After ten days in California, I can say that I am glad to be back in New York. I discovered a long time ago that I am essentially a Northeasterner. When I graduated from Princeton Seminary fifty years ago, I began my ministry in Huston, Texas, serving as an assistant pastor with responsibility for the education of children, youth, and adults. I lasted for two years, sometimes going to the Houston airport to get the Sunday New York Times as soon as it came off the plane. I missed the cultural richness I had grown up with, and I couldn't adjust to what I experienced as political and social parochialism. I got back to the Northeast as soon as I could.
San Jose, California, is certainly not politically or socially parochial. There was much to appreciate and enjoy in the city and in the region. But after living in New York, the pace of life seemed awfully slow to me, not because people stopped to smell the flowers, as it were. But because restaurants were disorganized, and it was illegal to cross against the light, even if there was no vehicular traffic in the street. It's good to be back in New York City!
To be fair, the people were very friendly, and the members of San Jose Presbytery outdid themselves in offering hospitality. There were volunteers everywhere to answer questions and provide assistance as needed. There was free bus service between the airport and the assembly hotels. Those of us who were commissioners (what Presbyterian call delegates) or just observers wore identifying cards in plastic with our names and home areas. Several people at different times stopped and asked me where I was from and what kind of convention I was part of. When I said "The Presbyterian Church," most people said, "That's nice" or something like that. There were only a few blank stares. Everybody was unfailingly polite.
Those of us who have been attending General Assemblies for many years—or decades—had the feeling that the prevailing spirit of this assembly was warmer, maybe even more loving, than past assemblies. Yes, there was sharp debate, and at times it felt as though people were going to the microphones to speak for the purpose of hearing their own voices. But it seemed to me, and to others with whom I spoke, that the rhetoric was less contentious than in the past.
One significant difference I noticed was the makeup of what are called youth advisory delegates. Each of the one hundred seventy three presbyteries is entitled to send someone between the ages of eighteen and twenty-three to the General Assembly. These youth advisory delegates serve with vote on the assembly committees and have the right to speak on the floor when the assembly as a whole does its business. They do not have the right to vote in the plenary meetings of the assembly, where voting is limited to minister and elder commissioners. This year the youth advisory delegates seemed to be more progressive and open in their positions on issues, whereas in the past there has been a vocal group of young people expressing a more conservative point of view. I took the shift to more openness to be a hopeful sign.
Going out to San Jose, I felt the most significant issue the assembly would be considering was the statement in our Form of Government that says,
"Those who are called to office in the church are to lead a life in obedience to Scripture and in conformity to the historic confessional standards of the church. Among those standards is the requirement to live either in fidelity within the covenant of marriage between a man and a woman, or chastity in singleness. Persons refusing to repent of any self-acknowledged practice which the confessions call sin shall not be ordained and/or installed as deacons, elders, or ministers of the Word and Sacrament."
That part of our Form of Government, known as G-6.0106b, has been in our Constitution since 1996. Since its adoption, primarily as a prohibition against gay, lesbian, bi-sexual, or transgendered people, there have been efforts to remove it from our Form of Government—a two part process. A General Assembly must approve the removal and then send it to the 173 presbyteries, a majority of which must approve it. Like the United States Senate, where each state has two senators regardless of population, each presbytery has one vote regardless of how many congregations or church members there are in the presbytery. The last time a General Assembly sent a proposal for doing away with G-6.0106b was the year 2000, and a majority of presbyteries voted not to remove the restrictive paragraph from the Form of Government.
This past week the General Assembly voted to send the matter to the presbyteries again for their vote. The presbyteries have a year to vote Yes or No, and the politicking will begin immediately. It remains to be seen whether enough people have overcome their resistance to having a fully inclusive church to have a different outcome this time. At one level I am hopeful on the basis of what I saw and heard at the assembly and what I read in the papers about younger people in the church. On another level I found myself feeling a little detached, because I have never felt bound by G-6.0106b. In the church I served for twenty-seven years we ordained many lesbian and gay people as elders and deacons, and we certainly feel free to do that in this congregation and in New York City Presbytery.
For the past several years there have been sign-carrying people outside the meeting place of the General Assembly, quoting the Bible and shouting homophobic invectives against the effort to have a fully inclusive Church. Such people are usually visible along the routes of Gay Pride parades around the world. They were present outside the convention center in San Jose. At least one of their number appeared to be a very angry person—red faced, loud, and hostile. He would scream at the commissioners and observers as they returned from lunch in neighborhood restaurants, creating an atmosphere of fear and hostility for some people. Just beyond the hostile group was a group of people with rainbow shawls and bracelets, not arguing or answering the critics, but offering home-baked cookies to all the passersby. A wonderful expression of hospitality.
You know by now that the central motif of my preaching is God's unconditional, affirming, inclusive love. Most of my sermons are variations on that theme. The theme of God's gracious love finds expression in a variety of ways. I sometimes think of God's love in terms of hospitality. I think of the abundant garden God provided in the Genesis stories of creation. I think of God's leading the Israelites out of the narrowness of slavery into the abundance of a "land flowing with milk and honey." I think of the Psalmist saying to God, "You provide a table for me in the presence of my enemies." I think of this morning's first lesson from the Psalms: "I will sing to the Lord, because he has dealt bountifully with me." I think of Jesus, who shows us what God is like—Jesus feeding a large crowd that had gone out into the countryside to hear him preach and teach. I think of Jesus providing a Passover meal for the inner circle of his friends and followers on the night before his arrest, trial, and death.
The God we know through Israel and through Jesus is a hospitable God, a God who offers hospitality as a safe space where we can explore the meaning of our humanity, a safe space where we can learn not just to accept ourselves in our flawed humanity, but to celebrate ourselves as woman and men, girls and boys, made in the image of God, entitled to fullness of life—including expression of our sexuality, entitled to full equality in every sphere of life, including holding office in the Church without regard to anything but the maturity of our faith and the integrity of our life.
One of my goals in ministry here at Rutgers Presbyterian Church is to increase our practice of hospitality, our welcoming of people, especially people who may feel estranged from the Church because they haven't experienced the Church as a place of safety, a place of welcome, a place of love. To use an Old Testament phrase, I want us to be sensitive to "the stranger within our gates" on any given Sunday, to understand that someone walking into a church, this church, for the first time or after a long time away may have feelings of uneasiness. What does it mean to offer hospitality to such a person or persons? Certainly it means not overwhelming them or making them feel self-conscious. I think it means being friendly without being pushy—recognizing signs of shyness and respecting boundaries. In other words, to be hospitable is to be gracious, as God is gracious to us.
In between session of the General Assembly and when things were routine during the sessions, I read a book published in 2001 that I somehow missed—A Whosoever Church—Welcoming Lesbians and Gay Men into African American Congregations by Gary David Comstock. The book contains an interview with James Cone, longtime faculty member of Union Theological Seminary here in New York. In explaining his personal journal from exclusion to full inclusion, Dr. Cone gives a lot of credit to one of his teaching assistants, Dan Spencer.
Dr. Cone says of Dan Spencer,
"Dan is interested in other people. He's interested in African American history, in women's issues, in people of color, in a broad range of different people's concerns. His capacity to understand Black history or Black theology, his willingness to dialogue, and his sense of knowing my desire to do the same make it easier for me to bridge with him, because he so genuine about his humanity and about his connection with other people. I felt that before I knew that he was gay. And I felt it even stronger afterward. When you meet somebody who is reaching out to others and who knows that others are connected with him—not because he wants to help them, but because our humanity is interconnected and what happens to others happens to you indirectly or directly—it's not hard for you to feel solidarity and empathy with him. Dan was that kind of person from the start, someone who was not just locked up in what he was about: his people, his group. Rather, he was involved with what it means to be human. That's the kind of person who can bridge the gaps between people, between differences."
To Dr. Cone's words about Dan Spencer, I add, "That's the kind of person I try to be. That's the kind of church we try to be here at Rutgers." May God strengthen our work of welcoming all people as an expression of God's awesome hospitality.