Sermons

 No Partial Inheritance

(More Light Sunday)

John Wilkinson	Third Presbyterian Church
July 12, 2009	Ephesians 3:1-14

In name and in practice we are a Presbyterian congregation. It’s not our central identity, but it’s close to the core. If you were to visit any Presbyterian congregation, it’s likely that you would discover many similarities. A Session, for example, comprised of elders, would provide oversight for the church’s mission. That’s why we are “Presbyterian” in the first place, from the Greek word presbytero, meaning “elder.” You would likely discover a worship service with a familiar outline – prayers, hymns, readings, a sermon at the middle of things, to reflect our understanding of the centrality of the Word. The elements would sound different, have a distinct flavor, but the framework would be the same. Many similarities.

But you would notice some differences as well. Unlike some, not all, denominational families, we Presbyterians live on a fairly diverse spectrum of beliefs and practices. If all Presbyterians congregations are ice cream, there are still many flavors, thank goodness, from which to choose.

You know that. You know that we are a Rochester congregation, for example, and not one from Buffalo or Syracuse or Portland (Maine or Oregon) or Miami. We are, as Presbyterian congregations go these days, large. We are urban and metropolitan. We worship with a particular style of music and words. Our building is, well, vintage.

And on every Sunday but on this Sunday in particular, we are a More Light congregation. What on earth does that mean? It means many things. The phrase itself, “more light,” is difficult to say and sometimes difficult to understand. It refers to an English minister who said in 1620 that God had yet “more light” to bring to bear on a certain situation.

In the 1970’s, a group of Presbyterians, concerned about the Presbyterian Church’s stance on matters of ordination and human sexuality, pitched their efforts toward change under the banner of “More Light.”

This congregation some 22 years ago, after a thorough process of discernment, declared itself to be a More Light congregation. That meant several things. Broadly, it meant that we were publicly and openly and officially a congregation who by its practices and profile sought to welcome all – including gay and lesbian persons – into the life of the congregation. More specifically, in the application of our decisions about who could serve in ordained leadership, we stated that we would not be unfairly restricted by our denomination’s restrictive standards. So being More Light means many things – a posture of openness and hospitality as well as a particular stance on Presbyterian ordination practices. A part of this, therefore, is reflective of who we are, our DNA. Another part is a strategic posture when it comes to the denomination's governance. They are related, of course.

Not all here would embrace that official position – and I am always grateful for your candor and honesty. There is no litmus test here for membership. And we are big enough that our More Light commitment is not a sole commitment – along with our commitments to justice and peace, to musical excellence, to outstanding children’s and youth programs. But on this the Session has taken a stand, and that decision has implications about what we do as well as suggests qualities about who we are.

We often talk about the “issue” of homosexuality. But what we are really talking about is people, with stories and experiences, so I try to avoid the language of “issue.” That’s what led us here into this in the first place. People – real people.

Some of you will remember this story much better that I do. We Presbyterians have been discussing this since the 1970’s, first with language called “definitive guidance” and “authoritative interpretation” that held authority that was not quite constitutional. Our prohibitive language became church law in 1996, and many of us, from here and in many places, have been seeking to change it or remove it ever since.

It seems like it’s been a long time. And it seems like it will be a long time. This congregation, for example, led the way to women’s ordination in the 1950’s, but my women minister friends will still talk about a stained-glass ceiling, limitations to their opportunities. I was ordained 20 years ago – this was our debate then, and I believe it will be our debate until I retire some 20 more years from now, and beyond that.

For a while, we ran parallel to the culture. Now it seems as if the culture is ahead of us, making some real progress on marriage equality, let alone important, if not entirely equal, rights that seem based on an entirely American understanding of fairness, if not acceptance.

In the Presbyterian world, people continue to work for change. The most recent vote lost, but it was the closest by far, and much closer than anyone anticipated, on any side of the matter. Change seems inevitable, but that inevitability feels elusive.

There are many places to focus on a More Light Sunday. We could focus, as has been suggested, on our culture, movements toward acceptance. We could focus, as we have implied, on the political and civil progress that is being made. But it is a Sunday morning, so it seems right to focus on the Bible, and the church, and our faith. And so we shall.

At some point, years from now when the church has embraced and lived into true change, part of the analysis on all of this will be the starting point. I believe, and believe more and more, that in the 1970’s we started in the wrong place. We started at ordination. We should have started with relationships. That is to say, we attempted to make decisions on a secondary aspect of the conversation while leapfrogging the primary matter – how people are attracted to one another and how relationships between people unfold.

Some of you will remember that I was privileged to serve on the Theological Task Force on the Peace, Unity and Purity of the Church, formed in 2001 when it seemed the wheels were coming off the church. In our final report, we wrote this: “Many believe that, instead of beginning with the question of ordination, it would be more profitable first to explore a more basic theological question: How does God’s gracious drama of creation, reconciliation, and redemption work itself out in the lives of baptized gay and lesbian persons who are committed to exclusive, covenanted relationships.”

Had the church spent a fuller amount of time on this, I believe, the ordination matter would be a more straightforward conversation, because we wouldn’t confuse matters needlessly.

Plus, the identity and relationship discussion is much more important anyway. Ordination applies to a few. Who we are, and to whom we relate, applies to all of us, all of us.

But even deeper than that is the matter of who we are, period. Inevitably, I will discuss baptism when considering all of this. The position that the church has taken, that LGBT folks can be church members but not officers, is wrong on several levels. It creates a second-class level of membership that is thoroughly inconsistent with our Presbyterian understanding of the priesthood of all believers. And because we create such a second-class, we automatically put limitations on what we believe the Holy Spirit can do and does do.

A categorical prohibition is bad church management, but more than that, it is bad church theology. It limits our ability to rely on all the gifts of leadership that the Spirit gives, but what it really says is that the Spirit does not give, will not give, gifts to certain people. That seems to be an untenable perspective to who we understand the third person of the Trinity to be.

The 20th century theologian Karl Barth said that our baptism is our ordination. I appreciate that, because it establishes a kind of primacy in who a person is before God and who a person is in relationship to their church. I’ve often thought – and it is a ludicrous thought – that we would be much more consistent in our practice and belief if we withheld the sacrament of baptism to people we were ‘not so sure” about. Once we say “let’s not baptize,” we realize how much that would miss the mark, what an unfaithful response that would be.

I spend a lot of time, personally and organizationally, thinking about and working on where we may be headed. We live in a kind of “don’t ask, don’t tell” world right now, though even that is not fully understood. What we are moving toward in a kind of transition is something like “don’t ask, but what do we do if someone tells.”

What I believe will happen is something close to states’ rights (from an American civics perspective) or what is called in the church “local option.” I am not fully sure what I think about that. We work hard to maintain national standards of theological perspectives and pastoral competencies. Yet if ten teachers are taught at the same college, their teaching experience will vary widely in ten different school systems. That is true for us.

We need to figure it out better than we have, but my deep hunch is is that that will be our direction – that presbytery A will decide one thing and presbytery B another, and congregation X will decide one thing and congregation Y another. Our connections will not crumble over differences, but they will need to be re-visioned more than a little as we find ways to accommodate differences.

But even that limited progress will take some work. It will take relationship building, new dialogue, and some creative approaches to our understanding of the Bible.

Ahh yes…the Bible. Some will ask me why we just can’t punt on the matter of biblical standards – that the Bible is an old, old book, codified in a different culture with a different world view. Others will ask me why I just can’t take what the Bible says at face value, that in the books of Leviticus and Romans particularly, the argument is clear and the case closed. But because we are Presbyterians, I say “not so fast” to either option. We have believed and continue to believe that the Bible is a living, breathing document, that God still speaks to us through its words, so that ignoring it or codifying is neither faithful nor helpful. Hence “more light.”

And so the Ephesians text from this morning’s lectionary has spoken to me, and has taken me a little deeper into the fundamental aspects of where we are. Paul is not really considering human sexuality or the church. He is considering who we are in light of who God is. He tells the fledgling church in Ephesus that God “chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world to be holy and blameless before him in love. He destined us for adoption as his children through Jesus Christ.”

Read the whole thing again this afternoon – there is no marathon Wimbledon match to keep you occupied! It is radical and magnificent. God chooses us, adopts us, redeems us, gathers us up. Paul does not mention categories, qualifications, boundaries, classes of belonging. And then this: “In Christ we have…obtained an inheritance.” An inheritance – and what we receive is welcome into the joys of relationship with God.

Paul mentions no partial inheritance, no partial redemption, no partial welcome, no half-way hospitality. This is, again, not about human sexuality. It is about something more fundamental than that – the very nature of who God is and who we are in that light.

If we are given such an inheritance – and I believe that we are – then how that gets worked out in the life of the church should be a vision of how the gift of that inheritance unfolds.

My friend Barbara Wheeler, president of Auburn Seminary, writes this: “I cannot believe that the God who is ‘most wise, most holy, most just, most merciful and gracious, long-suffering, and abundant in goodness and truth’ (Larger Catechism, C-7.117) would make virtually identical needs (for love and companionship), impulses (to seal a covenant with another person with sexual love), aspirations (to work out the call to discipleship and social responsibility in a family setting), and capacities (for faithfulness to a partner and commitment to children) a means of grace for one group of persons and the route to condemnation for another. God’s ways are mysterious and we cannot, as the confessions also remind us, understand all of them, but the God we know in Jesus Christ is not capricious or cruel.

Yet countless LGBT persons,” she continues, “have heard from the Presbyterian Church that God who blesses most people’s vocations of partnership and service arbitrarily rejects theirs. Unless they have been given the rare gift of celibacy, they are stranded, without either the support many Christians find in relationships celebrated by the church or the church’s affirmation of their call to leadership. Doctrines that leave a whole group of people helpless, more distanced from God than the rest of us, do not bespeak the one God who is most wise, most holy, most just, and most merciful and gracious.” (Presbyterian Outlook, November 2, 2008)

I believe that. And I would add as one more biblical patch to the quilt this morning’s testimony from Paul – that the inheritance we receive from Christ is for all of us, all of us. And that must be good news to all of us, not regardless of or in spite of our gender identities or the inclinations of our affections, but all of us. Period.

So that when we sing “just as I am” and “I come with joy to meet my Lord forgiven loved and free” and, in a moment, “all are welcome,” we mean it. Because God does. Amen.