November 5, 2006
Title: That All May Be One
In putting together this sermon this week, I was reminiscing about the first
time I stepped into the worship sanctuary of a UCC church, which was
actually a pretty neat experience. I haven’t thought about Pilgrim UCC in
Birmingham, Alabama for a long time, but it was always notable because
it was in a beautiful area of the city, and the building, with its distinctive
blue, a-framed roof, always caught your eye, when you were driving past
it. It was 1992 and I had just finished college and had been thinking
about leaving my own tradition, the Presbyterian Church, since I couldn’t
possibly receive ordination credentials because of my sexual orientation
without deceiving the ordination committee, probably by omission, by not
mentioning it and letting them assume something about me that wasn’t
true, which didn’t seem to be the best way to start off a career in faith
tradition that says that the truth itself will set us free. The other option
was to promise the ordination committee my celibacy, and that didn’t
really appeal to me personally either, but the other reason it didn’t
appeal to me is because the tradition of the church is that celibacy is a
special gift given to a few—it’s a spiritual gift—and I was pretty sure that
wasn’t one of my personal spiritual gifts. So, it was an odd time of my
life, because I was struggling with how to answer this call to ministry with
integrity, without lying, and I was working as the store manager of some
Haagen-Dazs Ice Cream shops—bet you didn’t know that part of my
past, huh?—and yet I was still thinking about seminary, but I struggled
with the whole question of “what was the point, if I couldn’t serve a
church?” I had been looking at Harvard, Yale, Vanderbilt, but had not
realistically considered them, because my father was very ill and I knew I
wanted to somewhat close to home if something should happen to him.
And so that is where I was in my life when I first visited Pilgrim UCC in
1992, a little tattered and a little worse for wear, personally. I visited a
couple of times, and became connected to the new associate minister of
the church, a young woman who had just finished her seminary training
and was now serving this blue-roof UCC church. I shared my struggle
with the whole question of going to seminary in the first place, and, even
if I was to go, where should I go, especially considering my own personal
struggle and my situation with my father. And then she said, “Have you
ever thought about going to the seminary at Emory University in
Atlanta?” She pointed me to a place I had never really considered, to be
honest, though I had looked at the Presbyterian seminary in Atlanta.
And that little recommendation changed my life—Emory was a perfect
match for me, for a lot of reasons—closeness to my parent’s home in
Mississippi; a very academic seminary so that if I could never get
ordained, I would still have a chance to get into good doctoral program
because of Emory’s strong academic reputation; and it had a reputation
for progressive, liberal Christianity—among conservative Methodists in
the deep South, there was a saying that if any potential Methodist
Ministers went to Emory, there were sure to go to hell! Sound like a
perfect place for me!
But that moment, with that associate pastor at Pilgrim UCC in
Birmingham, Alabama, has stayed with me, and it seems to be the right
metaphor for the way that UCC does what it does as a denomination—
the UCC always seems to point to the unexpected, to the new, to the non-
traditional, to the way it has never been done before—it points the way
towards a future that the rest of church has probably not yet imagined,
just like that incredible associate pastor pointed me to a place and a
future I had not yet imagined for my own life.
And yet, despite the fact that the UCC is always on the cutting edge,
always pointing to a future that the rest of the church ends up having to
catch up with, we are also denomination with roots that are some of the
oldest, if not the oldest, in this country—do you realize that almost 10%
of our current UCC churches were founded before 1776, before the
American revolution? That is close to 600 of our current, living churches
found mostly, most obviously, in the Northeast, which is still where the
UCC is strongest in terms of numbers. The predecessor denominations
that formed our own particular Congregational tradition in this church,
were, even at the very beginning of the country, pointing to a future for
the rest of the church that God wants for ALL of the church: we were the
first to speak out against human slavery in our country—that was the
year 1700, 165 years before the end of human slavery in this country.
We were the first Protestant denomination to ordain an African-American
man to the Christian ministry, in 1785, and in 1976 the UCC was the first
multi-racial denomination to have an African American as its leader, as
our president. And I think that even more amazing to me is that our
tradition ordained the first woman since New Testament times to the
Christian ministry, Antoinette Brown, and she is probably the first woman
to ever be ELECTED to serve as a pastor of Christian congregation—
think about that for a moment—we did something no one else has done
since the earliest days of the church, because we actually did finally
come to believe the New Testament when it said that “there is neither
male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”
And there is the ordination of William Johnson in the 1973, the first
openly gay man ever to be ordained into the Christian ministry in a
mainline church. I am here at this church because of him—hopefully that
is a good thing, but you have a few more months to figure that out for
yourself—after that, you are stuck with me! But even then, there is the
very recent, and very controversial call from our own General Synod to
consider, to prayerfully consider the rights of same-sex couples when it
comes to marriage, and that simple invitation has set off a firestorm in
our denomination, even in our very open and progressive tradition. We’
ve lost maybe 125 churches because of the Synod’s invitation to the
churches to consider—only consider—the rights of others, but even the
invitation was too much for some of our UCC churches, so they’ve
decided now they do not want to walk beside those of us who welcome
the General Synod’s invitation to consider this issue. And perhaps, to be
blunt, they didn’t want to walk beside people like me and Douglas
anymore, which is heartbreaking, of course, because I don’t think most of
us on this side of the table are asking for agreement—we have
incredible room to disagree in the UCC—as much as we are asking for
the chance to walk beside those who disagree with us. Every time the
United Church of Christ has done something like this, with ordination of
an African American man or a woman, or a gay man in the seventies,
people have left us, have left our fellowship, and then eventually, oddly
enough, the Methodist and Presbyterians, etc, eventually end up
catching up with us—they start ordaining people of color and then they
start ordaining women, though they have only been ordaining women for
50 years, whereas we’ve been doing it for over 150 years. People catch
up with us, so often, and it makes me proud that we are people that point
to a future that our fellow brothers and sisters have yet to barely
imagine, and so often, we are found to be on the right side of history,
though it often takes awhile for the rest of the church to get the place
where we’ve been for quite awhile.
But the sad thing about being the first, about the kind of people that
point the rest of the church towards its divine future, is that it sometimes
cost us, doesn’t us? Taking stands has cost us, deeply, sometimes, and
its so ironic, in many ways, if you remember how the formation of the
United Church of Christ came about. This denomination is celebrating its
50th year—and we need to remember that we came into being into as a
sign of hope, because the UCC brought together two Protestant
traditions that seemed very far apart, in terms of theology and church
governance, and we gambled on trying to do this together. The
ecumenical movement had begun in the last part of the19th century, and
it was hoped that one day the differences found in the Christian Church
and within multitude of denominations would fade away, and we would
finally become re-united into one church. But then two world wars and
the Holocaust happened—the mechanics of history weighed in—and
what remained out the ashes of the ecumenical movement was just our
two traditions, the Congregational Christian denomination and the
Evangelical and Reformed denomination, who were still wanting to see if
we could actually live out Christ’s prayer in the Gospel of John that all of
his disciples might be one. This idea of the church being one, of trying
to re-unite the church that had become so splintered, was so important
for our predecessor denominations that they put Christ’s prayer for unity
right into the logo of this newly formed denomination, the United Church
of Christ—“that all may be one.”
Obviously, we still have a long way to go, to actually fulfill Christ’s prayer,
the prayer that John tells us Jesus prayed before his coming date with
the cross on Golgotha. You see, the book of John is unique in a lot of
ways, as a Gospel, because it has stories about Jesus that no one else
has—and the other thing that is interesting about this rendering of Jesus’
life is that John has Jesus talking and talking and talking—long
speeches, and especially right before his death— and for three long
chapters, Jesus speaks of his connection to God, his fears about the
coming persecution of the disciples who are gathered in that upper
room, and he speaks of his hopes and dreams and prayers for the
disciples who will one day follow him in the future. That is where our text
finds itself—somehow, Jesus knows that we future disciples will become a
problem because we will fight and fight over what we think Jesus said or
didn’t say, and we will split, over and over again, and we will not be one,
and we will try to go it alone, without our brothers and sisters by our
side. In today’s passage from John, you can see Jesus pointing to his
own deep intimate connection with the father, with God, in order to point
out how they should be intimate with each other, how they should be
connected to each other—“I want you to honor me by not arguing about
me, by not dividing up yourselves over me; I want you to know the
intimacy and deep connection with God that I do, and the way you will get
that intimacy is remaining deeply connected with each other,” he seems
to be saying.
And it’s interesting that Jesus wants us to be connected to each other
because he wants us to show the rest of the world how its done, how to
be connected and how to drink from that deep river of love that he has
drank from because he has this deep connection with God. “Be one,
because I am one with God. Be one, because by being so you will show
the world that love cannot be divided, just like my father and I are not
divided.” And yet, we know, we know, how incredibly we have failed this
prayer, how in some ways the prayer didn’t come true, and that when the
judgment day comes, however you might understand such a moment, I
suspect we will spend most of our time explaining why we chose NOT to
walk beside SOME of our brothers and sisters, despite the fact that God
has never deserted our side, has never chosen to walk away from us. It’
s a sad thing, I think, but I guess I am still hopeful, that maybe, maybe
one day we’ll get it right, maybe we’ll decide that we are asked to be of
one heart, NOT of one mind, and to know that is to know how to love,
how to love even the people we don’t like or we don’t understand, or we
simply can’t believe might be included in God’s family.
I’ve been doing my own struggling with some of that truth this past week,
with the whole horrible scandal around Ted Haggard, the evangelical
pastor of that large Colorado church, who’s been accused by a male
prostitute of having a sexual relationship and of trying to get that same
prostitute to hook him up with some drugs. And he now admits to buying
drugs from this male prostitute, though not using them—go figure—and
definitely NOT having sex with the prostitute. I have deep doubts about
that, and its clear that the people doing the church’s investigation of
these charges had the same doubts I did, since they fired him as their
pastor yesterday. I have to admit that there is some deep dark place
within me that takes some visceral pleasure over exposing the hypocrisy
of a man who argues that people like me are some of the worst kind of
people, and certainly not worthy of any civil rights, including the right of
marriage, which is one the things that Ted himself had being pushing
Colorado voters to vote for on this coming Tuesday. There is a side of
me that has been glad to see it all unfold, to see him be the very thing he
spoke out against, which is usually the case, isn’t it?
But I’m not proud of that feeling, of having some personal satisfaction
over the misery of another human being, because that other person is
still my brother, a fellow Christian, though I know he and others like him
probably wouldn’t consider me much of a fellow Christian, but I can’t get
out of my mind the deep pain he is going through, despite his own choice
to live an untruthful life. Ted Haggard’s family, his children, his wife, his
congregation—all of them are now writhing in pain, because of his failure
to live up to his own words. And in the end, I think my sadness—and
hopefully our sadness—is because the truth of the matter is that his
failure to live up to his words hurts me, hurts us, hurts all of us, liberals
and conservatives, and everyone else in-between. The words Ted used
to condemn others are now thrown back into his face, but they’re also
thrown back at us who might not have agreed with him in the first place—
we Christians all end up looking like hypocrites, something we often get
accused of anyway. Ted’s shame is our shame, the church’s shame,
because every time we try to draw the circle in a little bit tighter, every
time we try to find somebody else to exclude or find someone else to
think we are be better than, God finds some way to push back, to shame
the church because we have shown that we mistakenly believe that
Jesus came to divide us all up, or that he wanted us to do this insane
thing we do of drawing circles that we use to exclude and include,
despite the fact that Jesus never seemed to do that himself, even with
the Pharisees, his worst enemies. Christ wants us to be one—and this
incredible, though imperfect denomination that is the United Church of
Christ is a witness to a moment in time when we actually believed Christ
might have been serious in that prayer he prayed two thousand years
ago. If I hurt with Ted Haggard, if we hurt with him, if we hurt with our
fellow Christians whom we don’t agree with on many, many issues,
maybe the prayer can somehow become true, maybe it can become a
reality, at least for a moment. Maybe we can do what the United Church
of Christ hoped it would be able to do when it came into existence, which
was to bring us, the church, together, if we can grieve with each other
about each other’s failures, rather than gloat over them. I don’t know—
maybe such an idea is a fool’s hope, but the Gospel is always about a
foolish hope, because our faith is not rooted in the probabilities, but in
the possibilities—and so I believe: I believe because crazier things have
happened, like the resurrection of Christ, and my own resurrection, and I
suspect the resurrection of many of you here. Maybe we can be the kind
of people that walk towards others rather than walking away from them,
no matter how difficult that is, and no matter how much they don’t want
the company. We know what our work in this world is, which is to keep
pointing to a future other Christians can barely imagine happening,
especially during this dark hour of deep division; we need to keep
pointing to a future world where the kingdom of God really will be among
us, and we finally become one, and not only us Christians, but all of God’
s beautiful people, we all become one. A fool’s hope, maybe, but hope is
the only thing worth living by and dying for, as our own Christ showed us
in his incredible choice to walk beside people like you and me and Ted
Haggard. May it always be so. Amen
