‘No
Male and Female’
Ruminations
on the New Creation
Missio
Dei: Boston Colloquy
GBHEM,
UMC
November
2017
Robert Allan Hill
Abstract
and Key Points: The paper explores the
ancient, biblical vision of the new creation.
A reckoning with ‘missio Dei’, in our time and for our connectional
situation, deserves and requires such a comparative reference. Within the exploration of the new creation,
the gospel affirmation of the full humanity of gay people readily arises. This paper moves from pastoral experience to
theological traditions to scriptural interpretation to reasoned debate. * Forty
years of pastoral ministry carry the content of the rumination in the first
section. * The Wesley quadrilateral, applied to traditions and temptations in
theological reflection, shapes the second section. *Exegesis and exposition of Galatians in
general, and Galatians 3:28 in particular, with reliance on the best extant
commentary on Galatians (Martyn, Anchor Bible) grounds the work of the third
section. * The fourth and last section attempts to bring reason to bear,
following experience, tradition and scripture, regarding the trouble and
dilemma for the UMC now, in conversation with the recent collection of writings
by general superintendents (Finding Our Way).
The gospel affirms the full
humanity of gay people, as shown in experience, tradition, scripture and
reason.
A. Pastoral Experience
I am grateful for the magnanimous,
loving people whom we have known in the experience of pastoral ministry, who have
embodied and awaited the new creation.
Jan and I went to London in late August
2017 to celebrate our 40th wedding anniversary. We had not been there for several years. Yet the memories and ghosts of earlier visits
quickened quickly, once we had landed. We had taken a church group through
London in 2000. One parishioner, then in her mid-eighties, along with her
husband struggled to move her luggage along through customs, back then. I could feel her alongside us in customs
again this summer. She sang in the
choir; she led in the service ministry; she volunteered to answer the office
phone. In her early years she had ridden
along with her mother to Methodist gatherings in New Jersey, to sort out the
shape of the WSCS. She remembered the
mission work in China before it ended.
When asked about her service, her giving, her happy singing, and her
faith she invariably said, ‘We just don’t want to leave anyone behind’. That was her way of speaking about the missio Dei, the divine inclusive
incursion into the orb of the human condition, by the way of the guidance to
leave no one behind. She very much
meant, by the way, to include gay people in the loving evangelism and
stewardship of the church, in its own frail attempts to live into the missio Dei—‘we just don’t want to leave
anyone behind’.
On our
recent London excursion, once we were settled into a hotel near Westminster
Abbey, other ghosts and memories emerged. Alongside, by the mind’s eye,
sauntered long dead Ralph Ward, our one-time general superintendent, who took a
group of us in 1972 to London and into the Abbey. He made sure we saw the Methodist sites. He arranged a dinner at Methodist Central
Hall, recalling Leslie Weatherhead. The
superintending minister of Central Hall moved us, moved us to tears, even those
of us only 17 at the time, speaking of the Second World War. Central Hall, he reminded us, had hosted the
birth of the United Nations. This
summer, Jan and I worshipped at Westminster Abbey, our feet resting on the
memorial to William Wilberforce, and then went across the street to see the
Hall again. In 1977 or so, Ralph Ward,
by then removed to New York City, hosted some of us who were by then seminarians
in the same city, at a Friday evening gathering at Washington Square UMC, to
support ministry with gay people. He and
his Manhattan DS, (if memory serves, the Rev. Bernie Kirkland), presided with
grace and love: ‘this work is crucial to the future life of the church’, said
Ward. Some years later, after his retirement, Jan
and I saw Ralph and Arlene in the narthex of Riverside Church, after worship
which concluded that day with the singing of ‘Love Divine, All Loves Excelling’.
Finish then thy new creation…
We
also sang that hymn at the funeral of Arlene Chapman in Watertown, N.Y, in 1989.
Her husband Bruce (BU undergraduate,
Yale Divinity), along with my Dad, took me to my first major league baseball
game at age 8 in Cooperstown, NY. (The last place teams, Al and NL, were
conscripted to play once a year upstate, as punishment for their losing ways. One of the teams was, of course, the
Mets). Driving home, I foolishly waved
my new Mets hat at a passerby on Route 20.
The wind blew it away. But Bruce
turned the car around and we found the thing.
In 2011, at Annual Conference, Bruce spoke quietly and gently into the
microphone, “In 1980 and 1984 I was a
General Conference delegate. I opposed
the inclusion of gay people in orders and marriage. Others did too. How utterly wrong I was. How foolishly wrong we were.”
Bruce still supports Boston
University, with an annual gift to Marsh Chapel. Tom Trotter was the first person to preach at
Marsh Chapel, after it was finished in 1949. Today Tom’s grandson is an intern
at the same chapel. Both Bruce and Tom
were at BU during the Thurman and King years.
As a pastor, Bruce could tell you what every pastor knows who has at
least five years of good working experience:
virtually every extended family system in Methodism and beyond has,
somewhere, at least one gay person in it.
I asked Bruce a year ago what he would teach seminarians about ministry,
after his own 60 years of experience: ‘Stay close to your people’, he said.
Jan
and I have had the honor to serve in ten churches, one district, one University
pulpit, and several general church efforts, including this promising one in Boston
2017, focused on missio Dei. Every congregation we have served has had gay
women and men in it, or in the extended families therein. That any of these good people have stayed at
all in connection with our connection given our exclusion of them from the missio Dei is truly a wonder. I love my church and am staying with it. Born and baptized a Methodist, I will so die
and be buried. I am not giving over the
church I love to a mode of exclusion contrary to the heart of the church in
which I was raised, and have lived and served.
But we should be mightily circumspect, considering missio Dei, about what
bigotry against gay people has already done--to us. I pass over the innumerable women and men who
have left ours for ordination in other denominations. I pass over the hurt to evangelism and
stewardship that comes with ribald exclusionary doctrine. I pass over the diminishment of membership,
particularly in the congregations of the US north and extended north, due to young
adults, especially millennials, who sense the homophobia in our sanctuaries and
find another place. Here is what I
mean: this is a spiritual issue, not one
of numbers, a theological issue, not one of members, a biblical issue, not one
of bodily strength, a homiletical issue, not one of disciplinary
interpretation. This cuts to and cuts into
our soul. Gay people are people, but we
preach otherwise. God loves gay people,
but we teach otherwise. In Christ ‘there
is no male and female’, but we argue otherwise.
Such spiritual, theological, biblical and homiletical malignancy and
mendacity is crippling us.
Nevertheless,
a lifetime in pastoral ministry has provided Jan and me with many snapshots of
grace touching the lives of gay people, that grace being the beachhead of God’s
incursion into life: here is a young
man, age 19, in the rough, poor rural upstate NY border country, realizing his
identity, struggling with his family, his church, and himself, and talking
slowly to a novice minister, in the snow of February, 1982; here is that same pastor, a bit older,
attending a community dinner in his city neighborhood, seated with 8 women—no,
he suddenly realizes, seated with 4 bright, happy, earnest, loving couples, September
1991; here is the minister calling on a
recently retired school teacher, and her partner, long time and long suffering
servants of God and neighbor and members of a United Methodist church, listening
as they are crying and crying out in bitterness over the ignorance and
exclusion they have known in a large, purportedly accepting city, 2004; here is a minister of the gospel, new to
University deanship, employing and deploying an openly gay campus minister to
serve across a large campus, one with a liberal history and spirit, that nonetheless
had never hired such a person for such a position, 2008. And here he is in
September of 2017 offering prayers, at the BU School of Public Health for those
who ministered to and those who died of AIDS thirty years earlier (often
without willing pastoral care from their churches). To repeat: any competent
pastor who has done the minimum two dozen or so weekly visits over at least five
years knows full well that almost every family system, near or far, has within
it gay women and men. This issue in relation
to missio Dei is not somehow out
there, long ago, far away, foreign, peripheral or minimal. Unresolved, the issue will hobble the
ministry of the church, across the globe. Missio
Dei, the mission of God or the sending of God, the preaching of the Gospel
of Jesus Christ, and him crucified, starts with God’s love. A preliminary incision to curtail the divine
love, and thus the missio dei, by
excluding, dehumanizing, and imprisoning gay people in a pseudo-biblical jail
constitutes the articulation of another gospel, not that there is any other
gospel. As Theodore Runyon argued in The New Creation: John Wesley’s Theology Today (Nashville: Abingdon, 1998), sanctification moves
from a gospel of new creation to the renewal of all creation: ‘The cosmic drama of the renewing of creation
begins, therefore, with the renewal of the imago dei in humankind
(12)…Salvation consists, therefore, not only in reconciliation but in service,
not only in an experienced sense of God’s reality and presence but in a life lived
out of that reality, extending divine transforming power into every aspect of
both individual and social existence (223)’.
B. Theological Traditions
I am
grateful for the open, broad minded traditions of our church, especially our theological
traditions, the spiritual waters in which we have learned to swim, from prone
float to butterfly, and especially the Wesley quadrilateral, that four verse hymn
to Jesus as our beacon not our boundary.
As we
consider the missio Dei, we could perhaps
give shared attention to our sources of authority for our apperception of that
mission, across the United Methodist Church.
At our best, our love of Christ shapes our love of Scripture and
tradition and reason and experience. We
are lovers and knowers too. Yet we are
ever in peril of loving what we should use and using what we should love, to
paraphrase Augustine. In particular we
sometimes come perilously close to the kind of idolatry that uses what we love. We are tempted, for our love Christ, to force
a kind of certainty upon what we love, to use what is meant to give confidence
as a force and form of faux certainty. It is tempting to substitute the the security
and protection of certainty for the freedom and grace of confidence. But faith is about confidence not
certainty. If we had certainty we would
not need faith.
1. Errancy
Your
love for Christ shapes your love of Scripture.
You love the Bible. You love its
Psalmic depths. Psalm 130 comes to
mind. You love its stories and their strange names. Obededom comes to mind. You love its proverbial wisdom. ‘One sharpens another’ comes to mind. You
love its freedom, its account of the career of freedom. The exodus comes to mind. You love its memory
of Jesus. His embrace of children comes
to mind. You love its honesty about religious life. Galatians comes to mind. You love its strangeness. John comes to mind. You love the Bible like Rudolph Bultmann
loved it, enough to know it through and through.
You
rely on the Holy Scripture to learn to speak of faith, and as the medium of
truth for the practice of faith. Around
our common tables in this colloquy we share this reliance and this love. We all love the Bible. I have been studying and teaching the Bible
for four decades. The fascinating
multiplicity of hearings, here, and the interplay of perspectives present,
absent, near, far, known, unknown, religious and unreligious, have a common
ground in regard for the Scripture. We may
all affirm Mr. Wesley’s aspiration: homo unius libri, to be a person of one
book.
But
the Bible is errant. It is theologically
tempting for us to go on preaching as if the last 250 years of study just did
not happen. They did. That does not mean that we should deconstruct
the Bible to avoid allowing the Bible to deconstruct us, or that we should
study the Bible in order to avoid allowing the Bible to study us. In fact, after demythologizing the Bible we
may need to re-mythologize the Bible too.
It is the confidence born of obedience, not some certainty born of fear
that will open the Bible to us. We need
not fear truth, however it may be known. Luke may not have had all his geographical
details straight. John includes the
woman caught in adultery, John 8, but not in its earliest manuscripts. Actually she, poor woman, is found at the end
of Luke in some texts. Paul did not
write the document from the earlier third century, 3 Corinthians. The
references to slavery in the New Testament are as errant and time bound as are
the references to women not speaking in church.
The references to women not speaking in church are as errant and time
bound as are the references to homosexuality.
The references to homosexuality are as errant and time bound as are the
multiple lists of the twelve disciples. Did you ever try to get the list just
right? Peter, Andrew, James, and
John—and after that it is a free-for-all. The various 'twelve’ listings are as errant
and time bound as the variations between John and the synoptic Gospels.
Our
discussion this week in Boston does not occur within traditions which affirm
the Scripture as the sole source of religious authority. We are not Baptists, Calvinists, or
Lutherans. We do not live within a Sola
Scriptura tradition. The Bible is
primary, foundational, fundamental, basic, prototypical—but not exclusively
authoritative. As an example, many
synoptic passages present an idealized memory of something that may or may not
have happened in the way accounted, somewhere along the Tiberian shore. Matthew is writing 55 years after the
ministry of Jesus. What do you remember
from 55 years ago? Nor were they written for that kind of certainty. They were formed in the faith of the church
to form the faith of the church. They
are, as W. Bruegemann once put it, stylized
memories.
2. Equality
You
love the tradition of the church as well.
Though with a scornful wonder we
see her sore oppressed…John Wesley loved the church’s tradition too, enough
to study it and to know it, and to seek its truth. One central ecclesiastical tradition of his
time, the tradition of apostolic succession, he termed a ‘fable’. Likewise, we lovers of the church tradition
will not be able to grasp for certainty in it, if that grasping dehumanizes
others. The Sabbath was made for the
human being, not the other way around, in our tradition.
Our
linkage of the gifts of heterosexuality and ministry, however traditional, falls
before grace and freedom. We roundly
cajole our Roman Catholic brethren for requiring universal combination of the
gifts of celibacy and ministry for ordination.
‘You may love God or a woman but not both at the same time.’ But then we turn around and by the same logic
require universal combination of the gifts of heterosexuality and ministry for
ordination. ‘You may love God or your
partner but not both at the same time’. It is theologically tempting to shore
up by keeping out. But it has no
future. Equality will triumph over
exclusion, just as gospel ever trumps tradition. It is
coming like the glory of the morning on the wave…
3. Evolution
You
love the mind, the reason. You love the
prospect of learning. You love the Lord with heart and soul and mind. You love
the reason in the same way that Charles Darwin, a good Anglican, loved the
reason. You love its capacity to see
things differently.
Of course, reason unfettered can
produce hatred and holocaust. Learning
for its own sake needs the fetters of virtue and piety. More than anything else, learning must finally
be rooted in loving. Do we still hear
the one thing requested in Psalm 27? To
inquire in the temple. Inquiry!
The
universe is 14 billion years old. The
earth is 4.5 billion years old. 500 million years ago multi-celled organisms
appeared in the Cambrian explosion. 400
million years ago plants sprouted. 370
million years ago land animals emerged.
230 million years ago dinosaurs appeared (and disappeared 65 million
years ago). 200,000 years ago hominids
arose. Every human being carries 60 new
mutations out of 6 billion cells. Yes,
evolution through natural selection by random mutation is a reasonable hypothesis,
says F. Collins, father of the human genome project, author of The
Language of God, and, strikingly, a person of faith. Yet 38% of Americans reject evolution (Gallup poll, May 22, 2017).
It
is tempting to disjoin learning and vital piety, but it is not loving to
disjoin learning and vital piety. They
go together. The God of Creation is the
very God of Redemption. Their
disjunction may help us cling for a while to a kind of faux certainty. But their conjunction is the confidence born
of obedience. And their conjunction
waits for us on the shore line of the new creation, the forecourt of the missio Dei.
4. Existence
You
love experience. The gift of experience
in faith is the heart of your love of Christ.
You love Christ. Like Howard Thurman loved the mystical ranges of
experience, you do too. You love experience more than enough to examine your
experience, to think about and think through what you have seen and done.
But
a simple or general appeal to the love of experience, in our time, is not
appealing or loving. It is not
experience, but our very existence which lies, right now, under the shadow of
global violence. We are going to need to
move our focus toward a balance of religious experience with existential
engagement in our time, in our culture, in our world. For example:
to have any future worthy of the name we shall need to foreswear
preemptive violence. How the stealthy
entry of such an ethical perspective could enter our national civil discourse,
2002-2017, without voluminous debate and vehement challenge, is a measure of
our longing for false certainties. Our
existence itself is on the line in discussions or lack of discussions about
violent action that is preemptive, unilateral, imperial, and reckless. One thinks of Lincoln saying of slavery,
‘those who support it might want to try it for themselves’. Not one of us wants to be the victim of
preemptive violence. We may argue about
the need for response, and even for the need of some kinds of anticipatory
defense. But preemption? It will occlude existence itself. Our future lies on the narrower path of
responsive, communal, sacrificial, prudent behavior and requires of us, in Niebuhr’s
phrase, ‘a spiritual discipline against resentment’.
There
are indeed theological temptations in an unbalanced love of Scripture,
tradition, reason or experience. Let us
face them down. Let us face them down
together. Let us do so by lifting our
voices to admit errancy, affirm equality, explore evolution, and admire existence. The measure of ministry today, a new creational
missio Dei, in the tradition of a
responsible Christian openness, is found in our willingness to address errancy,
equality, evolution and existence, in our rendering of the meaning of
traditions.
C. Scriptural
Interpretation
I
am grateful for my teachers, especially Raymond Brown and J. Louis Martyn, who
together sparked and sustained a life-time of love of the Bible, a love of the
strange world of the Bible. Martyn, in
particular, has had a lastingly personal impact on my life work in preaching
and teaching. It is his subtle,
apocalyptic interpretation of Galatians which has inspired many of us for
decades, and to which, in the course of rumination upon the new creation, we
now turn: J. Louis Martyn, Galatians:
The Anchor Bible: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary (New
York: Doubleday, 1997)
1. Exegesis
Every
generation comes upon the strange world of the Bible for itself, afresh. Paul’s letter to the churches of Galatia,
from the mid-50’s of the first century, may open for us some new and truly
remarkable insights, especially fit for those in United Methodist ministry in
2017. This fiery little letter has
exploded before: at the outset of the mission to the Gentiles (Paul); at the
creation of the New Testament (Marcion); at the dawn of the Reformation
(Luther—who called the letter "my Katie von Bora"); in the Wesleyan
movement ("finish then thy new
creation…"); in the heart of the Civil Rights movement (M. L.King,
"Letter from Birmingham Jail"). And why would that surprise? Consider the key
sentences (unless otherwise noted, Scriptural citations in this paper are from
the RSV): "(The gospel) came through a revelation (apocalypse) of Jesus
Christ." (Gal 1: 12b). "I have
been crucified with Christ. It is no
longer I who live but Christ who lives in me, and the life I now live in the
flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God who loved me and gave himself up
for me." (Gal 2: 20) "There is
neither Jew nor Greek; there is neither slave nor free; there is no "male
and female"; for all of you are One in Christ Jesus." (Gal 3:28). "For Freedom Christ has set us
free! Stand fast, therefore, and do not
be enslaved again." (Gal 5:1) "God forbid that I should boast in
anything except the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which the cosmos has
been crucified to me, and I to the cosmos.
For neither is circumcision anything nor is uncircumcision
anything. What is something then is the
New Creation." (Gal 6:14)
When these theme sentences from Galatians,
the Magna Carta of Christian Liberty, are read seriatim, steadily, and in a
spirited mode, one hears something entirely new. The new creation is the very missio Dei. "Instead of being the
holy community that stands apart from the profane orb of the world, then, the
church is the beachhead God is planting in his war of liberation from all
religious differentiations. The
distinction between church and world is in nature apocalyptic rather than
religious…’God has founded his church beyond religion’ (Bonhoeffer) (J. L.
Martyn, 37).”
What does Galatians 3:28 offer us, here and now? In this passage, Paul makes use of a
pre-Pauline baptismal formula, which he then interprets. In the apocalyptic now of the New Person of
Christ—in full reality, that is—these oppositions no longer exist: religious\unreligious; rich\poor;
male\female. Here Paul teaches as he
preaches, not of creation, but of new creation.
He intentionally, sharply, and harshly contrasts the former with the
latter, the creation which is in reality non-creation with the new
creation. Furthermore, and most
pointedly, Paul intentionally recites and rejects Genesis 1:27. "The
variation in the wording of the last clause suggests that the author of the
formula drew on Gen 1:27, thereby saying that in baptism the structure of the
original creation had been set aside." (Martyn, 376).
Martyn places Galatians alongside
Romans in this way: “In Rom 1: 18-32, Paul uses an argument explicitly based on
creation, drawing certain conclusions from the “things God has made” in “the
creation of the cosmos” (Rom 1:20). In effect, Paul says in this passage that
God’s identity and the true sexual identity of human beings as male and female
can both be inferred from creation…What a
different argument lies before us in Gal 3:26-29, 6:14-15! Here the basis
is explicitly not creation, but rather the new creation in which the building
blocks of the old creation are declared to be non-existent. If one were to
recall the affirmation ‘It is not good that man should be alone” (Gen 2:18),
one would also remember that the creational response to loneliness is married
fidelity between man and woman (Gen 2:24, Mark 10:6-7). But in its announcement
of the new creation, the apocalyptic baptismal formula declares the erasure of
the distinction between male and female. Now the answer to loneliness is not
only marriage, but rather the new-creational community that God is calling into
being in Christ, the church marked by mutual love, as it is led by the Spirit
of Christ (Gal 3:28). (Martyn, 381)
Martyn, again, to conclude:
“The result of such a radical vision and of its radical argumentation is
the new-creational view of the people of God...It is Christ and the community
of those incorporated into him who lie beyond religious distinctions... Baptism
is a participation both in Christ’s death and in his life; for genuine,
eschatological life commences when one is taken into the community of the new
creation, in which unity in God’s Christ has replaced religious-ethnic
differentiation. In a word, religious and ethnic differentiations and that
which underlies them—the Law— are identified in effect as the “old things” that
have now “passed away”, giving place to the new creation (2 Cor 5:17).”
(Martyn, 382)
2. Exposition
This initial exegetical examination
reminds us that Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians is one of the great high peaks
of the New Testament. It is about a
whole new life, a new creation. In fact,
it may be the highest peak in the whole range, the Mount Everest of the
Bible. It is written to address this
question: “Must a Gentile become a Jew before he can become a Christian?”. Is there a religious condition to be met,
prior to the reception of God’s apocalypse in Christ?
After
Paul had been converted to Christ, he spent 17 years in unremarkable, quiet
ministry. We know nothing of these two
decades spent in Arabia. All the letters
we have of Paul come from a later decade.
Paul was converted to Christ, as he says earlier in this letter, “by
apocalypse”. Christ revealed himself to
Paul. Thus, for Paul, the authority in
Christ is not finally in the Scripture, nor in traditions, nor in reason, nor
in experience. Christ captured Paul
through none of these, but rather through revelation, the apocalypse of
God. There is a singular, awesome
freedom in the way Paul understands Christ.
We have yet, I believe, in the church that bears His name, to
acknowledge in full that freedom.
After
these 17 years, Paul went up to Jerusalem to meet with the pillars of the church. Can you picture the moment? All in one room: Paul, Peter, Andrew, James, John, Titus,
Barnabas. And in that room there was
argument, difference. Paul preached the
cross of Christ to unreligious people, and the unreligious--the uncircumcised--heard. What would the Jerusalem elders say? Jesus was a Jew, and had been
circumcised. So also were all the first
Christians, including Paul himself. But
God had done something astounding. It
was the Gentiles, not the Jews, who fervently believed the Good News. Should
these unreligious children of God be brought back into the Covenant of
Circumcision? No, they all agreed,
no. God had done something new. So, Peter went to the circumcised, and Paul
went to the uncircumcised. Peter went to
the Jews, and Paul to the Gentiles. They
agreed to disagree, agreeably. And the
meeting ended and it was settled. The
freedom of the gospel trumped the ordered inheritance of tradition.
But do
you know how sometimes it is not the meeting but the meeting after the meeting
that counts? What was settled in
Jerusalem was unsettled later. Peter
could not be counted on to hold the line, and Paul told him so, to his
face. Peter was inconsistent about
freedom—sometimes he ate with the unclean Gentiles—that’s all of us by the
way. Sometimes, when somebody was
watching, he backed away. And Paul
caught him at it and as he says, “opposed him to his face” (Gal. 2:11). We could wish that all opposition in church
was so clean, direct, personal, and honest.
“One of us is wrong and I think it’s you!” Paul doesn’t talk about Peter, he talks to Peter.
Paul
envisions the end of religion, Christ “the end of the law” (Rom. 10:4). In its place, he pictures the community of
faith working through love. In our conversation that would put us close ‘missio Dei’. Whatever does not come from faith is sin. Your primal identity does not come from your
religion. Christ brings a whole new
life, the end of religion and the beginning of the church, understood as the
community of faith working through love.
The
new creation moves even farther, from religion to economics. As potent as is the power of religion to
determine identity, money is stronger still.
This is why in the Gospels Jesus speaks so repeatedly about money, about
its dangers…where moth and rust consume.
If you are used to solving your problems by writing a check, you are
doubly endangered by the real problems, for which no check is large enough.
Paul
sees what we still hardly ever do see. Finally, one’s place on the map of
economic life is not one’s primal identity.
It is interesting to remember that John Wesley at the end of his life
worried about the growing wealth of his poor Methodists. They did what he told them. They earned all they could. They saved all they could. They gave all they could. They prospered. And in their prosperity, they were endangered. They forgot the poor, once they were not
poor. Their diligence, frugality, and
industry, all wondrously good things, also contained the potential to obscure
their primal identity. We are not what we
spend, nor are we what we buy. We are
stewards, not owners. And finally, we
only truly own what we give away. Neither
slave nor free. No, your primal identity
does not come from your wallet, either.
What
could mark more indelibly than religion and money?
In the
new creation, there is no gender. In direct contradiction to the unfortunate
statement this summer of the ‘Nashville Nine’:
in Christ there is ‘no male and female’.
At least, according to Paul in
Galatians. Gender is swallowed up in victory.
We have yet, I doubt, to take seriously
the Good News of liberation found in these passages. Your identity does not come from your
sexuality, your gender, your orientation.
In
this passage, Paul points to a clue to our discussions about missio Dei. Here, in Galatians 3: 28, your identity is not
to be inferred from creation….but from new creation! This apocalyptic baptismal formula declares
the erasure—who says there is nothing radical about Christ?—of the distinction
we so heighten, that between male and female.
In the
missio Dei, in the new creation, God
is calling into existence a new community of faith working through love. There is our identity. Not what is natural but what is heavenly
about us forms our primary identity.
That is, the Bible itself, from the vantage point of this great mountain
passage, opens the way for an understanding of identity that is not just nature
or creation, but new creation. This is
the community of faith working through love.
Here, there is a place where God is doing something new, revealing
something new. And, most strangely, it
may be those who are not so easily confined by the creational categories of
male and female, who are on the edge of the new creation. I know what Paul writes in Romans, but you
still must ask yourself, at this point, which is the crucial Pauline passage,
Galatians 3 or Romans 1? It is a serious question. It is in Galatians that Paul speaks of the new
creation. Gender and orientation do not
provide our primal identity. ‘No male
and female’ means no gay and straight, no homosexual and heterosexual. God is doing something new, which includes
all in the community of faith working through love, and includes with full
grace the full humanity of gay people. This is what the Bible, the Bible,
teaches.
The
trajectory of Paul’s preaching in Galatians, and thus in total, makes ample
space in our churches for gay people. If
you love Jesus, and especially if you love the Bible, then you may just find
courage not only to defend a moral life in a post-moral culture, but also to
preserve freedom for those who have found a whole new life, and so are
harbingers of the new creation.
D. Reasoned Debate: Finding
Our Way
I am grateful to those women and men
who have given their lives in ministry through the superintending leadership of
our connection, and especially for their steady willingness to ‘reason
together’, with an irenic spirit, even across profound differences. A recent set of examples is found in Finding Our Way: Love and Law in the United Methodist Church. Rueben P. Job, Neil M. Alexander, eds.
(Nashville: Abingdon, 2014).
With
courage, several church leaders recently published this book of divergent views
regarding faith and homosexuality in United Methodism. Out of sincere respect for these writers, I
want to engage their work, in reasoned discourse. With respect, and out of
love, I differ with most of what is written in Finding Our Way. The passages below will give the details. But the singular heart of that difference is…the gospel itself. I move in four steps
here: summary, overview, discussion, and
concluding thoughts.
Summary:
After a personal introductory frame from Job and Alexander, seven UMC
general superintendents offer 10-20 page statements about Methodism and gay people,
following which Job concludes with a call to prayer. Two write directly about the full humanity of
gay people, one in affirmation (Talbert) and one in denial (Yambasu). Three offer administrative insights (Palmer—the
discipline must be upheld), (Lowry—the center cannot hold), (Carter—the connection needs support). Two offer mildly inclusive reflections on
recent conference level experience (Ward, Wenner).
Overview:
One feature of this collection--at least to my mind and ear and perhaps
I am wrong--is its lack of sustained theological reflection, biblical
interpretation, and homiletical assessment.
Does the gospel offer grace, freedom, love, acceptance, pardon, and hope
to sexual minorities or not? Does the
gospel disdain silent or spoken bigotry against sexual minorities or not? Where do the crucial Scriptures (John 14,
Galatians 3, Ecclesiastes 3, Amos 5), or the tradition (Bristol, Appomattox,
Seneca Falls), or human reason (diagnostic library, psychological research,) and
experience (case studies and stories of gay children harmed by religious
bigotry) intersect with these chapters?
Not, it seems, with frequency, granted occasional interjections, more
from Talbert and Carter than others.
One major exception is the attention Lowry pays to Acts 15 (and so, it
might have been, to Galatians 2), the Jerusalem Conference. He is right to do so. His reading of the passages however is, to
my mind, the opposite of their meaning (see, above, J. L. Martyn, Anchor Bible
Commentary, Galatians, among many
others). Lowry argues that the point of
the Jerusalem Conference was order. Was it?
Or was it freedom, the freedom for which Christ sets free, the freedom over
against the inherited order and tradition, to include the uncircumcised? Paul
in Galatians 2 leaves behind tradition for gospel. (Freedom, not order.) The uncircumcised are the recipients of the
gospel (then) as are gay people (today).
Lowry: ‘the famous debate at the Jerusalem Council in Acts 15 is a
debate over order, the doctrinal discipline of the church’ (74). Well, in the account as recorded in Galatians
2, the debate is about the gospel, about freedom, not about order. At the Jerusalem Conference, according to
Galatians 2, Paul, in choosing to leave behind religious order, textual
rigidity and an inherited holiness code in order to preach the gospel to the
‘genitally unclean’, men who were not circumcised on the eighth day, led the
church to decide that gospel trumps tradition, and grace trumps order. The Jerusalem Conference is the perfect biblical
citation for this debate--when read by and through the lens of Galatians 2 and
following. In Christ ‘there is neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free,
there is no male or female’. Nor gay nor
straight. Are gay people ‘people’ or
not? 5/5 or 3/5 human? (We have a bad habit in this country of
finding ways to fractionalize the marginalized.) We baptize, confirm, commune,
forgive and bury gay people. Yet we
somehow cannot find our way to marry or ordain them? Can we not live ‘in all things charity’?
Discussion:
Palmer’s distinction to prefer and
privilege the term ‘uphold’ over ‘enforce’ (his assigned theme), in
interpretation of the book of discipline stands out in the flow of the book. Ward honors the ‘brave witness’ of a
lesbian couple who suffered the bigotry of the Mississippi conference to bear
witness to their love for each other. Talbert has said and done the right
thing, well prior to this collection, and his essay is the truest of the
seven. He simply and categorically
states that the discriminatory language about gays in our church is wrong and
cannot claim allegiance, loyalty or support.
The UMC today provides ‘liturgical resources for pastors who may choose
to use facilities of congregations to bless animals, fowls, inanimate objects,
and more. Are not our LGBT sisters and
brothers of sacred worth like all God’s creatures’? (37) He and his African colleague are the only two
who fully and directly state what they personally think regarding the full
humanity of gay people. Carter calculates (perhaps accurately,
but there is no documentation) that small progressive jurisdictions have more
presence, voice, vote and leadership on boards and agencies than do larger and
more moderate jurisdictions. Yambasu.
Yambasu equates homosexuality with promiscuity, sexual slavery, and
adultery, describes the Bible as infallible, and places the denigration of gay
people on par with the venerable inheritance of the ten commandments (87). His is the voice, or at least the chosen
voice for this volume, of Methodism in Africa.
To the extent that his view represents African Methodism, it is a communicative
benefit to have such a remarkable and disappointing perspective stated in the
raw. Lowry. Lowry implores us to
keep covenant with one another. Many
would respond that the question is not whether to keep covenant, but in and
about what to keep covenant. If the
gospel of Jesus Christ, crucified, requires the affirmation of the full
humanity of gay people and the full rejection of bigotry against sexual
minorities, then the point of covenant is mutually to commit to that
gospel. Covenant on behalf of rules of
discipline that deny the gospel is false covenant. Today, as Lowry would perhaps concede, a
substantial USA UMC majority now affirms same gender marriage, and ordination
for gay people. Wenner concludes: “I pray and work for a future where we will find
ways to embrace diversity on many issues, including human sexuality, allowing
us to think differently. Perhaps we may
even be able to live with different answers concerning clergy who live in
faithful and loving homosexual partnerships and those who choose to conduct
same-gender marriages.” (98)
Thoughts:
The first task of an interpreter is to honor and affirm the texts
interpreted. In this case, rightly, our
general superintendents, interpreters of the book of discipline, affirm the
value of the book to be interpreted.
Once the general conference has passed off a version of the discipline
for another four years, it falls to the bishops, along with others, to
interpret and apply it. It may help all
of us to rehearse again some of the basic modes of interpretation of texts,
biblical texts and others, taught and learned years earlier. Most passages, including your favorite
scriptural passage, parable, story, psalm or teaching, allow of more than one
faithful reading. There may for sure be
out of bounds readings, but multiple legitimate ones, too. Simply on a non-literalist hermeneutic,
diversity of readings of the discipline itself should be expected. So, the dozen or so affirmations in the
discipline of the requirement of pastoral care for gay people may rightly be
read as a requirement for pastoral ministry for gay people who are getting
married or discerning vocations. Gay
marriage and ordination may be understood as not only permissible, but
required, to the fulfillment of these paragraphs. With respect of other contentious issues, the
Discipline allows for difference. For
instance, Discipline affirms a moderate pro-choice position regarding
abortion. But when it comes to marriage
and ordination, we do not exclude those who practice surgical abortion, nor
those who reject such practice. We have
a position as a church. But we allow for
differences in practice, practices that both agree with and conflict with our
stated position. For instance, we further do admit that while all abhor war,
some are pacifist and some are not, and all are part of the UMC. Why we can allow latitude regarding issues of
abortion and warfare, but not regarding love and marriage, is difficult to
understand. Finally, on marriage: UMCBOD Para. 340 2.a.3.a. (Duties
of pastor) To perform the marriage ceremony after due counsel with the parties
involved and in accordance with the laws of the state and the rules of the
United Methodist Church. The decision to
perform the ceremony shall be the right and responsibility of the pastor. So.
Do we mean this? Are we going to
‘enforce the discipline’? Here the
burden of responsibility is clearly, unequivocally placed upon the pastor whose
‘right and responsibility’ it is to decide to marry a couple. There is no shading here, no hem or haw. The pastor decides. After due counsel (pastoral care) and in
accordance with state law and church rules.
No comment here is offered to the situation when state law and church
rules, both of which are to be upheld, are different. Rightly, the Discipline leaves these
difficult (pastoral) decisions in the hands of the minister. “The decision to perform the ceremony shall
be the right and responsibility of the pastor”.
Not the General Conference. Not
the General Superintendent. Not the
District Superintendent. Not the Charge
Conference. The pastor. As it should be.
