The View from Pittsburgh

Mark 6:1-13

July 8, 2012

After traveling back to Pittsburgh last week, it is almost overwhelmingly tempting to focus in on Jesus’ observation that a prophet is never welcome in his home town. I spent several days in Pittsburgh last week at the 220^th General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), and I was reminded during the week of, well, of Pittsburgh. Most of you know the part of my own story that includes 26 challenging months in the ‘burgh: first call out of seminary; disastrous mismatch of gift and call; the little thing about a sermon on the civil rights of same-sex couples; and an unceremonious resignation.

But I’ll pass by the temptation because, to begin with, Pittsburgh is not my hometown. More to the point, if there has ever been anything prophetic in anything  I said back then or since, it has been around the call to full inclusion and empowerment of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender Presbyterians, and, friends, while the GA in Pittsburgh did not advance that cause in any particular way last week it was abundantly clear that the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) has been transformed by more than a generation of faithful witness by dozens and dozens of prophets who continue to speak the truth in love and challenge the church to repent, to turn from its exclusionary practices and embrace the radically inclusive love and grace of our God.

Repent! Turn from the path of brokenness and division and embrace the grace that God freely offers, and in which you will find your heart’s true home, your wholeness, your salvation. That is the message, that is the good news that Jesus sent the disciples out to share.

While those old scars from Pittsburgh will be with me always, they’re just faint reminders now, not a place of pain. So I looked at the ‘burgh with fresh eyes and saw, again, the beautiful city nestled there where the waters meet in a valley bounded by steep ridges, and I remembered that the steel bridges of the Steel City were always my favorite aspect of the built city.

In a city of bridges, then, it was sad to watch bridges burned in actions of the assembly and the words of some of its participants, but at almost the same time it was a joy to watch new bridges being constructed through both faithful action and dynamic worship.

Let me explain. First, in terms of actions I turn to the newly formed “Presbytery of the Twitterfeed” – which meets at #ga220 – for the best summation I saw: “#ga220 let’s discuss how to discuss this for four hours, do parliamentary craycray, discuss for two hours, then vote to do nothing.” And that’s pretty much the “report from GA” section of the morning.

Seldom have so many confabbed for so long to get so little accomplished.

More specifically, on the hot-button issues before the assembly they voted down the assembly committee on Middle East concern’s most controversial recommendation on divestment of holdings in three companies – Hewlit-Packard, Caterpillar, and Motorola – that continue to do business with the Israeli defense forces in the occupied territories. GA did endorse a boycott of Ahava Dead Sea Laboratories’ products and dates from Hadiklaim, both companies produce their products in the occupied territories in violation of the Geneva Conventions.

On the other closely watched item – same-gender marriage – the assembly, again against the recommendation of its own committee, defeated an overture that would have changed the wording in the worship directory section on Christian marriage that defines marriage as between “a man and a woman” to “two people.” The assembly declined also to offer an authoritative interpretation of our Constitution that would have offered protection from prosecution in church judicial courts to pastors who preside at same-gender weddings in civil jurisdictions where same-gender marriage is legal.

I was disappointed but not particularly surprised by these votes. After all, this assembly installed my friend and neighbor, the Rev. Tara Spuhler-McCabe as vice moderator after the moderator election last Saturday, and then sat back and watched as a conservative drumbeat mounted against Tara for presiding at a same-gender wedding in the District this spring. When the noise reached an ugly level, Tara decided, on Wednesday, that to continue as vice moderator was too much of a distraction to the assembly so she resigned.

In that atmosphere, there was simply no way that deep discerning was going to occur. In truth, sometimes the assembly struggled to maintain simple civil discourse.

In the midst of the anger and hurt and exhaustion and disappointment that follow on such decisions, it’s important – essential, even – to note the good, but often overlooked work of the assembly; and it is fundamental to who we are to lift up the mighty power of God evident in worship at the assembly and, sometimes, in the committees themselves.

In terms of business that reminded me of God’s powerful presence: the 220^th General Assembly endorsed the interim report on discerning God’s call to the Presbyterian Church to consider the question of aligning ourselves with the historic peace churches with respect to questions of violence. That effort, which lifts up a truly profound possibility of transformation in the church, began in our session.

The assembly also spoke a prophetic word to the church and the culture around several financial and economic issues. We have been instructed, as congregations and as individuals, to look carefully at lending practices of the financial institutions with whom we do business. If they are part of the problem of predatory lending and usurious interest then we are part of the problem, too.

Scripture throughout warns against financial practices that victimize the poor and the economically marginalized precisely because such practices erect insurmountable barriers to justice and thus to community, and, fundamentally, such barriers to community are also always barriers to communion with God.

The gospel passage used in each worship of the assembly was Mark 2:1-12, the story of the paralytic whose friends cut a hole through a roof to get him close enough to Jesus to be healed.

Pittsburgh’s Hot Metal Bridge Faith Community drama team reconstructed the story set in a contemporary Presbyterian church whose elder-in-charge-of-greeting cares more about the appropriate appearance of the church and its members than about sharing the gospel. Appropriate, in her eyes, clearly meant white, middle-class, straight and clean cut. After offending several visitors who didn’t quite measure up to her standards, the new minister shows up. The new minister is an African-American woman – the horror! The new minister invites the elder to accompany her down to the city where, she says, she’s met Jesus living under a bridge. The elder-in-charge-of-greeting is dumbstruck, resists until she falls down exhausted, screaming “don’t take me to Jesus; I have to go to church!”

That enactment of the gospel led to the preaching of elder Tony De La Rosa, a partnered gay man who opened his sermon welcoming his mother and his mother-in-law. Tony, who is interim executive of the Presbytery of New York City, really could have sat down at that moment.

Instead, he preached a powerful, poignant and prophetic word to the assembly calling upon the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) to dig through the ceiling and break down the walls to help the outcast, the broken, the sin-sick get to Jesus.

Years ago I brushed the dust of Pittsburgh off my feet because the folks in positions of power in the church there didn’t care to hear what I felt called to say. It was a joy to return barely a decade later to witness a married gay man preaching the word of God to the General Assembly of the church.

We have still a long way to go, but the arches on the bridges of Pittsburgh bend gracefully across three rivers to carry the rich and the poor, the struggling and the lost, the wondering and the redeemed across to the other side. Those graceful bending arcs of steel reminded me last week that the moral arc of the universe does, indeed, bend toward justice. When we do the work of love it bends the whole world round, and it will carry us on to the other side. Amen.