The Purity of Unity

“Mirror, mirror , on the wall.
Who’s the fairest of them all?”

For some reason, as a child, I could not get this nursery rhyme out of my mind. It was such a powerful message to a young impressionable girl – this cultural mantra that somehow being attractive was a competition  – and that it really mattered – and that it was important to be fairer than the girl next door. How lovely it was then – sometime in adolescence – to slowly realize that the gracious God I was beginning to know did not measure me – or anyone else - by appearances. And, that God’s style is much more community and collaboration – not competition.

But somehow that nursery rhyme still seems to haunt us in the church – only now a days the words are slightly different.

“Mirror, mirror, on the wall,
Who’s the purest of them all?”

Yes competing with one another about purity - purity of doctrine, or purity of justice, or purity of behavior has become an epidemic on the playground called the church – and, I believe, that the taunts and the cries are injuring the communal soul of the body of Christ.

This past Sunday, in the congregation I serve, we, like some of you, considered Isaiah’s prophetic call as part of our Trinity Sunday worship. You know the story - Isaiah’s  marvelous vision of God Almighty – with the seraphims  bowing and the smoke rising and the prophet quaking – the whole created order swept up into awe and wonder. And yet, equally important in this call story is the prophet’s woe: “Woe is me! For I am a man of unclean lips.”  What we find is the honest humility of a human sinner – one who knows that he is not worthy to be in the presence of the Holy One. But somehow the wonder of worship is enhanced, not diminished, by Isaiah’s woe – and both are central to the prophet’s call – to God’s gracious cleansing and calling forth of Isaiah’s imperfect but indispensable gifts for ministry.

One of the blessings of the past few contentious years in our beloved church is the difficult conversations many of us have had with those with whom we disagree. I am a better person and a stronger Christian because of those difficult dialogue moments. And one of the important lessons I have learned from my more conservative sisters and brothers is that those of us who are considered “liberal” don’t much like to talk about sin. And my friends, this is a real problem, if we are serious about finding common ground with those with whom we disagree. Yes, yes, we say, we are all sinners – but then we quickly jump to grace and forgiveness – letting ourselves, and everyone else, off the hook for dangerous and destructive behavior - never really admitting as Isaiah did that we are people of unclean lips – never really owning the reality that we – like Isaiah - are often lost in the narrowness of our own small vision. It is clear to me that until the progressive voices in the church are willing to seriously talk about the pervasiveness of sin, our more orthodox brothers and sisters will have a hard time hearing the other message of scripture - the even more powerful message of God’s generosity, God’ grace, God’s hospitality and God’s forgiveness.

And yet how odd it is, that in our debates about sexuality, this common reformed understanding of human sin somehow gets lost in the high decibel rhetoric of purity. And oftentimes it is our more conservative friends who abandon this common denominator of sin, which is present in every human context. Somehow we can’t have it both ways – focusing on the inevitability of human sin– but then holding up purity as possible – and preeminent - among all the values of the faith. Though Isaiah yearned for purity of heart and soul – despite the cleansing grace of God – he never attained it - and neither do any of us.

One of the most moving sections of the report of the Theological Task Force is the section entitled “Pain and Penitence.” There all the members of the Task Force confess the ways in which they have judged and excluded others – repenting publicly and asking for forgiveness. I believe that the challenge for the rest of us is to do the same – a challenge that in many places we are not meeting.

As I traveled around the church three years ago, I listened for the voices of Presbyterians talking about issues of peace, unity and purity. After all, at that point in time the Theological Task Force was still hard at work – trying to discern what these three words mean in our contemporary context. I have to tell you that what I heard three years ago from the hinterlands was very disheartening. For all too many of us, peace means silence: “Let’s not talk about the issues that divide us, and maybe they will somehow miraculously go away.” Well, my friends, as the number of opposing overtures to this Assembly show, it is clear that difficult issues are not going away. And what about unity? Well, for too many of us unity seems to mean just “getting along” – everything will be fine if everyone will just agree. But unity in scripture rarely means “getting along.” Instead scripture lifts up the mysterious possibility of oneness, that becomes real only because of our differences.

I’ll never forget a young man I met three years ago. His name was Adam Copeland, and he was the outgoing Co-Moderator of the Presbyterian Youth Connection. In his final sermon, Adam offered a very wise – and startling – image. He said that what he loves about being a Presbyterian is the way we fight – not with weapons and fists – but with words and ideas. This twenty-one year old was suggesting that vigorous debate, high octane conversation, intense dialogue is not bad for the church. In fact, it is very good for the church – as long as our goal is not to destroy – not to win – but to refine each other with the multi-tongued fire of truth. And for Adam, such honest disagreement often leads to finding a solution together beyond what any one of us might imagine alone. Yes, creative friction and complexity is what biblical peace and biblical unity are all about.

But what about purity? Well, purity on either end of the theological spectrum all too often means, my way or the highway. On the one end we hear: a church that does not adhere to the holiness code of Leviticus and Romans is apostate, and must be purified by the punitive discipline of our polity. And on the other end we hear: a church that does not completely incarnate the radical justice of the prophets and Jesus - completely right now - is a hypocritical and abusive institution.

My friends, such ideological extremes push us inevitably toward schism and judgment. And I believe both of these positions gloss over the reality of sin, which is, of course, in all of us. These two extremes simply fail to embrace the gracious spirit of Jesus who seemed to prefer eating and debating with sinners - people coming from very different social and theological places – people who may never have agreed in Jesus’ day on matters of faith and practice, but people whom Jesus wanted to feed – together – around God’s healing table. Yes, Jesus seemed to prefer a new way of dealing with human imperfection and disagreement. He replaced the purity of law with the purity of love. And I hope that is what you, the commissioners to this General Assembly, will be able to do in the days ahead.

I believe that the recent report of the Theological Task Force on Peace, Unity, and Purity has cut through the simplistic and legalistic definitions that too many of us hold onto when we think about peace, unity, and purity. There is nothing narrow or ideological about the Task Force report. Instead these very different 20 people have lifted up the reality of a Living Christ – an incarnation of God’s love that is full of both grace and truth. In place of silence, they are asking us to embrace a difficult peace – the peace of intense dialogue and discernment - asking us to lift our conflicts constantly into the light of scripture as we covenant to seek a new life together with those with whom we disagree. And unity?  Rather than glaring at one another over a deep chasm of disunity, the Task Force calls us to realize that unity in Christ means the opposite of uniformity and unanimity. Rather, unity means a dynamic cohesiveness – a flexible equilibrium – a church connected by a Spirit who purposely shifts the point of balance among diverse biblical principles in order to give full expression to the complexity of God. And, instead of the self-righteous purity of law – whether it be the purity of holiness or the purity of justice – the Task Force implores us to embrace hat I call a “purity of love” that proclaims unequivocally “we need each other.” Yes, the Task force promises that the Spirit of the Risen Christ can empower us to hold onto one another, even as we hold onto our deepest convictions. And so we are given a vision of possibility for the church - a purity of unity grounded in love – the Body of Christ as interdependent diversity – which is the true biblical meaning of peace.

My friends, our biblical story tells us that the reign of God has been inaugurated in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. But the fullness of that abundant vision has not yet been accomplished – in our lives or the world.. And so we live in a time of not-yet-ness – waiting for the promise when all will be one, yearning for the time when every tear will be wiped from every human eye. And so, in these not-yet days of the PCUSA, we are called to embrace an interim ethic. Keeping before us God’s vision of wholeness, we are invited to groan, but to also wait patiently to be fully born as the reconciled people of God.

This is what I believe Recommendations 5 and 6 of the PUP report – taken together – are all about – an interim step in the journey of the PCUSA from exclusion to inclusion – an interim step that will demand patience and mutual forbearance from all of us.

Now, I know that for some of us gathered here and across the church, such groaning and waiting and patience is almost too painful to bear – because injustice  and prejudice continues to dis-empower and exclude precious people from the offices of the church. But let us remember the promise. The baptismal touch of God’s grace never dries up. And one day, in God’s good time, the baptismal blessings of our gay/lesbian/bisexual/transgendered  brothers and sisters will become a fountain - an abundant stream of valued, ordained leadership within our church. And I believe that the Task Force recommendations are a fresh spring of possibility, encouraging God’s grace to flow in life giving ways.

Some of you have heard the story of the couple I met a few years ago in southern California. I will call them Don and Steve, one a social worker and the other a school teacher - and they have been covenant partners for over 15 years. They are also the proud parents of two adopted daughters, one of whom was abandoned on the streets of Los Angeles by her crack addicted mother. When the girls were two or three, Don and Steve decided – as good parents often do – that it was time to find a church to support their journey as parents, and to teach their children the Good News of the Christian faith. They didn’t particularly feel welcome at the local Presbyterian Church, but they tried it anyway. And of course those two little girls simply fell in love with the Presbyterian Sunday School. Even though the church is not perfect yet, Don and Steve joined that congregation, so that they could honor the promises they had made at their daughters’ baptisms.

My friends, this is not a story about sexuality, or Leviticus, or even human rights. It is a story about discipleship - about followers of Jesus seeking the abundant life of Christian community, as they try to faithfully, and imperfectly - live out the gospel of Jesus Christ. This week may our love be pure enough and our vision big enough and our forbearance strong enough to create  - for them  and for all of us - a church as just and generous as the grace of God.

May it be so. Amen