From the Covenant
Network Conference
Worship provides a vital core of the conference
Preachers offer lively images for the future
by Doug King
11-4-00
The worship services were once again a strong feature
of the Covenant Network Conference. Music was led and performed by an
impressive array of musical groups: soloists, choirs, organ, piano,
drums and guitar, and to add a note of joy and strength to the closing
worship, a brass quintet. The music itself covered a wide range, from
Taizé chants to gospel songs to classic hymns. The communion service on
Friday evening was closed with one of the "anthems" of the
More Light movement, "We Are Marching in the Light of God."
Thursday evening's worship included a time of prayer
for healing and wholeness, with anointing and laying on of hands for the
hundred or more worshipers who chose to go forward. It was a moving
moment of prayer for the healing of our church, of our world, blended
with awareness of the individual needs for healing that many carried
with them.
The four sermons preached, taken together, provided
creative images for the work of the Network.
A red tulip
The sermon for the opening service was preached by the
Rev. Angela Ying,
formerly on the staff of Seattle Presbytery and now serving as pastor of
Bethany United Church of Christ in Seattle. Starting from the text of
Ruth 1:1-18, she spoke of the "complicated dance of life,"
full of tension, among Naomi and her two alien daughters-in-law, Ruth
and Orpah. Observing that this book may well have been written during
the period after the Exile, when the Hebrews were struggling with the
issue of boundaries, "who's in and who's out," she compared
the Jewish need for "nice, neat, nailed-down boxes" to an
experience she had during a tulip festival in Seattle.
The fields of tulips were all laid out a separate
plots, each with its own single color. "White here, yellow there,
with signs warning any wanderer to stay on the path." Then, she
said, "we found it. Buried deep in a neat field of white-and-yellow
tulips was one bright red tulip, standing tall and boldly
different." So, she said, can we be in the church, standing tall
with those who are different, and helping them to stand tall too. And so
we might help our church to be a true community of God's love, reaching
beyond the neat boxes. So, she concluded, "my friends, stand tall
and let the spirit of the red tulip live in us."
Coming home
On Friday morning the preacher was the Rev. Agnes
Norfleet, pastor of North Decatur Presbyterian Church in Decatur,
Georgia. She too dealt with the Exile, beginning from Isaiah 55:1-13,
the prophet's hymn of joy as he contemplates the coming end of the
Exile. Quoting Walter Brueggemann she said "Yahweh is an
exile-ending God." Turning to the conference theme of the authority
of scripture, Norfleet pointed to Isaiah's proclamation that "the
bridge between the Exile and the return is the highway of the Word of
God." This invitation for everyone to "come to the waters ...
[to] buy and eat" is not some "liberal, left-wing
invitation," it is not some kind of secular response to a "gay
political agenda." This invitation to "everyone," said
Norfleet, "is not in spite of Biblical authority, it is because of
it."
As she closed her sermon she said "Yes,
exile-ending God, we are coming home." Coming home from exile --
another powerful image for the conference.
Coloring outside the lines
Friday evening's communion service included a sermon
by the Rev. Thomas Tewell, pastor of Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church in
New York City. Before he began his sermon, Tewell introduced Doug Nave,
a trustee of the congregation and a practicing attorney, to give "a
word of witness." Nave, as an out gay man, spoke of the power of
Jesus words to the woman taken in adultery: "Go and sin no
more." He did not give her the easier, more limited command to stop
her adultery, said Nave. Instead he commanded her with exactly the same
command that comes to all of us: "God and sin no more." It's
not just sexual behavior that concerns Jesus here, but something deeper
and more universal than that -- something for all of us.
Nave also commented that Matthew 1, the genealogy of
Jesus, is one of his favorite passages. (Maybe it takes an attorney to
appreciate that list?) What he finds in that list of widely assorted
people, he said, is the affirmation that "everyone has a place in
the family of God. That is the first word -- and the last word -- in the
Gospel of Jesus Christ."
Tewell's sermon, based on the account of Peter's
encounter with the Gentile Cornelius in Acts 10, began with an
acknowledgment that we all prefer a "God in a box," safe,
predictable. That's what Paul wanted, too, but the Spirit drove Paul to
get beyond his boxes in order to deal with Cornelius. "God is
always coloring outside the lines," he said -- pushing Paul to deal
with a Gentile in a new way, announcing the birth of Jesus to outcast
shepherds, and Jesus' resurrection to women.
Tewell went on to recount
his own movement, something like Paul's, from a general uneasiness about
homosexuality, through close acquaintance with lesbian and gay couple in
his former congregation in Texas, to the influence of people like Doug
Nave. Through such experiences, he said, "I believe God's doing a
new thing -- to make us a truly inclusive and welcoming church -- as
inclusive as the love of God."
He closed with the story of two GI's who, near the end
of World War II, were in France and were trying to find a place to bury
a dead comrade. They found a Catholic church, sought out the priest and
asked his permission to bury their friend in the churchyard. The priest
sadly but firmly told them that, since their friend was not a Catholic,
he could not be buried within the fence that surrounded the consecrated
ground. "But," he offered, "you can use any of the ground
just outside the fence."
The two GI's sadly took their comrade's body outside
the churchyard, walked around the fence to find the best place they
could. They dug the hole, buried the body and covered it neatly, and
went away. The next morning they returned with a plaque to mark the
grave. But the grave was nowhere to be found. They walked around the
fence, searching over and over for the grave of their friend, and found
nothing.
Finally, reluctantly, they entered the church again to
ask the priest what had been done with their friend's body. The priest
responded, "After you left, I spent half the night worrying about
what I had done. And I spent the rest of the night moving the
fence."
"May we always move fences," Tewell
concluded, "and may we color outside the lines."
New hearing, new speaking
For the closing service of worship on Saturday, the
sermon was preached
by Scott D. Anderson, former co-moderator of More Light Presbyterians, a
pastor who laid aside his ordination because he is gay, who is now
serving as Director of the California Council of Churches in Sacramento.
His text was Isaiah 65:17-25 -- the promise that God will create
"new heavens and a new earth," and Acts 2:1-13, the account of
Pentecost.
Anderson began by telling of a time while he has still
serving as a pastor, when he was asked to help lead a five-day workshop
for youth on homosexuality, along with another pastor whose views
differed strongly from his own. As the event approached he was told that
the two of them would be rooming together. "Not my idea of a good
time," he added. But those are the kinds of efforts that are need
if we are really to talk with one another.
Anderson told briefly of his own coming out as a gay
man, relating it to Mary's experience at Jesus' tomb. She was afraid to
go in, fearing the stench of death after the body had lain so long in
the tomb. "Something was rotting in my soul, too," he said.
"But Jesus call us, as he called Lazarus, to 'come out' of our own
tombs, to be free of the stench, to be fully alive again."
Turning to the "miracle of Pentecost," he
asserted that it's a two-fold miracle. One miracle was that people heard
the Gospel in their own languages, just as African-Americans and now
gays and lesbians have had to learn to hear the Gospel not as a word of
oppression, but of liberation. But the second miracle is equally
important: that people learn to speak the Gospel in new ways.
To do that, he has learned that he has to set aside
his own anxieties and resentments -- the feelings that well up when he
goes to General Assemblies and hears himself and his friends described
in such negative, hostile terms. He's trying to learn, he said, to speak
the Gospel to evangelicals in language that might make sense to them:
the "language of boundaries." And he urged that evangelicals
might try learning to speak to others in the "language of
justice." "I believe this Pentecost is waiting for us -- the
miracle that happens when some courageous person reaches across the
divide."
Anderson closed by returning to that youth workshop,
which turned out to be five days during which the young people talked
non-stop and wouldn't quit. As the ground began to disperse, one
16-year-old girl came up to him, gave him a big hug, and said "We
don't talk this way in my church." Anderson then charged the
conference as it prepared to disperse: "Don't you think it's time
the adults started trying?"
