We Shall Still Be Joined in Heart

Now the LORD said to Abram, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse; and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.”

Genesis 12:1-3

When Dr. Harrell Beck, my Old Testament professor, said, “Covenant,” he always clearly enunciated all three syllables. “Cov-e-nant.”

Holding the lectern with both hands, he would rise up on tiptoe to emphasize the importance of the word.

I don’t know whether I would love that passage in Genesis as well if it were not for Dr. Beck.

The LORD calls to Abram.

“Go.”

“Leave” everything that is familiar and comfortable and safe, and go.

But where?

“To the land that I will show you.”

With Harrell Beck, a lecture was also a sermon.

God always calls us into the future. It is always unknown. It is always both terrifying and full of possibility.

Just before our United Methodist General Conference met in Portland, Oregon, Bishop Scott J. Jones, who presides over the Great Plains Annual Conference, published an essay in the online journal, Ministry Matters, about the importance of keeping our clergy covenant.

He begins by saying that during the last few months he has had “multiple invitations to break my vows.” And then he explains that, “Many people have suggested that, in the name of protesting against perceived injustice, I should disobey the discipline of The United Methodist Church and violate the sacred promises I have made at two key points in my life — ordination as an elder and consecration as a bishop.”

“I decline those invitations,” says the bishop, “I will keep my promises. I will be faithful to God’s calling on my life as a leader in our church.”

He is talking about his refusal to officiate at a same sex wedding, or to condone clergy who do. And he speaks of the treatment of LGBTQ persons in the church as a “perceived injustice.” 

This is not surprising. Two years ago Bishop Scott told the clergy of the Great Plains Conference that he had been asked what he would do if 100 clergy were to conduct same gender weddings, he said that he would first suspend all 100 clergy and then there would be 100 clergy trials. And he said that he would do this even though he knew that each trial would cost $100,000.

If a bishop is willing to spend ten million dollars ($10,000,000!) on trials you can assume that he or she is pretty serious about maintaining discipline.

I do not doubt that the bishop sincerely believes what he is saying. And I commend him for the way he speaks about those on the other side of this issue. “I deeply respect and love many people who disagree about key issues in the life of our church” he writes. “They are friends and colleagues.”

Apart from my disagreement with him in terms of this issue. I also disagree with him about the nature of the covenant we share. 

His final paragraph illustrates our differences:

“When people justify their actions as ‘civil disobedience,’ they are misusing language. It is not disobedience against the government. It is ecclesial disobedience. They are violating the rules of a church they have freely joined when other, similar churches offer acceptable ways of pursuing their calling. If I ever get to the point where I cannot in good conscience obey the key aspects of our discipline — and I pray such a day never happens — it will be time to surrender my credentials as a United Methodist bishop and elder and find some other way to follow Christ.”

We agree that it’s not civil disobedience. I’m not sure who is using that language. And yes, it is ecclesial disobedience. 

The next sentence is where we part ways: “They are violating the rules of a church they have freely joined when other, similar churches offer acceptable ways of pursuing their calling.”

Yes, it is “a church they have freely joined.”

And that is precisely the point. In my ordination (and earlier, in my confirmation) I freely joined a church.

I joined a church. I did not join the Book of Discipline.

I freely professed my general agreement with and affirmation of our United Methodist doctrine and polity. And I agreed to uphold the discipline (not the same as the Book of Discipline) of the church. But as the children’s hymn says, “the church is a people.” That’s what I joined.

I joined Harrell Beck, and Paul Deats, and Walter Muelder. G. Bromley Oxnam and Henry Hitt Crane. Harold Bosley, E. Stanley Jones, Georgia Harkness, and Ralph Sockman. And in our corner of the world, I joined Dale White and Gil Caldwell, and Bill Ziegler, Evelyn Burns, Jane Cary Peck,  and Bobby McClain, and so many others. When I was ordained the pastors were almost all men, but I joined a church made up of wonderful human beings. The great Methodist preacher Halford Luccock called that church an “Endless Line of Splendor.” 

Our covenant, like Abraham’s covenant, is with God. But it is lived out with real people here and now. And across time with that great “cloud of witnesses.”

A church is more than the people who have joined it. We need order and we need discipline, and we need a common theology. We need a common covenant.

But in our current situation, the covenant has been reduced to the Book of Discipline, and the Discipline has been reduced to a rule book.

And the rule book has been reduced to the rules that exclude LGBTQ folks.

That’s not my idea of a covenant. Or a church.

Trials and Temptations

I therefore, the prisoner in the Lord, beg you to lead a life worthy of the calling to which you have been called, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, making every effort to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.
Ephesians 4:1-3

On January 15, the birthday of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Bishop Scott Jones began his address to the clergy of the Great Plains Conference of the United Methodist Church by asking them to focus on two questions:

“How do we live in the tension of upholding our covenant to follow and uphold the discipline of the United Methodist Church while disagreeing with some positions of the Discipline?” and “How do we respond with grace and love, both corporately and personally, when a colleague decides she/he can no longer live within that covenant?”

The answers, it turns out, are simpler than the questions. First, we need to follow the Discipline. And second, if we cannot uphold the Discipline then we need to leave. This is what he calls "Unity of the Spirit in the Bond of Peace." Apparently, we can only maintain our “unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace” by continuing to discriminate against our LGBTQ sisters and brothers.

When the bishop talks about upholding the Discipline, he doesn’t really mean the whole Discipline. He means the part of the Discipline that discriminates against LGBTQ persons. And when he talks about covenant, he doesn’t really mean the whole of the clergy covenant. He means the part of the covenant that relates to upholding the Discipline.

The Discipline has always been a flawed document. In spite of John Wesley’s crusade against slavery, the Discipline condoned slavery until 1844. It condoned segregation and even created a segregated system of jurisdictions until 1968. The Discipline did not include women in ordained ministry until the middle of the twentieth century. The Discipline is revised every four years. Most of the time those revisions are improvements. But the Discipline is not a sacred document. As in the initial case of slavery, the Discipline has sometimes simply codified the prejudices of the fallible human beings who wrote it.

In our present situation we have two basic problems with the Discipline. The first is that it discriminates against LGBTQ persons. It says that “homosexuality is incompatible with Christian teaching,” it bars “self-avowed practicing homosexuals from the ordained ministry,” and it prohibits clergy for officiating at same gender weddings or unions. The second problem compounds the first by making it a “chargeable offense” for clergy to bless same gender unions or preside at same gender weddings.

The Discipline endorses the teaching of evolution and finds in it no threat to our theology. But it provides no penalty for those who disagree. If a pastor wants to preach in favor of creationism, or tries to get creationism introduced into the local school curriculum, or becomes a candidate for the school committee on a creationist platform, there is no penalty. If presiding at same-sex weddings were not a chargeable offense, we would be having a very different discussion.

Similarly, the practice of homosexuality is a chargeable offense for clergy. Theoretically an unmarried heterosexual clergy person could be removed from the ordained ministry for having sex with his or her partner before they were married, but to the best of my knowledge, that has never happened.

In my favorite section of the bishop’s address, he writes:

Someone asked me “Bishop, what if 100 of us do same-gender unions?” My answer is this: “Then there will be 100 suspensions from ministry during the supervisory response followed by 100 trials.” . . . . But you should know that holding a trial is a major drain on our leadership and resources. In addition to the distraction from other priorities and the conflict they cause within the conference, trials are expensive. I am told that some conferences spend $100,000 on just one trial, and that the defendant may be spending up to $50,000 of personal money. Yet, not to hold a trial when a chargeable offense occurs and a just resolution cannot be achieved is to violate our United Methodist identity.

First, it’s just plain crazy to think that it would be worth $10 million to bring those clergy to trial. But the money is only a small part of the total cost. He talks about the “distraction from other priorities,” but still misses the larger point. Trials are a public relations disaster. They make us look stupid and medieval.

And look at that last sentence again.

“Not to hold a trial” would “violate our United Methodist identity.” Seriously. That’s our identity? Not grace? Or love? Or practical Christianity? What an inspirational message the bishop offered to the clergy of the Great Plains Conference: Our sacred covenant is with the Discipline and our identity is preserved by clergy trials to uphold that Discipline.

Some people think that “Open hearts. Open minds. Open doors.” is too simplistic, but it’s way better than “Trials ‘R’ Us.”