Speaking About God’s Deeds of Power
John Wilkinson Third
Presbyterian Church
June 4, 2006
Acts
2:1-21
Matthew Brown is a first rate musician, and more to the point,
an outstanding church musician. His commitment to the worship
life of the church struck us from the start, as did his fine
ability to connect musicianship and liturgy. He is now moving
on to new things, as the bulletin suggests, and this morning
and this afternoon will be his last times with us. His presence,
collegiality and giftedness will be greatly missed. Matthew,
we wish you Godspeed and every good wish in your future endeavors
– don’t forget about us and we will do the same.
Please join me in expressing our appreciation to Matthew.
***
Let us pray: Spirit of the living God, fall afresh on us. Spirit
of the living God, fall afresh on us. Melt us, mold us, fill
us, use us. Spirit of the living God, fall afresh on us. Amen.
Today marks the convergence of several events and opportunities.
It is a day when we have recognized several hundreds of outreach
volunteers. It is a day when we will celebrate the sacrament
of the Lord’s Supper. It is a day that has been designated
as More Light Sunday for those congregations who have declared
themselves so to be.
And under girding it all, today is the day of Pentecost, a
Jewish festival happening some 50 – hence the name Pentecost
– days after Passover, and now for we Christians, happening
some 50 days after Easter. Pentecost is likely the most important
day in our liturgical year and the least understood. It is the
day when the Holy Spirit came to earth and gave birth to and
empowered the church.
Outreach. Communion. More Light. Pentecost. They are not unrelated,
and more so, they are deeply interconnected.
On any given Sunday morning, the conversation is typically
not as structured as this one will attempt to be. We preachers
often joke about the structure of a sermon. Three points and
a poem or three points and a joke. Other days it may be three
jokes and, we hope, at least one point. Today it will be two
points, with two parts to the first point, something along the
lines of why More Light matters and why Pentecost matters.
In 1620, Reformed minister John Robinson preached a sermon
that suggested that God had “more light” to bring
to our understanding of things, and that our human tendency
is to limit the spirit of God in changing hearts and minds.
In 1987, the Session of this congregation decided to join with
others in the Presbyterian church to declare itself to be a
“More Light” congregation.
That action affirmed that we are welcome and open to all, including,
in the language of that time – gay and lesbian Christians
– and in the language of this time – LGBT Christians,
lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender.
That statement of welcome and inclusion was coupled with a
kind of official protest against Presbyterian policy. It was
our written practice not to ordain, using the language of the
provision, any “self-affirmed, practicing” gay or
lesbian person to any of the offices of the church – minister,
deacon or elder. That provision was codified into church law
in 1996 in something called G-6.0106b, whereby only those who
are living in “chastity in singleness or fidelity in marriage”
may be ordained.
Fidelity in marriage we like, but since same gender marriage
is not legally permissible, then gay and lesbian persons are
effectively barred from ordination. Membership, yes; leadership;
no – a theological inconsistency to me, though we haven’t
even done a very good job of living out more broadly that membership
commitment.
At Third Church, we seek to continue to live out these dual
commitments continually with their many implied trajectories.
This includes a public witness, working for equality in state
laws. Working against homophobia. Working toward justice on
many levels. In the church, it has meant working to change our
teaching and practice on human sexuality and ordination.
Progress has been slow. But the witness has been persistent
and hopeful. And as important as our ordination policy is, the
issue, which is not really an issue but a concern and journey
about real-life people whom we know and love, goes deeper than
that. It is about what we believe to be the nature of our humanity,
the nature of church membership AND leadership, and, on a day
like today, the nature of the Holy Spirit to us.
We do seek to welcome. Welcome is as welcome does. It is a
focus of what we do and who we are, not the only one but a central
one. And it is the undercurrent and background of much of what
we do. We welcome.
And we educate. Different ones of us – LGBT and straight
– understand the concerns and conversations differently.
I happen to believe that the Presbyterian church got it wrong
in 1978 when it began this conversation. We began it by answering
a question about ordination. I believe we would have been much
better off by addressing a prior question about the nature of
human sexuality. Our official church position is that any same-gender
intimacy is inherently sinful and contrary to biblical teaching.
As long as we believe that, officially, the ordination question
will be unclear. As that understanding evolves, so will our
understanding about ordination. And I further believe that we
would be benefited – all of us – by a sustained
conversation about human sexuality and place the discussion
of same gender sexuality into that broader framework –
biblical, theological, ethical, cultural, biological.
While we do those things, welcome and educate, we do one thing
more. We advocate. Civil advocacy and church advocacy. What
was once a single advocacy group in the Presbyterian church
– PLGC – Presbyterians for Lesbian and Gay Concerns
– is now several. More Light Presbyterians, That All May
Freely Serve, Shower of Stoles, the Witherspoon Society, the
Covenant Network of Presbyterians. Different perspectives. Different
strategic approaches. A single aspiration – to change
the church’s mind and its practices. Third Church is a
leadership congregation in this conversation.
What that conversation will look like in a few weeks could
be very different. Or not. The General Assembly of the Presbyterian
Church (U.S.A.) convenes in Birmingham with several big buckets
of activity before it. One is our investment policy and the
Middle East. Nice and simple.
The other two are related. Twenty-two presbyteries, including
ours, the Presbytery of Genesee Valley, have submitted overtures
to change our ordination polity and to remove the restrictive
language. Several presbyteries have overtured the assembly to
maintain the policy.
While one committee deals with those matters, another will
deal with the final report of the Theological Task Force on
the Peace, Unity and Purity of the Church. Though the Task Force
was not a sexuality task force, it dealt extensively with those
matters. Rather than proposing any change to the current policy,
it proposed a new interpretation of that policy, that would,
in effect, return decisions about who may be ordained and installed
to the bodies actually doing the ordaining and installing –
not local option, but local application of a national standard,
a historic practice.
Affinity groups on the left have expressed deep concern about
this because it leaves the current standards in place, and because
the task force has asked the assembly not to take action on
any of the other proposed overtures if this report passes.
Affinity groups on the right have expressed even deeper concern,
because the implication of this constitutional interpretation
is that in some places in the church, people could get ordained
who are presumably not able to now. A friend of mine who happens
to be gay and who supports the report says that this is “progress,
if not justice.”
The task force report was adopted unanimously. That has seemed
to matter. The task force has also produced a boatload of resources
that will help the church think about these things, so that,
when the church changes its mind, and I believe that it will,
there will still be a church.
I have stated repeatedly as I’ve traveled around the
church discussing this that the human sexuality conversation
is the gift and challenge we’ve been given for this generation,
and that regardless of what we decide at any one moment, we
will be living with this for a while. So that how we hold the
conversation, and how we live with one another, on various sides
of the aisle and across the spectrum, will matter indeed.
At the same time, churches like this one, with our historic
commitments and future hopes, must not let up in our efforts
to welcome and educate and advocate. This is clearly about church
politics, and clearly about so much more than that. It is about
who we are and who we are called to be.
Which links us to Pentecost, where the Spirit seems to be doing
everything it can to defy conventional wisdom and human limitations.
The Spirit calls whom it will, and so it seems to me that any
categorical prohibition not only is an unhelpful practice, but
would seek to limit the ability of the voice of God to speak
to the church and to call leaders for the church’s mission
and ministry.
The case can be made in two different ways: negative and positive.
Stated in the negative: none of us are worthy to be called,
and yet God calls. Stated in the positive: the Spirit calls
all of us and gives us all gifts to serve: Galileans, Parthians,
Medes, Elamites, Cretans, Arabs, LGBT and S, all of us.
The lesson of Pentecost works both sides of the argument, for
every time we must ask who are these unlikely people that God
is using? Or to put it another way, if we all, by virtue of
our baptism, are offered a place at the table, and we are, then
how could the same Spirit who welcomes us also not call us?
That is why we must welcome, and educate, and advocate, not
so much to convince anyone of their rightness or wrongness,
but to help us all understand this fundamental affirmation about
the hospitality of Jesus and the work of the Spirit.
A friend of mine e-mailed me this week that Pentecost seems
like a pretty good noun but people begin to worry when it is
used as an adjective. That’s true. And yet any conversation
about ordination is a Pentecostal conversation.
· The Spirit gives us ability.
· The Spirit enables us to understand one another.
· The Spirit allows us to talk about God’s deeds
of power.
Colin Gunton writes that “the Spirit is not the person
of the Trinity who closes the circle of the divine being, but
rather the one who perfects divine eternity by being the focus
of God’s movement outwards.” (The Oxford Companion
to Christian Thought, page 306)
If that is true, and this day insists that it is, then our
task is not to limit anything, whether it is our own understandings
and practices or our understanding of who God is and what God
does. Rather, we are called to be open, as much as we possibly
can be, to the God whose Spirit will be poured out upon all
flesh, all flesh, so that our sons and daughters shall prophesy,
our young shall see visions and our old dream dreams.
Those are the points. Here is the poem: “And so the yearning
strong/With which the soul will long/Shall far outpass the power
of human telling./For none can guess God’s grace,/Till
Love creates a place/Wherein the Holy Spirit makes a dwelling.”
Amen.
