Scripture: Exodus 4; 2 Corinthians 5
My words for this morning grow partly out of some reflections on the Central Atlantic Conference meeting that seven Sojourners attended last weekend. I probably shouldn’t say that, since there may be some of you who, hearing that, will tune me out for the next fifteen minutes. Before you do that, let me first thank Kathy Baker and Alice Justice for guiding worship. Kathy is a long time friend of Sojourners and I’m glad that she was able to be back with us as our preacher for the day.
Now as to the conference we were at…For those of you who are not familiar with how the United Church of Christ is structured, Sojourners is part of a group of churches called the Shenandoah Association, which consists mostly of churches in the Shenandoah Valley. Then there is a regional grouping of churches called the Central Atlantic Conference, which consists of churches from New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, the District of Columbia, and a large portion of Virginia, and a small portion of West Virginia. These churches come together once a year, as we did last weekend, to do some necessary business like passing budgets, to hear the ideas of speakers, to receive reports of work going on in South Africa and in New Orleans and elsewhere in the wake of Katrina, to worship and visit…and occasionally to pass resolutions or make pronouncements.
Resolutions might have to do with church life, or they might have to do with large social issues. This year the resolutions passed included one establishing an endowment fund for the conference, one that mandated professional ethics and boundary training for clergy, and one that mourned the exploitation and loss of life among Mexican immigrants and urged a more just and humane approach to immigration from Mexico.
This last was the only one that dealt with any public issue beyond the church, and it turned out not to be very controversial, but always in the background was the awareness of the fact that the national general synod of the UCC last summer passed a resolution in favor of marriage equality for same sex couples that caused a good bit of turmoil and that was no doubt partly responsible for some churches leaving the United Church of Christ. I’m guessing that there were a good number of people who were thankful that there weren’t a lot of resolutions on public policy issues that were likely to create further controversy or fan the flames of discord in the church. Nice to have a comparatively calm meeting this year, though people managed to find a way to give Enid a hard time anyway, but which I can report she handled as gracefully as you would expect.
But even though social pronouncements were not a big part of this meeting, I can’t attend a meeting like this without reflecting some on whether or how or in what ways the church can or should speak to the culture. I’m not going to talk about the resolution on marriage equality much this morning. We’ll turn our attention to that a little more next week when we observe Pride Sunday. But it does raise a more general question about how the church speaks. Even a resolution on immigration that passed overwhelmingly and without much debate raises the question for me. I have often wondered about the wisdom of such resolutions. They clearly don’t represent everyone in the church. Theoretically, they speak only for the delegates at that meeting and churches or individuals are free to dissent. In reality, it is unavoidable that when the national body, or even a regional body, of the UCC passes a resolution, it will be understood that “the UCC” has taken this position, and it is uncomfortable for people in the UCC who don’t share that position. Hard feelings are a real possibility, and that is not theoretical. That is a matter of long and ongoing experience. There are lots of hard or hurt feelings in the UCC these days.
Furthermore, I can’t help but feel that while there is on the one hand a high potential for hard feelings, at the same time such resolutions don’t actually mean very much. You pass a resolution, but it doesn’t really change anything in the church or in the wider society. It gives you the illusion of having done something, but too often gets forgotten or ignored. You wouldn’t know about a resolution on immigration if I hadn’t told you, and you won’t know the details of what it says unless you take the trouble to read it on the conference web site. All of which is to say that I have always felt this business of passing resolutions at church meetings is a pretty questionable activity, even if the resolutions in question are ones I am in complete agreement with. And yet…
I can’t help but wish that the Christian church could speak with a strong, unified voice on at least some matters. I can’t help but wish that there could be a Christian voice that said clearly and persuasively that we need to treat this planet with more care, with more respect, with more reverence not only to keep us from committing mass suicide but because this piece of creation, this tiny speck in the universe, is a gift from God. I can’t help but wish that there could be a strong, unified Christian voice that said that people dying of hunger is not acceptable, that it is not unfortunate, that it is not just the way the world is, though it is the way the world is, but that it is unacceptable and it needs to move to the top of our priority lists and not be number 72 or 93 or 145, which is where it seems to be most of the time. I wish the Christian church could get itself together to say something like that. I wish the Christian church as a whole would always stand firmly in the way when nations were preparing to go to war. I wish the church could say strongly that this too is not acceptable. There is a small group, you may know, called Christian Peacemakers. I wish that phrase could come to be a redundancy, rather than referring to a small minority of the Christian community.
You get my drift here. I know that the kinds of things I have just been saying I wish for really are wishful thinking. But shouldn’t Christianity make a difference? Not just wouldn’t it be nice if Christians could all agree and if what we all agreed on was what I thought we should all agree on. But shouldn’t being a Christian make a difference—to me and to world I live in? I think that’s what Paul was getting at in the reading this morning: “If anyone is in Christ, he or she is a new creation.” I think what he meant by that is that those who are “in Christ”, see the world differently, see other people differently, see themselves differently. Not that people who are not Christian can’t share those points of view, but it means something to have a Christian point of view. It is not this little private thing you may have going between you and God. It is a way of being in the world. If it’s not, if Christians have nothing to say to the world, if I as a Christian have nothing to say to the world, then what’s the point?
But of course the reality is that Christians cannot agree on what the Christian point of view is. And so we do not speak with a clear unified voice on anything. And we are reduced to trying to speak from a Christian perspective from our little UCC corner of the Christian world and even in this little corner people don’t agree, and as a result there is discord and hard feelings. Yet we go on trying to say some things in this very flawed, questionable way, because not to say anything is also not acceptable.
Of course the reality is also that there is not a single Christian point of view even at Sojourners. This is not just a matter of what happens at denominational meetings. I do realize that may not be a matter of great moment to everyone. For us at Sojourners it may be a matter of more moment as to whether and how we are to speak as a church. I think it is the case that we are fairly like-minded on a number of broad issues. It is also the case that on any given specific issue at Sojourners there will be approximately as many viewpoints as there are people involved in the discussion. And we value diversity. That is one of the things we are all pretty much agreed on. And we are committed to respecting and listening to each voice that is present among us. We are also committed though to speaking up on matters that churches are too often silent about or where what has been said in the name of Christ should not be granted the status of “the Christian point of view”. Those various commitments on our part don’t always easily fit together.
One of the speakers at the conference last weekend was urging on us the idea that there are some issues, some tensions in the church that ought to be allowed to just be there, that one of our problems is that we see too many things as problems and problems are assumed to have a solution. But there are some situations in the church that don’t have solutions. What I have been talking about is one of those areas where there is no solution or resolution. Standing for something, taking stands, speaking out may not do justice to the variety of viewpoints in the church. It may discourage discussion and debate and needed conversation. On the other hand recognizing and respecting different viewpoints may result in not taking stands where stands need to be taken. It’s a tension we live with and need to live with in the church.
It’s a tension even in our personal lives. This is not just a question of denominational meetings or of how we go about being church at Sojourners. Each of us has various voices within ourselves that need to be heard. We take a stand on something. We speak out. We want our voice to be heard in a way that is clear and unambiguous and strong. I want my voice to be that way, at least on the things that matter most to me. But I also don’t want to be without certain other inconvenient voices inside me that say things like: I could be wrong. Or at least there might be some other ways of looking at things. Don’t I owe it to my friends, or my opponents, to be open to what they are trying to say to me? Don’t I owe that to myself? I need voices like that inside me to keep me from being arrogant. But if I get stuck, if I have trouble standing for anything because after all I might be wrong, if I respect different viewpoints so much that I can never settle on one of my own, if being inclusive of all the different thoughts and doubts that may inhabit my mind keeps me from saying much of anything, well that’s not acceptable either.
I thought of Moses in connection with this. Moses, you may know was raised in the pharaoh’s household and worked for the Egyptians but intervened for a Hebrew slave who was being beaten and ended up killing an Egyptian and then running away, off into the desert where he could not only avoid punishment but lead a nice, uncontroversial life. But God found him…said he had a different idea…figured Moses was the right person to go back and free the slaves, lead them out of Egypt to freedom. Moses of course says “oh, no, you got the wrong guy. There must be some mistake. I can’t go tell pharaoh to let my people go. I’m a really lousy talker.” In fact tradition says that Moses stammered when he spoke, and it’s really that thought that drew me back to this story. Because we do well to stammer, not only when we are talking about God, who is really untalkable, but also when we are talking about what God would have us talk about. Maybe even more the latter. How dare we claim to know God well enough to talk confidently about her? Even more…how dare we claim to know what it is that God would like us to say about life on this earth? As though we, more than others, are privy to the will and heart of God. God could have said to Moses, maybe should have said to Moses (I hope God doesn’t strike me dead for telling him what he should have said), “You’re a stammerer? That’s good. That’s just what I need in someone who’s going to speak about God or about what God wants you to speak about. You’re supposed to stammer when you’re speaking God language. You’re supposed to have self-doubt. You’re supposed to have a lump in your throat. If you don’t there’s something wrong. But not speaking is not an option.
It’s not an option—for the church or for you or me—not only because it’s morally not an option. It’s literally not an option, because while actions speak louder than words, so do silences. When Christians are silent, when this Christian is silent about something that demands a response, it says that the matter is not urgent enough or I am not brave enough to speak. My choice is not really whether to speak or not. It is what I want to say. That is frankly a difficult thought, I think, because I know I am effectively silent on so many things. So my own thoughts leave me feeling uncomfortable this morning. But it’s a discomfort I think I need to live with and that I think the Christian church needs to live with. Too often the church has spoken in an arrogant voice, without stammering, too certain of its ideas about God, too certain of God’s ideas about us. But also too often the church has avoided that arrogance by being silent about things that matter, choosing to try to avoid the hard feelings by not standing for very much at all. In between those two options is an uncomfortable place where we try to stammer our way toward justice and wholeness. That uncomfortable place is where we belong. Amen.
Jim Bundy
June 18,2006