May 20, 2004

Thank you. Of all the introductions I’ve ever had, that was easily the most recent. Just no question.

I am surprised to see this many people here on a day when I know most of you would prefer to be off at one of the many celebrations marking the opening on this date in 325 AD of the Council of Nicea, the first ecumenical council of the church.

I’ll try not to go on forever here this evening so you may be free later for some of the inevitable Nicea whoop-de-doo.

Odd as it may seem, it actually may be a helpful coincidence that today really does mark the opening of the hugely important Council of Nicea, because I want to speak with you a little bit about the church, its history, its tradition and our place, yours and mine, in all of that.

But before I begin I want to make you two promises: First, that I will try to stop talking before you stop listening. And second, that I will tell you the truth – though only so far as it’s possible for someone who is both a Presbyterian and a newspaper man to do that.

I want to suggest to you that even when the church gets things wrong – as it surely does sometimes – those of us who disagree with the church are called to disagree publicly and aggressively, but lovingly, even if sometimes the church itself doesn’t behave that way.

And I think we must do our disagreeing knowing that there is hope – not a false hope, not a pie-in-the-sky hope, not a somewhere-over-the-rainbow-sing-it-again-please-Judy-Garland hope but, rather, a hope that is borne of history, a hope that is rooted in the liberating word of God, a hope that is embodied in the head of the church, Jesus Christ, who envisioned and prayed for a unified church and whose visions ultimately will be reality.

But let’s first acknowledge how hard the call can be for gays and lesbians to stay active in the church. And above all, let’s not be judgmental and intolerant of people who have made another choice, even if that choice breaks our hearts.

In the spring of 2002, Presbyterians Today magazine did a cover story called “When a family member is gay.” It quoted James Henderson, son of Mitzi Henderson, co-moderator of More Light Presbyterians.

This is what James said: “I feel in many ways I didn’t leave the church. I think the church left me. The institutional church has been abusive of gays – and healthy people don’t stay in abusive relationships.”

James Henderson speaks much truth. He articulates with passion the wisdom possessed by people with self-respect – which is to say people who are whole and healthy – that they should not remain in abusive relationships. James’s words reflect wisdom articulated by Catholic moral theologian Daniel Maguire, as he’s quoted in a new book by Marvin Ellison called Same-Sex Marriage? A Christian Ethical Analysis. This is what Maguire says: “We show what we think persons are worth by what we ultimately concede is due to them.” Ellison then writes this: “This insight leads to a jarring conclusion: ‘If we deny persons justice, we have declared them worthless.”

If James Henderson were speaking solely of human love or human family relationships, I would have no disagreement with him at all.

In fact, I really don’t want to argue with him, anyway. I think he said something that is perfectly understandable, given the shameful way many parts of the church have historically treated people whose sexual orientation is not heterosexual.

But I hope his words also can challenge us to think about what it means to be the church. James indicted the institutional church. I think most of us who have spent any significant part of our lives active in the church know what he means by that phrase.

Are we Presbyterians not likely to say, for instance, that it was “the institutional church” that first adopted what became known as Amendment B? Yes, we are likely to say that, but I think the term “institutional church” can mislead us, if we let it. So I’d like you to think about what the church really is.

I used to teach 6^th and 7^th grade Sunday school at the church I call home, Second Presbyterian here in Kansas City. Teaching 6^th and 7^th grade Sunday school is penance for sins you may not even have committed yet. I taught it for several years, so I’m covered for some sins until I’m 104 years old.

Sometimes I would ask my students to draw a picture of our church. Almost inevitably they would draw the building. Nice try, I’d say, but no cigar. Try again. Eventually, one of them would figure out that the church is not the building but the people who are members of the church and who use the building. We are the church, you and I. I loved seeing that light go on in their heads.

The Greek word most often used in the New Testament for church is ecclesia. As many of you no doubt know, it means “called out.”

That is, the church is not a voluntary organization like the Kiwanis Club or the Business and Professional Women’s Club. Rather, the church is the gathering of the Body of Christ. Its members are people whom God has called out of the world and to whom God has given gifts of the Spirit that the church needs to be the Body of Christ. I want to repeat that and I would like you to keep the definition in mind when, in a few minutes, I tell you about two friends of mine, Kirk and Doug. The church is the gathering of the Body of Christ. Its members are people whom God has called out of the world and to whom God has given gifts of the Spirit that the church needs to be the Body of Christ.

Think about the members of your own church. If you were God (oh, what a thought; give me 15 minutes of that, I sometimes think to myself, just 15 minutes). Anyway, if you were God, would you have selected all of those people who call your church home? Would you have?

I know I certainly wouldn’t have. I don’t even like some of those people. But I’m not called to like any of them. I’m called to love them, and they, in turn, are called to love me. What hard work that can be sometimes.

In concert with the theme of this conference, “From the Heartland to the Horizon,” I think it’s crucial for us to carry from the Heartland to the horizon these ideas about church because they will help us understand why I believe you are called to stay within the church to work for change in that church, to live lives of what I like to think of as assertive humility within that church and to love people in the church who, in disobedience to the divine will, may not, in fact, love you, no matter what they say.

Bruce Feiler, author of Abraham: A Journey to the Center of Three Faiths, says that in the early days of Christianity, long before it became the world’s most dominant religion, church members “felt a powerful sense of being alien.”

I must tell you that as a white, male, heterosexual, married, employed, tall, semi-modest middle-class American Protestant, I rarely experience a sense of being an alien. It’s why I give thanks for the experience I had as a boy of living in India for two years. That taught me at least a little about what it’s like to be an outsider.

Well, what does it look like when gays and lesbians stay in a congregation through good times and bad?

Let me tell you about two close friends, Doug and Kirk, who have been in a committed relationship for years. Their situation may be unique because they are still members of the church they grew up in, the church their parents – both mother and father in Kirk’s case and mother in Doug’s case – still are members of. It’s an Episcopal church in the Kansas City area, but we Presbyterians can relate to Episcopalians well. Heck, I tell my Episcopal friends that I’m a Presbyterian who’s just saving up to become an Episcopalian.

Doug, by the way, is my estate-planning lawyer. But because I’m a journalist, I essentially have no estate, so he has been forced to find other clients. In fact, a journalist having an estate-planning lawyer is a little like a homeless man having an interior decorator.

Anyway, I want you to hear what Doug and Kirk have to say about their experience because I think they are living out the model that is crucial for the church to see if the church is ever going to repent of its sins of exclusivity, discrimination and misuse of the Bible as a weapon of sexual oppression.

Listen now as I share some of Kirk’s and Doug’s own words:

Kirk: The more we get into this whole issue, the more it strengthens my resolve to stay (in the church). You tend to become defiant. I need this place, but it’s also that they really need me. There are Sundays when I think that I’d rather not go to church. But I don’t want (the rector) reading anything into that. It’s almost become: I’m going to go every Sunday to show them.

I find the most struggle that I have is trying to explain why I’m there to my friends who do not go to church – not my gay friends. They’re not the ones who are saying, “How can you put up with that?” Our gay friends are the ones who support us and tell us how great that is.

Doug: In fact our gay friends say, “I wish I could find a place like that. I wish I could find a place that supported me.” We’ve often had a problem with the institution, but our experience in our own parish – usually, not exclusively, but usually – has been different. We were born there. Our parents still go there. The parish watched us grow up. We have a history.

Kirk: It’s the community that binds you there and makes you realize that that’s home. The best thing we can do rather than hold up signs or parade down the street is simply be there.

Doug: I have these friends who are Benedictine monks, and one of their vows is to the stability of life, commitment to the community. Part of stability is the commitment to stay in the community, no matter how boring or angry or whatever it becomes or you become. It’s just commitment. I guess you don’t abandon your church community any more lightly than you would your partner or your family or your job.

Doug and Kirk, of course, wrestle with a great deal as active members of their congregation. For instance, listen now to Kirk:

Kirk: You see the church so freely bestow marriage on some young kids who shouldn’t be getting married and that I’ve seen divorced within a year or two. I used to get bitter about it and now I’ve learned to celebrate the fact that this is exactly what we should do. We should try to do things that bind people together. That’s what marriage is about. But there was a while there when going to weddings was really tough for me. And going to baptisms was hard for the same reasons.

But the whole struggle has helped my faith by keeping me committed. It kept me bound there. But more importantly than that, it has shown me – particularly in times of struggle – that Christ is alive and the Christian community is alive through action, not through reading and teaching and books, but Christ is alive through other people. Christ is alive in people, not in bureaucracy and not in politics.

Doug: I’m not sure I would have stuck around had I not been receiving something from the church. I’m not that much of a martyr and I’m not that much of a fight-the-good-fight kind of a person.

There is a relationship with the institutional church. And at times when the institutional church has really frustrated me, I can always look to the local community of faith and say this is where Christ is present and these are people who touch my life and this is how I experience Christ. But if you take that too far you’re just a Congregationalist and that’s not what I am. I just really have this love for the Episcopal Church. I’m not going anywhere. I’m just in the right place. This is the tradition for me.

I can live in a church with people who don’t want me there, but some people don’t seem willing to live with me there.

Kirk: We do feel our ministry is just to be there.

I also want to share with you a few words that Kirk said to his vestry, the ruling board of his church, on which he has served. I think it says in a few words part of what I’m trying to say to you about church:

Kirk: We thank God every day for the way that this community already blesses our relationship. It is in the church that our relationship was formed. It is in the church that we have built our strongest community to nurture our commitment to each other. It is the church that has carried us, as a committed couple, through times of joy and sorrow. It is the community of (this church) that witnesses our commitment to each other, that “does all they can in their power to uphold these two persons in our relationship.” We do feel that someday we will be able to audibly hear in the sanctuary that resounding “we will” to what we already feel and know. In the meantime, we continue to be blessed by our families, our friends and our church.

One of the things I take away from Kirk’s and Doug’s experience is a renewed understanding that because the church historically has been a major reason that the broader society has oppressed gays and lesbians – indeed, the whole GLBT community – and that such oppression continues, the church must become a leader to change that.

It’s why I was heartened when the Episcopal Church last year gave its approval to the selection of Gene Robinson as bishop of New Hampshire. I saw it – and Kirk and Doug saw it – as an indication that the church has begun to lead society out of the darkness, the sickness that we sometimes call homophobia.

Please understand that I am not claiming to understand in detail the struggles many of you have gone through and continue to go through to be members of your churches. But just as I don’t have to have AIDS to be part of our church’s AIDS ministry and just as I don’t have to be a convicted criminal to write column after column about why we should abolish the death penalty, I also don’t have to have exactly your own experience to be able to commit myself to stand with you.

Your journey must seem incredibly lonely at times. And I will be the last person to condemn you if you decide that you can’t be part of what you consider an abusive relationship with the church any more. But you are not alone within the church. There are allies, friends, brothers and sisters in Christ who want to walk with you and who are, in fact, beside you on this journey.

And the church needs you. I won’t say it needs you more than you need it. I think that what the church has to offer everyone – salvation by grace through faith in Jesus Christ – is a treasure without price. So I say that you need the church, too, even if it fails to live consistently into its calling to be a channel of God’s love and grace.

We together are the body of Christ, but if the body of Christ is divided – and it is – all of us suffer. You, me, all of us. So I ask you to stay the course, to renew your commitment to be light and life for the church, to help the church find its way. It may not happen in my lifetime or yours, but it will happen, and you are part of the reason we’ll get there.

Thank you and may God richly bless each of you as we travel together as children of God, as sinners of Christ’s own redeeming.