American Baptist pastor Peter J. Gomes, long-time Minister of Harvard’s Memorial Church and author of numerous bestsellers including The Good Book, died on February 28, 2011.

The prolific author and eloquent preacher addressed the second Covenant Network General Assembly Luncheon, in 1999.  His observations then remain timely now, as the church again considers what standards to apply in discerning whom to ordain as deacons, elders, and ministers of Word and Sacrament.

Beyond the Human Point of View

Address to the Covenant Network General Assembly Luncheon
June 21, 1999

The Reverend Peter J. Gomes
Professor of Christian Morals and Minister in The Memorial Church
Harvard University

(excerpt)

. . . .The first thing I want to affirm — and that is the word I will use in this setting — is the importance of what you are doing as the Covenant Network.  This is far more important than simply an internal matter of housekeeping or denominational polity or politics within the Presbyterian church.  I hope you are aware that the witness that you make in this Covenant gathering, and in the covenant of communities of which you are a part, is witness not just to the Presbyterian church: some of you might feel that if it were just to the Presbyterian church it would not be worth your time, and I feel that way too.

Your witness is not just to the Presbyterian church, it is to the whole church of God, and to the whole of civilization because it is not only religious people who will see what you are doing and what you stand for, but that vast army of the secular, the bewildered, the confused, and the people on the outside of any household of faith.  They are the ones who will be curious about people of Christian convictions that extend beyond the conventional view of their own polity and communion, and will look to your witness and from it take courage and high example.  The importance, therefore, of what you are doing cannot be underestimated not only within your fellowship but well beyond it.  It is important not just for sexual minorities, not just for gay and lesbian people within the church and beyond the church, but important for the sake first of the vitality of scripture.

The first reason that your witness is important is that it attests to the vitality of scripture.  The second reason is that it affirms the current activity and power of the Holy Spirit, and the third reason is that it is a testimonial to the future vitality of the church.

Now let me talk about each of these briefly.  Why is your work important for the vitality of scripture, and a way of appropriating scripture which is consistent with the whole history of the church in general, and in particular with our reformed Protestant inheritance of treating scripture and its relationship between the printed text and the vital word?  A conundrum that I face frequently in my courses on the interpretation of scripture, and in my general commerce across the country, is being addressed by people in any one of my privileged minority statuses, including that of a gay man, a black man, an unmarried man, a Harvard man, a Baptist man — any one of them, choose your label — and they say, “How can you keep loyal to a book which is used to do in every one of your distinctions?  How can you maintain fidelity when it would make so much more sense just to chuck the whole thing, or do what Thomas Jefferson did and rewrite it, editing out all the things you’d rather not have in it?”  Why are we so committed to that which on a superficial basis would appear to be the instrument of our own destruction or our own inhibition?

. . . It strikes me, as I think about how to answer that question each time it’s put to me, that I’ve never thought of myself as apart from the community of scriptural experience, scriptural interpretation. and scriptural authority.  It has never been mine on the outside to look at, for I was born into the faith of my fathers and my mothers, and I was nourished by it and continue to be nourished in it.  I am not there on probation, I am not an on-looker, it is my church, my faith, my book, it belongs to me as I belong to it, and the notion just beggars credulity that I should chuck the whole experience or reconfigure my experience to conform to it because there are parts of it which do not describe the world as I now know it or as I have experienced it.  It simply does not make sense, nor has it ever made sense for the people of God.

This makes me realize what our evangelical friends refer to as the “perspicacity of scripture,” and realize what a dynamic and vital book it is that in every age and in every place and in every clime it has the capacity, without changing one jot or tittle, to include within its gracious orbit people who heretofore or in other circumstances would have no way of being included.

It is a book that invites, that opens, that compels, that consoles, that comforts, that redefines our relationship to ourselves, to each other, and to God; and the book that is capable of doing that is the book to which I am prepared to devote all the powers and skills and graces that God has given me.  The Bible in its dynamic way is an inclusive book, and our ancestors understood that.  Our earliest Christian ancestors understood that the Jewish book was a book that was capable of accommodating a different revelation; and as they moved through their human experience they discovered the capacity of this book to draw them in.  It certainly was true of our ancestors at the time of the Reformation, and it has been the experience of Christian people throughout the world ever since.  This is not a book that belongs to somebody else, or to some prior period, or to some particular school of interpretation or exegesis, and every attempt to put a fence around this book, to keep it from change, and to keep people from it, has gone down to defeat.

The history of the interpretation of scripture is a history of the capacity of God’s word to speak in many tongues and in many ways, and to draw all people into its gracious embrace.  It strikes me that that is perhaps the most compelling and exciting case for what we would call the ‘authority’ of scripture, which does not mean bowing down to some inert text or to some absolute school of exegesis, but in this case means recognizing in the history of the people in the book and in the encounters of the peoples of the world with this book, the experience of people who have been called to new life and who have recognized in that experience and in that relationship the vitality of their own image created in the image of God.  It is from that book that that operating principle comes.  Therefore I affirm the authority of scripture, in the sense of its exemplary model, its authority for us in describing the relationship that God intends for us to have, and for all of us to share, and I recognize that the authority of scripture is based on one fundamental principle of modesty which acknowledges the fact that God knows more about human vocation and salvation than we do.

That is a very important principle for my fellow exegetes, my fellow historians of interpretation, my fellow biblical scholars and expositors: it is very important to remember that God knows more about vocation and salvation than we do.  This principle requires that the church take the unaccustomed position of a certain generosity and a certain modesty in imputing its values upon the values of scripture and God.  That is the first thing that we must remember.  We are committed to the vitality of scripture, we take the book seriously, we take the history of the book seriously, we take the interpretations of the book seriously, and we understand that the book is but a means and not an end.  We do not worship this book.  If you do worship it you are in the wrong church and in the wrong tradition, for there are other places in which to worship books, such as in the Morgan Library in New York City; or you might visit any fine collector of rare bindings.  You can worship books, they’re there, but you can’t worship books in the house of God.

The second thing that I want to affirm by the good example and the powerful witness of this Covenant Network is the affirmation of the Holy Spirit, the power of the Holy Spirit which makes us believe, and makes us know that God speaks, not simply that God spoke.  God speaks in the present tense, and the great question that we always have to be alert to is what the spirit is saying to the churches today.  It is interesting to know what the Spirit was saying to the churches in Antioch, in Calcedon, and even what the Spirit was saying to the churches in Geneva, but it is equally important to ask what the Spirit is saying to the churches today.

In the Presbyterian church, USA, in the last year of the twentieth century, for example, what is the Spirit saying?  What does the Spirit require?  In order to hear what the Spirit is saying to the churches we have to listen, and that is a rather unfamiliar posture to so many of us in the Protestant and Reformed versions of Christ’s catholic church.  We are not good listeners.  We tend to stop speaking, which is not the same thing as listening, for usually we stop speaking in order to prepare our next set of remarks rather than to listen to what is being said.

What your Covenant Network represents is a force both for listening and for hearing throughout the whole church, and that sometimes may be a difficult task for you.  You may sometimes feel inhibited or strapped in by the notion that one of your tasks is not so much to convert or to triumph immediately but simply to be heard, simply to be listened to.  That is a long and tiresome vocation but it is the vocation that has been thrust upon you, and it is the vocation that you have chosen.

We know through the history of our experience as believers in this country, and in the world, that we feel that if we really do hear what the Spirit is compelling us to do we will be forced to change our ways.  We may hear things that we’d rather not hear.  I suspect that’s one reason why public worship in the great generality of Protestantism is such a noisy enterprise.  On Sunday mornings at ten o’clock or eleven o’clock in most Presbyterian churches, I would be willing to bet there is not three minutes of unstructured sound in the services.  If somebody is not speaking, somebody is singing; and if somebody is not singing, somebody’s about to sing or the organ is playing or somebody is strumming on a guitar: we desperately block out the silences for fear that we might hear something that may make a difference.

You are in the business of both listening and of hearing what the Spirit has to say, and then by your example, by your witness, by your perseverance, you are persuading others to listen to what the Spirit is saying to the churches.  Now, we realize that we’re fighting tremendous odds in any effort to bring the church from where it has been to where we think it ought to be, for the church exists in this wonderful conundrum where here is an agent for change created out of the most powerful elements for change that one can imagine.  The Creation is certainly an element for change, the Incarnation is certainly an element for change, the Resurrection is certainly an element for change, the coming again of our Lord is certainly an element for change.

We are built for change, and yet the church by itself is probably the most conservative institution short of private banks.  We are terrified of change,  we have been dragged kicking and screaming into every positive and constructive movement that the world has faced, and our track record of change is not very good.  Show me where we have stood on the frontlines and I’ll applaud it, but there won’t be many such instances.  Your co-moderator has already indicated that if one were to be judged this moment on the church’s position on women, or the church’s position on race, few would be able to stand.  “If Thou shouldst judge iniquity, O Lord, who could stand?”  I believe that the question of the full inclusion of homosexual persons in the ministries of the church will have the same kind of indicting quality when the question is asked, “Where were we, where was the church, when the movement came, the moment to affirm the gifts which God has laid upon those people whom he has called into his ministry?”

….  Resistance to change is natural and persistent, and you Presbyterians are devoted to order, as is well known around the world, not because you are orderly but because you are chaotic, and that is why you do everything decently and in order like the person who washes three times a day: either he is very dirty, or he is very clean.

The work of the Spirit may at times seem chaotic, risky, and very dangerous; and although Presbyterians are Trinitarians, they tend to place two-thirds of their emphasis on two-thirds of the Trinity, that is, on the first two members.  The third member is a little loosey-goosey, a little hard to define and very hard to orchestrate or corral.  The important thing to remember about the Spirit’s work at Pentecost, for example, is not the ecstasy which is usually invoked on Pentecost Sunday, the confusion and the excitement and the high energy level.  That’s an interesting point, but if that were preached in my sermon course I would say that it’s a ‘B’ point, not an ‘A’ point: the ‘A’ point is the Spirit-induced understanding.  That was the thing that the Spirit did, and that was how the people could say that they each heard in their own language the wonderful works of God.  The work of the Spirit is designed to foster understanding and ultimate reconciliation.  You are about that work.

The final thing I want to say to you is that you members of this Covenant Network are in my opinion the future of the church, and that I think most people recognize that: I think that is why you encounter as much resistance as you do.  Most people recognize that this is the way of the Spirit. You are the future of the church because you represent the kind of hospitality, openness, and lively reading of the word of God that in the long run is going to be the evangelistic seed for the church of the next millennium, and it is to that that you should be lending your energies.  You are witnesses to the sure conviction that we must transcend the world of which we are a part.  You must not be driven by the agenda of the secular world, you must not be driven by fashion or custom or convenience; you are driven by conviction, and most Christians realize that there are times when conviction crosses in a very jagged way the cultural consensus.  You Presbyterians cannot be the church of the cultural consensus, for we do not need another denomination to bless the status quo, or another group of people who pander to the fearful and to the anxieties of our culture.  We do not need that: America has enough churches of that order and you ought not to be among them.

You must remember that God knows where you are.  God knows what you are doing.  God honors the witness and the ministry that you are making, and while God may not deliver victory into your hands on your timetable or when you think you deserve it or want it, you are on the Lord’s side.  You must never ever give up.  Never give up, never go away, never cease to work for the goal of a whole church, a whole ministry which reflects the image of God in all of its splendor, all of its diversity, and all of its glory.  That is the work that you have chosen for yourselves, but perhaps more insistently, that is the work that has been chosen for you.

“From now on, therefore” — my brothers and sisters — “we regard no one from a human point of view.”  We have moved beyond that, and by God’s grace we will reach that moment, that place and time when all of this will be seen as a mere prelude to the great ministry and work to which all of God’s people have been called.  I wish you well in the struggle.  Do not give up.  Thank you.