Returning from a vacation spent drinking in the natural beauty of our great state, I’m refreshed and reminded of the wonder and goodness of God. In touch with the vastness of God’s creation, the urgent concerns of humanity tend to shrink in comparison. To be surrounded by the awe-inspiring rugged grandeur of the mountains, to sit quietly and hear the whisper of God in the silence of the desert, has been, for me, to gain a renewed appreciation of the timeless and divine blessings that God, I think, would have shape the lives of His people. In our supposedly more civilized settings of city and suburb there reside concerns or ‘issues’ that can drive us quite forcefully. And unless they are integrated with the eternal and divine, these are the issues that can most easily divide, and whose resolutions, if similarly divorced from the transcending goodness of God, can bring far more harm than healing. My experience in the past and of late has been that these ‘issues’ can be humbled, issue-driven-ness quickly can be tamed, in the context of less-mediated and less-distracted contact with God.
Throughout history, there seems always to have been some specific concern with which the faith of the Church was either exercised or distracted, or both. In the beginning of ‘the missional life of the Church’ (a redundant phrase), it was the issue of the welcome or exclusion of Gentiles in the fellowship of the Church: were Gentiles to be regarded as fellow heirs of salvation, equivalent in spiritual stature to the original Jewish Christians? Later the major divisive concern was the proper understanding and confession of the nature of Jesus Christ: is Christ the first and chief creation of God, or is Christ fully God as well as fully in-the-flesh? Still later, the highly schismatic issue was the location of the true human authority of the Church; was the ultimate head of the Church located in the West in Rome or in the East in Constantinople?
In each case, Christians of good faith and conscience disagreed vehemently, even violently, with one another. As a reading of the book of Acts reveals, the Apostle Paul was constantly criticized and challenged by his fellow Jews and Jewish Christians for his ministry to the uncircumcised. No master of tact and diplomacy, nevertheless, Paul was God’s instrument for the salvation of the Gentiles, whose inclusion in the Church is the singular event that opened the way for our own salvation today. Similarly, Eusebius Pamphili, Bishop of Cæsarea and the ‘Father of Church History,’ tells us that the composition of the Nicene Creed was preceded by “a violent controversy,” more exactly, a fist-fight among several bishops and priests on the floor of Council over how best to describe the nature of the Son of God. Even so, thanks be to God, this definitive statement of essential Christian belief emerged from the fray.
Resolution still evades the schism of the Western Church, i.e., the Roman Catholic and, subsequently, the Protestant churches, and the Eastern Church, those churches identified ethnically or nationally along with the moniker ‘Orthodox,’ e.g. Russian Orthodox, Greek Orthodox, Syrian Orthodox. This deep wound, over a thousand years old, has only in the past few years shown but the most tentative hints at healing. Yet, though we cannot hope to predict what specifically it might be, we can know by faith that God is even now bringing about a resolution that will bless the Church and the world.
Each of these issues demonstrates the passionate rigor with which people invest their participation in controversies within the Church. More recent examples that resonate with all the energy of the earlier examples include the issues of the Christian stance toward slavery, toward the roles properly accorded women in society and the Church, and the use of contemporized language in the liturgy. In navigating these issues, the Church has sometimes done well and sometimes done poorly in using a respectful and charitable process in its deliberations. It should be beyond doubt, however, that the passion brought to the debates is evidence of the desire of most, if not all, of the people involved to be faithful to God.
The same surely can be said for the issue that is both exercising and distracting the faithful today, and having taken center stage at the tri-annual General Convention of the Episcopal Church recently adjourned this month. It is the issue of the proper place and role in the Church for the Christian homosexual. I choose not to use the terms ‘gay’ and ‘lesbian’ here because these terms have become steeped in ideology, and the point I wish to make is precisely that the ideological politicization of an issue works against God’s call to His people to a ministry of reconciliation.
Ideological politics is about partisanship, and today such partisanship receives unprecedented encouragement through the commercial competition of popular media whose collective reach is at its historical broadest. As a result, it seems the language of debate is no longer so much discussion as it is a sort of parallel criticism, with those on each side determinedly not speaking with those of differing viewpoints, but instead leveling accusations at one another. One person’s justice is another’s apostasy, and it seems never the ‘twain will even want to meet. There is then an implication for those whose investment in the Church is less ideological (and more missional?), or who simply are invested in an issue other than the issue du jour. It is that they are supposed to take sides on the hot issue, else they are somehow lesser Christians than they ought to be. And it is this about all controversies in the Church that I think grieves God, and pleases the Enemy, the most.
Certainly, history shows that these controversies have proven important for the spiritual progress of the Church and its witness. For instance, is there anyone anymore who would argue in favor of Scripture’s textual affirmation of slavery? Undoubtedly then, God has worked through the Church’s controversies and in the midst of them. Nevertheless, the sad aspect is that they often become ideological and partisan, pitting Christian against Christian. I think one simply cannot imagine the magnitude of injury this sad and angry factionalism has done over the life of the Church to its witness and credibility.
For this reason, however the current controversy is settled, now in the short-term, and ultimately in the long-term, my chief concern as Christian and as priest is that the truly persistent issue will come closer to resolution. I am speaking of the issue of how the Church addresses controversy, or matters of opinion and disagreement. My hope and prayer are that the people, as the organic Church, will rediscover the grace of their role and responsibility in the life of the Church, and that they will reclaim it from the political ideologies that garner most of the world’s skeptical attention. Indeed my prediction is that the people’s Communion with one another will prove to be a gift from God that cannot so easily be undone, and which we the people will not so easily forfeit to controversy, and so which ultimately will prove to be God’s vehicle of reconciliation.
As someone has said, the Church is a hospital for sinners, not a hotel for saints. No matter the outcome of a vote at General Convention around the current controversy, the Church will continue to be comprised of people who disagree with one another, who even disapprove of one another. It has always been so. The issue now, as always, is how we will rediscover the grace to live with this, and how we will reclaim our vocation to live beyond it. I do not know how, but I know that we desire it. And as long we desire it, I know that the wonder and goodness of God will show us how.
Jim +
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