Peace, Unity and Purity
In the Burns and Burns Civil War on PBS, the recently late Shelby Foote said that one of the causes of the War Between the States was the failure of various interests within America to reach a compromise on issues like slavery and states’ rights. Americans pride themselves about being a principled, uncompromising lot, but the opposite is the case, he went on to say. The ability to compromise has been and continues to be a key American strength. But when sides hardened and stopped talking in the 1850’s, it was Johnny get your gun.
A similar dynamic played out during the days of Martin Luther. Before Luther, the Roman curia was expert at meeting reform movements with a disarming embrace. A monastic order might be established, both to give voice to the dissenting point of view and to bend it toward the overall Catholic cause. In this and other ways, the church thrived by being flexible. By the time of Luther’s 95 thesis, however, the church’s leadership had calcified into a particular pattern of positions, and there was no place in them for the ideas of this upstart Augustinian monk.
The General Assembly of the Presbyterian church approved a compromise carefully stitched together over four years by the Theological Task Force on the Peace, Unity, and Purity of the Church. And Gerald Stephens was right on in his earlier posting about the General Assembly coming to “his town.” One can detect a fresh breeze blowing through the Presbyterian Church, and it may stir up a new way of discerning and welcoming leadership for the Body of Christ. If that happens, it’s because a large, tradition bound, unwieldy bureaucracy was able to bend, to find an opening, to relax muscles of control.
Our church’s cleaving issue (in the double sense of something that holds together and splits apart) hasn’t the full weight of slavery or of salvation by grace by grace through faith. But it—the nature and practice of homosexuality—is hefty enough. Many, many years of thinking about the issue are under reconstruction. The emerging shape of such thought repulses some, while others rejoice. Whatever the outcome, the conversation has been launched, and cannot be recalled.
One senses fertile possibilities if the church can hold the compromise together long enough to let it germinate. “Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.” Paul tells us, and he wasn’t talking about Egbert and Lulaleen getting hitched. (Okay, 1st Corinthians 13 includes Lulaleen and Egbert’s relationship, so it’s acceptable to read it at a wedding, but we just need to remember that it’s aimed at the broader audience of all Christians, the whole church.) Part of the agony and the joy, the elation and the drudgery of living in faith with God and the people of God is learning how to endure “all things” together, like all kinds of personality types, divergent social and educational levels, competing political alliances, genetic and ethnic differences, theological persuasions, and various ways of expressing human sexuality. It is excruciating work, to live at this depth of intentional community. Many people, fleeing its intensity, retreat into shelters of sameness, under umbrellas of uniformity, especially in churches. But for those who stick with covenant faithfulness, through thick and thin, dividends of mercy and grace are received.
So it is like marriage. Life-long partners unwilling or unable to compromise hard won, deeply held values don’t stay married very long. Or they spend their lives in a loveless marriage, or, worst of all, an abusive one. Good marriages are marked by spouses who regularly, in big matters and small, meet each other more than half way.
This Presbyterian compromise concerning who may be ordained by whom and where will make us stronger believers in Jesus. Because both sides in the homosexuality debate had to give up something in order to build this bridge between them, lessons of humility have been taught and learned. Nobody knows all they think they know. Everyone needs to listen more and speak less. All benefit as they learn to be still, let God be God for a change, and see what new thing the Spirit will do blowing through and around a patient, open minded, grace-seeking people.
I recommend the most recent issue of Presbyterian Outlook in its entirety. It has the very un-Outlook cover of a couple walking in a grassy field under a huge, inviting sky. (By the way: how ‘bout that new editor, Jack Haberer, friends and cousins? That ol’ boy is doing ‘em a good job!). I particularly commend the article by Frances Taylor Gench, who, besides teaching at the “other Union Seminary,” the one in Virginia, was a member of the Theological Task Force on the Peace, Unity, and Purity of the Church. It’s a beautiful exposition of John 17, the “High Priestly Prayer” of Jesus. She writes:
“Now unity with God in Christ is one thing. The hardest thing, I think, to overhear is Jesus’ prayer for our unity with each other, for there may be no doubt of what it consists. For all those who believe in Jesus as the One sent from God—God’s own Son who binds God to us and binds us to God and to each other as God’s own children—that that unity consists in one thing above all else: love. The language of love is the primary language by which Jesus in John speaks of the life of the believing community. The one commandment, the only ethical injunction he gives us in John: love one another… the unity believers share lies in something beyond doctrinal agreement… It lies in our experienced love of God in Christ, which keeps us together in spite of our differences and links us with disciples past, present, and future. Mutual love is at the heart of John’s vision of the Christian life -- the identifying characteristic of the community that continues to exist in the world in Jesus’ name. “By this everyone will know that you are my disciples,” Jesus said, “if you have love for one another.”
You want true believers, look at the Middle East. Uncompromising people make great fundamentalists, and when mixed with small doses of political fervor and technological sophistication, fundamentalism, like its offspring, war, is unhealthy for children and other living things (remember that one?). Uncompromising people do not forgive others as they have been forgiven and neither do they love their enemies. Fundamentalists we have known have not impressed us with their understanding of the Sermon on the Mount, so recently the background text for these postings. They seem unwilling to bless those who persecute them, and unable to turn expose a left cheek after an assailant strikes the right. Not that any of us find those practices easy.
Though we were born a few years too late, we remember the days of the anti-war movement well, and marched in some of its demonstrations (It’s Your War, Too!, IT’S YOUR WAR, TOO!) Some of us even wrote letters to the editor expressing our disgust with the Christmas bombing of Hanoi in 1972 and the mining of Haiphong harbor. Our sociopolitical consciousness, such as it was, owed gratitude to the earlier civil rights movement and to the feminist movement which grew from the culture of peace-mongers. We’re not saying that we joined the Black Panthers exactly, and burning bras was all right with us because we kinda liked the resulting look. But with the misty-eyed and murky-minded conviction of a college sophomore, we pledged ourselves to be staunch supporters of the cause. “Compromise” was a dirty word, and no decent person with whom we associated would ever give an inch (Didn’t Janis Joplin sing a song about that, or was it Joan Baez?). Ah, those were the days.
And here we are this day praising compromise as a wonderful, life-giving thing. Maybe our praise is a sign of wisdom, or just of old age. Maybe it’s the easy way out for militant moderates like us, who still get all choked up over the idea of reconciliation of sworn enemies and who hold ever so tightly to the dream of the beloved community, made up of every breed of human beings imaginable, and their dogs and chickens, their cats and horses, too.
Or perhaps—just perhaps—through the sifting, thesis/anti-thesis/synthesis, dialectical doors of compromise lies the realm of maturity, of spiritual purpose, of which Jesus speaks, again, in the Sermon on the Mount. “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect” (Matthew 5:48).
As Ever,
Dee
A similar dynamic played out during the days of Martin Luther. Before Luther, the Roman curia was expert at meeting reform movements with a disarming embrace. A monastic order might be established, both to give voice to the dissenting point of view and to bend it toward the overall Catholic cause. In this and other ways, the church thrived by being flexible. By the time of Luther’s 95 thesis, however, the church’s leadership had calcified into a particular pattern of positions, and there was no place in them for the ideas of this upstart Augustinian monk.
The General Assembly of the Presbyterian church approved a compromise carefully stitched together over four years by the Theological Task Force on the Peace, Unity, and Purity of the Church. And Gerald Stephens was right on in his earlier posting about the General Assembly coming to “his town.” One can detect a fresh breeze blowing through the Presbyterian Church, and it may stir up a new way of discerning and welcoming leadership for the Body of Christ. If that happens, it’s because a large, tradition bound, unwieldy bureaucracy was able to bend, to find an opening, to relax muscles of control.
Our church’s cleaving issue (in the double sense of something that holds together and splits apart) hasn’t the full weight of slavery or of salvation by grace by grace through faith. But it—the nature and practice of homosexuality—is hefty enough. Many, many years of thinking about the issue are under reconstruction. The emerging shape of such thought repulses some, while others rejoice. Whatever the outcome, the conversation has been launched, and cannot be recalled.
One senses fertile possibilities if the church can hold the compromise together long enough to let it germinate. “Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.” Paul tells us, and he wasn’t talking about Egbert and Lulaleen getting hitched. (Okay, 1st Corinthians 13 includes Lulaleen and Egbert’s relationship, so it’s acceptable to read it at a wedding, but we just need to remember that it’s aimed at the broader audience of all Christians, the whole church.) Part of the agony and the joy, the elation and the drudgery of living in faith with God and the people of God is learning how to endure “all things” together, like all kinds of personality types, divergent social and educational levels, competing political alliances, genetic and ethnic differences, theological persuasions, and various ways of expressing human sexuality. It is excruciating work, to live at this depth of intentional community. Many people, fleeing its intensity, retreat into shelters of sameness, under umbrellas of uniformity, especially in churches. But for those who stick with covenant faithfulness, through thick and thin, dividends of mercy and grace are received.
So it is like marriage. Life-long partners unwilling or unable to compromise hard won, deeply held values don’t stay married very long. Or they spend their lives in a loveless marriage, or, worst of all, an abusive one. Good marriages are marked by spouses who regularly, in big matters and small, meet each other more than half way.
This Presbyterian compromise concerning who may be ordained by whom and where will make us stronger believers in Jesus. Because both sides in the homosexuality debate had to give up something in order to build this bridge between them, lessons of humility have been taught and learned. Nobody knows all they think they know. Everyone needs to listen more and speak less. All benefit as they learn to be still, let God be God for a change, and see what new thing the Spirit will do blowing through and around a patient, open minded, grace-seeking people.
I recommend the most recent issue of Presbyterian Outlook in its entirety. It has the very un-Outlook cover of a couple walking in a grassy field under a huge, inviting sky. (By the way: how ‘bout that new editor, Jack Haberer, friends and cousins? That ol’ boy is doing ‘em a good job!). I particularly commend the article by Frances Taylor Gench, who, besides teaching at the “other Union Seminary,” the one in Virginia, was a member of the Theological Task Force on the Peace, Unity, and Purity of the Church. It’s a beautiful exposition of John 17, the “High Priestly Prayer” of Jesus. She writes:
“Now unity with God in Christ is one thing. The hardest thing, I think, to overhear is Jesus’ prayer for our unity with each other, for there may be no doubt of what it consists. For all those who believe in Jesus as the One sent from God—God’s own Son who binds God to us and binds us to God and to each other as God’s own children—that that unity consists in one thing above all else: love. The language of love is the primary language by which Jesus in John speaks of the life of the believing community. The one commandment, the only ethical injunction he gives us in John: love one another… the unity believers share lies in something beyond doctrinal agreement… It lies in our experienced love of God in Christ, which keeps us together in spite of our differences and links us with disciples past, present, and future. Mutual love is at the heart of John’s vision of the Christian life -- the identifying characteristic of the community that continues to exist in the world in Jesus’ name. “By this everyone will know that you are my disciples,” Jesus said, “if you have love for one another.”
You want true believers, look at the Middle East. Uncompromising people make great fundamentalists, and when mixed with small doses of political fervor and technological sophistication, fundamentalism, like its offspring, war, is unhealthy for children and other living things (remember that one?). Uncompromising people do not forgive others as they have been forgiven and neither do they love their enemies. Fundamentalists we have known have not impressed us with their understanding of the Sermon on the Mount, so recently the background text for these postings. They seem unwilling to bless those who persecute them, and unable to turn expose a left cheek after an assailant strikes the right. Not that any of us find those practices easy.
Though we were born a few years too late, we remember the days of the anti-war movement well, and marched in some of its demonstrations (It’s Your War, Too!, IT’S YOUR WAR, TOO!) Some of us even wrote letters to the editor expressing our disgust with the Christmas bombing of Hanoi in 1972 and the mining of Haiphong harbor. Our sociopolitical consciousness, such as it was, owed gratitude to the earlier civil rights movement and to the feminist movement which grew from the culture of peace-mongers. We’re not saying that we joined the Black Panthers exactly, and burning bras was all right with us because we kinda liked the resulting look. But with the misty-eyed and murky-minded conviction of a college sophomore, we pledged ourselves to be staunch supporters of the cause. “Compromise” was a dirty word, and no decent person with whom we associated would ever give an inch (Didn’t Janis Joplin sing a song about that, or was it Joan Baez?). Ah, those were the days.
And here we are this day praising compromise as a wonderful, life-giving thing. Maybe our praise is a sign of wisdom, or just of old age. Maybe it’s the easy way out for militant moderates like us, who still get all choked up over the idea of reconciliation of sworn enemies and who hold ever so tightly to the dream of the beloved community, made up of every breed of human beings imaginable, and their dogs and chickens, their cats and horses, too.
Or perhaps—just perhaps—through the sifting, thesis/anti-thesis/synthesis, dialectical doors of compromise lies the realm of maturity, of spiritual purpose, of which Jesus speaks, again, in the Sermon on the Mount. “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect” (Matthew 5:48).
As Ever,
Dee
posted by Rick at 6:05 AM
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