August 23, 2005
Just a little more than a year ago in the middle of last summer there came a defining moment that seemed to paint the year ahead as the year of Job. You know the moment I mean. I was in my office attending to business as executive director of the Ministers Council, the wonderful professional society of pastoral leaders in the American Baptist Churches USA that I have loved and served in various capacities for over twenty-five years. As a matter of fact, I was working on exciting plans for the 2004 Senate meeting that was soon to take place at Green Lake.
Life was indeed good - much as it was for Job at the beginning of the biblical book that recounts his story, before his life fell apart. The Ministers Council was engaged in a three-part process to strengthen ministerial leaders. We had won a $2 million Lilly grant to fund collegial covenant groups for clergy and at that point already had over 1,200 of us learning and sharing and praying together monthly. We had just completed a spiritually nourishing national conference for pastoral leaders and had our eyes on another one for 2006. We had plans to strengthen the constituent Ministers Councils so that we could even more effectively minister to the ministers of this denomination.
Then the phone rang. On the other end was a region executive minister from the other side of the country, who presented an ultimatum that shook the world as I knew it: "You have a senator who plans to marry her female partner this summer just before your Senate meeting. You must refuse to seat her."
Without taking all our time to rehearse every detail of what transpired, let me simply say that the shape of the year ahead immediately shifted as the Ministers Council took center stage in the American Baptist warfare over who gets to determine denominational DNA. Here are the sides I have heard articulated during this challenging year. Are we a body ready to concede the delicate balance between local church autonomy and interdependence because we have lost associational principle practices that make that balance possible and desire centralized control to replace the hard work of hashing out issues together? Or are we the Baptist body birthed by Roger Williams and colleagues in 1638, where there is space for all believers in Jesus Christ because each must act in the humility of knowing that I just may not possess all truth, and scriptural authority is protected by Baptist principles that allow a congregation to hear God speaking to it in its context? This year has turned out to be not so much a referendum on the presenting issue of homosexuality as on the manner of dealing with differing convictions about how Scripture informs our life together.
When the executive committee decided that on the basis of our bylaws we would seat the senator in question since there is no provision for anybody to dictate whom any local body may send as their representative so long as that person is in good standing and abides by the Covenant and Code of Ethics, there were two immediate responses. First, my Blackberry was overwhelmed by a flood of email from persons of all persuasions expressing such anger that when I sent a message with a typo that referenced email as emaul, I took a second look and decided that emaul was indeed the operative word. This is a world of intracontinental ballistic letters apparently designed not to communicate but to destroy. A characteristic of our time is anger, indeed hatred, and my experience is that it comes from all sides.
Second, as you well know, a proposed bylaws amendment to specify whom the body may seat quickly followed our decision, to begin parliamentary process at this meeting. Through that proposal the agenda of the year ahead was determined by the need at last to engage the pastoral leaders of this denomination in dialogue and discernment through Jerusalem Councils based on the early Church's struggles in Acts 10-15, about whether we can go on together given our vast differences over biblical interpretation and homosexuality, and behind that, as it turns out, a host of other issues over which we do not see eye to eye: variations of conviction on women in ministry and abortion, to be sure, but also such basics as what is the point of it all anyway, to get people into our churches and safely to heaven, or to work for a world of justice and peace here and now -- or is it both? Along the way we have encountered a threat to disfellowship the organization from any ties to the ABC if we do not vote "the right way."
Perhaps you can imagine why at that point I felt like Job, with all the blessings of God turning to ashes. All our positive projects had to be set aside for at least a year as we sought through Jerusalem Council conversations around the country to prepare the body for yesterday’s vote that we knew could end up losing us one end of the theological spectrum or the other or maybe both, as well as our place at the family table. Any one of those losses would be tragic.
But here is the gist of what is on my heart this morning to say to you and to myself: in retrospect this has turned out to be not so much the year of Job as the year of Jonah. You remember Jonah, the story we sometimes dismiss as a whale of a tale, a fairy tale for children. This is no story for kids but it is indeed a whale of a tale, tough to swallow its implications for us in our moment.
You see, Jonah was a prophet during an age when Israel was a conquered colony of Assyria. The word of the Lord came to Jonah, "Go at once to Nineveh, that great city, and cry out against it; for their wickedness has come up before me." In other words, God expected Jonah to travel just about to the other side of the known world into the Assyrian capital city of more than 120,000 that took three days to cross, to preach for the redemption of the other side, indeed the oppressor. With every fiber of his being Jonah so hated the Ninevites that he refused to be an instrument of God's will to redeem that people. So he took the logical step, he hopped a ship to set out to flee in the other direction, to Tarshish and away from the presence of the Lord – or so he thought.
You know how the story goes, how God hurled a storm at that ship and the sailors sought to save their own lives by tossing Jonah into the sea where a great fish swallowed him and Jonah remained there in the belly of the whale for three days and three nights. Plenty of time to reconsider… Then God spoke to the fish and it spit Jonah up on dry land. Once again: "Get up, go to Nineveh, and proclaim the message that I tell you."
Against his will Jonah obeyed. He went to Nineveh and preached the shortest and most effective sermon on record anywhere, just one sentence, whereupon the Ninevites believed God and engaged the entire city, people and animals as well, in a ritual of repentance, and God did not visit calamity on that city. Now isn't that good news? However, the story goes on, "But this was very displeasing to Jonah, and he became angry."
Which brings us to us… Who wants to be an agent of God's redemption of the ones we perceive as seeking to destroy all we hold dear? One of the messages crossing my Blackberry screen put it this way: "Do I want peace, reconciliation, union, with the other side? No way!" No matter what our position in the current warfare tearing apart our denomination, how do we work up the empathy to cross over to the other side when we perceive their presence as a threat to our very own? Would we not also prefer to hop a ship away from such a call, even if it is a ship to denominational division? I confess that sitting in conversation after conversation in this year's Jerusalem Councils and in too many places hearing the tones of hatred being spoken in the name of love, my name has become Jonah.
The theologian Walter Wink has written extensively on the powers and principalities of biblical language. Far from being artifacts of a primitive cosmology, disembodied spirits that leap from the sky to coerce destructive behaviors, Wink characterizes the powers as the combined physicality and spirituality of the collectivities in which our lives are joined. The powers include nations, churches, organizations, and they have both inner and outer manifestations through which they live out their will. For example, when we think of Assyria and its capital city Nineveh, what leaps to mind is not just a physical nation in a particular place and time but also the spiritual animating force that drove it to its actions. Likewise, we can discern intertwined physical and spiritual realities in, say, American Baptist Evangelicals, the conservative force that has been operative in the denomination, or the Association of Welcoming and Affirming Baptists, the force for openness.
Here's the thing: it is human nature to wish away a body set in opposition to our convictions, even to hate them and long for their defeat. But as Walter Wink analyzes the language of the Bible and the work of Jesus he directs us to the very place where God took Jonah. Wink elaborates three points: first, the powers are created for the good purposes of God; second, the powers are fallen short of those good purposes; and third - I always expect the ultimate third to direct us to the defeat of powers in opposition to us; every time I read this I am shocked all over again - third, the powers are to be redeemed.
Let me unpack that line of reasoning. The collectives in which our lives are engaged have in the mind of God a positive purpose, but in the nature of earthly matters they fall away from that high intention, every one of them. Then what? God's will for us, as for Jonah, is not polarizing and mirror-imaging hatred, descending into a cycle of violent reactivity that destroys both sides and all hope of creating a better world. God's will for us is to be about the work of bringing fallen powers back to God's purpose for their being in the first place. God’s will for us is that Christ’s nature will transform our own so that we are able to be about that work of transforming the world.
In 1995 I experienced a strong call from God to move from pastoring in Rhode Island to my current work, to be part of leading the leaders of a people known as American Baptists into our destiny as a poster of heaven, a foretaste of God's reign realized, where every nation, tribe, people and language unite to glorify God by working together across all our differences and even across all our disagreements, for a world of justice and peace. As a matter of fact, our differences within this denomination enrich us even as they make of us a model for this nation of which we are a microcosm: red and yellow, black and white; gay and straight; single and coupled; conservative and progressive; rural and urban; red state and blue state. God calls us as a body to be about the redemption of this world, and for each one of us to be about the redemption of our other sisters and brothers within the body.
Some time after I began this work and the difficulties of being one body had become abundantly apparent, I read a short piece in Christian Century that shed new light on our situation. The author posited that in the midst of mainline denominational battles the value of denominational endowments is that they provide glue to hold those bodies together and in that holding on we are pushed to have the difficult conversations that will occur nowhere else in contemporary culture. In every other segment of life we can isolate ourselves into like-minded enclaves where our version of truth is absolute truth. We can watch Fox or CNN; we can read The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal; we can read Christianity Today or Christian Century, we never have to be challenged by different stories, alternative perspectives, any other way of seeing things, or at least we never have to be challenged to see another side until some part of our world is blown apart.
Could it be that God has called all of us to reach across the vast divide to persons and groups set in opposition to us and our way of believing? Could it be that God is counting on us to figure out how to get along across all the ways we are different and all the ways we disagree, despite the immediate history of hurt and hatred? Could it even be that God intends for us to show the world that Christ has indeed "broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us" as the letter to the Ephesians has it? A whale of a tale for sure, more than God could possibly expect of us.
And yet… In the fullness of time God chose to do just that in Jesus Christ. Imagine "the only-begotten Son of God, begotten of the Father before all worlds; God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God; begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father, by whom all things were made. Who, for us … for our salvation, came down from heaven”…
Jesus Christ crossed over the greatest of all divides to show us the way to live together, died, and spent three days in the belly of death that it shall be so. One day in the midst of his ministry as the crowd hassled him to prove himself by showing a sign, he said clearly that no sign would be given except the sign of Jonah, and something greater than Jonah is here. Commentators have different takes on what he meant by that statement but here is what I believe: it is no accident that those words of Jesus in chapter 11 of the gospel of Luke follow his teaching of how to pray that starts that chapter, the brief Lukan version of the Lord's Prayer.
"Abba, hallowed be your name.
Your kingdom come.
Give us each day our daily bread.
And forgive us our sins, as we ourselves forgive everyone indebted to us.
And do not bring us to the time of trial."
Our sisters and brothers of the Jewish faith read the book of Jonah at Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, because in the divine economy of grace they know that there is a connection between God's forgiveness of us and our forgiveness of others. We pray the Lord's Prayer for the same reason. Even in the particularities of our time and the peculiarities of our circumstances, God gives to us this cruciform pattern that the Church may wish to turn into a story of what Jesus did in forgiveness for us to open the way to a new day, but in fact crossing over to the other side is nothing less than the tough way we too are called to walk, for the sake of God's future.
How does that look in the real life of here and now? How does crossing over turn hatred turn empathy? In one of our Jerusalem Council dialogues this year someone told a story of returning from a missionary assignment overseas and becoming a pastor. He received a letter there from a Council of Churches executive, sent to pastors of all denominations in that state, requesting that folk get together to discuss social justice. What would Jesus have them do in their time and place? The pastor was too busy to answer but months later found the letter again and called to ask if there had been any takers. There had not, so these two began to meet monthly for lunch to discuss what Jesus would have them do. After many months one day the Council of Churches minister happened to mention something about his partner of 30 some years who happened also to have a male name. The pastor said that he was shocked, this is sin, he was afraid that his lunch companion may have touched him, perhaps someone had seen them at lunch together. But then he said, "I realized that we are brothers in Christ, we love one another, and each would die for the other. Let’s focus on the work Christ calls us to do."
And of course that is my hope as well. Let us focus on the work set before us, to be as the Ministers Council who in the mind of God we exist to be. We can never go back to where we were just over a year ago as we strategized to strengthen constituent Councils, nor would we wish to. The journey has been long and arduous, and we have learned much along the way. But we can and will go back to that goal, and we need one another for the work. We also need one another for the sake of wrestling with where God would have us go. None of us fully possesses the mind of God and it is together that we discern more completely the fullness of God’s truth.
As Dallas Willard put it in Christianity Today’s Leadership Weekly last week: “Remember, the gospel as Jesus brought it to earth is the most powerful thing that has ever hit the world. If you preach what he preached, you will see it beginning to pop up around you. And you'll find your people asking the right questions: How about this blessing those who curse you? How about loving your enemies? Can we really do that?
A whale of a tale? Jonah is not a fairy tale for kids, as I said a while ago, and neither is Jesus, but sometimes children are the ones who most easily see into the heart of the matter. A group of children were asked what love means. A six year old answered this way: "If you want to learn to love better you should start with a friend who you hate.”
Sisters and Brothers of the Senate, I have seen you doing that very thing at this meeting and I find you beautiful. Persons who have come from opposite sides of the country and very different convictions have sat at tables and walked the Green lake grounds and prayed together. You have developed relationships, treated one another with remarkable respect, felt God’s Spirit moving among you. Tomorrow you will go home to tell what happened here. Along with the vote I ask you to remember and report how God has touched all our hearts as we have wrestled with Scriptures and with persons from the other side. And if your Senate term has not yet expired I look for you to return next summer ready to focus together on the work Christ has called us to do.