Spring Convocation    April 24, 2002
Lutheran Theological Seminary at Gettysburg                                      

by the Rev. David L. Miller, Editor, The Lutheran magazine

Let us Pray:  O Lord Our God, you call us again from the sleep of nothingness merely because, in your unspeakable love, you want to make good and beautiful beings to come to life and to see the joy and the gorgeous wonder of all that you have done.  You call us by name from our mother’s womb.  You have given us breath and life and movement.  You walk with us every moment of our existence.  I am amazed my Lord, God of the universe, that you should attend to me, to us, and more, that you should cherish us.  Yet, you do. Create in us, I pray, the faithfulness that moves even your divine heart, and we will trust and yearn for you all of our days.  Amen

You are here to talk about sex.  You got the right guy.  Because you see, in recent months, I have more people wanting to call me up and talk about sex than does Dr. Ruth.  She is getting very concerned because I am talking about syndicating.  It all began last August.  Last August, the 2001 churchwide assembly meeting in Indianapolis, among other things, did three things: 

1. It said that our church shall develop a study document on homosexuality by 2005, complete with proposals for action.
2. It said that the church shall develop a plan and a timeline, also by the 2005 churchwide assembly, that will lead to a decision about allowing gay and lesbians in committed relationships on ELCA ministry rosters.
3. The assembly authorized the development of a social statement on human sexuality. 

All of those actions came in response to memorials sent to the churchwide assembly from various synods around the church.  If I am not mistaken, every one of the three actions involved the assembly overriding the recommendation of its own memorials committee.  You might correct me on that, but I think this occurred in relation to all three actions. 

Following that assembly, the letters began to arrive in The Lutheran’s office in waves.  The news reports went out and the mail flooded in. It slowed down for about six weeks after September 11, as you might well imagine.  Then the church council met, and there were new stories about the development of a sexuality task force and the study process headed by the ELCA Division for Ministry and the Division for Church and Society.  There were stories about the funding of the sexuality study.  That brought mail, believe me.  And the mail continues, even now. 

I don’t think it is fair, that this cheese, that your president Michael Cooper-White says must stand alone, should have to read all this mail by himself.  [By the way, Michael, before I forget it, I need to tell you everything that Kaleigh [Blezzard] told me about you:  that you live in the biggest house in Gettysburg, that you talk a lot, and that you are kind of funny – because you think dogs go ‘cock-a-doodle doo’.]  Now, I want to read some of my mail. I need to tell you that letters to the editor are the most unrepresentative sample of opinion known to humankind.  That is true, if you are looking at the proportions of who thinks what.  But if you are looking at the range of extent opinion within the ELCA, I think you get a pretty good idea of what that spectrum is out there, but not the proportion of how many are where.  So without further ado, I read my mail:

Sequim, WA – “Leviticus 17 reads ‘thou shalt not lie with mankind as with womankind, it is an abomination.’  Tell me, what is it about that verse that you do not understand?  Like a whole bunch of liberals in this day in age, you are trying to tell me that homosexuality is okay; it’s not okay, and we are saddened that David Miller should allow this article to be printed in our church’s publication.  My wife and I are Christians first and Lutherans second.  However, if I thought that this was our church’s view on something God said was wrong, I would have to reconsider where we would worship, and after 64 years that would be painful.” 

Stevens Point, WI – “Good Friday evening I opened the magazine before going to church, looking for some spiritual refreshment, and I immediately got to this article on homosexuality by Marva Dawn.  Seldom have I seen such obfuscation, such half-truths and down right lies.  I immediately consigned the entire issue, unread, to the garbage where it belongs.  I have a suggestion for the head bishop.  Since one of your first acts upon taking office was to authorize a costly study on sexuality, including homosexuality, why not extend the study to include human sex with animals.  Leviticus 18 seems to indicate that the Lord looks on the two matters in pretty much the same way.”

PA – “Until three years ago, I was two things: one was a Lutheran – because my parents chose that religion for me; the other was a lesbian, because God chose that sexual orientation for me.  I am proud and happy of being the person God created me to be. During my 40 years that I spent in a Lutheran congregation, I knew 24 other gay members.  Believe me, we are here, we have always been here; we will continue to be here and God did not put us here for everyone else to hate.  Ignorance and hatred should never be disguised as the word of Jesus Christ.  I got tired of waiting for my church. Three years ago I became a member of the Metropolitan Community Church of Pittsburgh.”

Birmingham, AL – “No minister of the Lutheran or any other Christian church should be ordained or continued as a minister if he is defiantly and openly guilty of homosexual conduct.  Only if he/she has repented, which includes turning from such conduct, will a confessed sinner be entitled to God’s grace.”  (We have a little work on the doctrine of justification to do here). 

Buffalo Center, IA – “A person who lives a homosexual life has put his own will first, not God’s.”

Brooklyn, NY – “Young Christian gays know they are being judged by the church, and they stay away in droves.  Because of this rule, congregations believe themselves justified in refusing to welcome gay Christians, and gay pastors must give up their partners or hide their identity to receive a call to ministry.  I believe if we drop this rule, healing will take place, and in our congregations we shall know with deeper certainty that Jesus really did come into the world to live and die for all people, and it is our duty and our joy to love one another as he loved us.”

Lakewood, WA – “The primary reason for this study is to justify a conclusion that has already been reached.  That is, to allow gay clergy.  If such an action is taken, I believe many small rural churches will withdraw financial support and may even consider withdrawing from the ELCA completely.”

Brazil, IN – “If you thought the ill-conceived Call to Common Mission was a divisive issue in the ELCA, you haven’t seen anything like what the gay and lesbian issue will bring about if it, too, is to be thrust upon an ‘enough-already’ Lutheran Laity.  I really don’t think it is worth losing a million members or more to be politically correct rather than spiritually correct.

Springfield, GA – “When we express opposition to this, we are labeled intolerant and hateful and we are tired of the strife and the name calling.  We are now preparing for membership in an LCMS congregation where we fit in well.  We have to be in a church where the Bible is still treated as the word of God.”

Eden Prairie, MN – “When the church treats people like outcasts, that becomes their memory of the church, memories that become cold and hard and full of rejection and hate.  Our adult children visited us and came to church with us on Easter.  But Jake cried out on the way home that we had given an offering that day.  “How can you support a church that rejects me?”  He asked.  We had stopped pledging, but on occasion still give.  But I know now that I can’t do that any more than I can slap Jake in the face.  That is what I am doing when I give gifts to a church that rejects him.  … I wish I could send you a tape of the gorgeous music we heard on Easter.  The gift of this music came from a member who is an outcast in the ELCA.  Our organist and music director is gay.  He is also beautiful and kind and I love him dearly. He is a lesson in grace.  We take the gifts of these beautiful people, these loving children of God, and we reject them as people.  How can we do that and still follow Jesus?”

One final letter: “Confucius say:  ‘You let in gay, your people go away.’” 

But I can’t end on that glib note.  My last phone call on Monday afternoon before leaving the office was from a pastor in Washington state.  He told me how angry he was about what is happening in his church, especially the study on sexuality. He took me off guard because, out of the blue, he began crying.  He is a retired pastor. “Everything they taught me,” he said,  “the foundation on which I have lived my life, it is now all going; it is all gone.” 

Now, … I want you to imagine that your congregation has just given you the job, whether you are a lay or clergy or other rostered staff, to assemble in one room the 11 people whose letters I have just read. Your job, should you have the courage to accept it, is to convene a little group, and using study materials approved by the ELCA sexuality task force, to initiate a discussion of issues related to biblical interpretation and ethics regarding whether this church ought bless same sex relationships and allow on its ministry rosters gay and lesbian people who are in committed relationships.  This Is Your Job! With these 11 people!  Do you want it?

On one hand, there is no shortage of things to talk about.  I am not even going to list all the theological and biblical topics implied in these letters that you might discuss.  You can come up with a longer list than I can, I am sure.  But just imagine, it is your responsibility to convene this group, to lead this conversation.  What are you going to do?  How are you going to do it when a significant percentage of the group believes that there is nothing to talk about, nothing to discuss?  What are you going to do when most of the rest of the group asks, “ethical discernment? What’s that?  Have we ever done that before?”  But this is exactly what the churchwide assembly has asked the 11,000 congregations of this church to do. 

In the wake of Indianapolis, when we all went home and realized what had occurred, I don’t know if any of us recognized how difficult this was probably going to be.  Congregations were going to have to learn how to do moral deliberation and discernment, a subject near and dear to me [you should have asked me to talk about that].  They are going to have to learn to do moral deliberation and discernment not in the safety of some abstract, largely meaningless issue, but with the hottest of hot button issues among American religious bodies in more than a century. 

We come to this task, as Lutherans, without much practice.  Despite the rhetoric about congregations being communities of deliberation and moral discernment, how many of our congregations really are–or want to be?  How many have ever gathered as a community, looked in each other’s faces and asked, “What do you really think about this and why do you think that?  We are uncomfortable with that.  It has not been part of our tradition.  Frankly, our congregations have enough conflict.  They tend to avoid controversial issues because they are not quite sure how to handle it. We don’t want to create more conflict, and we avoid such questions unless we can see some clear ministry payoff for our congregations; then we might do it. 

I am not dumping on congregations. Please don’t get me wrong.  You see, I sit as a member of the presiding bishop’s cabinet.  Now that sounds very elevated, but please don’t be impressed. What it really involves is the heads of all the churchwide units–the executive directors of Congregational Ministry, the Division for Ministry, Church and Society, Women in the ELCA, etc.  The heads of all the churchwide units gather with the presiding bishop roughly once a month for an agenda that lasts about six hours.  They talk about what is happening in the units. Ecclesiastical and other matters are discussed, of course.  The first time I went to a cabinet meeting, two and a half years ago, I felt like a kid on Thanksgiving who had just been invited to the grown-ups table.  It took me roughly seven minutes to realize that I wanted to be back in the corner, at the short table, with the kids, who were far more interesting.  Near the end of that first meeting I had the bad judgment to speak.  Something came up about which (I don’t even recall what it was) there was some theological implication. I impetuously said, “You know, there is another way to look at that.”  I explained in about 90 seconds how I saw it, using a particular theological category. There was dead silence in the room.  In the silence, I looked around and recognized something very quickly:  We don’t talk about those things here, do we?  But it was too late; I was already in deep water.  Then came a voice, over in the far corner of the room, saying, “Uh oh.” There was another pause, and the same voice said, “Joe normally wins these.” 

This is the presiding bishop’s cabinet, and I don’t want to dump on this group because they do good and important work. But I hold it up as an illustration that we are not used to having these kinds of tough, ethical conversations, not even people who breath air at high ecclesiastical altitudes. Maybe you do it here at the seminary, but few do in our congregations.  At cabinet I learned very quickly that though we talk about many things important to the church, the group at that time did not feel free to test each other’s thought to see if it is really well founded.  I also learned something else: When such topics come up, Joe normally wins.  This, of course, means that what was happening was a competition.  It wasn’t about testing thought; it wasn’t about coming to common understanding.  At least some in the room saw “those” conversations as competition a sure way to destroy the very possibility of moral deliberation and discernment.  The sexuality study is going to be a hard process because we need to learn how to do this discussion with little preparation, more on this later.

I want to talk about another reality of congregation life that is going to challenge us all in this process.  The sexuality study asks pastors and congregations to engage in a process that runs utterly counter to many of our basic instincts about what we want our congregations to do and be.  I include myself in this statement.  Last Sunday, I went to my congregation, St. Paul Lutheran Church, Wheaton, Ill., feeling a little beaten up.  The phone had gotten the best of me last week, and mail had reminded me of uncomfortable truths I usually try to avoid: It made me all too aware that I have feet of clay--that smell bad; that I am probably occupying a position for which I am under-qualified, and I mean that.  I came to church bearing that weight.  I came to church knowing that in the coming week I would face questions and be in deeper water with trickier currents than I know how to navigate.  I walked into the narthex bearing the load of knowing that there were several times in the previous week when I devoutly wished I had had the good sense to keep my mouth shut but didn’t.  I came knowing that there had been opportunities to say a gracious and creative word and, for reasons unknown to me, I hesitated.  I came to church bearing all of that.

You know what that makes me? Average.  Typical. 

I came wanting a gracious word to cut through the cloud over my soul, some bread to fill my empty hands and heart, some joy to reactivate my soul and make me feel alive again.  I needed to tingle with a newness that would clothe me with the hope and the beauty that God wants for me and for all creation.  I wanted to transcend for a few moments the noise and the clamor of the world and to enjoy a fellowship that glowed--or at least was tinged--with the grace of the One around whom we gather.  And I didn’t want to be reminded of the world and all its unsettled issues. I truly didn’t. 

But today, church bodies, denominations, synodical structures, and—Lord only knows—church magazines have another function.  A function that might be called the “great reminder.”

Our church bodies, our bishops, our synods remind us of the world and all its unsettled questions with which we somehow have to deal if we are yet to be faithful to our Lord.

It works like this: Somebody 1500 miles away writes a resolution, gets it passed at a synod assembly, which sends it on to the ELCA churchwide assembly. The churchwide assembly considers and adopts it, and before you know it you are sitting in the church parlor talking about sex.  And why? Because sexuality involves some of those great unsettled questions in this society, and in this church, that faithfulness to our Lord now requires us to examine.  And once again, a denominational structure becomes a great reminder of uncomfortable realities we must confront. Yet, even though it is difficult, there is also something unique and wondrous about what we are going to do, something absolutely wonderful.  We are about to do something that happens almost nowhere else in this society. Where else, I challenge you, other than in a congregation and probably a mainline congregation at that, can serious discussion, real moral deliberation about life changing issues happen in an atmosphere of care?  We see such discussions in politics all the time, whether it is the legislature or the local school board.  But most often, these life-changing discussions occur amid an atmosphere of high stakes competition and hostility.  We are asked to do something in which we might be able to show not just ourselves—but the community and the world around us—the love of Christ that is among us in a profound and powerful way. 

Now I change directions.  When I was approached to take this assignment, they asked me to talk about “the state of the question.”  So one of the things I asked is:  Are there any statistics, any data that tells us where we are?  Well, very little, but still a little. 

In 1996, Kenn Inskeep, the Director for Research and Evaluation for the ELCA, was asked to consult on a piece of research being done by an ELCA pastor out of New York.  This pastor was working on a Ph.D. dissertation.  He was trying to find out if there was any relationship, any correlation, between how these clergy scored on psychological tests and personality inventories and their attitudes toward homosexual behavior.  He ran his sample through a whole series of personality inventories.  He was looking for correlations between how people answered inventory questions and their attitude toward homosexual behavior. He had a beautiful, scientifically designed methodology. He gathered all the data, crunched the numbers and came up with … absolutely nothing—not one correlation of any significance or anything close to being statistically significant. 

He did discover that 44% of ELCA clergy said that homosexual behavior between men is, in study’s words, “just plain wrong.”  Later, the study asked the same question about female homosexual behavior, and 42.5% said such behavior is “just plain wrong.” 

The study did show one correlation.  The primary factor predicting clergy attitudes toward homosexual behavior was … their view of the Bible.  I’m sure you are all shocked.  The pastors who expressed a belief in a literal, or something like a more literal Bible, were more likely to say that homosexual behavior is “just plain wrong.”  Ask their attitude toward the Bible, and you could predict their attitude toward homosexual behavior 86% of the time. 

That’s clergy, what about lay folk?  In 1991 the ELCA Department for Research asked ELCA members what they thought about “two men or two women living together as sexual partners in a life long relationship in which they are faithful to each other.” 

• 53% of the clergy said it’s always wrong or almost always wrong, which means that 47% didn’t. 
• 64% of the lay leaders said it’s always or almost always wrong. 

Is there a trend in the ELCA? We don’t know. We don’t have comparable data on that question.  I looked at the general social science survey, done by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago—think Andrew Greely.  They have been studying and comparing social attitudes across society for decades, state of the art stuff.  What did they tell me?  They told me that in 1991 just about 69% of Americans said homosexual behavior is wrong or almost wrong.  Seven years later 56% said it’s wrong or almost always wrong.  A 12% shift in seven years.  Ask a sociologist if that signifies a significant shift in cultural mores and she’ll say, “give me more data.”  If you push hard, you will likely hear, “yeah, that may reveal a significant shift.” 

That’s the general population.  How do the ELCA members compare with the general population?  Does anybody know?  ELCA members tend to be slightly more liberal than the general population.  It’s easy to know why.  In this society, the more education you have, the more likely you are to be just a little bit to the left of center as opposed to just a little bit to the right of center.  What do Lutherans believe in? Education, brothers and sisters. We do it well.  Ours is an educated constituency, for the most part. 

So what do I do with all of this?  [I am going to bypass the fact that we are in the midst of a huge generational shift that you can see everywhere, inside the church and out, relating to attitudes toward homosexual behavior.] I ask my Christian brother, Kenn Inskeep, the Lutheran question: What does this mean?  I am not a sociologist; I am not a researcher; I need help.  I try not to say things that I don’t know.  The things that I do know are enough to get me in trouble.  Well, the beloved Inskeep said that if you took a popular vote in the ELCA today, on whether people think homosexual behavior is wrong or typically wrong, you would probably get something like a 50-50 split.  That is his surmise.  I asked: What if we asked what they think about same-sex blessings?  He said it would probably be something like a 50-50 split. Then he paused and said, “but I wouldn’t bet the farm on it.”  Neither would I.  Maybe that’s because I read my mail. 

But maybe it’s also because I saw what just happened to the Presbyterians, who confronted a constitutional amendment that would have allowed local and regional presbyteries to ordain gay and lesbian folk who are in committed relationships.  It would have made it a local or regional question. The data I have seen indicated that the clergy supported this fairly decisively.  But the measure went down when the presbyteries voted, by a factor of about 2 or 2 1/2 to 1.  Are Lutherans like Presbyterians?  I’m not sure that we are.  I’m not sure that their action really tells us much about the state of the question among Lutherans. 

But there are a couple things that we know about these statistics.  First, there is a clear and powerful difference of opinion in the ELCA on the questions facing the sexuality study.  And there is one other thing I know from some fairly new data, which confirms information from earlier studies: about 20% of ELCA members are biblical literalists.  We know that.  What this means is, for at least that group, this is a church defining issue and hence, maybe a church dividing issue.  What I am proposing is something that you knew before you walked in:  How we view Scripture and the appropriate way to read Scripture will be the determining factor about whether this church can or cannot truly accept and embrace same sex blessings and the rostering of gay and lesbian ministers in relationship.  If there is to be a change in the ELCA’s theology and practice surrounding sexuality, what will be required is a clear and convincing biblical argument.  If that argument is not made or cannot be made and communicated concisely and widely, then the shape of the ELCA as a structure could be radically changed in coming years. 

Maybe I am too pessimistic or have spent too much time with my mail.  But I believe as firmly as I am standing here that a great deal of what is about to happen among us, in our church, will depend on the Bible, how we read it, how we use it to make ethical judgments. And for a few minutes I want to turn to the Bible. 

I am not going to discuss what this or that text says: I turn to a more basic question that is going to require a lot of attention. I am convinced that it is terribly important is to look at our presuppositions about how we move from a text to an ethical decision.  How do we do that?  I am heavily dependent for what I am going to share on Dr. Walter Taylor, Professor of New Testament at Trinity Seminary, Columbus, Ohio and on Victor Paul Furnish and his book “The Ethics of St. Paul.”  Taylor proposes, based on Furnish, six ways that the Bible functions in the making of ethical decisions.  Now some people, from whom I regularly hear in my mail, say they don’t have presuppositions about how the Bible is interpreted or used ethically. “I just read the Bible and try to believe the do it,” they say.  But, of course, there are a whole host of suppositions involved in that statement.  We don’t have anywhere near enough time to lay all of those out.  But there are six models, Brother Taylor tells us, that shape how we move from text to decision. These represent six sets of presuppositions that people tend to have about Scripture: 

1. The sacred cow view.  Here the Bible is considered a written deposit of God’s truth, and its ethical prescriptions are valid in very specific ways for all times in all places.  The Bible’s ethical statements are not to be touched or disturbed and certainly not explained away. They are to be taken at face value.  What the Bible said to ancient Israel about family life and sexuality is as valid today as it was then.  That is the sacred cow position.  Some of my mail reflects that position, but a minority.  More of my mail reflects the next position, which I think really is the traditional Lutheran view. 

2. The traditional view.  Here, human nature is viewed as basically constant from generation to generation, age to age, culture to culture.  Cultural variables may shade how we understand things a little bit.  But they don’t primarily change or reshape the ethical norms of scripture.  Therefore, the ethical norms of the Bible are just as valid today as when they were first uttered, unless Jesus or something in the New Testament specifically overrides them or if the ethical teaching involved has some very obvious cultural baggage.  Many hold this view.

3. The neo-traditional view. This is a very significant view in the church today.  It is pretty much like the traditional view except for one thing.  The neo-traditionalists are very much like the traditional folks except they are deeply concerned with the appropriate understanding of scripture.  They will say, “Yes, these ethical precepts are as valid today as they were then, but have we really understood them correctly?  Have our cultural blinders kept us from really seeing what scripture, what God is saying to us here?”  This has been very important in 20^th Century Lutheran History.  Do you know why? 

This was the basic line of argumentation that led to the ordination of women among Lutherans.  Yes, we have these things in scripture that talk about women being quiet, but because of our own cultural baggage, we didn’t see the many places in scripture where women were performing all kinds of leadership roles in the 1^st Century Church.  We didn’t understand the Bible correctly.  Does scripture remain ethically valid?  Very much so.  But we’ve got to be aware of our cultural blinders. 

4. The Bible is a source of principles.  Folk who hold this basic approach to scripture would say the authority of the Bible for ethical decision-making doesn’t rest so much with specific moral instruction on particular problems.  Its authority rests in the general, overarching, broad themes, norm, values, ideals and goals of Christian life. We need an example of this.

I was recently going through old material in my files about sexuality, and I ran into a pamphlet first written by Walter Wink in the 70’s.  Wink is professor of New Testament at Auburn Seminary in New York City.  I believe the pamphlet was called “Homosexuality and the Bible.”  He rewrote it, freshened it up in the mid 90’s and re-issued it.  Basically, Wink argues that there is no biblical sexual ethic.  But there is a great love ethic that needs to determine our consideration of the relevant issues when we talk about sexuality.  Those who see the Bible this way might come to some very traditional views.  But they arrive at those views in a very different way, not by applying specific prescriptions but by applying the overall goal or direction of biblical life to ethical questions.

5. A fifth way of looking at how scripture is used in ethical decision making sees scripture as a source of identity and a dialogue resource.  If you want an example of this, read Paul Jerisild’s book Spirit Ethics.  Jerisild is emeritus professor of ethics at Southern Seminary in Columbia, South Carolina.  In this view, the function of scripture is chiefly to provide the source of identity for the Christian community.  It tells us who we are and who God is.  But in terms of specific ethical decision-making, the Bible is essentially a dialogue companion for the church. The church bears its contemporary experience and problems, aware of scientific development and brings all of this into dialogue with Scripture.  The church determines what the scripture is really saying amid this context.  Jerisild offers a good and well-argued example of this point of view.

6. The last, sixth, model is the white elephant position.  Scripture is antiquated, it says.  It doesn’t have much to say to us today about the specific ethical decisions we need to make.  Do I hear that among Lutherans, occasionally? Yes, but only occasionally. 

I characterize the voices I hear like this:  I hear from a lot of people who hold the traditional understanding.  Frequently, they ask me, “Why is the church doing this study?” Somebody said to me on the phone recently, “Any fool can read Leviticus, and know what it means.” I answered, “Well, that’s just the question.  Could it be that we do not understand some of these things as clearly as we thought we had?”  In other words, I asked this person, who holds a traditional understanding of how the Bible functions ethically, to consider a more neo-traditionalist view that says, “Yes, scripture is valid, but we need to take another look at it and see if we have correctly understood what it says.” 

Now why do I bring this up?  Only because of this:  If we are going to ask our congregations, our members to do this kind of conversation, it will be important for them to see how presuppositions shape how they read scripture.  If there is ever to be any movement in our understanding and practice regarding sexuality, it will have to be accompanied by a movement from one end of the spectrum [positions 1 and 2] to a position somewhere in the middle of the options I presented about how we understand scripture. 

I can offer one biblical example of this, and then I must move ahead quickly.  Many ELCA members see God, God’s law, creation, not as dynamic, but as static–fixed.  The law is fixed, it doesn’t move, it doesn’t change.  To suggest that it does change quickly brings to my mailbox an avalanche of letters telling me, “Don’t you know Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today and tomorrow? Don’t you know God is the father of lights in whom there is no variation, no shadow due to change?”  This is where a lot of folks are coming from.  They have not seen and do not know that, within scripture itself, there is a radical reappropriation and reinterpretation process going on regarding law and creation and how God interacts with creation.  God changes God’s mind 40 times or so in the Old Testament.  In Leviticus 21, eunuchs can’t be priests.  By Deuteronomy 23 they can’t even be with the faithful covenant community in worship.  But by Isaiah 56, these same eunuchs,  who were declared in the community as being “against nature,” are proclaimed to be an integral, valued, delighted in part of the covenant community.  God not only invites them in, but God says, “I have a special place for them.”  That process of reappropriation and reinterpretation reveals a dynamic understanding of creation and law. We see major examples of this in Jesus who showed breathtaking freedom to reinterpret and even abrogate the law and the faith tradition in issues of marriage, Sabbath and purity. 

What I just said, isn’t news to many of you, but it is news and utterly unknown to many who are being asked to rethink and reconsider how God relates to us, how God’s law changes, grows, develops as it is reunderstood and reappropriated.  This can be a fruitful line of conversation, but if we cannot talk about this issue frankly, we aren’t going to get through this study very well. 

Now I come to the end.  What I am going to say in the next three minutes is, I believe, the most important thing I have to say to you.   The question is this:  How do we handle this discussion?  How do we come together to discern who God is and what God is up to among us right now?  And as we do it, what is going to hold us together? 

The table is going to hold us together my friends.  But I still have that question.  How do we handle the tough issues? 

Being inveterate pragmatists, most of us read that question, how do we handle the tough issues? That makes us good Americans. We want a technology, a method, a set of techniques that we can apply that will bring us safely through this time.  We love three ways to do this, six ways to do that because such technologies feed our illusion that life is manageable—and manageable by us.

I want to change how we read that question.  Not, how do we handle the tough issues?  But how do we handle the tough issues?  And who are we?  We are not a debating society, we are not a classroom, we are not a school board, we are not a board of directors, we are not a legislature, we are not a community service group.  Were we any of these groups we would bring in the experts, listen to their opinions, sort out the facts, hear the evidence, hold a debate, sift out the insights, have a discussion, vote our preference, and it would be done.  But we can’t do that because that is not who we are. 

We are the captured, the community of those who are captured by God’s gracious mission to the world.  Our hearts, minds and vision are drawn by God’s holy future, the kingdom, and God’s holy dream to gather all things into harmony and unity in the incomprehensible, the inexpressible love of Jesus who is the Christ.  Ephesians 1 says that we are chosen before the dawn of time to belong to God, to share in God’s unspeakable love.  We are forgiven and redeemed before the foundation of the world. We are holy and graced; grace poured out on us.  Why? Because it is God’s good pleasure.  It brings joy and satisfaction to the divine heart of God so to grace us.  We are the community of God’s utterly beloved, the body of the broken beloved reveling in the belovedness in which the Loving Mystery holds all things, all people, all creation--you.  That’s who we are.  And it brings me great joy to say it.  Communally, individually, we are God’s beloved.  And if we are to do real moral deliberation and spiritual discernment, we must start here, with who we are. 

We must recall, savor and continually return to this identity, subjecting our actions and attitudes to that identity—for this sense of communal and individual identity is the basic prerequisite, the indispensable ingredient for communal discernment.  Without this sense, this awareness of our lives as God’s beloved, we will lack the freedom of spirit that is necessary to resist the temptation of needing to be right, to win, to prove that my side is intellectually, morally and spiritually superior.  Only as I know, as we know our belovedness, can we look at each other and truly listen to each other’s wisdom, even to those who hold positions that are repugnant to us.  Only if I see John Spangler and his camera over there as God’s beloved blessed, gifted by the Spirit, can I really listen to him as one who seeks truth, as opposed to listening as a competitor, a contestant, a debater, seeking an opening where I might pounce and prevail. 

Communal discernment is not about winning.  It’s not about debating the most likely, most practical or even the most successful course of action.  Communal discernment is communal, prayerful listening, listening love for how God is leading us to reveal God’s holy dream for the world in our time and in our place.  When we do this, we must, of course, listen to scripture and to tradition and to each other, our present experience and needs.  To do this we have to cast off a whole ton of baggage.  We have to get rid of our mistrust of those who are different from us, our belief in our own superiority, our conviction that I or that my group possesses the real truth, the best understanding and the greatest wisdom—and that, therefore, I have no need to listen to you.  We have to cast off the lunacy that there is something wrong—intellectually, morally and spiritually—with those who disagree with us.  We have to get rid of the idea that my opinion must prevail or the church will go to hell in a hand basket, as if it all really did depend upon us. 

We will have the freedom to do absolutely none of this unless we know who we are—chosen, loved, forgiven, known and delighted in before the dawn of time, the beloved of God before the birth of the worlds. 

You don’t know how much I wish I could gather those 11 people, whose letters I read, and get them to look at each other and truly see who they are.   

Thank you very much.