Scripture Lessons
Isaiah 43: 18-19; Acts 10: 34-36; John 4: 5-26, 39-41
With a humble heart, my friends, I have a prediction to make: These next few years will be the most challenging and exciting ones in the United Methodist Church in our lifetimes. In my opinion, there are changes brewing in our denomination – perhaps not so much in Lake Oswego, but rather, in the United Methodist Church across the United States. Today, I want to give you a quick summary of what I observed at our Oregon-Idaho Annual Conference this past week in Eugene and an estimate of the crossroads where our church now stands.
I speak to you as one of LOUMC’s official delegation to the Annual Conference. Six of us were there, three laity and three clergy: Eric Carlson joined Pastor Michelle, Deacon Joyce Sluss and me as direct representatives of our church, while Ann Murchison and Danna Drum were in Eugene in other capacities.
Of the three Annual Conferences that I have officially attended, this one was the most agitated and moving of all. A great majority of those present expressed deep dissatisfaction and hurt by events that have occurred in the United Methodist Church in the past year. The need for change in the denomination was a constant refrain.
I’m not going to hide my personal viewpoints from you: I think the anguished ones at our Annual Conference were correct in their righteous indignation. Our global church in early 2019 crossed a line that, to me, will lead directly to injustice and exclusion. I am opposed to that. I join the protestors in their search for a new paradigm.
Don’t get me wrong, though. I am not ready to hit the streets in protest! In fact, I left the Annual Conference with great hope. There was a separate thread of thought that ran through Annual Conference this week, and that is that God is doing a new thing in 2019, even in the hidebound United Methodist Church. A new and glorious future is possible, even though none of us has any idea what it will look like. We just have to keep our eyes open to that possibility and our minds free to do what Methodists are supposed to do: make disciples for Christ for the betterment of the world.
Besides, I think that our Methodist Wesleyan history shows that we are a church of change, even from our very beginnings. What is going on now is not insurmountable; it is only another bump in that rough road to establishing God’s kingdom on earth. I have faith that, with God’s grace and guidance, and a sense of our connectional attachments with all Methodist churches, we will pull through okay.
First, however, I want to show you briefly how our Annual Conference got to this week’s state of pain and anguish.
You may recall that our church’s highest legislative body, the General Conference, met in a special session this past February in St. Louis, Missouri. Delegates came from all over the world. While there, those delegates adopted by majority vote a series of measures collectively known as the Traditional Plan. They also defeated major counter proposals known as the One Church Plan. The key difference in the two plans revolves around the inclusion in our fellowship of gay and lesbian Christians, as well as several additional categories of believers who have alternate sexual identities and practices. The debate over inclusion of LGBTQI+ individuals is not a new one in the United Methodist Church. It has gone on since our first General Conference in 1972 and has been repeated every four years at every successive General Conference since that time.
The 2019 Special General Conference in St. Louis was called specifically to resolve that debate, and to all at our Annual Conference, it failed in that task. We remain a deeply divided church. A few things will remain the same under the Traditional Plan: The Church will retain in its official Book of Discipline the deeply hurtful words that homosexuality is incompatible with Christian teachings. Therefore, the exclusion of LGBTQI+ Christians was reaffirmed. Moreover, there are new disciplinary measures that will go into effect this coming January 1, which will punish clergy and even bishops for such acts as trying to ordain an LGBTQI+ person or performing a same sex marriage.
The aftermath of the St. Louis General Conference in U.S. churches has been remarkable, and it reflects that fact that most US delegates did not favor the Traditional Plan. There was great pain and outcry when the final votes were tallied in St. Louis. Since that time, churches across this nation have vigorously raised a new debate on whether we can live under the newly-approved rules and doctrines of the United Methodist Church. I observed this dynamic in action in Eugene.
To no great surprise, our Annual Conference this week passed action resolutions and statements of belief that strongly support inclusion of LGBTQI+ persons, to include ordination of gay and lesbian deacons and elders in our church and same sex marriages. As I say, no surprise. Our Conference has passed similar resolutions for years now. We, along with our sibling conferences in the Western Jurisdiction, remain a vanguard on these issues for the rest of the nation.
What is new and remarkable, though, is the firestorm of resolutions and actual ordinations that have occurred just the past three weeks in Annual Conferences all across the US. The North Carolina Conference yesterday voted overwhelmingly to become an inclusive conference just like ours. Gay and lesbian clergy — elders and deacons – have been ordained or commissioned this spring in conferences as diverse as New York, North Texas, New Jersey, Michigan, and Baltimore-Washington. Numerous resolutions were passed that deplored and expressed resistance to the implementation of the Traditional Plan. Our Western Jurisdiction bishops collectively said flat out that they will not abide by its restrictions. The Baltimore-Washington Conference has said that it wants to
officially join us in the Western Jurisdiction. Maybe that’s a stretch, but I appreciate the feeling.
For our part, yesterday our Annual Conference approved an action item to form a study committee which will work with our church’s financial consultants and legal entities to develop a plan of exit for the entire Annual Conference from the United Methodist Church. And truthfully, I did not hear a dissenting vote to that one.
Are we doing the right things? No one knows just now, but I think there is both Biblical and Wesleyan thought that suggests we are on solid ground. My friends, I don’t claim any special expertise, and certainly do not want to be called the final word on any of this. But I have read some things in scripture that I think are applicable.
I ask you a simple question: Was Jesus inclusive or exclusive? As near as I can tell, Jesus was radically inclusive of all who came to him in faith, except for one noteworthy group: the scribes and Pharisees of the Jewish church. Jesus sparred and debated with these self-righteous hypocrites all throughout his ministry, and they, of course, despised him enough that they eventually had him tried and put to death. However, outside of this group, I cannot detect any other person or group of persons that Jesus did not wholeheartedly and lovingly accept into his father’s kingdom when they showed genuine faith and love of God. Today’s scripture lesson of the Woman at the Well illustrates this point, although I can say that there are other stories in the gospels that provide similar examples of Jesus’ sense of radical inclusion.
Who was this woman at the well? First, she was a Samaritan, and an outsider to the Jews. Good Jews did not talk with, nor associate with, Samaritans! Worse than that, this woman had been married five times previously and even when she met Jesus, she was living with a man who was not her husband. Talk about a scandalous sinner! Yet Jesus saw deeply into her heart, spoke to her of giving her “living water,” and perceived that she was genuine in her faith and acceptance of Jesus as the Messiah, her Lord. What did he then do? He sent her back into her Samaritan hometown to tell others what she had seen. And her testimony was so powerful that “many came to believe.” Jesus came to rescue
the oppressed, to associate with the outcasts, and to heal the hurt and downtrodden.
Although Jesus did not speak a recorded word about homosexuals or homosexuality in the gospels, I believe firmly that he would (and does now!) love them and accepts everyone who believes into his kingdom. No exceptions!
A second question: Was Jesus judgmental? Again, there are several stories from the gospels that show his love and generosity even to those who did not merit it. But one story shines above all others. It is the story of Jesus, and, once again, a woman coming into his presence. The woman is a sinner who is dragged into the temple and presented to Jesus by the Pharisees, who are trying to entrap Jesus into a legal conundrum. The woman, you see, had been caught in the actual act of adultery, which in traditional Jewish law requires that she be stoned to death. Would Jesus go along with putting this woman to death, or what? You know what he did, of course. The Gospel of John (Chapter 8) records that Jesus knelt down, wrote something into the ground, and then said, “Let the one who is without sin cast the first stone.” No one present could respond to this; they slowly departed, until only Jesus and the woman remained along with those he was teaching, the witnesses. Jesus asked her, “Woman, where are they? Is there no one to condemn you?” and she replied, “No one, sir.” He then said, “Neither do I condemn you. Go, and sin no more.”
This gospel story illustrates that Jesus’ first response to the woman was love and understanding. He of course recognized that she, like all of us, was a sinner, but she was a sinner in need of forgiveness rather than harsh punishment. I therefore think that his response had a lot to do with the harsh and judging attitudes of her accusers.
I think that the Traditional Plan, via its advocacy of church trials and punishments for those whom they think violate United Methodist doctrine, crosses the line into dangerous judgmentalism. As with the woman at the well, love and forgiveness is more the way of Jesus, rather than harsh judgment and punishment.
Next, what about our founder, John Wesley, and th Methodist Church itself?
Since their earliest days in the 1730’s in England, Methodist societies and churches were searching, searching, and always seeking better ways to bring the gospel of Jesus Christ to non-believers. To me, those societies were taking to heart the words found in Isaiah 43: “Look! I am doing a new thing; now it sprouts up; don’t you recognize it?” In his ministry, John Wesley faced at least two daunting challenges in discerning the newness of what God was doing:
· In 1738, Anglican Rev. Wesley was challenged to come to Bristol, England, to preach out-of-doors to coal miners in the region who were un-churched. This was such a radical idea, since preaching was supposed to be done in those days inside Anglican churches to good church members. These coal miners were outsiders and not at all like Anglicans! He was hesitant at first, but John accepted the challenge and went to Bristol to preach. What a reaction he got! These humble workers, muddy boots and all, wives included, became solid, enthusiastic new disciples of Christ! Wesley served them via letters, guidance, and many return visits all the remainder of his life. Their inclusion super-charged the early growth of Methodism in England.
· In 1784, just following the conclusion of our Revolutionary War and the creation of the United States of America, John Wesley was faced with the reality that Anglican clergymen had fled the New World because of their allegiance to the British Crown. There were no ordained clergy in the United States who could administer the sacraments to Wesley’s many Methodist societies! That was truly a horror to him. Finding no help at all from the Church of England, he reluctantly concluded that he must take matters into his own hands to address the emergency in America. He ordained two pastors to go from London specifically to ordain new clergy in the United States. This they did, and at the famous Christmas Conference in Baltimore in 1784, dozens of Methodist clergy were ordained. A new church had been born!
What conclusions can we draw here? First, Wesley was a man of radical inclusion. His hesitance to preach initially to the coal miners in Bristol was a bit like St. Peter, who in Joppa refused to eat forbidden, “unclean” food. But after Peter’s vision in Acts 10 of the sheet coming out of the sky and a voice declaring, “Never consider unclean what God has made pure,” he visited the home of the Roman Centurion Cornelius, a Gentile believer, and baptized his entire family. As Peter told Cornelius, “I really am learning that God doesn’t show partiality to one group of people over another. Rather, in every nation, whoever worships him and does what is right is acceptable to him.”
Wesley in similar fashion accepted and included the outsider coal miners in Bristol.
Second, Wesley recognized when an emergency in a church is an emergency. Although he had trepidations in what he was doing, he nonetheless took the radical steps and made the decisions that allowed the creation of the Methodist Church. With the passage of time and addition of millions of faithful Methodists in the United States, I think we can safely say that Wesley correctly discerned a great new thing that God was doing in his day.
Are we at such a moment in time again, a time for inclusion of all and the birth of a new form of Methodism? In my humble opinion, we are. We are waiting and searching for signs of God’s new creation to come.
Ten days ago, United Methodist Bishop Sue Haupert-Johnson of the North Georgia Conference wrote an interesting thought piece that described our current moment as one of “Holy Incubation.” She said our time now is like the expectant and vigilant brooding that a mother bird does over her eggs before they hatch. It is a time for all of us, said Bishop Haupert-Johnson, to watch and pray. She even compared this Holy Incubation time to that Saturday after Good Friday, when our Lord lay quiet in the tomb. The disciples did not know what was next; some even had doubts. But in a flash, God triumphed for them and for all of us. That is our hope and expectation now, that following the painful events of St. Louis in February, we are watching and searching for the new thing that God will do.
I’m not going to let you off the hook freely, though, Lake Oswego. As our conference Lay Leader Jan Nelson said, if we think that this is going to come from our bishops, we are mistaken. If change starts with our bishops, it isn’t going to work. Change in reality will happen by the hard work of all our churches, working in close Methodist connection with each other. I think that there are things that we in Lake Oswego should do and need to do in order to live up to our welcoming statement. First, don’t hesitate to challenge your church’s leadership — your clergy, your lay leaders, your committee leaders — to speak with you on what is happening in our church now. Second, please participate in the upcoming “temperature-taking” that our church council will be doing. We need to know your feelings on these developments. With your concurrence, we intend to advertise our welcoming statement in local media. Finally, I think that an outward sign of acceptance and reconciliation with our LGBTQI+ siblings, clearly visible to all who pass us on South Shore Drive, is called for at this time of turmoil in the United Methodist Church. Let’s show the outside world that we are truly a welcoming and accepting, affirming church!
I have hope that in the next few months, or perhaps a year or so, we will discern a whole new Wesleyan connection, one that is both inclusive and affirming of all of its believers, young and old, and of all stripes. And I have the hope and faith that the new creation that God will give us will be a non-judgmental, non-punitive church where all can express their genuine selves openly in public and private worship of God.
Thanks be to God, our Father!
Amen
