Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
May 9, 2004

Scripture:

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

As many of you know, over the past few months, as our position as an Open and Affirming church has become publicized in this community, I have been called upon on several occasions--three separate occasions, actually--to explain or justify that position by fellow Christian pastors who do not share our vision of a God who loves and accepts all people, specifically gay and lesbian people, just as they are. In the view of these more conservative pastors, I think it is safe to say, gay and lesbian people place themselves beyond the bounds of God’s grace when they violate what traditional Christians consider to be a requirement that God puts upon us, in this case specifically the requirement that we never, under any circumstances, in any context whatsoever and regardless of our natural orientation engage in a sexual relationship with a person of the same gender. For these Christians, unless gay people live a life that is for them unnatural, either by remaining celibate or by having intimate relations with a person of the opposite gender, they are breaking a law of God. They are violating one of God’s conditions. The consequence is, of course, God’s withdrawal of grace or refusal to extend grace in the first place, as a punishment. It seems that for many Christians one requirement for being a Christian is that we condemn the sexual orientation of large numbers of God’s children. Because I don’t believe any of those things, I have been called to answer for what my fellow pastors consider to be heresy or, worse, apostasy.

Maybe that’s why I felt such sympathy for Peter, such a connection with him, when I read this morning’s lectionary passage from Acts. In that passage, Peter has returned to Jerusalem from a visit to the coastal cities of Joppa and Caesarea. Those were Gentile cities, not Jewish ones. Joppa, which is at the northern end of what we know as the Gaza strip, was in the land of the ancient Philistines. Caesarea, to the north of Joppa, was a Roman city. In New Testament times, the inhabitants of both cities were Gentiles, not Jews.

Now, the Jewish law of their day told the Jewish people that they would be defiled if they ate with Gentiles. The reason was that Gentiles ate food that wasn’t kosher, food that was, and is, forbidden to Jews under the dietary laws of the Torah. Peter had violated this prohibition while he was in Joppa and Caesarea. He had eaten with Gentiles, and, worse, he had apparently eaten unclean food, non-kosher food. So the other Christians back home in Jerusalem called him on the carpet. They required that he explain himself: "Why did you go to uncircumcised men and eat with them?" Acts 11:3 They’re saying: "Explain yourself! Justify your actions! Justify your false beliefs! We don’t think you can do it. We know the rules. We know the law. We know that God has requirements that you have violated. Come talk to us, and we’ll set you straight."

So, Peter came; and he explained himself. It seems that he had had a vision in which God had told him, essentially, that the dietary laws of the Torah were no longer binding. A heavenly voice told him: "What God has made clean, you must not call profane." Acts 11:9 Peter’s friends were saying: God has this requirement about what you eat and with whom you eat it. Peter was saying: No God doesn’t.

It isn’t clear from this Acts passage alone, but the issue it presents represented a real crisis in the early Christian church, a crisis that threatened to split the church or to destroy it altogether. We learn a lot more about that crisis from the Letters of Paul. The leaders of the church in Jerusalem, particularly James and, initially at least, Peter, were insisting that people had to convert to Judaism before they could be accepted as followers of the Way of Jesus Christ. That requirement meant, for everyone, that they had to follow the Jewish dietary laws; and for men it meant that they had to be circumcised. In other words, the Jerusalem church insisted that God had requirements that had to be met before a person could be in right relationship with God through Jesus Christ.

Paul, on the other hand, who was working among Gentiles outside the Jewish homeland, taught that it was not necessary that a person first convert to Judaism before becoming a follower of Jesus. He knew that the requirement of conversion to Judaism was a huge impediment to the spread of the new faith. He also believed that we cannot and do not need to put ourselves into right relationship with God through obedience to the law, that is, through meeting legal requirements. Rather, God puts us in right relationship with God by grace through faith. For Paul, there were no legal requirements for us to be justified or saved.

Through the grace of God and the power of the Holy Spirit, Paul’s position prevailed. The first attempt in the history of the church to impose requirements on the availability of God’s grace failed. As an historical matter, Paul may have had some success in persuading the leaders in Jerusalem that the requirement of conversion to Judaism placed an insurmountable barrier in the way of the spread of the faith. Passages in Acts and in Paul’s letters suggest that this may have been the case. It is, however, also true that the destruction of the Jerusalem church in the First Jewish War of 66 to 70 CE, in which the Romans crushed a Jewish rebellion and destroyed the Temple, played a major role in the victory of Paul’s no requirements position.

The victory of the no requirements position certainly did not come as easily s it is portrayed as coming in this morning’s passage from Acts. There, Peter bears the no requirements message. In the story, Peter’s authority and eloquence are such that he immediately convinces his friends that God does not in fact require compliance with the dietary laws in order to follow Christ. By implication, God doesn’t require compliance with other aspects of the Jewish law either. The no requirements position, here attributed to Peter, one of its original opponents, carried the day. The crisis was resolved and a split in the church was averted.

We are once more facing a crisis in the Christian church in our own day, and in many ways it is essentially the same crisis as Peter faced almost two thousand years ago. It is a crisis that threatens to lead to schism in the Presbyterian Church USA, the Episcopal Church, and the United Methodist Church among others. It has already led to a split in the local Conference of the American Baptist Church. It has caused numerous churches in our own Pacific Northwest Conference of the United Church of Christ to withdraw from the denomination, including recently our neighbor church in Arlington.

The crisis is being played out mostly in terms of a denomination’s position toward gay and lesbian people. Most recently, just this past week, the United Methodist Church, meeting in their General Conference, strongly affirmed that denomination’s position that one cannot at the same time be actively gay and Christian. It affirmed that, despite the jury’s verdict in the recent Karen Dammann church trial just down the road from us in Bothell, gay people who choose not to follow the unnatural lifestyle of celibacy cannot serve as ordained clergy. It matters not in the United Methodist Church what a gay person’s gifts for ministry may be or how convinced a pastor and a congregation are that the Holy Spirit is calling the person to ordained ministry in that congregation. The church has put a requirement on God’s grace, and that’s all there is to it.

This dispute, which is rocking every mainline Protestant denomination, is really at its root a dispute over a larger issue than acceptance of God’s gay and lesbian sons and daughters, as important as that issue is. It is at heart the latest in the series of conflicts that is as old as the church itself over the attempts church people make again and again to impose requirements on God’s grace. The opponents of our Open and Affirming position believe that there are requirements, specifically in this context the requirement that we express our God-given sexuality only in an approved way. These folks generally impose other requirements as well. The Presbyterian Church USA, for example, nearly split recently over an attempt by conservatives to make Presbyterian doctrine even stricter than it already is that salvation comes only and exclusively through belief in Jesus Christ and, by necessary implication at least, that all other paths to God are false.

The point is this: People are still trying to impose limits, requirements, on God’s grace just as they were in the early decades of the church in the dispute over the necessity of conversion to Judaism. Way back then the belief that God’s grace is unlimited prevailed. It had to. If it had not, the Christian movement probably would have died. It will prevail again in our day. It will prevail because it is right. It will prevail because God’s grace, God’s love is so much bigger, so much broader, so much deeper than anything we humans can imagine that any attempt to limit it, no matter how sincere or well-intentioned, is necessarily false. It will prevail because, once again it has to. Humanity’s movement toward justice for all people, a movement seen throughout our lifetimes in the civil rights, women’s, and gay rights movements, in inexorable. It is the result of God’s ongoing revelation to humanity of the limitless nature of God’s grace. The church must embrace the values of the Open and Affirming movement primarily because they are right, faithful, and just. Beyond that, if the church continues to resist the movement toward greater and greater liberation the way most of the church does today, the church and the Christian faith it represents will become irrelevant to the world; and the Christian faith itself will die. Nothing less than the future of Christianity is at stake.

Friends, there are no requirements on God’s grace. The church had better figure that out pretty soon if it hopes to have a future. I pray that it will. Amen.