Below is the keynote address given by John H. Thomas, General Minister and President of the United Church of Christ, at the General Assembly Banquet of the Gay, Lesbian and Affirming Disciples Alliance, July 24, 2005, Portland, OR.
As most of you know, the United Church of Christ has been having some fun on television over the last few months. Our "God is Stillspeaking" initiative included a television commercial that aired in December and March accompanied by an unexpected but in the long run rather helpful public controversy when ABC and CBS refused to run the ads because they were deemed "politically controversial," and "supportive of gay marriage." Thank you letters are due to the networks for all the free air time! More importantly, our ad placed front and center in the culture an alternative perspective on how the church extends its welcome, and to whom. The ad portrayed a church being guarded by two bouncers and a velvet rope, as if we are an exclusive nightclub. Some are welcomed. Others are turned away. The ad has an edge to it; it speaks directly to the countless people in our culture who have felt excluded by the church, dismissed by the church, wounded by the church. Friends, they are legion. Whether we like it or not, the Gospel for many in this land is not a friendly word, a welcoming word, a gracious word, but a harsh word of judgment. Can we alter that reality? After the scene with the bouncers, a diverse group of people is portrayed, accompanied by the words, "Jesus didn't turn people away; neither do we. No matter who you are, no matter where you are on life's journey, you're welcome here. The United Church of Christ."
One little girl wrote us after seeing the ad this Lent. She has a degenerative spinal diseases that requires her to sit in a wheel chair. She saw someone in a wheel chair in our ad and asked, "Does she have the same disease I have?" Is there a place, she seemed to ask, for someone like me, someone who has know what it means to be different, to be excluded, to be feared by other children, by other adults? Is there an extravagant welcome for me? This is the question before us at a time when God's extravagant welcome seems so counter cultural. We vote to leave the covenant when grace is offered in ways that seem indiscriminate or undisciplined. We withhold citizenship, not only in the church, but also in our land, when the stranger is deemed too different, too alien, too strange. Is there a word for us?
In 1662 my own Puritan and Congregationalist forebears in New England struggled with the question of baptism, of who might be baptized and granted citizenship in the household, the commonwealth of God, of who might appropriately be excluded. The specific question was whether the children of adults who had been baptized, who were faithful in church attendance and discipline, but who had never experienced regeneration in a way that might be testified to among the deacons of the congregation, whether those children might receive baptism and share, as they grew up, in the covenant of grace. The conclusion of those Puritan divines is instructive:
Baptism, which is the seal of membership in the church, the body of Christ. . . , is not to be made a common thing, nor to be given to those, between whom and the Godless licentious world there is no visible difference: This would be a provocation and dishonour to the Holy One of Israel. On the other hand, we find in Scripture, that the Lord is very tender of his grace; the he delighteth to manifest and magnify the riches of it, and that he cannot endure any straitening or eclipsing thereof. . . . Hence we dare not exclude the same children of the faithful from the covenant. . . Neither dare we exclude the same children from membership when they are grown up. . . . God owns them still, and they do in some measure own him; God rejects them not, and therefore neither may we; and consequently their children also are not to be rejected.
"The Lord is very tender of his grace, he delighteth to manifest and magnify the riches of it, and he cannot endure any straightening or eclipsing thereof." The language is archaic, but the meaning clear. There's a wideness in God's mercy like the wideness of the sea. The Half-Way Covenant did not extend to all the baptized the privilege of the Table. That remained reserved for those regenerated, for the "visibly elect." Thus it was "half-way." Even so, the authors recognized they would be exposed to criticism from all sides: "We are not ignorant that this our labor will be diverse by diversely censured; some will account us too strict in the point of baptism, and others too lax and large." Sound familiar?
It's not just in the church that Americans have struggled with the question of whether to extend citizenship. In spite of the welcome carved in the foundation of the Statue of Liberty, "the tired, restless poor yearning to breath free" have often been rejected from our shores or received with ambivalence. The same New Englanders who found a way to lower the fences around the baptismal fount in the 17th century, and then around the Table in the18th century, lamented the arrival of the Irish and the Italians in the 19th century with their different culture and their priests and bishops. Political cartoons portrayed those immigrants as reptiles crawling from the sea onto the shores of Massachusetts and Connecticut, their crocodile jaws formed in the shape of Catholic bishops' mitres. The framers of the Chinese exclusion acts in the late 19th century cruelly and, of course, inaccurately described the Asians they had brought to California to build the railroads as sub-humans favoring filthy squalor in opium dens in San Francisco, men and women who would cavalierly offer their children into slavery. An editorial in the Butte, Montana newspaper, opined that "The Chinaman's life is not our life, his religion is not our religion, he belongs not in Butte." When Great Falls made a bid to become the capitol of Montana, its slogan was , "Great Falls for the Capitol. No Chinese."
In the middle of the twentieth century Jews seeking to flee the holocaust received, for the most part, a cold shoulder from the United States; many who were refused sanctuary here had to wait years to be liberated from the camps by soldiers of that same nation. Most, of course, never survived for liberation. During the 1940's Japanese citizens here on the west coast lost the privileges of citizenship in a time of racist fear. Today our southern borders continue to fence out the poor; the fortunate ones who elude the border patrol face dehydration in the desert or abuse in migrant labor camps all across the land. Among the central narratives of our history is the genocide of those who arguably had the greater claim to citizenship, native Americans, indigenous people, whose surviving descendants now struggle to live with the ambiguity of dual tribal and American citizenship.
To that shame we add the forced migration of Africans, welcomed only as slaves, as two-thirds citizens, constitutionally deemed only a fraction of the worth of white citizens. Arguably the defining struggle of America has been the transformation of some of God's children from being perceived as property to being welcomed as citizens, a struggle that still continues. The Amistad event, one of our beloved UCC stories, battled in the churches, the courts, and the public square, and the American Missionary Association that carried this struggle forward in the face of segregation, separate and unequal schools, lynching, denial of the right to vote, and back of the bus, was about the pilgrimage from property to citizenship. The journey across the bridge toward Selma was about claiming citizenship. The March on Washington was about the descendants of property claiming the divine rights of citizenship. Yet even in the face of steps toward a more extravagant welcome, we remain uncertain. Today's Patriot Act is not just a reaction to 9/11, a strategic response to terror, but is in fact part of the ignoble heritage of our nation's long trajectory of reluctance to extend citizenship to the stranger, the alien, to those who are different, a reluctance often manipulated by fear. At best we have been ambivalent. And too often the church has followed suit. Sometimes not even half way.
Paul's letter to the Ephesians turns on this very point. Could Jews extend to Gentiles "citizenship" in the covenant? Could Gentiles extend to Jews hospitality? Could the "far off" as Paul describes them, "be brought near?" And could the hostility be brought to an end? Could the dividing wall be broken down? Paul reminds the Gentiles that they were at one time "aliens from the commonwealth, strangers to the covenants of promise." Now, in Christ, "you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are citizens with the saints and members of the household of God." Could those who are alien, strange, different, indeed in some sense repulsive, be brought near from the safety of a far distance? Could citizenship be extended?
The letter of Peter struggles with a similar theme, recalling that Jesus himself, chosen and precious in God's sight, is rejected by mortals, yet like a rejected stone at a building site, is now chosen to become the cornerstone. Then Peter turns to the Christian community, aliens in the empire of Rome. "You are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God's own people." A holy nation. Citizens. Once "not a people." Now God's people. For Peter and for Paul at the heart of the gospel is a welcome extended to the rejected, to the excluded, a welcome that reaches far beyond "half way" and that is not just about hospitality, but about citizenship.
Earlier this month the General Synod of the United Church of Christ took up this question of citizenship in a resolution on marriage. It was and is a question dealing with citizenship in the church and citizenship in the commonwealth, in the state. Should a marriage license be given to same gender couples by the state? Should the church bless those relationships as they would a marriage between a man and a woman? Once again, as with our ancestors, we are asked to consider what it means to be an alien, what it means to be a citizen, of who is "near" and who is "far" and how the Gospel of grace is to be lived out amid the competing claims of those who sometimes fight over where to establish the borders and boundaries of civil and ecclesiastical life.
At face value the heat in the marriage debate is generated by competing interpretations of scripture, of how one is to discern God's will for the contemporary church in a few texts of the Bible, so contested, for some so definitive, for others so minimal and obscure. The Biblical text is not to be excluded from the debates; the scriptures are the rule of faith and moral practice for the Christian community. But as was the case with slavery over a century ago, or the leadership of women in the church, these interpretation debates often mask a deeper Biblical reality, namely, the reality of human sin and our profound ambivalence over "the other," the stranger, the alien in our midst. The murderous jealousy of Joseph's brothers, the mortal combat between the two brothers, Cain and Abel, the makeshift clothing that Adam and Eve fashioned to hide what had suddenly become their shameful nakedness and their physical differences from one another, their hiding from the Creator in the Garden, even their desire to be "like God" and to forsake their "difference from God," the journey back toward our origins and the dream of Eden reminds us that, at the heart of human existence, suspicion and fear of difference lurk close at hand. This fear and ambivalence described by the text is never prescribed by the text, yet this fear often shapes our reading of the texts in distorted and oppressive ways. And such distorted readings become ready excuses for withholding citizenship.
A birth certificate, a social security card, a driver's license, a passport - these pieces of paper are more than bureaucratic documents. A colleague of and mine recently told the story of finding his German immigrant grandfather's citizenship papers, saved as a cherished possession through the years. "No longer a subject of the Prussian emperor, now a citizen of the United States." These documents portray status in the community granting certain rights and privileges but, above all, inclusion in the commonwealth. Only a few of us, I suspect, know what it is to be "undocumented." To be without documents is to be without citizenship. To be without documents is to carry the title, "illegal," with all the vulnerability that confers. Documents matter.
A marriage license is, in a sense, but one more piece of paper issued by the state. In the rebellious days of the sixties young people scoffed at the need for this piece of paper, how could certification by the state be important in the face of the loving commitment of two people? How ironic, and how much things have changed, that now the most radical among us make the obtaining of a marriage license a mark of prophetic witness while the most traditional among us seek to withhold it! But is it just one more piece of bureaucratic paper? Is it not the one, last remaining tangible symbol of citizenship we are yet able to withhold from some among us? Is this really all about clinging to what the Bible says about marriage? (And friends, go down that path, particularly in the Old Testament, and believe me, you end up in some very strange places!) Or is it yet one more example of our deep historical ambivalence over the stranger in our midst, and of our reluctance to extend citizenship? Could it be that the great marriage debate which roils the political and ecclesiastical waves today is as much about citizenship as it is about what the Bible may or may not say about homosexuality and marriage?
The debates about marriage we had leading up to and during our Synod in Atlanta, and the discussions being held across our church since then, test not only our view of particular Biblical texts and theological traditions, but our understanding of citizenship which is, itself, at the heart of Christian mission. Mission matters not just because of the things we do to educate or to heal, to nurture churches or to confront injustice. It is compassion and it is justice but it is more than that. It is nothing less than a witness to the mission of God, a great historical sending of God's own self into the world to bless it and to redeem it. Mission is sending, the sending of Christ - born homeless, joining his family in Egypt as a refugee, a Jewish subject of the Roman empire, a criminal executed outside the gates - the sending of one who continues and completes the trajectory of blessing that begins with the call of Abraham and Sarah to be a blessing to the nations, the bringing of slaves to a homeland, and the return of exiles to their forsaken capital. The story of "not a people" who become "God's own people." God's extravagant welcome is nothing less than the breaking down of the wall of hostility, of reaching those who are near and those who are far off and making them one, no longer strangers and aliens, but citizens, members of the household of God.
The decision to affirm marriage equality at General Synod was not easy, and the reception of this decision by the wider church will certainly be challenging. God's extravagant welcome asks us to extend citizenship, not simply to offer pleasant hospitality. Extending citizenship does not easily translate into clear public or church policies about marriage and family life. Some in the United Church of Christ are already telling us that extending citizenship in the form of marriage licenses to gay and lesbian persons renders them exiles from their own church. The bold and prophetic word the Synod offered will now need to be accompanied by pastoral grace. Discipleship is costly, even as it is joyful, and we - and you in your own way - will need to carefully weigh the cost - all the costs - for there will be costs no matter how Christians decide, and the bearing of them is not always equal. So I am comforted by my Puritan forebears who struggled with these questions in the context of baptism, and found a way to extend citizenship, even if it was only "half-way," marking out a trajectory toward a welcome others would one day be able to offer more fully.
Leviticus may seem an odd place to find a text for us to meditate on in these challenging times of costly decision and discipleship around the demands of citizenship that are the living out of the mandates of extravagant welcome. At the very least there may be a sense of delicious irony! Yet tucked in the midst of admonitions about witchcraft and making daughters prostitutes and respecting the elderly and being honest in the use weights and measures in commerce, comes this word: "When an alien resides with you in your land, you shall not oppress the alien. The alien who resides with you shall be to you as a citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt, (Leviticus 19.33-34)." Extending citizenship. A challenging vocation for us as Americans, for us as Christians. It is never something we do comfortably. Sometimes we can only go "half way," disappointing to some, an important milestone on a journey yet to be completed for others. Yet it is the very mission of God who is always making "not a people," "God's people." And it is the legacy of our forebears who struggled as we do today, who in the end, found in the Scriptures a God "who is very tender of his grace, who delighteth to manifest and magnify the riches of it, and cannot endure any straightening or eclipsing thereof." Decisions that once seemed to offer nothing but unbearable cost, now yield the most profound joy. So too, these new commitments we now experience as awesome and lonely burden will, one day I believe, be embraced by most as marvelous gift.
On June 5, 2004, in the Congregational United Church of Christ of Needham, Massachusetts, not far from where the Puritans debated the Half-Way Covenant, Barbra and Kathi exchanged vows. Then the pastor declared,
Since you have consented to join together in marriage and have pledged yourselves to each other today, by the power vested in me by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, I now pronounce that you are married in the eyes of God, of the United Church of Christ, of those who love you, and of those who witness this event.
God's extravagant welcome. Extending citizenship. Half-way no longer!
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