"The Gifts of God for the People of God"
A Sermon on Acts 11:1-18Drew M. HenryLa Placitas Presbyterian Church, Placitas, NMApril 28, 2013
My home church, the First Presbyterian Church of Selma, Alabama, has been on my heart and mind over recent months. That is the congregation that raised me in the faith and profoundly shaped who I am today. I would like to share with you a letter that I have written to them, and I ask you to join with me in holding them in prayer.My dear brothers and sisters in Christ,I bring you greetings from the good people of Las Placitas Presbyterian Church. Know that these sisters and brothers have been generous in their welcoming of our family into this community. While we are enjoying our life here on the other side of the South, we still miss our friends and family back in Alabama. Know we consider you to be both.I am aware of some of the struggles you have been facing within the church there for some time now. You have been and continue to be on my heart and in my prayers. I have felt called to address you in regard to these matters. I hope you receive these words in the love with which I have written them to you.I have been and always will be from Selma, Alabama. I grew up walking to our First Presbyterian Church there, the congregation that in my heart will always be my home church. I often tell others that you took your baptismal vows with me seriously. You kept your promise to guide and nurture me by word and deed, with love and prayer, encouraging me to know and follow Christ and to be a faithful member of his church. That is a commitment we Presbyterians make with every child at their baptism. I am forever grateful to you for upholding those promises to me, even to this day.Growing up in Selma has had a profound impact on my life. I have yet to meet a person who has not heard of our hometown. Obviously many of us want to lift up the good qualities of Selma to those who have heard of it only in the context of the events of 1965. Indeed there are many good things about Selma that we love. However, I want to say I am grateful for our history, for I likely would not be the same person I am today had I been born in another place.From a very early age prejudice and injustice have rubbed me the wrong way. You my dear sisters and brothers in Christ taught me to follow a Jesus who teaches us to love one another - period. I have done the best in my life that I could to live up to that commandment, knowing that I too have fallen short on many occasions. If I am honest, I have had to overcome in my life prejudices of my own. Many of us grew up with mistaken opinions about people who simply are different from us. It is indeed humbling and a lifetime's work to go about unlearning ingrained misconceptions of others.I understand that much of the current conflict in the church there is focused on our denomination's growing acceptance and support of people who are homosexual and their families in the life of the church. Please allow me to share a bit of my story. I grew up thinking it was funny to call people "queer" and "fag." I did so myself, until I knew the pain of being the recipient of those very insults. I am not a gay man, however my personality and sensibilities were often not as "masculine" as some would have liked them to be. So I was criticized and ridiculed to the point of tears at times.I left Selma at 18 glad to be moving on and went off to a Presbyterian college with your blessing. There I met one of my dearest friends in life. It was not until years later that she felt comfortable openly revealing to me her sexual orientation as a lesbian. I had to then ask myself what was it about me and my beliefs that kept one of my closest friends from fully being able to be her true self in my presence.You helped send me to Argentina as a Presbyterian missionary. I went to seminary there with your support. I had a gifted colleague, classmate, and friend with whom I worked very closely. We studied theology together, taught Bible studies in the church together, and preached from the very same pulpit. Yet when the time for ordination came, the church welcomed me while sending him away because he was gay.Much to my surprise, when I left Buenos Aires I found myself back in Alabama for what turned out to be almost ten incredibly enjoyable years. I was blessed to be called to serve our sister congregation of the First Presbyterian Church of Birmingham. That community too was marked by the iconic events of the civil rights movement. A stand that was made there in 1963, "We welcome all whom God welcomes," eventually grew that church, but not first without pain and many members who left. That First Presbyterian Church now is an inclusive congregation that openly welcomes men and women, young and old, black and white, gay and straight, liberal and conservative.[1] I saw first hand the Holy Spirit transform and revive that congregation as it grew in depth, diversity, and membership.Now I serve a congregation, Las Placitas Presbyterian Church, that embraces all of our human diversity in very much the same way. We are not all of the same mind on every issue. I can guarantee you that. Yet we love and respect one another, and we see that God is doing a new thing in our very midst to the extent that we are able to allow ourselves to grow into God's expansive love. I am so grateful to be able to serve as the pastor of a congregation like Las Placitas.In the New Testament book of Acts, we find stories of our earliest Christian brothers and sisters and their nascent communities of faith. We learn of the Spirit's enlivening of the early church, and we see there that even then they too were not always of the same mind. In the opening of both the 10th and 11th chapters of Acts, we find a significant vision given to Peter that holds lessons for us today.Peter was invited by God to partake of that which had formerly in the very law of God been deemed both profane and unclean. There is an "ick" factor here that often goes unpreached. Peter being strong in the faith refused this unknown openness, and it was God who had to insist repeatedly, "What I have made clean, you must not call profane." This vision led Peter to extend the boundaries of his faith to include those who up until that point had not been accepted because they were different.The church criticized Peter and essentially said, "Who are you to let those people in? They are not like us, nor do they adhere to God's laws as we do." Peter's message to Cornelius and his household was, "Jesus commanded us to preach to the people and to testify that he is the one ordained by God as judge of the living and the dead. All the prophets testify about him that everyone who believes in him receives forgiveness of sins through his name." (Acts 10:42-43)To his critics in the church who were upset with him, Peter's reply was, "If God gave them the same gift that he gave us when we believed in the Lord Jesus Christ, who was I that I could hinder God?" (Acts 11:17) I, Drew, throughout now almost 20 years of ministry have seen the gifts of God given to the people of God in all of our God-created variety. I know and have deep respect for men and women whose sexual orientation is different than my own and who like me seek to serve God and the church with all their energy, intelligence, imagination, and love. I know families with same-gender parents who are working hard against all odds to raise their children with the very same love and respect that Tamara and I strive to pass on to our children. It is my belief that God has created each and every one of us and that God loves us all more than we will ever know. You taught me that. I also believe the Holy Spirit gifts us all regardless of who we are, or maybe exactly because of who God made us to be. We are called together as Christ's body, broken yet also whole, so that we might carry out Jesus' ministry of love and compassion to this world.My hope and prayer for you my dear sisters and brothers in Christ is that you will remain in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) and that you will continually place your focus and trust in our God. I pray to God to give you all the strength and the passion that you need to dedicate yourselves for generations to come to the ministry to which God is calling you from that very corner of Dallas Avenue and Broad Street. God's reach through you extends farther than you will ever know. You have so much important work yet to do.From here in Placitas, I give thanks again for the love of God which you have nurtured in me. It is such a remarkable gift that makes all the difference in my life. I know my friends that we are not all of the same mind on some these issues. However let the same mind that was in Christ Jesus be in us. (Philippians 2) And may the same love of God that unites us make us whole both in this life and the next.Know that I and your brothers and sisters in the faith here in Placitas are holding you on our hearts and in our prayers. I ask that you do the same for us as we carry forward Christ's ministry and love from this place. May God bless us and our churches richly, so that we may be a blessing to others. I look forward to the next time we are together again in person so that we may exchange with one another a sign of Christ's peace. I love you.Until then, faithfully yours,Drew Morrow Henry* I commend to your study a book by evangelical theologian and former Moderator of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) Jack Rogers - Jesus, the Bible, and Homosexuality. You can find it here.
