My sermon for Luther Seminary chapel on the ELCA Churchwide Assembly Votes

Christian Scharen + Sermon for Luther Seminary Chapel + September 23, 2009

Text: Mark 9: 30-37

This past August the ELCA Churchwide Assembly voted on some controversial ministry policy recommendations that commit itself to  “finding ways to allow congregations that choose to do so to recognize, support and hold publicly accountable lifelong, monogamous, same-gender relationships” and “to finding a way for people in such publicly accountable, lifelong, monogamous, same-gender relationships to serve as rostered leaders of this church.”   You might have heard about it.  

 

Some of us have pretty strong feelings about it, strong positions we’ve articulated in conversations with friends. Perhaps some have, as I have, put our strong positions in print. Others of us don’t know exactly what to think, or what’s ahead.  Some of us who are not Lutheran are looking on wondering what will be learned from how Lutherans deal with all this.  Where ever you are in this, please know that I am a saint/sinner treading carefully, seeking not my own word but a word from the Lord, a word that leads us all from death to life. Do I hear an “amen”?

 

Across the church we have a struggle going on regarding how congregations and members of congregations will respond to the August Churchwide votes.  Let me share first of all how I responded.   I have gay family member.  She, her partner and son don’t go to a Lutheran church anymore.  But in their church on the Sunday after the assembly, they gave public thanks in their Sunday prayers for the fuller welcome they feel the ELCA has now extended. I have dear friends from seminary, a lesbian couple, both daughters of Lutheran pastors.  They live in Chicago and attend an ELCA church.  The Chicago Tribune interviewed them after church the Sunday the assembly ended.  One of them stated that for the first time in her life she felt those two huge pieces of her identity could embrace, lesbian and Lutheran. Our family attended a church served by a gay pastor during our years in Atlanta.  He loved and cared for our family, and baptized my daughter Grace.  After falling in love and joining his life to his beloved, he was put on trial in the Southeastern Synod and consequently removed from the ELCA clergy roster.  His congregation embraced him and he continues to serve them well.  The emotion of the moment is so evident in the photo of him at the time of the vote.  I, too, was overcome by emotion--for my family, for my friends, for my former pastor, and so many others who have felt profoundly un-welcomed by the church. 

 

Many who have longed for and argued on behalf of such a broader welcome have turned to just such passages as Mark 9 for support. In the debates across the church, claims of Jesus’ radical grace become the trump card in the argument for inclusion. I believe it has been an especially powerful argument for youth who are deeply shaped both by the cultural reality of pluralism and the cultural value of tolerance.^[1] The basic logic goes like this: Jesus continually offers stark reversals that displace the holy insiders and embraces the marginal outsider.  Here, distressed by the inability of the disciples to understand the suffering messiah’s path through death to life, frustrated by their scheming regarding power and position, Jesus unloads on them.  “Look at this child,” he says, “who is marginal, nearly without any status at all, invisible to us as we sit here.”  It is in seeing from the child’s place that one can see what God is doing.  The marginal ones, like children, will be first, and those with status and authority will be last.  See, the argument goes, with the children, the sick, the women, and on and on, Jesus reaches out, breaking socio-religious exclusions to include those on the margins. It is a powerful reading of the texts, and one that orients my daily discipleship in gratitude for my own inclusion.  For I, too, am but a sinner, a beggar standing at the gate, and was invited in by this same Jesus. 

Since the assembly, as I’ve headed back to classes and I’ve listened to conversations unfold in the news, on blogs, and in hallway conversations, I’ve continued to ponder my own reactions and the circumstances we now face as a church.  As I walk back and forth to school, I must go under a huge oak tree stretching its enormous branches over the alley. This fall it has been in acorn overdrive, with acorns falling (bang, thud) in the grass, in flower beds, on the roof of the garage, in the alley and, occasionally, hitting ME as I walk by.  I’ve been pondering this God who makes such wasteful trees, tossing literally hundreds of acorns all over a wide area under the tree and beyond. 

 

I started thinking especially about these acorns sitting on the asphalt alleyway, where you’d never expect them to grow.  The tree was dropping them all over the alley, and perhaps, in this crack or that, an acorn might find access to dirt. But that wasn’t the real point. The tree dropped acorns everywhere, without regard, leading me back to the story about the disciples, Jesus and the child. Jesus wants to get across that God is very, very big.  And God gives very, very generously to us and all creation.  All this leads to an understanding of a God, who is embarrassingly profligate in showering blessings, mercy, love, on the deserving and the undeserving.  Here Matthew 5:45 comes to mind: God sends rain on the just and the unjust, the nice and the nasty, all the same. Other similar verses could be mentioned all showing how atrocious God’s math really is.  The parable of the prodigal son? Perhaps Tim Keller is right, the title ought to be: the parable of the prodigal god. Considering such a God then refuses the claim that God is merely on ‘my’ side.  And because this challenge arises, I begin to ask, “but who are the marginalized, who is the ‘child’ I must welcome, who is one to whom I must give special place in my life just when I begin to think I’m special? 

So when I ask where else God’s mercy is falling, and which others are feeling outside and ignored, I find myself turning again and again to one of the best theologians of our church, Paul Hinlicky, who teaches at Roanoke College in Virginia.  In early September, he wrote, “The shipwreck in Minneapolis has now taken place.” Yet he is not arguing for jumping ship as are some others who are unhappy with the votes.  He is convinced that adequate arguments have not been made to justify the direction of the ELCA on sexuality and ministry. And when arguments are made, they often are specious ones.  For instance, he might say, a welcome to gay people rooted in an understanding of God’s grace and mercy for all is as much a ‘traditionalist’ position as a ‘progressive’ one.  Of course Jesus Christ died for all, welcomes all, redeems all in his Church.  The question at issue is not one of welcome, but how one regards homosexuality in relation to creation, and therefore how to encourage life in Christ after the welcome. Jesus said ‘go and sin no more’ after his welcome, Paul might remind me. So be clear on the role of the law and of sin, not merely grace.

 When I read what Paul, or his daughter, Sarah, now editor of Lutheran Forum, write on these issues, my arguments are better, stronger, more faithful to brothers and sisters Christ who disagree.  We part ways on their fundamental conviction that homosexuality is a result of sin’s disordering effects in creation, but our common conviction regarding civil rights in society, on the one hand, and gospel welcome in the church, on the other hand, give us much common ground in our daily discipleship.  In a powerful Forum editorial last summer titled “Speak the Truth in Love,” Sarah confesses that too few ‘conservatives’ have gone out of their way to say all gay people are welcome, precious, loved by God--the way that ‘liberals’ have.  Too few have devoted their time and energy to denouncing all forms of public and private discrimination, abuse, reviling.  “Learn to love those who disagree with you,” she argues, “no one is won over to the truth by shame, reviling, or condemnation.”  In fact, she goes on, “pray for those who promote false teaching. Pray for them by name. Tell them you are praying for them.  Ask them to pray for you too.”  No one has told me they are praying for me yet, but I’d welcome it!  Can we pray for those with whom we disagree? Can we tell them we are, and why?  What if we did this in humility, and not as an attack cloaked in piety?

When I received the call to Luther Seminary, one of my mentors and former pastors, Susan Briehl, wrote to me with words of love and gravity: “Christian,” she said, “you will now be a teacher of the church, accountable for its life to Scripture and the Confessions, and to our Lord.”  A reminder of what I committed myself to in confirmation and later at ordination.  Listening to Paul and Sarah Hinlicky, and others like them, teaches me to make my arguments with the best opposing view in mind.  Anyone can dismiss and even ridicule the lame arguments on the other side. What credit is it to you if you only love those who agree with you and ridicule those you oppose?  I say to you, love those you disagree with, and listen well to them, humbly asking how they may be right, and letting their wisdom give shape to your own.  After listening well, I must sit with the charge that I have swallowed the Holy Spirit, feathers and all, and am simply making up a new gospel.^[2]  I hope those with whom I disagree will sit with the charge that they have made tradition an idol and the gospel a dead, rather than a living, word.  Together, we are accountable to Jesus Christ who, through the Holy Spirit, calls us and the whole Christian church. 

 

Woe to us if we, like the disciples, don’t understand Jesus and are afraid to ask him.  Again and again, he invites us into his very death and resurrection, dying to sin, and rising to new life in him.  Only through dying to our desire to be right, to be powerful, to be on God’s side, can we be raised again to be last of all, and servant of all.  In that pattern, so powerfully portrayed in our hymn of the day, we meet again God’s ways in the world:

power in weakness,

            wisdom in folly,

                        living in dying. 

May it be so for us, Luther, and may it be so for the ELCA.

---

^[1] Research continually shows that teens and young adults are 1) much more likely than their elders to personally know a gay person and 2) much more likely support changing the church’s historic teaching on homosexuality. 

^[2] A claim of James Nestingen in his post-assembly commentary titled, “Joining the Unchurched” posted on the WordAlone website.

Comments

[Sarah Wilson]

I'm praying for you, Chris. Please pray for me.
Sarah Hinlicky Wilson

[Chip May]

Chris, thanks for posting this. I appreciate your humility and willingness to listen to others. I especially like the idea of finding the best opposing views and seekeing them out. Maybe we will be changed by them, maybe we will sharpen our views, maybe we will find common ground.
Thanks,
Chip May

[Peter]

Chris,
Powerful sermon. Thank you.

I was particularly pleased to see that Sarah Hinlicky Wilson was the first to respond. It's a tribute to you both.

I'm praying for you, too.

Peter

[Nadar]

I have read your article. I have been a member of the ELCA for over 20 years of my life. I am certainly not a person who could quote the Bible as a way of making an argument for inclusion. I am no longer a member of the ELCA. I can't say that there was only one reason for my leaving the church. There were many reasons. I have know many people and still know many that are gay. I know that being gay is only part of what makes each of them who they are. I have a hard time feeling that god is really that concerned about whether they are gay or not. There certainly are many other issues we all care about. The people that often speak against including any large group of morale people in their church often have little understanding of what being gay is and what it is not. The Biblicial arguments seem to be secondary to other major misunderstandings about who these people are that we are not being included.

I will pray for you.