One of the things that annoys me is when I get an anonymous message, especially one that has a negative bent, and I almost always choose not to give it much thought when the sender was unwilling to sign his or her name. But I received one such message recently, and here I am responding! After being out of town, I returned to the office to find in my inbox a copy of an article from the Dallas Morning News, entitled “Presbyterians to ordain their first openly gay minister.” A handwritten note at the top of the page said, “So, how will St. Andrew address this issue? Or will it be ignored?” The “or will it be ignored?” phrase I took as a as pejorative comment that has been troubling me.
What will we do? All I can say is that we will continue to proclaim the good news of God’s love given in Jesus Christ, and that we will seek to embody, in the words of Diana Butler Bass recently on Facebook, “love toward everyone with no exceptions allowed,” as well as “an openness to engage serious questions without fear.”
How will we address this issue? We will continue to attempt to do the mission and ministry of the church, and keep the main thing—proclaiming God’s saving grace in Jesus Christ—the main thing. And we will be thankful that this congregation has not been held captive to an issue that has been highly contentious in many parts of the church. I thank God regularly that I am part of a congregation that has its priorities straight. The Bible, after all, has a whole lot more to say about reaching out to the poor and hungry than it does about sex.
What will our response be? We will follow the Jesus who, in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, showed a remarkable affinity for the down and out, the demonized and marginalized, and who consistently showed more interest in people and relationships than in tidily keeping rules and regulations.
How will we address this issue? We will continue to elect people whom we believe to be called of God to the ordained offices in the church.
This is what our response will be. And, again, let me say how grateful I am to be part of a church that keeps the main thing the main thing.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about who we are as a community of faith. This was the subject of my meditation at the evening worship service on September 4, and I’ve continued to wrestle with it since then. My hunch is that we often think of our faith in purely individualistic terms. The rugged individualism of the American psyche makes it difficult to hear what the Bible says about Christian community. The gospel and our Reformed tradition teach us that, through baptism, we belong to each other, and that no one is a Christian alone. When we stand before God, we always stand with others in the Christian community. This is why the old hymn “I come to the garden alone,” is so out-of-step with the communal nature of the Christian life. Read the rest of this entry »
As we approach the 10th anniversary of September 11, 2001, I have been deeply moved by many of the documentaries on TV. I have been reminded of the pain, the loss, and suffering not only on that one day, but through all the ensuing years. And I have known once more what it means to hope and long for the new world of Revelation 21 where God will wipe away every tear from our eyes. In this new world, death will be no more, and mourning and crying and pain will have come to an eternal end (Revelation 21:4). In the words of the great playwright, Eugene O’Neill, it will be a world where death itself is dead.
In reflecting on this new world promised to us, I am drawn to another vision of the future found in the book of Revelation, this one in the seventh chapter. There we read of a global worship service. It’s an amazing picture that is painted by the poetry of the text: “After this I looked, and there was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb . . . . They cried out in a loud voice, saying, ‘Salvation belongs to our God who is seated on the throne, and to the Lamb!” (Revelation 7:9-10) Could this possibly be? A great multitude from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages? Really?
This makes me long for that world, a world where people are no longer afraid of each other because of their differences, a world that has laid down its arms, and all that matters is the peace and unity of God’s love. It will be a world in which the insufferable bones of contention that fracture the human family have been eternally dissolved. What might we do, as this momentous anniversary arrives, to bear witness to this new world? How will we live if this new world has already dawned in our lives?
I’ve still been thinking about the Parable of the Mustard Seed, which we read in worship a couple of Sunday’s ago. One of the things that can be unsettling about the Bible is that it continues to work on you, keep you thinking, and seeking you to move in new directions. This is something I find to be true about this particular parable.
What I’ve been hung up on is how the gospel can shatter our expectations, our patterns of life, and our assumptions about who God is and what God is about in the world. A mustard seed is not what a gardener wants to find in the garden. It’s a weed, and the seed is so small, it’s impossible to identify it along with the good seed at the time of planting. It can be unsettling because, once it germinates, sprouts, and grows, there it is—an irritating disruption in an otherwise proper, orderly garden. And the shocking thing about the parable is that the realm of God is compared to this kind of irritating disruption. Read the rest of this entry »
