authentic church is to be in mission in the world. The second is to be a community of diversity. By including women and men of all ages, races, conditions, and abilities the church is “providing for inclusiveness as a visible sign of the new humanity.”

These marks of the church are what make the church normal, up to standard: Preaching the Gospel; administering the sacraments; spiritual nurture; mission in the world; and, being a community of diversity. It is these last two: mission in the world, and diversity, that are hard to accept for some who are quite certain about the first three marks. As contemporary Presbyterians we need to affirm all of them to be true to what we have learned from Scripture under the leading of the Holy Spirit. When Jesus prayed in John 17:20 that “all may be one,” it was not just an interesting option. The purpose is evangelism, “that the world may believe.”

I was at Columbia Seminary a few weeks ago. After an hour and a half discussion with students and faculty in which we had dealt with a wide range of problems in the church, their new president, my friend, Laura Mendenhall made the most helpful comment. She said: “I read through the Book of Acts last summer. They had problems greater than ours. But the Holy Spirit was at work and created a church that now is spread over the whole world.”

That is what I need to remember. This is God’s church. The Holy Spirit is not done with us. Isaiah 43:19 depicts God as saying, “I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?” I want, this year, to be open to discern what God’s Spirit is doing in this great church .

Amen.

by Jack Rogers
Vice President and Professor of Theology
San Francisco Theological Seminary

Paper presented at the 1998 Covenant Conference
November 6, 1998

 Note: An edited version of this paper appears in Covenant Connections #5.

In the mid-seventies, two educational psychologists decided to test their educational theories by observing a master teacher. The teacher they chose was John Wooden, the coach of the UCLA basketball team. Wooden had coached UCLA to 10 national championships in 12 years. This was a record unapproached by any other coach. During what turned out to be Wooden’s last season, 1974-1975, The two psychologists observed over 20 practice sessions and carefully recorded and coded each interaction of Coach Wooden with his players. Most of the interactions fit one of the standard teaching categories that they knew. However, one of Wooden’s teaching methods was so new to them that they had to add a category. They called it a “scold/reinstruction.” It was a criticism followed instantly by instruction on how to do it right. When a player made a mistake, Wooden would stop the play. He would go to the player, and say: Not like that. Then he would illustrate the correct way and say: Do it like this. The psychologists felt that this technique was so effective that they named it a “Wooden.”

The Presbyterian Church is observing “The Year with Education: Transforming Hearts and Minds.” To transform means to change. Education requires change. To learn a new thing is to change. It often means to acknowledge that what we have thought or been doing is wrong and we must think or do something new.

On September 1, I came back to my job as director of the Southern California campus of San Francisco Theological Seminary after an 8 _ month sabbatical. I confess that I felt like a kid who didn’t want to come back to school after the freedom of the summer. I had been privileged to spend every day, five days a week, at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California. It is one of the premier research libraries in the United States, specializing in 18th and 19th century British and American history and literature. The collections great added to my knowledge, and the scholarly atmosphere greatly enhanced my enjoyment of the process.

Whenever I wanted to know the definition of a word at the Huntington I went to the massive Oxford English Dictionary. It gives quotations from literature to illustrate the definitions. Interestingly, the second illustration of the word, “Transform” was a quotation from English Bible translator, John Wyclif in 1382. The text was 2nd Corinthians 3:18: “Allyebe transformed into the same image,” the image of Christ. We are often fearful of what we may lose if we change. The issue is rather what we may gain. If we are being transformed into the image of Christ, that is certainly gain.

There was also a mathematical definition of transform: “To alter to another differing in form, but equal in quantity or value.” Changing the form, or style, or manner of our belief or behavior may be a way of preserving the value of that belief or behavior.

I am using going to use Coach Wooden’s method in this address. I am convinced that we can and should sometimes radically change the form in which we have practiced our Christian faith precisely in order to retain and renew the genuine value, love, and transforming power of the Gospel of Christ. During my sabbatical I looked at how the Presbyterian Church has been transformed, how it has changed its mind, how it has acknowledged that it was wrong about the way it had interpreted the Bible and how we changed our interpretation. I researched the manner in which Presbyterians have interpreted Scripture in three areas: Slavery and segregation; The role of women; and, divorce and remarriage. You may find this recital of past mistakes painful, as I have. Following Coach Wooden’s lead we are acknowledging that learning requires recognizing our mistakes and rejoicing in new and better ways of being faithful to Christ.

Slavery and Segregation

The first pronouncement of Presbyterians regarding slavery was by the Synod of New York and Philadelphia in 1787. Its stance was definitive for over half a century. It declared that as Americans we were for the principle of universal liberty. It minimized the problem, saying that “some states” were concerned. Then it described slaves as “dangerous.” Thus, it recommended “prudent measures,” consistent with the interests of society, that might lead to eventual abolition of slavery.

In 1815, a Presbyterian minister named George Bourne put the whole matter in a different light. While preparing for ordination, in 1811, he had noticed that Question 142 of the Westminster Larger Catechism designated “man-stealing” as a sin forbidden in the Eighth Commandment. He further noticed that a footnote to the catechism defined “man-stealing” as slavery. In 1815, Bourne, now Stated Clerk of his presbytery, was, for the third time, a commissioner to the General Assembly. Bourne presented a paper to the Assembly “in which he asked what should be done with a Presbyterian minister who had taken a Negro slave into his orchard on a Sabbath morning, tied her to an apple tree, stripped off her clothing, lashed her unmercifully until he had exhausted himself, left her tied up, mounted his horse, rode to his meeting house, preached, returned home, repeated the lashing until he had again exhausted himself, called in another man to continue the whipping, rubbed salt in the wounds, and finally released her.” Bourne therefore proposed an overture, prepared with his elders, to the General Assembly. The chair of the business committee refused to put it on the docket. Bourne then presented it as a commissioner’s resolution. His resolution called slave-holding a sin and demanded the excommunication of slaveholders.

The General Assembly, over a period of years, responded in three ways. 1. The following year, in 1816, the General Assembly removed the footnote from the Catechism. (Question 142 of the Larger Catechism was still there, but its reference to slave-holding was not so noticeable). 2. In 1818, the General Assembly deposed Bourne from the ministry for having brought “reproach on the character of the Virginia Clergy.” (The minister about whom Bourne had told the story of the Sabbath whipping was one of the judges at Bourne’s trial.) 3. Also in 1818, the General Assembly made what was later considered a brave statement against slavery as inconsistent with the law of God (to love neighbor) and the gospel of Christ. However, it sympathized with slaveholders who, it declared, were not responsible for this evil. It further noted that slaves were ignorant and vicious and could not be immediately emancipated. It hoped for eventual emancipation when it was good for the public welfare.

This reluctance to change the societal status quo was strengthened in 1845 by a new ecclesiology and a new method of biblical interpretation. Over the previous several decades the interpretation of Scripture had solidified into a literalistic and legalistic mold. Charles Hodge, at Princeton Seminary in the North, and James Henley Thornwell at Columbia in the South used and taught this method. They were teaching the theology of a late 17th century Swiss theologian, Francis Turretin. Their method of biblical interpretation came from 18th century Scottish Common Sense philosophy. All the while, they claimed to be teaching the theology of Calvin and the Westminster Confession of Faith.

I give just one illustration of the difference between these methods. Calvin and the Westminster Divines, following the lead of Augustine, taught that we accept the authority of Scripture because of the internal testimony of the Holy Spirit in our hearts. Beginning with that faith we can go on to deeper understanding as we analyze and apply Scripture’s teaching in the real situations of our life. Hodge and Thornwell followed Turretin who patterned his methodology on Thomas Aquinas, the great theologian of the medieval Roman Catholic Church. Aquinas and his followers taught that you could not believe something unless you first could understand it. They asserted that you should first prove Scripture to be the Word of God before you accepted it. Such an attempt at proof, Calvin had called “foolishness.”

The practical consequence of this difference in methodology, was that Hodge, Thornwell, and their disciples began their theological reasoning from what seemed logical and evident to them in their 19th century culture. They then sought particular proof-texts in Scripture as confirming evidence of their culturally shaped views. Thornwell wrote, for example, “if men had drawn their conclusions upon this subject only from the Bible, it would no more have entered into any human head to denounce slavery as a sin, than to denounce monarchy, aristocracy or poverty.”

Thornwell developed twin pillars of resistance to societal change by asserting, first, that the Church was a purely spiritual body that did not deal with social and political matters. Second, he argued that unless some particular text in the Bible expressly forbade slavery that it was not sinful. He thus ignored the cultural context of the Bible itself. He used its depiction of the ancient practice of slavery as a justification for American slavery in the 19th century. He argued: “Let us concede, for a moment, that the laws of love, and the condemnation of tyranny and oppression, seem logically to involve, as a result, the condemnation of slavery; yet, if slavery is afterwards expressly mentioned and treated as a lawful relation, it obviously follows, that slavery is, by necessary implication, excepted.”

It was the Old School Presbyterian General Assembly of 1845 that made explicit the doctrine of the spirituality of the church and the proof-texting method of defending slavery. Thornwell, a commissioner to that Assembly, had worked hard in the background for this result. He wrote to his wife during the Assembly, “I have no doubts but that the Assembly, by a very large majority, will declare slavery not to be sinful, will assert that it is sanctioned by the word of God, that it is a purely a civil relation with which the Church, as such, has no right to interfere, and that abolitionism is essentially wicked, disorganizing, and ruinous.” Note that on this basis, not slavery, but the attempt to abolish slavery, was declared sinful.

In 1861, the Old School Presbyterian Church divided North and South over the Gardner Spring resolution calling for loyalty to the Federal Government in the case of civil war. Charles Hodge and 57 other Northern commissioners agreed with the absent Southerners that the Assembly had no right to pronounce on a political question.

One of the great excitements of working at the Huntington was to sit in the rare books’ room and hold in my hands the “Address to Christendom,” written by Thornwell, and published, December 4, 1861, by the newly formed Presbyterian Church in the Confederate States of America. Fifteen of its eighteen worn pages give a biblical and confessional defense of slavery. It concludes with the pious promise that this Presbyterian denomination will pray and labor that all may be saved, “without meddling as a Church with the technical distinction of their civil life.”

Following the Civil War, the Presbyterian Church in the United States succeeded the Presbyterian Church in the Confederate States of America. Robert Lewis Dabney succeeded Thornwell as the formative theologian of the PCUS from the Civil War through the era of segregation. The PCUS seminaries used his systematic theology as a text until 1931. In 1888, this same Dabney declared that the “radical social theory asserts , ‘all men are born free and equal.’” This, he declared, is “an attack on God’s Word.”

It was not until the 1930s and 40s that a theological shift took place. Seminarians began to study Calvin and modern theology. In 1934, the PCUS established a Permanent Committee on Moral and Social Welfare that began to deal with societal problems, including racial justice. The theological resurgence that began in the 1930s in Europe reached American with strength in the 1940s. Theologically this resurgence centered in the work of Barth, Brunner, and others. In biblical studies it took the form of the “biblical theology movement.” Instead of viewing the Bible as a collection of inerrant facts, the new theology affirmed that, “The very human Bible was the record of the very real encounter of God with people.” It attempted to correct the legalistic and literalist fundamentalism of the 19th century and replace it with an understanding of the totality of the life and teachings of Jesus Christ.

The change in theology made it possible for the church to change its stance toward continued racial segregation in society. The PCUS was ready when on May 17, 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court, in “Brown v. Board of Education,” outlawed segregation in the public schools. On May 27, the General Assembly adopted a report that the Church should practice no discrimination and commended the Supreme Court decision. The PCUS was the first denomination to speak in support of the court’s decision.

The clearest statement rejecting a biblical justification of slavery came in a 1956 PCUS report advocating equality for women. It said: “we no longer argue that human slavery is justified by the Bible, and in accord with God’s will. Some of our grandfathers did so argue, declaring that slavery was God’s permanent institution. Through the illumination of the Holy Spirit, we have come to a different understanding on this subject. We see that the Bible passages they quoted were not kept by them in the larger context of the Bible as a whole.” That larger context included the awareness of the cultural limitations of people in biblical times. It also, and preeminently, included the perspective of Jesus who said the whole law was summed up in the dual commandments of love God and love your neighbor.

The change in biblical interpretation was followed by confessional change. The theme of the Confession of 1967 in the Northern Church was reconciliation, and its focus was on racial reconciliation. On Scripture, it declared: “The one sufficient revelation of God is Jesus Christ, the Word of God incarnate, to whom the Holy Spirit bears unique and authoritative witness through the Holy Scriptures, which are received and obeyed as the word of God written.”

In 1976, the PCUS General Assembly approved “A Declaration of Faith.” It stated that “antagonisms between races, nations and neighbors, are manifestations of our sin against God.” Regarding Scripture it declared: “When we encounter apparent tensions and conflicts in what Scripture teaches us to believe and do, the final appeal must be to the authority of Christ.”

From 1787 to 1957 there was a decisive change in the way that Presbyterians interpreted Scripture regarding slavery and segregation. It was a move from letter to spirit, law to grace, and from particular proof-texts to the positive ministry and message of Jesus Christ. I discovered the exact same pattern with regard to Presbyterian treatment of the role of women and of divorce and remarriage. Time does not permit a full treatment of those issues. Let me just share with you a few provocative quotations.

The Role of Women

The General Assembly first officially notice women in 1811 when it recognized the significant contribution women were making through voluntary organizations for missions, benevolences, and social reform. The men of the Assembly announced that: “Benevolence is always attractive, but when dressed in female form [it] possesses peculiar charms We hope the spirit which has animated the worthy women of whom we speak will spread [to] animate other bosoms ” That same year a Presbyterian minister put the position in a typically patronizing manner: “Who will not delight in the sweet and heavenly work of honoring the weaker vessels, and of endeavoring to make them ornamental and useful in the house of God.”

This concept of “ornamental womanhood” appeared in at least 14 articles by Charles Hodge and the learned gentlemen of Princeton Seminary between the years 1825 and 1855. The point was that while women could express their piety in private, the public realm was only for men. As with the case of slavery, Presbyterian men in the 19th century defended the status quo that prohibited women, e.g., from voting, and from owning property. They found selected proof texts from the context of the ancient Near East in Scripture and used these to justify their suppression of women.

We often conveniently forget that leading Presbyterian theologians were passionate and vehement in their rejection of women’s rights. Charles Hodge, in a negative review of a book that attacked slavery, justified slavery by the analogy of the necessary subordination of women. He wrote: “If women are to be emancipated from subjection to the law which God has imposed upon them;if, in studied insult to the authority of God we are to renounce, in the marriage contract, all claim to obedience, there is no deformity of human character from which we turn with deeper loathing than from a woman forgetful of her nature and clamorous for the vocations and rights of men.”

In time, things began to change. In 1916, the PCUS General Assembly continued to forbid women to preach or be ordained, but, left “other services of women to the discretion of sessions and the enlightened consciences of our Christian women.” The implication was that the Assembly refused to repeat the oft-quoted prohibition of women from speaking in what was called “promiscuous assemblies.” These were groups, like local prayer meetings, that were attended by both women and men. Sixty-one commissioners protested this omission as a violation of biblical authority. The General Assembly answered with clarity and continuing relevance: “The Scriptures may have their authority discredited not merely by a violation of their precepts, but also by any attempt on the part of ecclesiastical courts to bind the consciences of God’s people on matters of doubtful interpretation.”

Gradually, with a struggle at each step, women were ordained, first as deacons, then as elders, and finally as ministers of Word and Sacrament. One of the best statements on biblical interpretation is contained in that 1956 PCUS study on the role of women. It declared: “We are led to believe that the Holy Spirit will progressively lead God’s people into a new understanding of the practice of the will of God.” It stated that this is the promise of Jesus (John 16: 12-14). The report noted that the Church has experienced the leading of the Spirit of Christ in abandoning forms that were no longer appropriate while retaining the value, or meaning, or function of a mandated act. For example, we no longer enjoin greeting one another with a holy kiss, despite the fact that Paul commanded it in two of his epistles. Nor do we wash each others feet, even though that was in accord with the word of Jesus himself. The report rather affirmed, “We seek to preserve the principle of loving fellowship and humble service, but we do not observe the actual letter of the deed.” The report implied that we should look for the scriptural function (the spirit), not the ancient cultural form (the letter).

Women were ordained to all offices in the church by 1956 in the North and 1965 in the South. Some men, however, who still held to the Old Princeton understanding of Scripture as a book of inerrant facts, cited proof-texts to claim that the ordination of women was invalid. Walter Wynn Kenyon, a senior at Pittsburgh Seminary in 1974, precipitated a judicial case by declaring to the Candidates and Credentials Committee of Pittsburgh Presbytery that he believed the Bible forbade the ordination of women. The case went from presbytery to synod to the Permanent Judicial Commission of the General Assembly.

Kenyon, his professor, John Gerstner, and several colleagues wrote a pamphlet defending their views. They wrote: “our purpose is simply to demonstrate what we believe to be the real issue: Biblical authority.No one can read the Bible and not see authority ‘writ large’ therein. Everywhere we meet a chain of command.everyone who loves and fears God should acknowledge that the Word of God authoritatively establishes authority – male authority – in the church.”

The Kenyon Case is often referred to as an example of the imposition of a polity solution on a theological problem. If one reads the decision of the Permanent Judicial Commission in the UPCUSA’s Kenyon Case of 1976, however, one discovers a biblical and theological rationale for the equality of women and men. The PJC wrote: “The question of the importance of our belief in the equality of all people before God is thus essential to the disposition of this case. It is evident from the Church’s confessional standards that the Church believes that the Spirit of God has led us into new understandings of this equality before God.”

The PJC decision cited the Confession of 1967 which proclaims, “Congregations, individuals, or groups of Christians who exclude, dominate, or patronize their fellowmen, however subtly, resist the Spirit of God and bring contempt on the faith which they profess.” The PJC decision continued, “The UPCUSA, in obedience to Jesus Christ, under the authority of Scripture (and guided by its confessions) has now developed its understanding of the equality of all people (both male and female) before God. It has expressed this [theological] understanding in the Book of Order with such clarity as to make the candidate’s stated position a rejection of its government and discipline.” Thus a biblical principle in a former confession was applied to a new situation under the guidance of the Spirit of Christ.

Divorce and Remarriage

The issue of divorce and remarriage is a paradigm case for understanding biblical interpretation. Many scholars believe that Jesus proclaimed all remarriage after divorce to be adultery (Matthew 19:9 and Mark 10:11-12). Nonetheless, the Westminster Confession of Faith provided two exceptions, based on biblical principles, to the prohibition against divorce. In 1853, the General Assembly officially affirmed the stance of the Westminster Confession. The Assembly said that divorce and remarriage were possible for the “innocent party” in cases of adultery and “willful desertion as can no way be remedied.” What is most interesting is the manner in which Presbyterians theologized to broaden the scope of these exceptions.

It first became necessary in 1791 in the case of slave marriages. By law, slaves could not marry. Yet many did marry by their own rituals and some were baptized and became members of the church. What was the church to do? Hanover Presbytery in Virginia wrestled with the issue of bringing into the church slaves who lived together, but were not legally married. The presbytery solved the problem by reflecting theologically on the nature of marriage. Marriage was constituted “in the sight of God” and by “mutual consent of the Parties.” Therefore if slaves lived a Christian life as a married couple they could be accepted into the church without legal formality. The Presbytery then extended this logic to divorce. If a slave couple was forcibly separated by sale or removal of one of the spouses, that separation was the “moral equivalent” of death. The remaining slave could take “another Companion” and continue in the church. The concept of a “moral equivalent” was thereby introduced and became very important.

Beginning in 1928, both the PCUSA and the PCUS General Assemblies attempted to tighten the prohibition against remarriage after divorce. In each case the presbyteries rejected this limitation of pastoral judgment.

In 1930, a PCUSA Commission on Marriage, Divorce and Remarriage presented a spiritual, rather than legalistic, approach to Scripture. The report asked “whether our Lord is meaning to legislate for universal application, or whether he is emphasizing the spiritual values involved in a true marriage.” The report then used the concept of a “moral equivalent” of death or adultery. The Commission concluded: “Anything that kills love and deals death to the spirit of the union is infidelity,” citing the biblical phrase, “The letter killeth; but the spirit giveth life.”

In 1950, the PCUS Council of Christian Relations reported: “Any attempt to build a Christian doctrine of marriage and divorce on a few isolated ‘proof-texts’ will always fail for at least two reasons: (a) the usual proof-texts are open to more than one interpretation, and (b) they fail to give due weight to the implications of Jesus’ total teaching with respect to man’s personal responsibilities and social relationships.” They then applied this principle to divorce by declaring, “infidelity can be spiritual as well as physical and it manifests itself in many forms.” They concluded: “Wherever free Protestant churches are studying this problem today in the light of Jesus’ total teachings on human relations, the trend is unmistakably away from a strictly legalistic approach to one more finely and fundamentally spiritual.”

In 1953 in the North and 1959 in the South, both Presbyterian denominations amended the Westminster Confession to allow divorce and remarriage. The rationale for divorce is that there is a moral equivalent of death, adultery, or desertion, when “the marriage dies at the heart and the union becomes intolerable.” Then, in the PCUSA wording, “remarriage after a divorce granted on grounds explicitly stated in Scripture or implicit in the gospel of Christ may be sanctioned by the Church, in keeping with his redemptive gospel.”

Pondering the Pace of Change

It took over a century for the church to cope with entrenched injustices to African-Americans and women. On the other hand, the church changed its stance on the matter of divorce and remarriage in a relatively short time, between 1928 and 1959. Might it be that one significant difference was that those present and voting in presbyteries and General Assembly were vulnerable to divorce and thus could feel the necessity for change. When presbyteries were all white and all men they were able to distance themselves from those affected by their decisions. They could treat the problems “objectively,” and focus on the good of society in general. When it touched them, as with all human beings, their concerns become much more personal and pastoral.

Conclusion

Presbyterians have made dramatic changes in their interpretation of Scripture and the Confessions. We have been listening to Presbyterians like ourselves. As we do, they struggled to distinguish between the entrenched attitudes of their culture and the new possibilities of the Gospel. In each of the cases I have cited, I believe that most Presbyterians would agree that these changes have been positive. Few of us would be willing to go back to an earlier method of reading the Bible as proof texts that justified the oppression of African Americans, the subordination of women, and the exclusion of divorced and remarried persons from church leadership. In each of these cases, we believe that we have moved beyond the restrictions of the popular culture. We have rather become better attuned to the Gospel of Jesus Christ. It has been positive for the Presbyterian Church to move from a focus on the letter to the spirit, from law to Gospel, and from particular proof-texts to principles in accord with the ministry and message of Jesus.

Coach Wooden trained his players by pointing out what they had done wrong and then showing them the right way. He was a master teacher. We are disciples of the ultimate master teacher, Jesus Christ. We learn best when we heed the unanimous testimony of the confessions in pointing away from their own authority and pointing to the authority of Jesus Christ. The Westminster Confession reminds us that, “All synods or councils may err, and many have erred; therefore they are not to be made the rule of faith or practice, but to be used as a help in both.” (WCF 6.175) The Westminster Confession, concluding its magnificent chapter on Scripture, gives us the appropriate perspective: “The Supreme Judge, by which all controversies of religion are to be determined, can be no other but the Holy Spirit [the Spirit of Christ] speaking in the Scripture.” (WCF 6.010.)

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These remarks are expanded in Dr. Rogers’s forthcoming book, Reading the Bible and the Confessions: The Presbyterian Way, to be published in May 1999 by Geneva Press.