“THAT’S
FOR SURE”
Doug Nave
Covenant Network Convocation
Dinner
General Assembly - Minneapolis
July 2, 2010
[7-3-10]
They call it “coming
out” – the process of discovering and accepting who you are, and then
sharing that identity with other people.
 |
| Randy Bush, a member of the Covenant Network
Board of Directors, describes "the hopes Covenant Network has
for this Assembly," namely reinforcing the strides made at the
last Assembly while still working to remove G 6.0106b. |
“Coming out” always
starts as a conversation with yourself. It took me many years to come out to
myself as a gay man. There were years when I didn’t believe that I was
really different from most people – that my attraction to men was
transitory, and would fade with time and experience. Eventually I realized
that that wasn’t true, that I belong to a small and rather unpopular
minority – a realization that was a bit jarring to me as an economically
prosperous, white male who had come to accept privilege without even
thinking about it. I spent a number of years reflecting on what it meant to
be gay – discovering new ways to see the world, learning the rules of this
new community, and grappling with the values that help us relate to one
another as gay men.
But that wasn’t the only
“coming out” experience I’ve had. Shortly after I came out as a gay man, I
attended a Roman Catholic service that was held mostly for GLBT people. The
experience was jarring because I had simply assumed that I would fit in, and
I suddenly realized that I didn’t. I didn’t know the liturgy. The leaders
asked for some volunteers to help serve communion and I volunteered without
thinking, only to realize – once I was up front with the rest of the group –
that I didn’t have a clue what to do. At the coffee hour, I remember the
look someone gave me when I told him that I was a Presbyterian, not a
Catholic. Suddenly, I didn’t fit in.
This really shouldn’t
have been a surprise – I knew my church history. But somehow I never
connected with that history at a personal level. I never really understood
that for many in the Christian family, being a Presbyterian places me
somewhere at the margins of the true church. Many believe that
Presbyterianism is the very embodiment of error, in its rejection of church
authority, tradition, and teaching.
Having stumbled out of a
closet I never realized I inhabited, I began the odd process of coming out
to myself as a Presbyterian. I began to take more seriously than ever before
what it means to be Presbyterian. Why are we different?
One of the things that
makes us Presbyterians is a belief that God speaks to individual believers
in that sacred forum we call the conscience. We were born in the Reformation
protests against the rule of popes and bishops. We believe that requiring
someone to disregard his or her conscience, in favor of man-made rules, is
the sin of idolatry. We declare our Reformed identity in our Historic
Principles of Church Order, a core part of the Constitution that remains
sacrosanct in the new Form of Government. There we declare that “God alone
is Lord of the conscience,” that “there are truths and forms with respect to
which [people] of good characters and principles may differ,” and that in
those areas, we have the “duty . . . to exercise mutual forbearance toward
each other.” And we do that because, at the very core of who we are, we know
that we can’t be anyone else.
So let me ask you: Have
you come out? Have you really accepted what it means to be Presbyterian? I
ask the question because many in our community, it seems, are struggling
with that today. Some seem determined to preserve a certain view of
orthodoxy, to bind the consciences of a great number of Presbyterians to
their own way of thinking.
We have spent the last
30-odd years arguing about sexuality – at least, that’s what we think we are
arguing about. But over the years I have come to believe that the crux of
the issue is not what it means to be gay, lesbian, bisexual or
transgendered. The crux of the issue, for us, is what it means to be
Presbyterian.
Let me stop here for a
moment, because I mentioned sex, and that’s always fun to talk about – I’ll
come back to Presbyterians, who are much less fun, in a minute. If we are
going to talk about GLBT people, it seems to me that we need to get our
terms straight. We need to acknowledge that what’s really at issue here is
not sex, but love. Our society is coming to understand that as never before,
in our debates about same-sex marriage.
Gay and lesbian people
may be denied the formal recognition of marriage in many places, but we are
married nonetheless. Our relationships emerge out of the countless little,
implicit promises that we make to each other, day after day, until one day
we wake up and realize that in fact we are married. It’s not as much fun as
parties, perhaps, but certainly as real and often more enduring. Anyone who
doesn’t know that by now simply hasn’t been paying attention.
My favorite definition
of the love that I share with my partner of twelve years now comes from a
Broadway show, courtesy of Barbara Streisand – clichéd, I know, but true
nonetheless: “His is the only music that makes me dance.” Or we can look to
the assessment offered by David Nimmons, a gay activist in New York: “We are
gardeners of each other’s hearts.”
And if that doesn’t do it for us dour Presbyterians, perhaps we resonate to
the views of Law & Order’s Jack McCoy: “Let ’em marry. Why shouldn’t
they be as miserable as the rest of us?”
We know that there is a
hard practical reality, and a deep theological truth, in McCoy’s remark.
Living in committed, lifelong relationship is in fact a means of
sanctification – the daily discipline of learning, in ways large and small,
to find the understanding, patience, compassion, and support that can help
another person to flourish. It is a life of generosity and self-denial that
enables each of us to grow more fully into the people God intends us to be.
When we deny marriage to any group, we deny them a powerful means of
discipleship.
Gay and lesbian people
know this. I was in New York City earlier this week and walked by St
Vincent’s Hospital, a bulky brick fortress looming over a neighborhood of
historic brownstones and tree-lined streets. St Vincent’s became the
epicenter of daily life for many of us who lived in New York in the 1980s –
the place where friends with a frightening and fatal disease went in search
of care, when no one really knew what to do. All of gay life was there – the
horror of men wasting away in their prime, and also countless friends who
came to offer comfort and companionship, to grieve, and to love.
St Vincent’s is where
Dylan Thomas, the famous Welsh poet, died some years earlier. He wrote these
eloquent words that comforted many of us in that dark time:
“Though lovers be lost, love shall not;
And death shall have no dominion.”
When his wife, Caitlin,
was taken to the hospital where Thomas died, she was so overwrought that she
had to be taken away in a straitjacket. Love often defines the heights of
our hopes and the depths of our despair – the richness of life as it is
given to us.
It is always jarring to
me when I attend a Presbyterian gathering and find the church reducing the
extraordinary richness and challenge of committed relationships to a tawdry
fixation on sex. That kind of “pegs and holes” theology reminds me of the
games we played with wood blocks when we were children. We outgrew those
games, and the church really should too. Maturity comes in the recognition
that sex is an indivisible part of that deeply human, and humanizing,
experience called love.
Some of us have learned
that. And some of us cling tightly to more restrictive views. And that
brings us back to what it means to be Presbyterians.
Kathryn Schulz has just
published a wonderful study of human error called Being Wrong – I
wish every Presbyterian would read it. In it, she says: “You might never
have given a thought to what I’m calling wrongology; you might be the
farthest thing in the world from a wrongologist; but, like it or not, you
are already a wrongitioner. We all are.” She acknowledges the comforting
illusions of certainty: the sense that our world is stable, that we are
safe, that we are informed, intelligent, and powerful. But despite those
attractions, we are all wrongitioners, and she calls on us to “foster an
intimacy with our own fallibility.”
It is a lesson we
Presbyterians need to relearn from time to time. But in fact the church has
changed its views on a variety of issues over the years.
Church understandings of
the natural order have changed over time. We now appreciate that the earth
is not the center of the universe, but revolves around the sun – Galileo was
right, and the church’s condemnation of him was wrong. We have come to
increasing appreciation of how organisms grow and evolve, insights that
ground many of the great medical advances of our day.
The church’s
understanding of a just social order has changed over time. We no longer
defend slavery, or the segregation of the races. We no longer preach hatred
of the Jews. We have rejected old condemnations of capitalism and usury. We
have departed from the early church’s commitment to absolute pacifism in
favor of just war.
In governance of the
church, we have rejected centuries of rule by bishops in favor of collective
discernment by councils. We have come to appreciate the importance of
history and context in understanding Scripture. We have endorsed the
separation of church and state. We have repented the hostile sectarianism of
the past, and embraced calls to ecumenical dialogue.
The church in many areas
has reformed its understandings of gender and sexuality. In our tradition,
we have embraced women’s equality with men, and women’s fitness for service
as ordained leaders. We have rejected an age-old requirement that clergy be
celibate. We have come to appreciate that marriage can be a means of
self-giving, even sanctification, rather than simply a way to produce
children. We permit the use of birth control. We have come to more
compassionate understandings of divorce and remarriage. We have come to
appreciate that chastity does not require the total renunciation of sexual
pleasure, and that married couples can even have sex on Sunday – all those
conservative marriage manuals that tout the importance of good sex don’t
seem to appreciate how radically they depart from centuries of Christian
teaching.
In light of such
changes, over such a wide range of issues, it is remarkable that some among
us bring such an entrenched sense of certitude to our historic understanding
of homosexuality. In fact, we Presbyterians are almost evenly divided on
this question, and perhaps we should be honest in acknowledging that there
is no single, Presbyterian view on it today.
The early 1600s were a
time of religious turmoil in England. This was the age of Queen Elizabeth
and King James. (I have to digress, and note that the man who brought us the
King James Bible is also an early figure in the history of men who loved
men. Those who think the King James Version was dictated by God personally
might find that a worthwhile point to ponder.) The English Parliament had
outlawed the practice of Catholicism. Protestantism was the law of the land.
But the population was divided, with many rejecting what they saw as
“heresy” and adhering to the traditional (Catholic) faith.
One place this conflict
sometimes played itself out was on the gallows. Criminals in those days were
hanged in groups, by the wagonload, and Protestant clergy would try to
obtain public confessions of faith from them before they were executed.
Princeton historian Peter Lake writes that these efforts were not simply
about vindicating justice and restoring social order. He says: “Souls were
at stake and the power of true religion and God’s grace were on display,
even in some sense, on trial.”
Some confessed fidelity to the Protestant church before they were hanged.
Others stoutly resisted.
In 1610, a Roman
Catholic priest, John Roberts, was sentenced to death under a law that
barred priests from ministering in England. He was brought to the gallows in
a wagon full of common criminals. As they waited for the hangman to put the
nooses around their necks, the priest encouraged his companions to embrace
the Catholic faith, and they began praying aloud together. Another group was
also being prepared for execution nearby, under the care of a Protestant
pastor. When the pastor heard what was going on, he organized the condemned
men in his cart to start singing hymns, loudly, so the priest could not be
heard.
My imagination is
captured by that picture: two groups of convicts, one praying, the other
singing hymns – each trying to drown the other out. If souls were at stake
and God’s grace was on display – even on trial – grace and souls almost
certainly were lost. Somehow I think we know they could have done better.
Even if they disagreed on points that in their time were regarded as
earth-shattering, they could have found some true “essentials” to rally
around – faith in Jesus Christ, hope in the providence of God. They could
have extended some fellowship and comfort to each other, and they certainly
could have offered a more compelling witness to the gospel message of
reconciliation for those who stood around watching.
And so it is now – but
not for the first time.
We Presbyterians have
had a number of deep divisions in our history -- in 1729, 1758, 1869, and
1927, to name a few. Each time, after a period of rancor and debate, we
resolved our differences through a return to the founding principles that I
mentioned earlier: an acknowledgment that God alone is Lord of the
conscience; that there are many things which, important as they are, are not
so essential they justify a rupture in our communion; that we owe each other
the duty of mutual forbearance in such matters. This should all sound very
familiar, because it is the solution that the General Assembly offered to
the church in our debates about sexuality, in 2006 and 2008. This solution
is in our history, and in our DNA.
Some say that this
solution is simply caving in to compromise – that the church can make no
place for same-sex relationships so long as even a slight majority is
unwilling to do so. Now, these may be very fine Christians, but they’re not
very good Presbyterians, because they are ignoring the very principles that
have helped to define Presbyterianism for hundreds of years. Certainty can
be had in many Christian fellowships, but not in the Presbyterian Church –
we trust too much in the conscience of our fellow Presbyterians, moved by
the guidance of the Holy Spirit. And we are too suspicious of authoritarian
impulses that may achieve uniformity at the price of error. We are the
church Reformed, always being Reformed – it is what makes us Presbyterians
in the first place.
We sing the old hymn,
“Amazing grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me” – but I
think we have it wrong. Were we to really be honest, we would have to admit
that what’s really amazing about grace, to us, is that it saved a wretch
like him, and him, and him – people with whom we have nothing in common, who
we wish would just go away. So how are we to be church together? Perhaps we
can take our inspiration from two of Jesus’ first disciples, Matthew and
Simon – the tax collector and the Zealot, right-wing conservative and
leftist guerilla. Somehow they found themselves fellow travelers and,
despite all their differences, formed a Christian community. Perhaps we can
make them our patron saints.
Let us go out this week
and remind each other what it means to be Presbyterians. We have work to do,
in preserving the last two Assemblies’ affirmation of our core traditions,
and still more work to do in correcting exclusionary rules that have deeply
hurt GLBT people and their families. Let us hold fast to the gospel of grace
and reconciliation, to conscience and mutual forbearance. When people want
to point fingers at gay and lesbian people, want to debate what it means to
be like them, let us bring the focus back to ourselves, and remind each
other want it means to be Presbyterian. Let us believe that a sovereign God
will exclude whom God wills, and that we risk grievous harm, to the church
and each other, when we arrogate the task of exclusion to ourselves (surely
Jesus’ parable of the wheat and the tares teaches us that (Matt. 13:24-30)).
Let us remind each other that we see in a mirror dimly (1 Cor. 13:12), but
that our brothers and sisters in the Presbyterian Church love Jesus as
surely as we do, and that we owe each other mutual forbearance where we do
not see eye to eye. That is not caving in to compromise, that is living
together in conversation – sharing insights so that we who see dimly now may
help each other to perceive the truth more clearly in years to come.
And what if we’re wrong?
There we have Paul’s magnificent affirmation: “Neither death, nor life, nor
angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor
height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to
separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Rom. 8:38-39).
And that’s for sure.
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219th
General
Assembly