Our Unbroken Vows
In defense of clergy who show the full
grace
of Jesus Christ to homosexual persons
Rev. Jim
Rigby
Pastor St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church
Austin, Texas 512-251-0698
Jrigby0000@aol.com
Like so many of my peers, I now face a crisis in my ministry. We are accused
of violating our ordination vows by participating in the ordination and
marriage of homosexual persons. The complaint against me asserts that I have
acted in “willful and deliberate” violation of my ordination vows and that I
participated in the ordination of an “unrepentant homosexual.”
In this brief document I speak in defense of my
actions and, hopefully, in defense of those who face similar accusations.
On the charge that we are defiant:
Our accusers claim that we have violated our ordination vows by
defying a ban on the ordination and marriage of homosexual persons. The
truth is, in our first ordination vow, we promised to place Jesus Christ
over every other authority, including the church.
The Confession of 67 says: “Obedience to Jesus Christ alone identifies the
one universal church and supplies the continuity of its tradition. This
obedience is the ground of the church’s duty and freedom to reform itself in
life and doctrine as new occasions, in God’s providence may demand.”
To affirm Christ is head of the church means that our
theology and polity must resemble the humble and nonjudgmental Jesus. There
is nothing clearer in the teaching of Jesus than that we should not judge
one other. While we must be selective as we choose our leaders, such
decisions must be based on inner qualities of character not on external
factors like race, gender or sexual orientation.
We cannot serve two masters. We cannot submit to a
loving Christ and surrender our conscience to a mechanical political
process. No Christian has the right to become a cog in a machine. We must
answer directly to Christ for how we treat each person. In ethical dilemmas,
the first question a Protestant asks is not “what does the church teach?”,
but “what does Christ require of us?” We who offer the full rights of
membership to all people do not wish to be defiant. We simply do not know
how to respond to the contention that something Jesus did not even mention
is central to his teachings.
On the charge that we have violated the clear
teaching of scripture:
When we took our second vow to accept scripture as God’s word, it
was understood that we meant a Reformed view of scripture not a
Fundamentalist one. When our vow mentions the role of the Spirit in biblical
interpretation, it eliminates literalism as an option. When we accepted
scripture as God’s word to “the church universal”, we made a vow to
multiculturalism.
To claim that there is one cultural model for marriage
in scripture is simply not truthful. We find many models of marriage in the
Bible. The patriarchs had multiple wives. We find slaves used as surrogate
parents. Ruth had pre-marital sex with Boaz and then sealed the deal with a
shoe. When Mary and Joseph checked into the Christmas Motel they were
engaged but not yet married. In other places, unmarried celibacy seems to be
the ideal. To remain Presbyterian must we pretend that we do not see this
diversity? Can anyone imagine Luther taking a vow to ignore the complexity
of scripture?
It is true that the Levitical Code of the Hebrew
Testament seems to condemn homosexual behavior, but it is also clear from
the creeds and the teaching of Paul that this code has been overturned in
the new covenant. Some claim that Paul calls us to condemn homosexuality in
the first chapter of Romans. This interpretation is made impossible by the
conclusion of his argument in Romans 2:1 which says that no one has a right
to judge another.
A growing number of scholars believe that the church’s
condemnation of homosexuality stems more from culture than from scripture
itself. A recent statement signed by a majority of biblical professors at
Presbyterian seminaries reads: “We would encourage the church at this time
to interpret particular passages of the Bible in light of the whole Bible,
and in the recognition that Jesus Christ, the Redeemer, is the living Word
of God. It is the gospel of Jesus that invites gay and lesbian brothers and
sisters to full communion in the church.”
On the charge that we permit acts that the
Confessions call “sin”.
In our third ordination vow we promised to be instructed by the
confessions. By calling the confessions, “expositions of scripture” the
third vow makes clear that we should not lift human doctrines to the level
of scripture. In other words, a doctrine does not become scriptural just
because some council writes a creed to “clarify” what the Bible says.
Westminster Confession states clearly that scripture
stands alone as our primary guide for living. “All synods or councils since
the apostles’ times, whether general or particular, may err, and many have
erred; therefore they are not to be made the rule of faith or practice, but
to be used as a help in both.”
At ordination we took an oath to be guided and
instructed by the confessions. The reason the vow affirms the “essential”
tenets rather than the “fundamental” ones is pivotal to our whole system.
The confessions specify over two hundred and fifty sins. If literally
enforced, the confessions would empty the church overnight.
The reformers taught that every human being is a
sinner justified not by works of the flesh, but by grace working through
faith. In Seminary, I was taught that one of the great banners of the
reformation was “Faith Alone”. Am I now a heretic for believing it?
On the charge that we disobey the Book of Order
The fourth great pillar of the Reformation was “Grace Alone”. When
we talk about our Christian vocation we must remember that we are called to
a ministry of grace not legalism. When ministers claim that others are
unworthy to serve God, they secretly imply that they are worthy to serve.
This belief is not only cruel, it is heretical.
When the Reformers spoke of the “priesthood of all believers” they affirmed
that Christ had built a temple out of the stones the builders had rejected.
They understood scripture’s edict to “call no one unclean.”
The Confessions of 1967 warns against a polity without
grace: “The church thus orders its life as an institution with a
constitution, government, officers, and administrative rules. These are
instruments of mission, not ends in themselves. Different orders have served
the gospel, and none can claim exclusive validity.”
At first glance, the fourth ordination vow seems to be
a duplication of the first three. Instead, it establishes the order which
allows grace to blossom into humane church law. Our first allegiance is to a
loving Christ, then to scripture as a witness to Christ, then to the
confessions as expositions of what scripture would have us believe and do,
and finally to the church’s polity. A fundamentalist begins at the other end
of the process. By beginning with the Book of Order and trying to move back
to Christ, a fundamentalist unwittingly lifts human rules over scripture and
Christ. If we begin with Christ, we will seek out the rules of righteousness
by which to live, but if we begin with some human idea of righteousness, we
may never find our way back to the merciful Christ.
In our fourth vow we affirmed the process of the
church. When we were ordained, the Book of Order was a manual of operations
not an inquisitor’s handbook. To long for too much clarity in law is to long
for chains. Christ died in part to save us from the curse of the human law.
What does the freedom of Christ mean if slavery to the Book of Order
replaces slavery to Old Testament law? Are we to submit to new chains just
because they are cast by Presbyterian hands? To quote Paul, “God forbid!”
On the charge that we have renounced the polity
of the church
The Book of Order calls us to uphold the “essentials” of church
polity. This means that the polity does not consist merely in the rules
imposed by the dominant group, but more essentially in the principles that
make democracy possible in the first place. Our system of organization
cannot be understood solely in terms of power. It is helpful to think of
elements of polity not as cogs in a machine, but sinews in a body.
One central purpose of a constitution is to protect
the minority from the tyranny of the majority. The constitution establishes
separations of power, as well as inalienable rights. Inalienable rights
cannot be put up to a vote just because a certain group is unpopular.
Examples of such protected rights are the right of
every member to hold office (G.5.0102e), and the right of every church to
choose its own leaders (G.6.0107). These ancient safeguards protect us from
each other. They allow us to disagree, and yet, still serve Christ together.
The Presbyterian system makes no sense if we are all supposed to be the same
or to surrender to the herd.
At our ordination, we promised to submit to one
another, but that submission is “subject to the ordering of God’s word and
spirit.” We submit to majority rule whenever possible, but an assault on the
inalienable rights of a minority is an attack on the very heart tissue of
our polity and must be opposed.
On the claim that we are hurting the church’s
mission
It has been said that Christians in other countries disapprove of
homosexuality and so we should not bring up the subject because it hurts the
church’s mission. But what is the church’s mission? According to our fifth
vow, it is to work for the reconciliation of the world.
The church often quotes the verse in Second
Corinthians where Paul talks about Christ’s work of reconciliation and how
we are called to be ambassadors of this message. It is interesting that many
references to this passage leave out the part where Christ was: “not
counting their sins against them”. To say that some people cannot lead the
church because they are sinners is to miss the whole point of the Gospel.
The Confession of 67 gets it right when it says: “In
spite of their sin, Christ gives them power to become representatives of
Jesus Christ and (the) Gospel of reconciliation to all human beings.” Bishop
Tutu captured this spirit of reconciliation with his words: “In God’s
family, there are no outsiders. All are insiders. Black and white, rich and
poor, gay and straight, Jew and Arab, Palestinian and Israeli, Roman
Catholic and Protestant, Serb and Albanian, Hutu and Tutsi, Muslim and
Christian, Buddhist and Hindu, Pakistani and Indian -all belong.”
If homosexual persons are sinners it is not because
they are homosexual, but because they are human. Spreading the message that
our holy God works through human sinners is not a threat to the mission of
the church. It is our mission.
On the charge that we are violating the peace,
unity, purity of the church
We also stand accused of violating the peace unity and purity of the
church. But by “purity” our accusers do not mean the purity of
sanctification. Their “purity” consists of obedience to laws governing the
flesh. This is the same heresy condemned by Paul in Galatians.
By “unity” our accusers do not mean a dynamic polity
where people can disagree in the spirit of Peter and Paul and yet still
serve God in our differences. To them, “unity” means conformity to one point
of view -theirs.
When our accusers speak of “peace”, they seek a false
peace where Presbyterians no longer bring up controversial issues. They long
for a day when we will have settled hard questions once and for all. They
seek a day, in other words, where the Reformation is dead and buried.
The Theological Task Force on Peace, Unity, and Purity
of the Church has written a preliminary report which reads: “There is rich
diversity in the Body of Christ and there are deep disagreements among its
members. The unity we seek cannot be reduced to either uniformity or
unanimity. In particular, unity cannot be attained if the voices of some
members of the body are ignored.”
On the claim that we are assaulting the
traditional biblical meaning of marriage
One will seek in vain to find in our vows where we promised to pluck
out our eyes so that we would not notice new truths that challenged our
traditional understandings. On the contrary, when we vowed to “serve the
people with intelligence” it meant we would keep an open mind to new
discoveries about the human condition. When we vowed to serve the people
“with imagination” it meant we would be flexible in adapting religion to
human need.
One motto of the Reformation was “always reforming”.
When many of us joined the Presbyterian Church, we believed our faith could
be allowed to grow as we learned new truths about the world. We believed
“semper reformanda” meant we would never be asked to lie about scientific
discoveries the way Galileo was asked to lie about helio-centrism.
It is true that the ancients believed human beings are
created either male or female, but we also know that their genetics is
obsolete. We now know every human fetus begins between the genders. We now
know that sexuality is a continuum and that every day children are born
between the genders and are surgically altered to fit our two categories. If
“God is not the author of sin” as Westminster teaches, who are we to say
that in blessing male and female, God does not bless the whole continuum in
between?
Human councils can no more remove the ambiguities of
biology by making rules than ancient popes could ban eclipses by religious
decree. If it is an act of relic worship to carry the thighbones of the
saints, is it not worse idolatry try to see our world through their dead
eyes? Is not the very essence of faith openness to God’s new word?
It can be argued that the basic “plan” for human reproduction is
heterosexual coitus, and yet maintain that God still has a plan for those
who do not fit that norm, such as people with disabilities, aged couples,
and homosexual persons. Because humans are more than genitalia, it is
possible that God still offers us spiritual fullness of life even if our
relationships do not fit the biological reproductive norm.
Perhaps marriage, while not a sacrament, can be
understood sacramentally as a gift of God’s grace. This would make sense of
the statement in the Book of Order that “Marriage is a gift God has given to
all humankind for the well being of the entire human family.” Christ calls
us to a new humanity beyond conditions of slave or free, Jew or Greek, male
or female. Christian ethics are not based on these conditions of the flesh
but on the fruits of the spirit In Christ, every person is offered the
possibility of fullness of life.
On the claim that we should be patient and work within the system
We hope to work within the system wherever we can, but our last vow
was to show the love and justice of Jesus Christ to all persons. Jesus
Christ was the author of human rights when he said that the Sabbath was made
for humans not humans for the Sabbath. Our last vow means we are not free to
violate human rights even if ordered to do so by our peers.
In 1959 our denomination signed on to the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights. Article 12 of that document states: “No one
shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his (or her) privacy,
family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his (or her) honor and
reputation.”
In the spirit of human rights, in1977, the PCUS
General Assembly expressed ”…the need for the Church to stand for just
treatment of homosexual persons in our society in regard to their civil
liberties, equal rights, and protection under the law from social and
economic discrimination which is due all citizens.” It would be a pitiful
thing if the standard for human rights were higher outside the church, than
in.
When the Book of Worship says that marriage is a
“civil contract” we must remember that the church renounces any civil power
(G9.0102). If marriage is a civil contract, then it a question not of church
polity, but of civil rights.
Our last vow calls us to justice and reminds us that any doctrine is heresy
in an unloving heart.
Conclusion: Our vows compel us to offer the full grace of Jesus Christ
to all persons.
It is ironic that those who stand with Christ over and against the
prejudices of culture are accused of pandering to that culture. The claim by
some Christians that homosexuals have been popular in our culture is simply
not honest. On the contrary, gay and lesbian, bisexual and transgender
persons have been cultural targets- scapegoats. They live under the threat
of being beaten, fired, or having their children taken away.
To be a friend of outcasts is to become an outcast
yourself. So while our critics operate safely within the culture, we are the
ones called “traitors” and “heretics”. We are the ones brought before church
counsels. Our “sin” is that we have tried to treat our culture’s outcastes
the same way Jesus treated his.
We take our stand not so we can be defiant, but so we
can be Protestant. It is sometimes forgotten that the word “protestant”
comes from the word “protest”. Our “protest” is only against a tyranny which
threatens our Reformed polity and faith. The Reformation did not reject
Popes alone, but all forms of ecclesiastical bullying. An allegiance to
tradition over principles will insure conformity in the church, but it will
also insure that anyone with the spirit of Martin Luther will be driven from
our midst.
To be a member of the Reformed faith does not mean to
worship at the graves of Calvin and Luther. To be worthy of the Reformation
it is not enough to praise the noble dead. We must ourselves become
reformers. We must take responsibility for our place and time. The most
unreformed thing we can do is to copy the reformers.
From our forebears we gratefully receive the
principles of the Reformation, but we cannot, and should not, force their
answers upon a different time. We must think with today’s science and act
upon today’s necessity. To be worthy of the Reformation we must struggle
against all human systems that enslave the mind and spirit. To be worthy of
the Reformation we must know that God does not live in some musty past but
calls to us from the future. To be worthy of the Reformation we must know
that God’s greatest word is yet unsaid.
Rev. Jim Rigby,
Pastor St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church,
Austin, Texas
512-251-0698
Jrigby0000@aol.com |
