"A MORE
EXCELLENT WAY"
Reflections of the 213th
General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church
I Corinthians 12:27-31
Theodore J. Wardlaw
Central Presbyterian Church, Atlanta, Georgia
June 17, 2001; The Eleventh Sunday
in Ordinary Time
In one of the letters I wrote for the front page of The
Weekly before leaving Atlanta to go to the General Assembly which
just adjourned yesterday, I promised that this sermon would be a
reflection on the events of this past week; and would therefore be an
intentional "Saturday Night Special." Well, the truth is that
-- maybe for the first time in my ministry, and since I did not get home
until something like eleven hours ago--this sermon is actually a Sunday
morning special. You've never heard me preach a fresher sermon. The
better part of wisdom, from one way of looking at it, would have been
for me to secure a guest preacher for this day and to simply assist in
the service. But frankly, I am glad that things have worked out this way
because--even though the ink is still wet on this sermon manuscript -- I
feel the need to speak to you on this day about what happened in
Louisville this past week.
My text for this morning is a portion of St. Paul's
first epistle to the church in Corinth. It is a great portrait,
actually, of the patchwork quilt that any General Assembly is--that any
church is. "Now you are the body of Christ and individually members
of it," Paul writes. "And God has appointed in the church
first apostles, second prophets, third teachers; then deeds of power,
then gifts of healing, forms of assistance, forms of leadership, various
kinds of tongues;" and all of these gifts are abundant at a General
Assembly of our church. I saw these gifts throughout my eight days
there.
Sometimes we're tempted to think of our General
Assemblies as hopeless collections of tall-steepled egos and rancorous
posturings and gasbags who stand at microphones pretending that they're
at the Democratic National Convention. But, truly, General Assemblies
are more than that. They are opportunities for splendid worship, for
faithful witness on hundreds of topics, for endless committee meetings
and necessary debate, for caucuses at lunch around a zillion single
issues, for a grand family reunion, really, and for earnest
conversations in corridors and around committee tables and over morning
cups of coffee or single-malt scotch at night. From one angle, it might
look, all too often, just like the Democratic National Convention (or,
perhaps, to be more statistically accurate, the Republican National
Convention), but from another angle it's far more than that. I can
testify to you this morning that, on a few occasions this past week,
when my head tilted back in my seat and my eyes looked at the ceiling of
that convention center, I saw that ceiling crack open a little, and then
I saw a glimpse, I think, of the peaceable Kingdom of God--a glimpse of
what our church and our world will look like when God gets finished with
it.
I saw a host of people who have ties to this church.
Everyone one of them sent their good wishes back to you, and I won't
even try to call their names because I'll miss a few. But it's a long
list, which reminds me, once again, of what a pivotal role this church
has always played in the larger life of our denomination. I saw one man
from northern Alabama who went to seminary with my brother and who told
me that he was led into the ministry by the example and witness of my
father. I saw a few people who asked, naturally, about Howard and
Margaret Montgomery -- who all by themselves, as you know, have had a
statistical biological impact upon the number of Presbyterian ministers
and elders in our denomination, and upon so many more. I saw, once
again, what a stunning rainbow we are when we gather together in one
place.
"Now you are the body of Christ," writes St.
Paul, "and individually members of it." What a rainbow, what a
quilt we are.
And what work we do! I can't begin to tell you how
many votes we took, how many global efforts we began, how many dollars
we agreed to send to this and that point of need in the world, how many
missionaries we commissioned, how many new church developments we made
possible. My mind tries to sort it all out, and becomes instead a
collage of campus ministry reports, and "The Decade of the
Child," and Caregiving for Older Adults, and non-geographic
presbyteries for first-generation immigrant groups, and health and
social issues recommendations, and reports on domestic violence, and
debate and debate and debate; and then my head starts to hurt.
And did I mention debate? The newspaper reports that
one commissioner went into a restaurant one night last week in
Louisville, and he said to the waitress, "Is this a Presbyterian
restaurant?" She seemed startled and asked him what he meant, and
the man said, "Because in a Presbyterian restaurant, everything
served up comes with two sides." Yes, there was debate. Some of it
endless.
But there were two debates that more likely than not
will make the papers as people reflect upon this assembly. The first was
the debate on the Lordship of Jesus Christ. You're wondering why any
Christian church would be debating that, and that's a good question. It
seems straight up, doesn't it? That Jesus Christ is Lord! But far more
esteemed assemblies than ours have spent years in such debate, have
started wars over such debate, have created new churches over such
debate. I'm thinking about the Council of Nicaea, I'm thinking about the
division between Eastern and Western Christianity. Just for kicks, why
don't you open your hymnal sometime and note how long the paragraph is
about Jesus in the Apostles' Creed, in the Nicene Creed. Stop and linger
for awhile with every word and every syllable, and try to imagine the
arguments and fights that erupted, and all the issues that were at stake
over how we would describe this Jesus who is our Lord. It's not just an
academic exercise, better left to the discussions of bearded,
pipe-smoking intellectuals sitting around in some ivory tower. Truth be
known, it may be the most important exercise any of us ever go through
-- that of thinking carefully about what we're willing to say -- and not
say -- about Jesus Christ.
On Thursday afternoon, the Assembly heard the report
of the Theological Issues Committee. One of that committee's actions was
a response to overtures from three presbyteries asking for the Assembly
to reaffirm the church's historical understanding of the nature of Jesus
Christ. These overtures came in response to an address given last year
by a Presbyterian minister at a Presbyterian-sponsored conference who
suggested that maybe Jesus wasn't the only means to salvation. It may
come as a surprise to many of us, but that speech stirred up a hornet's
nest. Church-sponsored conference, questions about Jesus, what do we
Presbyterians stand for anyway? Many of us here at Central might respond
from a position of liberal Protestantism or academic freedom and be less
apt to get defensive; but after being at the Assembly this year, I
understand better than I did earlier that this speech was deeply
offensive to whole precincts of our church. And when the Theological
Issues Committee, in a divided vote, sent out a recommendation to the
Assembly that "the Office of Theology and Worship prepare and
widely publicize materials for study and worship that will help our
congregations better understand the theological richness of the Lordship
of Jesus Christ in The Book of Confessions and Book of Order", many
faithful Christians there interpreted that action to mean that the
Presbyterians were reluctant to affirm the Lordship of Jesus Christ and
were instead referring the whole matter to a committee. As one
commissioner friend of mine put it, "What's the church coming to
when Jesus can't even get sent out of committee?"
Because that sentiment was evident not just at large
but also within the Theological Issues Committee, there was a minority
report that was also presented to the assembly--signed, even, by the
committee's chair. That report recommended an alternative
statement--that "God has been revealed in and through Jesus Christ
to be the unique Trinity--Father, Son and Holy Spirit;" that
"Jesus Christ, fully divine and fully human, is the singular saving
Lord as understood through scripture, our confessions and Book of
Order;" and that "All people are encouraged to embrace and
experience the Lordship of Christ by putting Jesus first in their
lives." At first blush, that statement seemed to many like a
perfectly fine thing to say. But it seemed to others of us to be both
unnecessary (after all, we have a whole confessional tradition that has
had a lot to say about Jesus, thank you very much) and, frankly,
poorly-written. "Unique Trinity," for example; "singular
source of salvation"--what do those words mean? My own sense was
that that minority statement would have reduced a majestic dimension of
our theological heritage to something that might fit on a bumper
sticker--or worse, something, in our world of multiple truth claims,
that might make a great litmus test.
So there was great debate. Amendments to the main
motion, and then a substitute motion, and then amendments to the
substitute and amendments to the amendments. Motions went up and motions
went down, and some of us began to get a little seasick. Meanwhile, one
commissioner -- a modest, self-effacing man from Charlotte and a former
missionary -- kept standing up at Microphone Number One to get the
Moderator's attention. "No sir, your motion's not in order right
now, we're still perfecting this motion; no sir, not now, we're still
perfecting the substitute; no sir, not now, no sir, not now."
Finally it was time, and that self-effacing man--more than a little
perplexed by the spotlight on him and by the enormity of the crowd and
by the cameras of the press and by the alphabet soup of parliamentary
this and parliamentary that--had the chance to read his motion.
In a halting voice, he moved these words:
"We confess the unique authority of Jesus
Christ as Lord. Every human authority is finally subject to Christ. In
him we see, as nowhere else, who God is and what it means to be fully
human. As Lord, Jesus has shown us that lordship and authority mean
servanthood and love, not dominance and force.
"Jesus Christ is also uniquely Savior. It is
his life, death, resurrection, ascension and final return that
restores creation, providing salvation for all those whom God has
chosen to redeem. In Jesus Christ, God comes to us in our sin and
claims us as God's own. Although we do not know the limits of God's
grace and pray for the salvation of persons of other faiths, for us
the assurance of salvation is found only in confession Christ and
trusting in him alone.
"We are humbled in our witness to Christ by our
realization that our understanding of him and his way is limited and
distorted by our sin. Still the transforming power of Christ in our
lives compels us to make Christ known to those of other faiths and of
no faith even as we are challenged by them to be more like Christ and
receive from them wisdom which deepens our understanding of what God
wants."
For my money, that statement -- which after more
debate, the Assembly adopted -- captured one of the most brilliant,
unscripted moments of the entire week. You may read editorials in church
papers that go on and on about how unwilling we Presbyterians are these
days to make a strong stand for the Lordship of Jesus Christ, and how
captive we are to culture; but, for my money, we adopted a substantive
and thoughtful statement, and we avoided an in-your-face bumper sticker.
The second debate I want to tell you about was the
debate that went on for most of the afternoon on Friday. It was the
debate over paragraph G-6.0106b in our constitution. Most of us refer to
that paragraph by the name it was given -- "Amendment B" --
when, in 1996, it was sent from the Albuquerque General Assembly to all
of the presbyteries for approval or disapproval. It became, by the
thinnest of margins, a part of our constitution, and for five years it
has been, in some way or other, the source of great pain throughout our
church. The net effect of this amendment--often called "the
fidelity and chastity amendment" -- has been to prevent gay and
lesbian Christians from serving in the ordained offices of our church.
This past Friday, the Assembly Committee on Ordination Standards,
reacting to overtures from 29 presbyteries, recommended that G-6.0106b
be stricken from the Book of Order. The committee also recommended that
we add these words to our constitution: "Suitability to hold office
is determined by the governing body where the examination for ordination
or installation takes place, guided by scriptural and constitutional
standards, under the authority and Lordship of Jesus Christ." The
committee further recommended that authoritative interpretations on
ordained office by homosexual persons -- interpretations that go all the
way back to 1978 -- "shall be given no further force or
effect" You cannot imagine the debate over these recommendations.
You cannot imagine the amendments from the floor, the substitute
motions, the rhetorical excess. And further, you cannot imagine the wind
of the Holy Spirit that blew through that room that afternoon.
I went to my seat on that Friday morning prepared to
vote for any move that would refer that committee's report to a special
task force that would come back, in a few years, with some new
recommendation on this and a cluster of other issues. I even wrote to
you about that task force in The Weekly before I left to go to the
Assembly. I had in my mind the names and faces of so many people whom I
dearly love throughout this denomination for whom the striking of
Amendment B will cause great pain and hardship. I had in my mind the
names of whole churches -- and presbyteries, even -- who will react to
the striking of Amendment B by wondering if they can remain members of
the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). I had in my mind the awful scenario of
schism. I had in my mind how hard it would be for the next year if, once
again, another amendment on the whole question of sexuality makes its
way through the presbyteries. I had in my political mind thoughts of how
unlikely it is for such a thing to get through this presbytery, and so
many others, and thoughts of how bad the timing is and can't this wait a
few more years.
But something got to me late on Friday morning. I
began thinking of other names and faces -- of people whose gifts for
ministry and service in the church are undeniable, but whose orientation
prevents them from serving with integrity. I rehearsed in my mind the
faces of black people from another era who, too, were denied an equal
place at our church's table. I thought of Lawrence Bottoms, God rest his
soul, once the Pastor of Oakhurst Presbyterian Church and later the
Moderator of our General Assembly, who at his first Assembly as a
commissioner could not take his meals in the dining-hall but had to eat
in the kitchen. I thought of divorced people once denied the privilege
of ordination. I thought of Katie Ricks. Mainly, what I thought of was
what I believe in my heart, and what you know I believe--that the denial
represented in G-6.0106b amounts to nothing less than a false teaching
which will someday embarrass the church when we look back on these
years. What I came to grips with, around noon on Friday, was that I was
letting political fears and anxieties--"Will it work this
year?" "Is now the time?"--overrule the conviction deeply
embedded in my heart that G-6.0106b is wrong. And so, when debate began
on that committee's recommendation, I stood up and spoke on its behalf.
The Assembly on that day was determined to resist any attempt to refer
this issue, and ultimately -- by a vote of something like 60% to 40% --
the motion to delete this divisive paragraph carried. By some twist of
fate, I have therefore had the privilege of serving as a commissioner to
two General Assemblies in the past five years -- the one that voted to
approve Amendment B and the one that voted to delete it.
For many people at the end of that afternoon, the
temptation was to celebrate this action to delete. But I could not go to
any victory party. In fact, the first thing I did when I pondered the
enormity of that vote was to well up with tears. I told friends of mine
from liberal presbyteries, "You have no idea what a lot of us in
more conservative presbyteries are going back to." Our church is
now in for another hard year, and some people will leave. Many people
will be in pain, and a lot of us who left the Albuquerque Assembly in
pain five years ago feel nothing quite so much as empathy for that pain
that they now feel. This is a bigger issue for me than some people
winning and others losing. Just because the body now has a broken arm
instead of a broken leg, the leg doesn't rejoice that the arm is in
pain. Not if it's the kind of body I want to be a part of. One
presbytery executive from a presbytery in South Carolina said to me as
he got on the plane yesterday, "Since you essentially voted to
change my job description on Friday, would you at least come to my
presbytery and explain to us what this will mean for a whole corner of
the church?" And I told him I would, providing one thing--that he
take me to a place where I can get good barbeque. But this will be
another year of pain, and anybody who is glad about this vote in
Louisville needs to curb any undue sense that this is a great victory,
and to be instead in an attitude of prayer and mindfulness as to how we
might help the body heal itself.
Garrison Keilor said somewhere that God gives us the
gifts of time and space. God gives us time, he said, so that everything
doesn't happen at once. And God gives us space so that everything
doesn't happen to you.
God gives us time, and God gives us space. What will
we do now in the time and space that lies ahead?
Maybe it's just my poetic heart, but I saw something
yesterday -- in an airport lobby, of all things -- that just took my
breath away. All of us sitting around at the gate, while planes came and
went, while one flight had equipment problems and had to be cancelled,
while many of waiting in vain on standby to get an earlier flight out of
Louisville. It was a gridlock there at that airport -- three thousand
Presbyterians trying to leave a mid-sized town. And I looked up from my
coffee cup at one point to see two people standing with luggage all
around them looking intently at a ticket that belonged to one of them.
One of them -- I'm not sure which one -- was being helped by the other
in figuring out some confusing flight information. And that by itself
was not so unusual -- anybody with the milk of human kindness should try
to help somebody else in a situation like that. What was breathtakingly
unusual to me was that one of those two people was Jack Haberer, a
pastor from Houston and a committed evangelical Christian, and the other
was Janie Spahr, a lesbian evangelist from California and a committed
Christian, too. Jack and Janie are equally visible throughout the
church, and have been on opposite sides of this important question. But
there they were, working together on the shared project of being sure
that they both got home.
As I understand the church of Jesus Christ, we are
committed to no higher calling than just that. And the purpose of this
body staying together is for all of its parts to work with equal
diligence to the end that we all of us -- finally -- get Home. Are all
of us apostles? No. All of us prophets? No. All of us teachers? No. All
of us for Amendment B? No. All of us for deleting Amendment B? No.
"But strive," writes St. Paul, "for the
greater gifts. And I will show you a still more excellent way."
