[posted here 8-21-03]

I am glad to be here. This is the third time in a little over a year that I have had the opportunity to speak in tandem with a Presbyterian leader who is an evangelical. Two of those invitations have come from Fuller, an institution that doesn't get full credit in the Presbyterian Church. The church has noticed that Fuller is orthodox and that it is energetic, expanding and spreading its educational resources far and wide. One observer of theological education said that the sun never sets on Fuller Seminary's degree programs. (Several years ago I attended the National Prayer Breakfast at Richard Mouw's invitation. We could not walk six inches through the ballroom without someone stopping to introduce him or herself as a teacher of a Fuller course in this place or that. Rich said, tongue only partly in cheek, that the largest group at the Breakfast was probably not Promise Keepers, as advertised, but rather Fuller adjunct faculty.) But other dimensions of Fuller's leadership are not as widely recognized. This school sets a high standard of intellectual generosity. Though not every view is accepted here, judgments made by people associated with Fuller tend to be based on first-hand engagement rather than hearsay or rumor. Visit the Fuller bookstore, where you will see an extraordinarily wide range of theological works, all shelved together. Or come to a conference like this for Fuller's evangelical constituency, and note the presence on the program of a card-carrying liberal, two years running. Non-conservative Presbyterian institutions could learn something about theological hospitality and liberality of spirit from Fuller Seminary.

I am pleased and grateful to be here. At the same time, I am in a very sober mood. Last year at this conference I took my theme from one of the most hopeful and joyous texts in all of scripture: Our salvation is nearer to us now than when we became believers. (Romans 13:11). I argued that is true even for us Presbyterians at this difficult time in the life of our church. I advanced a theory that some must have thought far-fetched: that we, liberals and conservatives in this denomination--for all our differences, and they are deep--have been given to each other by a gracious God to help each other work out our salvation. I talked about the ways that my Christian life is richer and deeper because of the parts that conservative evangelicals have played in it; much more tentatively, I identified some things of value that our side of the church, liberals, might be able to offer yours.

Several months later, at last year's General Assembly, I observed a number of persons, from both sides of the aisle, who seemed as eager as I was to find common ground. With astonishing speed and ease, given how far apart the parties have been, liberals and conservatives worked together to resolve the most contentious issues before the Assembly. During what journalists later called a "holy" meeting, commissioners joined in support of two statements about Jesus Christ--one long and explanatory, the other (drawn from it) short and to the point--that together promised to meet the needs of Presbyterians back home to express both the nuances of faith and also deep conviction about essential truths. Commissioners went on to resolve a more political matter, how to deal with a congregation that some perceived as resisting directives from church courts. Most remarkably, the so-called sides at points gave each other advance notice of the proposals they planned to make. I and many others took that as a sign of grace, a signal that God had invited the members of the 214th General Assembly to live honorably as in the day, just as my last year's text from Romans said would happen as salvation draws near. Many who observed this small, or maybe not so small, miracle--a Presbyterian General Assembly in which party politics did not determine the outcome--wondered whether we were witnessing the beginning of a new, more constructive period in the life our denomination, one in which we might, in a new spirit, make some real progress on the most divisive issues. Your holy people took possession [of your temple] for a little while, it says in Isaiah 63. It seemed, last June, as if in some important senses that were so.

But now [Isaiah continues] your adversaries have trampled your sanctuary, and those adversaries, as Pogo said, are us. In the months since the Assembly, there has been more provocative behavior and partisan posturing than I've seen in the twenty-five years I have been a Presbyterian. I'm going to take the next few moments to comment on what we have been inflicting on each other. I do this with real reluctance. For years I have felt that the gospel claim the church most urgently needs to hear--one that is found everywhere in scripture and is specially featured in Reformed tradition--is that nothing we do--nothing--gets in the way of God keeping God's promises. Whether or not we cooperate, whether or not we even notice, God repairs the world and saves those for whom Christ died--always has, always will. When one is privileged, as I am today, to talk with other believers about serious things, the best way to use the time is to lift up and celebrate the ways that God blesses us no matter what. (For my efforts to do this, especially to show how liberals and evangelicals may be blessings to each other, I have earned a reputation in both camps for sentimentality and naivete, but I don't care, because the testimony is true. There are no party lines that God is not strong enough to breach.)

My preference is to lift up and celebrate God's amazing work with and among us, but sometimes the magnitude of what God is doing is evident only in contrast to our resistance. Now, I believe, is such a time. So I propose to begin with confession, with as honest an account as I can give of the bad things to each other, especially to each other. Then I will pose the theological question that such an account raises: Why? Why are we doing this? Why does God permit God's own people to mistreat each other so miserably? Last, I will turn to the future and suggest what seeds of hope may be germinating in the smelly mess we are making. My text for this exercise is the one I have already quoted, Isaiah 63, one verse each for each of my three sections, confession, theological questioning, and hope for the future. First, confession.

   We have long been like those whom you do not rule,
      like those not called by your name. (63:19)

Indeed. The ink was not dry on reports of that remarkably gracious assembly and the Moderator whose graciousness had helped to make it so had not issued his first message before all hell--I use that term advisedly--broke loose. It is fruitless to try to establish who started the fighting, but because the theme of this part of my talk is confession, I will look first at the belligerent activity on my side, among those whose long-term political goals I share.

From the left side of the church in recent months have come a series of statements. Some ministers, sessions, and congregations--not as many as the more hysterical reports would make you think, but enough to generate a lot of publicity--have declared that they do not intend to comply with certain provisions of church law. One of the legacies of our denomination, formed as it was in a rationalistic age, is that it is much easier to get into Presbyterian trouble for what one says than for what one does. This church is like a really strict school in which you are as likely to be disciplined for threatening to break the rules as for actually breaking them--more likely, in fact, because it is easier to establish that someone has made a defiant statement than that they have committed an illegal offense. This is especially true in the case of the Presbyterian rules and precedents that pertain to homosexuality. They are convoluted, even sloppy, as laws and rulings go. It's hard to prove that someone has broken a confusing rule, and indeed, so far, no one has been convicted of a disciplinary offense under Amendment B and related legislation.

Some of my allies have figured that speaking is more automatically illegal than acting. They are outraged by the church's position on ordination and marriage of homosexual persons and have chosen the most aggressive way to express their consternation in a denomination like ours: they have declared themselves defiant, the move most likely, and indeed intended, to provoke a response from the other side.

They have succeeded. While some on my side have been devising the most effective ways to break the law, some on yours have been combing the Constitution and all our other rule books for the most militant means to enforce it. Well before the Assembly, a lawyer began lodging disciplinary accusations against church officers on a wholesale basis, targeting not only those who seemed to be asking for it but also others who had worked very hard to keep their conscientious dissent within legal bounds. Another evangelical activist located an obscure provision for calling a special meeting of the General Assembly and has made every effort to implement it. It's an unprecedented move; if it happens, it will create confusion and maybe chaos. If it doesn't, its announced purpose, to punish vociferous liberals as quickly and harshly as possible, will no doubt be a major theme of the regular General Assembly when it meets in May.

There is a deep irony in the choices the sides have made of their weapons of war. They are very much out of character. For most of American Presbyterian history, liberals and their predecessors have criticized the over-reliance of conservatives on words. We fought literalism, subscriptionism, verbal fundamentalism. We've been the party of action. "Just do it," has been our slogan. "By their fruits you shall know them," has been our text. Evangelicals, for their part, have persistently called attention to the dangers of legalism and bureaucracy, both Presbyterian specialties. "Do not quench the Spirit," they have told the church, as they have pioneered new forms of church life that don't exactly conform to current rules and regulations. Look at us today! Liberals risking their ordinations over what can and can't be said. Conservatives calling for enforcement of most peripheral and anachronistic provisions of the law. The most visible and audible leaders on each side have chosen their means of engagement not because they resonate with their historic way of being Christian, but because they are available and expedient. By using them, political ground might be gained, and our side might win.

You may be thinking that I am making a great deal of the activities of a very few people in a limited arena, national church politics. It's true that the actual number of defiers and filers of accusations and petitions is small, though their efforts have been greatly magnified by the press, secular as well as religious, which revels in their doings, and especially by the propagandists on both sides, who are having a field day, declaring that their particular champions are righteous without remainder and their opponents not only misguided but evil in intent. If you spend any time at all reading Presbyterian publications or electronic bulletin boards, your know that the news and noise from the Presbyterian Church these days are mostly rancorous: Bitterness, wrath, anger, wrangling, malice and [yes], slander are the marks of much of our life together. They are not, Ephesians reminds us, the way we learned Christ (4:20, 31).

There's more. The combativeness of the superactivists and their sympathizers are not our biggest problem. The most alarming feature of the present scene is not what they are doing, but the fact that the rest of us are letting dominate our national church life and, if the sampling of highly polemical sermons people have been sending me is any indication, attract considerable attention at the local level as well. We should be grateful for the few attempts there have been to offset the damage, especially for the wonderful statement of commitment to pray without prejudice for the whole denomination that Presbyterians for Renewal issued this fall. I am pleased that Covenant Network called for compliance with the Constitution. With a few exceptions, however, the great middle of the church (including most of us who make up Covenant Network and PFR) has sat silent as a small number of our colleagues have siphoned off an enormous amounts of time, energy, and money into judicial proceedings and political grandstanding. That same passage in Ephesians that says that those who have learned Christ must permit "no evil talk" also enjoins us to speak words for building up, [words] that may give grace to those who hear, as there is need.

There is need. We live in a world literally dying for words of grace. The society of which we are very much a part lives loosely and selfishly. It is--we are--greedy, undisciplined, and all too readily use force to solve problems. In Christmas cards last month I received identically worded messages from five friends who don't know each other: "Our world really does need a savior." It does, and we, the church, the very body of Jesus Christ in the world, are supposed to be an occasion for the world to meet him. What we say and what we do should sound and look just like him. Yet here we sit, on our hands, as a few of our colleagues speak and act in ways designed to infuriate and alienate each other, and that is what the world sees and hears from the Presbyterian Church. Long since we should have taken back the church. We should be speaking loudly and acting clearly words and gestures of grace so compelling, so inviting that those who are wandering lost in this culture would come this way, to taste and see how gracious our Lord is. We, the majority, haven't done that. We, together with our bellicose friends, have not been speaking or behaving like Christians, at least not dramatically enough for those outside our communities to notice.

I want to pause in my outline to prevent a possible misunderstanding. I do not think that the matters that vex the Presbyterian Church are unimportant and should be set aside in favor of more unifying themes. I believe that God is urgently calling the Presbyterian Church to change its teaching on homosexuality and its policies on ordination and marriage. Promoting that change has become a central part of my vocation. I am equally concerned with what I think is the most pressing challenge for theology and witness in our time: what to say about Jesus Christ to a world that needs him, but that is also full of people who are not and probably will not become Christian, people who are nevertheless part of God's world and God's purpose for it. I believe that God has handed us these issues and does not want us to drop them. But our present way of dealing with them--a few contestants crowding the airwaves with tirades, taunts and threats, the rest of us sitting more or less idly by--is not a faithful response to God's mandate. We have all become like those whom you do not rule, like those not called by your name.

Why? Why, when we have God's patronage, God's favor, do we still make such messes by what we do and leave undone? That is what Isaiah wanted to know about God's holy people:

Why, O Lord, do you make us stray from your ways and harden our heart, so that we do not fear you? (17a)

Isaiah's way of asking the question bespeaks a doctrine of God high enough to satisfy the strictest Calvinist--right up there with Richard Mouw's beloved Canons of Dort. Why do you make us wander? We're not just prone to wander on our own, as it says in Richard's and my favorite hymn. God has willed it. Why do you harden our hearts--qashach, the hardest of the Hebrew words for hard--why do you make us deal cruelly, so that we do not fear you? Isaiah believed, and I do too, that no situation, no matter how bad we have made it, lies beyond God's control. Last year I said at this conference that God is at work in the friendships that have formed between liberals and evangelicals, and that great mutual benefit will result if we get to know each other better and draw on each other's strengths. Some, as I noted before, found that idea preposterous. Today I make an even more outlandish claim: God is letting things unravel for a reason. God's purpose is to save the world, and the mess we are making of the church must be in some way part of that purpose.

God's strategy in letting us sink so low, Isaiah proposed, is repentance. Turn back, Isaiah said boldly to God, turn back for us, who can't stand to be this bad much longer.

Turn back for the sake of your servants, for the sake of the tribes that are your heritage. (17b)

In Isaiah the same word, shubh, repent, is used for what God does and what Israel should do. The Lord will repent, will return to Zion--and, I am convinced, to the people of God called the Presbyterian Church--and then, with God's help, we will be able to turn around too.

That is the reason for our hope: God will relent, will give us remorse for the harm we are causing. God may be relenting already, by letting us see and show each other ourselves at our worst, so that we will be sorry and, when sorry, changed. The content of our hope, the substance of the change, is just what Isaiah says: yir'a, fear of the Lord. In God's providence and in God's good time--I would prefer that time come soon--we will become a fearful people, not scared of each other or afraid to speak and act, but properly, respectfully fearful of God. You could say, to rearrange the terms of this conference, that we should hope for fear. Calvin, I think, would offer another term for the same aspiration. We should be asking, praying, he would tell us, for piety, for "that reverence"--to use his definition--"[that reverence] which the knowledge of the benefits of the love of God induces."

Piety, in Calvin's sense, is partly a posture, an attitude: awe, reverence, respect for a God whose goodness and love have no limits and show us to be very limited and helpless by comparison. But reverence, piety, is not only what we think and feel; it is also what we do. True piety is ingrained habits, patterned practices, regular acts of faith that develop in grateful response to what God always does for us.

So far I've made my points more sadly and solemnly than is usual for me, so I'll try to pin down this one by telling you my only Calvinist joke, about the Presbyterian minister who died, at a ripe old age, and made his way to the gates of heaven. When he got there, St. Peter asked him why he thought he might be eligible to enter. "Well," said the minister, "for starters, I served faithfully in the Presbyterian ministry for forty-five years." "In that case," said St. Peter, "go to hell." Shocked and dismayed, the minister trudged down to hell. Those gates were unattended, so he walked right in. Far in the distance, he could see the entrance to the fiery furnace and, as he got closer, two figures in black gowns sitting dejectedly at either side of it. One he recognized as Luther, the other Calvin. The minister had never been comfortable with Luther's ideas, so when he reached the men he tapped Calvin on the shoulder. "John, he said, "what happened?" "Bad news," said Calvin, "works count."

In their way, works do count. God doesn't count even the good ones, but they are a great benefit to us. An active piety creates the capacity for more of the same. In responding to God with our whole being, we learn how to do that, to act in ways that reflect and show God's love, and the more we see of God's love, the more we love God. This is why we should want to be good: because it feeds, fuels our love for God.

What kind of piety, what pattern of good behavior and wholesome works, does God intend for the Presbyterian Church? If our new or renewed piety will represent a turnaround from our current state, as Isaiah hoped for his holy people, then we might be able to hope for the following benefits. Here are four fervent hopes for the church, for a better way of life for which God may, by letting things get so bad, be preparing us.

First hope: that we will develop a deeper respect for the truth. Talk about truth is rampant in the church and the culture. Some use their certainty that they alone possess it to justify any action, however extreme. Others suggest that different, even opposing truths are equal, or relative, and that therefore each person or party should be welcome to her or his own. Neither stance, it seems to me, is appropriate if we are talking about the only truth that finally is fully true, the truth of God. God's truth has two indelible features: there is only one, and only God knows all of it. Those features dictate how we should honor it. Because God does reveal the singular truth to us, preeminently in Jesus Christ, we are required to proclaim it: Jesus Christ and him crucified, the same yesterday, today and tomorrow. At the same time, we have always to entertain the possibility that our understanding of the truth it is imperfect or incomplete. Truthfulness about God requires profound humility on our part. Recently we've had a lot of declaiming of certainties and a lot of shoulder-shrugging--you tell your truth and I'll tell mine. A truth-telling piety, by sharp contrast, will be marked by the good work of persistent, passionate, but also humble proclamation. When we get pious, we will have too much respect for the truth to impose it on others by force or to ever stop sharing it.

A second pious habit that we can hope to develop, when God enables us to repent our current practices is forbearance. Presbyterians today are great perfectionists. No deviation from the rules, not even the smallest, say some; no waiting, say others, not even a minute, for our brothers and sister who haven't seen the light to get on board. We have become sticklers, sharply intolerant, unable or unwilling to consider what might be driving the other side. Often it's a mixture. It is the case that some statements and actions that are fueling the current conflict are highly intentional, driven by the political theory--a mistaken one, I think--that the Presbyterian Church will change in the desirable directions only if extreme pressure is applied. But others things that offend and upset are not devised for that purpose. They are simply responses to local conditions. Leaders, pressed by increasingly alienated followers, sometimes need to say or do things that express deep convictions but that may not meet the highest standard of legality or intellectual subtlety or theological rigor.

In both cases, there is a lot to be said for looking the other way, for refusing to be drawn into extreme political games and, especially, for showing some understanding what it takes to hold things together in the very different kinds of local communities that comprise the Presbyterian Church. The practical effect of cutting each other a little slack would be a quieter church, one in which our efforts to learn and teach the truth might have some chance of success. The spiritual effects would be even greater. Forbearance, patience, kind understanding: these are what God has extended to us:

Do you despise the riches of his kindness and forbearance and patience? Do you not realize that God's kindness is meant to lead to repentance? (Romans 2:4)

A remarkable idea: God's kindness, God's tolerance of us is not conditional on our first shaping up and flying right. It is offered before we repent, in order to make that possible. When we become a pious people, we will extend that same anticipatory patience and understanding to each other.

A third hope for the church, for the time when God decides to soften our hearts and make us fear God: that we will become a holier and more righteous people, eager to lead pure and disciplined lives and to see justice done. We talk quite a lot about holiness and justice these days, though almost all the conversation is narrowly focused on one aspect of holiness, the sexual behavior of the homosexually-inclined minority among us, and on one dimension of justice, the full inclusion of these persons in the life of the church.

These are important issues, neither of which, in my view, we have addressed adequately, but even if we could do a much better job of that, the church as a whole would not advance substantially toward living well or living right. Why? Because all the moral reasoning in the world, however soundly based in scripture and tradition, will not make our lives more holy or just unless we deeply desire a closer alignment of human life with God's will. If we really want that, the joys of life lived close to God, we will begin not with what others should do, but with ourselves, examining our own consciences, confessing our real sins.

We don't often do that. I visit a fair number of Presbyterian churches, liberal and conservative, and I've noticed an interesting pattern in the prayers of confession of fault we write. Liberals confess failures in social responsibility, conservatives personal moral lapses. In other words, we focus on the areas in which our strengths rather than our worst sins probably lie. As we grow in true piety, God will give us the clarity to see what we have really permitted to come between us and God. In all likelihood, the list of our actual offenses will contain more and different items than we would like to think, and our amended lives, holier and more righteous, will look different from what our ideologies might lead us to design for ourselves.

Last, we can hope--if indeed God intends the future to be different from the present--that we will become a hopeful church. I think the most dismaying quality of our life together now is how predictable it is, how trite. We've become just like all the other organizations. We are divided into parties that share certain general goals and hope to gain power, not only to achieve our goals but also because we are convinced that our fellow party members, those who share our views and values, are better qualified to run things than our opponents. Inside our parties, in fact, there are some pretty deep differences about methods, style, and even substance. But we mask them, and play up how much better we are than our opponents, because a united front is required to win. It's the way of the world, and the world has little faith that it can ever be any different.

But we do. Jesus Christ has the power to reconcile the whole world to himself and even, believe it or not, Presbyterians in different factions to each other. I am back to the same conclusion I reach in my upbeat speeches, the ones in which I count our blessings instead of telling our faults: God can do anything. Really. We don't have to be as we always were, as everyone else usually is, because in Jesus Christ all things are made new. In that hope, you evangelicals may find that there are practicing gay and lesbian Christians who are your soul mates, who share your intense, expressive faith. (I spend a lot of time with evangelicals and some time in parts of the church where there are many openly gay and lesbian Christians, and in important ways the two groups seem to me a lot more like each other than they do like us buttoned-up, traditional liberals and moderates.) In the hope we have in Jesus Christ, the defiers and the enforcers may discover how much they have in common, including laudable traits like bravery and zeal. In that hope, moderates and militants--this is the hard one for me--will come to appreciate each other's strengths and virtues.

It's going to be different. We will be pious. We will do good. God has promised it: The leopard shall lie down with the kid; the wolf and the lamb will feed together. They--we--shall not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain, says the Lord. (Isaiah 11:6; 65:25.)