Dear Sisters and Brothers in Christ at Lord of the Hills Church:
This is a pastoral letter: that is, it comes to you only from your pastor, not the Congregation Council nor anyone else.
I would rather be doing almost anything other than writing this letter (Root canal? Bungee jumping into the Grand Canyon?). And perhaps I need to confess my cowardice in not addressing this topic at the end of the summer after the August Evangelical Lutheran Church in America churchwide assembly. We're in a building program, I timidly reasoned, why disturb the troops?
The issue before us is: whether or not ordained pastors who are in a committed homosexual relationship can remain as pastors in good standing. The present policy of the ELCA is that they cannot. At that 2007 assembly several decisions were made to postpone any final discussion or decision until the 2009 churchwide assembly (when a statement on sexuality will also be before the assembly). But then the assembly approved a motion encouraging bishops to refrain from disciplining any pastors in a committed homosexual relationship. And you may have seen the recent newspaper report of the November ordination of a lesbian in Chicago who refuses to abide by the present ELCA policy (and her bishop is refraining from disciplining her congregation).
So...we are in a period of flux for the next 20 months; decisions made at the 2009 churchwide assembly will be critical.
For those of you who are newer here at Lord of the Hills Church, this issue has surfaced here infrequently in our 12 years together. (Again, my timidity? My fear?) I preached a sermon on it in June 2002; in the winter of 2004 we had three or four sessions together where we discussed the issue. Those of you who have been here for a while know where I stand on this issue: I am in favor of retaining the present ELCA policy of not ordaining practicing homosexuals and not blessing same-sex unions. However, let me be sure you also understand this at the very beginning:
Some of you know that my mind was not always in this place. Twenty-five years ago, in a previous congregation, I was in fact a supporter of the ordination of practicing homosexuals. In that congregation we began the discussion by inviting in homosexual Christians who told us, "This is the way God made me, so it must be good." And precisely there is the misstep: beginning with our human experience. Building our theology on the human experience is a foundation of sand. Eighty years ago, when the Swiss theologian Karl Barth first began his Church Dogmatics, he made just such a false start. Thank goodness, he recognized his mistake after his first volume and started all over again:
. . . in this second draft I have excluded to the very best of my ability anything that might appear to find for theology a foundation, support, or justification in philosophical existentialism. The Word or existence?
Since we all do know homosexual persons--and like them and love them!--it is so tempting to begin with the human experience: here is X, who so obviously has gifts for the ordained ministry in the parish; whether he has a homosexual partner or not, should we not ordain him and make use of his gifts? Once again it is the argument: "This is the way God made me; therefore it must be good."
But that is an approach that stays stuck in Genesis 1 and 2 (the Stories of Creation) and totally forgets Genesis 3 (the Story of the Fall into Sin). None of us are as God intended us to be; sin has tainted us all. In fact, that was the sin of Adam and Eve--and therefore the sin of us all--the desire to exalt ourselves and be like God. To this audacious presumption of humans to become God, God answers with the gracious good news of the Gospel: God became human!
The mistake of beginning with our human experience is such a serious misstep; please allow me to continue in this vein for a while. There was a recent debate on homosexuality in the pages of Commonweal (a Catholic magazine) between Luke Timothy Johnson (a lay Catholic New Testament scholar at Emory University, who has a lesbian daughter) and Eve Tushnet (a writer and recent convert to Catholicism who self-identifies as a lesbian but has committed herself to be chaste and non-practicing).
First, this from Luke Timothy Johnson, arguing from the human experience perspective:
I think it important to state clearly that we do, in fact, reject the straightforward commands of Scripture, and appeal instead to another authority when we declare that same-sex unions can be holy and good. We appeal explicitly to the weight of our own experience and the experience thousands of others have witnessed to, which tells us that to claim our own sexual orientation is in fact to accept the way in which God has created us.
Eve Tushnet responds:
I'm not convinced this is how human love stories relate to the divine love story. Loving one another can be an echo of the love we receive from God; it can be the child of that love; it can be preparation for our own awestruck love of God. (I would argue that my erotic and romantic love of women has been all three of those things, at different times.) But our human experience, including our erotic experience, cannot be a replacement for the divine revelation preserved by the Church. We must be careful not to let it become a counternarrative or a counter-Scripture.
In that previous congregation I remember asking in a sermon, "If homosexual behavior is a sin, how does it differ from the persistent sins that I repeat...like my greed?" I have since come to realize that there is no difference between homosexual behavior and greed: both are sins. God speaks His No to both, and yet also to both the homosexual and the person trapped in greed God proclaims His more powerful Yes, the Yes that empowers obedience to refrain from behaviors where God has spoken His No. It is the good news of the justification of the sinner (where God's Yes is rightly announced), but not the justification of the sin (where instead God's No should be spoken).
And why do I regard homosexual behavior as sinful? Because Scripture does. No, I am not a fundamentalist. Mine is not a bumper sticker theology: "The Bible says it, I believe it, that settles it." I was taught a more discriminating exegesis: "Let Scripture interpret Scripture" (from the mouth of Martin Luther). Here's how I would apply that.
Yes, there are many examples where the church today differs from the Bible in its moral practices: women as property, slavery, polygamy, and the role of women. In all of those cases, one is able to find a path within the Bible itself that justifies a critique or moderation of those texts. Especially we need to see the redemptive movement in Scripture. With both slavery and the women issue, there is a redemptive spirit in the bible that did not exist in Israel's surrounding culture: slaves are treated better, there is the jubilee freedom for Hebrew slaves; with women, and the Scripture moderates the harsh patriarchy in the surrounding culture.
Furthermore, that redemptive movement continues even within Scripture. With the issue of slavery, there is the central Exodus event (Israel being freed from Egyptian slavery), and there is Paul's letter to Philemon in the New Testament where he subtly suggests that Philemon free his slave Onesimus. With the issue of women, there is the Deborah story in the Old Testament, and there is Paul's call for equality in the sexual realm between husbands and wives (1 Corinthians 7).
Do you see how this redemptive movement works? If the movement from the surrounding culture to Old Testament Israel is in a certain direction...and if that movement continues in that direction as you go to the New Testament, then it is right for that movement to continue on into our modern culture. That is why you can move from a cruel treatment of slaves in the surrounding culture to a better treatment of slaves within Israel to Paul's subtle plea for the freedom of the slave Onesimus to the 19th century Christian abolition movement. That, I believe, is how God's spirit moves the Church in a new direction...by continuing the redemptive movement that is already present within Scripture.
But . . . with the issue of homosexuality, the biblical movement is in the exact opposite direction. Homosexuality was openly practiced and more widely accepted in Israel's surrounding culture, but the Bible speaks God's No to this practice (Leviticus 18:22}. Furthermore, there is no softening of that position in the New Testament. The No still stands, as witnessed by Paul's classic statement in Romans 1:26-27. If we were to bless homosexual unions and to ordain practicing homosexuals, we would be reversing the direction in which the Spirit has led the Church, and that we must not do.
The 2,000-year tradition of the church also provides guidance in how to interpret Scripture: As G.K. Chesterton said, "Tradition is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about." For all the issues that divided the church in the past, tolerance or blessing of homosexual acts was never one of them. Apparently Scripture's plain sense was simply too plain when it came to homosexual behavior.
Do we also need to mention what a tiny proportion of the world's Christians is lobbying for this un-sinning of homosexual behavior? 2% at the most! Not, of course, that church doctrine and discipline is settled by a majority vote, but that does speak to the vast majority of Christians who are in line with the great tradition of the Church.
I fear that our Evangelical Lutheran Church in America is in danger of losing its biblical perspective. You and I are invited into this strange and different world of the Scriptures, to see our world from God's point of view, to let the biblical world become our world. Too often in our modern culture, we have done the reverse: that is, we have interpreted Scripture through the language and categories of the world when we should have been interpreting our world through the language and categories of the Scriptures.
Therefore the church cannot condone homosexual behavior. But, are homosexuals to be excluded from the community of faith? No! A thousand times, no! As Richard Hays (New Testament professor, Duke University) said, "If homosexual persons are not welcome in the church, I will have to walk out the door along with them, leaving in the sanctuary only those entitled to cast the first stone." But, once again, as Hays' homosexually oriented friend said, "Anyone who joins such a community should know that it is a place of transformation, of discipline, of learning, and not merely a place to be comforted or indulged."
One last time. The amazing good news is that God has spoken his powerful Yes to the world; the whole world has been reconciled to God in Jesus Christ! However, that wonderful Yes of God does not obliterate God's No. If we take away the No, then there is no need for the Yes. If there is no sin to be condemned, there is no need for a Savior. "So . . . it is indeed necessary to say No too. But the right No can only be one which derives from and is upheld by an even more powerful Yes." (Karl Barth)
Grace and peace,
Pastor Tom Renquist
Lord of the Hills Lutheran Church, Centennial, Colorado