Here We Stand, VI: A Brief Statement

July 28, 2013

If you were called upon to state your faith, to, as scripture puts it, “give an account of the hope that is within you,” what would you want to say? What key points would you want to make? What would be essential to you?

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That was the question put to the drafting committee that wrote A Brief Statement of Faith. The committee was convened by the moderator of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) when the denomination was born of the 1983 union of the two largest Presbyterian denominations in the nation. That union was, in fact, a re-union of the northern and southern strains of Presbyterianism that had split over the issue of slavery in the first half of the 19^th century.

The General Assembly directed its moderator, J. Randolph Taylor, to appoint a committee representing “diversities of points of view and groups within the reunited Church to prepare a Brief Statement of the Reformed Faith for possible inclusion in the Book of Confessions” (Rodgers, 231). The moderator appointed 21 people from across the church, and they began a journey that would carry them forward for the better part of a decade.

While the occasion of reunion was, in and of itself, perhaps significant enough to call forth a statement of faith, the larger concern the drafters confronted is one we continue to face: the basic question of faith in an increasingly secular world, and, in particular, how to articulate – in brief – a coherent, Reformed, Christian faith in and for our time.

As Jack Rodgers, who served on the committee, said in his foundational book on the creeds of the church, “It may be the first time in the history of Reformed creedal formation that a group was chosen specifically for its diversity and then expected to write a document evoking unity” (Rodgers, 231).

In other words, the challenge of confessing the faith in our particular moment in Christian history lies in recognizing the validity of numerous perspectives while naming and acknowledging a common commitment that claims us as a distinctive people of faith. In still other words, how do we draw the circle within which we find ourselves as members of this body? How do you make that circle wide enough to include the orthodox, the neo-orthodox, the post-orthodox? The staunchly conservative and the creatively liberal?

A Brief Statement of Faith approaches that fundamental challenge not so much by talking about the church, about the community within the circle, but, instead, by talking about the God who calls us into the circle.

The first claim the statement makes about the God who comes to us in Jesus reminds us just how widely God draws the circle and whom it is that God sees within the circle of God’s concern. Giving voice to the Divine will within him, “Jesus proclaimed the reign of God: preaching good news to the poor and release to the captive, teaching by word and deed and blessing the children, healing the sick, and binding up the brokenhearted, eating with outcasts, forgiving sinners, and calling all to repent and believe the gospel.”

That’s a wide circle: the poor, the captive, the children, the sick, the brokenhearted, the outcasts, the sinners – all, all, all fall within the circle of God’s care, concern and compassion. In these words, uniquely among the confessions of the church, A Brief Statement of Faith takes seriously and speaks clearly and eloquently about the life and teachings of Jesus. You may recall my remark about the Apostles Creed reducing the life of Jesus to a comma. A Brief Statement of Faith describes this Jesus whom we call Lord.

The statement continues in the same vein, proclaiming that, “In sovereign love God created the world good and makes everyone equally in God’s image male and female, of every race and people, to live as one community.”

A Brief Statement was the first broadly accepted Christian creedal statement that not only makes clear the fundamental equality of men and women – including the equality of call to ordered ministry in the life of the church – but also employs both male and female images of God.  God is described as “like a mother who will not forsake her nursing child, like a father who runs to welcome the prodigal home.”

These clear statements about God’s love and grace, along with the clear statements about fundamental human equality, have been crucial in the struggle for GLBT equality in the church during the past 20 years. In the same way, they have been critical in the work of proclaiming the good news to a largely unchurched young adult population across North America.

I am always happy to respond to those who dismiss the church as unrepentantly bigoted by lifting up our denomination’s most recent confession, and saying, “well, that may be true of some, but it is not true of the faith that the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A) proclaims.”

Of course, the truth we proclaim with our lips is not always the truth that we reveal in our lives.

As we did a few moments ago, we often use words from A Brief Statement of Faith in worship as our prayer of confession. In this statement of faith, the church acknowledges the deep brokenness of our lives. We humans regularly ignore God’s commandments, and in doing so “we violate the image of God in others and ourselves, accept lies as truth, exploit neighbor and nature, and threaten death to the planet entrusted to our care. We deserve God’s condemnation.”

That would be the part of worship that the youth at our church in Cleveland called the “we suck” prayer. I prefer to think of it as the, “yeah, we’re pretty broken” prayer, but whatever works for you. The truth is, of course, we are pretty messed up. It doesn’t take more than a glance at the news, or at Facebook, or in the mirror to confront that truth.

Thanks be to God, that is neither the end of the story nor the end of A Brief Statement of Faith. For, as I noted earlier, the statement is much more about God than it is about us. We trust in a God who loves us in spite of who we are and because of whose we are.

In life and in death we belong to God. The statement begins there, with an echo of the first question of the Heidelberg catechism, to tell us whose we are and to remind us of the great comfort that comes in that simple assurance. No matter what, God claims us as God’s own.

Thus, as we confront the truth about ourselves we are assured by the truth about God:

“God acts with justice and mercy to redeem creation. In everlasting love … hearing [our] cry … loving us still … God is faithful still.”

This is the core of what we believe to be true about the God in whose heart and hands we have our being. We are claimed as God’s own … for the world.

That’s the key. We are called and claimed for the sake of all the others who are also loved by the same Creator. In that call, the Spirit gives us the courage to live not for our own sakes but for the sake of the world. A Brief Statement describes what it looks like to live for others when it proclaims that the Spirit gives us the courage “to pray without ceasing, to witness among all peoples to Christ as Lord and Savior, to unmask idolatries in church and culture, to hear the voices of peoples long silenced, and to work with others for justice, freedom, and peace.”

In good, proper, decent and orderly Presbyterian fashion, the church crafted this statement of faith to serve as a reminder of whose we are and how we are supposed to live based on that belonging. We are God’s own for the world – not in an exclusive way, but in a clear and particular way whose roots sink deep in the soil of the Reformation.

It took eight years of conversation, drafting, debating, forming and reforming, the votes of two General Assemblies and a majority of the 187 presbyteries before the work begun in 1983 was brought to final fruition with the formal adoption of A Brief Statement of Faith.

The statement remains, almost a quarter century on, a clear and simple declaration of Reformed faith and it continues to serve the gathered community of the church as both guide and inspiration for our common life. We will use the opening and closing sections of the statement as our confession of the faith this morning.

Here We Stand, V: The Ministry of Reconciliation

2 Corinthians 5:16-21; The Confession of 1967

July 21, 2013

The Confession of 1967 opens with a helpful reminder to anyone studying Christian creeds and confessions:

“In every age, the church has expressed its witness in words and deeds as the need of the time required. The earliest examples of confession are found within the Scriptures. Confessional statements have taken such varied forms as hymns, liturgical formulas, doctrinal definitions, catechisms, theological systems in summary, and declarations of purpose against threatening evil.

“Confessions and declarations are subordinate standards in the church, subject to the authority of Jesus Christ, the Word of God, as the Scriptures bear witness to him. No one type of confession is exclusively valid, no one statement is irreformable. Obedience to Jesus Christ alone identifies the one universal church and supplies the continuity of its tradition. This obedience is the ground of the church’s duty and freedom to reform itself in life and doctrine as new occasions, in God's providence, may demand.”

Our time is, at once, no different while also unique. That may sound contradictory, but I believe it is true of each moment in history. We are, as the apostle Paul put it 2,000 years ago, “working out our own salvation day by day in fear and trembling.” The human condition is constant across the infinite variety and distinctiveness of each age.

To understand why people in a given moment in history chose to speak of their faith in a particular manner, it is always helpful to understand a bit of that history. Take the United States in 1967 … please, as Henny Youngman would have said.

I could recite a bunch of facts for you, but, instead, I’ll just play this piece, released by Simon and Garfunkle at about the time the crafters of the Confession of ’67 were ending their work:

Silent Night/7:00 News

The sad thing is, all we really need to do is change a few names and datelines and the news remains. Not sure why we call it news, when it’s all that old.

Here would be something new: naming, proclaiming and enacting reconciliation across the lines of division that have marked our nation for at least the past half century.

The truly remarkable thing about the Confession of 1967 lies in how plainly, honestly and accurately its drafters named their present time. In April, 1967, Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his now-famous “A Time to Break Silence” sermon at the Riverside Church in New York. In it, he named the “triple evils” of racism, militarism and poverty that plagued the nation.

The Confession of 1967, formally adopted in May of that year, was the result of eight years of work by faithful Presbyterians, and it noted the same three issues as “particularly urgent at the present time,” added a fourth – which it calls “anarchy in sexual relationships.” In that context, the confession proclaims four matters of faith quite clearly:

1.      In reconciling love, God overcomes the barriers between sisters and brothers and breaks down every form of discrimination based on racial or ethnic difference, real or imaginary.

2.      God’s reconciliation in Jesus Christ is the ground of the peace, justice, and freedom among nations which all powers of government are called to serve and defend. The church, in its own life, is called to practice the forgiveness of enemies and to commend to the nations as practical politics the search for cooperation and peace.

3.      The reconciliation of humankind through Jesus Christ makes it plain that enslaving poverty in a world of abundance is an intolerable violation of God’s good creation.

4.      The church, as the household of God, is called to lead people out of this alienation into the responsible freedom of the new life in Christ.

Reading the confession again last week I was struck once more by the prophetic tone of a text that dared to name the present time. Whenever I read this confession, I wonder how well or poorly we might do if charged with naming our present time. Another way of asking that question: what are our great moral blind spots?

It’s easy to look back and criticize our forebears for the things they missed or, more often, the issues they simply avoided. German Christians who prayed in church on Sunday and went about the business of the Third Reich on Monday and somehow didn’t see the disconnect. American Christians who went to church on Sunday … with their slaves worshipping in the balcony and somehow didn’t see the disconnect.

The Confession of ’67 demands that we confront the present time through the lens of our faith, and to do so with the honesty that compels us to confess our own deep brokenness and our complicity in and profit from deeply flawed systems and sinful institutions.

The challenge of the Confession of ’67 always leads me to think of the deep contradictions that reside in every time, and, indeed, within every human heart. Thomas Jefferson declared for the nation that “all men are created equal …” – words that probably rang just a wee bit hollow along the slave row at Monticello.  It’s not that Jefferson did not recognize the contradiction. Jefferson’s words carved in marble at the Jefferson Memorial are his own prayer of confession:

“Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, that his justice cannot sleep forever. Commerce between master and slave is despotism.”

Jefferson understood the evil, and he profited from it too much to put his considerable gifts to the hard task of abolishing it.

Again, it’s easy to look back two centuries and see that great moral blindspot. It’s easy to look at Germany in the 30s and see the blindness. It’s easy to look at the Jim Crow South of my childhood and see what then seemed so hazy to so many. It’s somehow way more difficult to look in the mirror and see the log in my own eye.

To be sure, it’s not really all that difficult to imagine some of the issues future generations will take us to task over. All of the issues that the Confession of 67 named remain unresolved almost 50 years later. The news of recent days reminds us that race remains the great wound in the heart of America. Militarism remains a largely unexamined fact of American life that has grown both in its scope and in being unexamined. The gap between rich and poor that sparked the concern of the Confession of 67 has only widened. And we still remain so very far away from articulating, much less living into, a rich, deep, and faithful expression of human sexuality.

If I were in the room to discuss a “confession of 2013” I’d press to add climate change, heterosexism, and the idolatrous worship of the market to the list of central concerns of our time.

It could sound utterly hopeless, this reciting of a lengthening list of broken places in our lives and the life of the world.

So where is hope? Where is the good news in all this?

What gives you hope? I put that question out to the book of faces last week. Folks responded with some of the things you might expect: family, friends, children, nature. I’d add music and art to that list. All of these are places of inspiration for most of us, but our friend Cheryl Hartmann really nailed it when she lifted up these words from scripture:

I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

This is the great promise of reconciliation upon which the Confession of 67, and, indeed, the entirety of our faith, rests. That, in Jesus, God was in the world reconciling the world to God. We are called, as C’67 insists, to the ministry of reconciliation – to participating in the great work of reconciliation.

So where is hope? I find hope, and inspiration, and joy, whenever and wherever I witness people joining together in the great work of reconciliation. As the Confession of ’67 concludes:

With an urgency born of this hope, the church applies itself to present tasks and strives for a better world. It does not identify limited progress with the kingdom of God on earth, nor does it despair in the face of disappointment and defeat. In steadfast hope, the church looks beyond all partial achievement to the final triumph of God.

We live faithfully into that triumph, praying, “come, Lord Jesus.” Amen.

Here We Stand, V: Saying Yes and Saying No

July 15, 2013

Ephesians 4:11-16; selected verses from John

by the Revs. David Ensign and Peg True

German Christians in the 1930s faced an existential threat as great as any faced by followers of Jesus at any time or place since first-century Palestine. By and large, they failed the test quite miserably, though some did speak out early in the Nazi era to warn of its threats, especially its threat to the church.

That’s pretty much the story of the Theological Declaration of Barmen, the earliest of the three 20^th-century statements of faith in our Book of Confessions.

Declared by a group of clergy, laity and theologians calling themselves the Confessing Church, Barmen reflects the deep crisis of the German church in the early years of Hitler’s Reich. Crafted largely by Karl Barth, the Swiss Reformed theologian whose work looms large over 20^th-century Western Christian thought, the Barmen Declaration is framed as six statements of evangelical Christian commitment and six rejections of the false doctrines emerging from a German church that was making its bed with the Nazis.

It marks the most sustained and, indeed, dangerous effort of the church in Germany to speak the truth. Whether or not its framers were able to do so “in love” is not a judgment I would dare offer, though looking back through the lens of history I’d have to confess that I don’t think I could manage it.

In the face of the rise of the fuhrer, who claimed ultimate allegiance from Germans in all aspects of life, Barmen boldly affirmed the centrality of Jesus and his lordship in all aspects of life. The Barmen framers were chiefly concerned with that central question of Reformed thought: who is lord of your life?

Barmen has been criticized for failing to “do enough” or “say enough” in the face of the rise of Nazism. The declaration was silent on the plight of the early victims of the Third Reich, and it said nothing to name the clear and present fears of what was coming by 1934. Instead, it focused on the threat to the church and on the encroachment by the state into the realm of the church. On the other hand, the state clearly understood the deep criticisms of the Nazis imbedded in the words of Barmen and many of its supporters and signers wound up either in prison or in exile.

Barmen has its own fascinating history, and I commend to you the small effort of tracking it down. More than its history, however, Barmen has still much to teach us and inspire in us for the task of following Jesus in our own time. Toward that end this morning Peg and I, following both the pattern and the ideas of the Barmen Declaration, will share a few affirmations and rejections.

John 6:51:"I am the living bread which came down from heaven. If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever;" John 11:25: Jesus said to her, "I AM the resurrection and the life. He who believes in Me, though he may die, he shall live.

David: We affirm that, by the grace of God, we live in an economy of abundance. There is more than more than enough. Moreover, we affirm that the gracious economy of the kingdom of God is not bound by the limits of our lives nor our understanding of time.

Peg: We reject the false doctrine of individualism which includes hanging on to all we gain for ourselves.  Keeping material belongings at the center of our lives ignores our call to help those who have less.  We reject our abuse of the environment and what it will mean for future generations.

2.  John 8:12: Then Jesus spoke to them again, saying, "I AM the light of the world. He who follows Me shall not walk in darkness, but have the light of life."

Peg: We affirm what John Robinson said to the pilgrims as they left Holland for the new world, "God has yet more light to bring forth."  As we continue to strive to welcome and include all people in our church and denomination we know that God urges us forward.  In our personal lives we can discern God's leading us to live each day as a beloved child of God living in the light.  When our world seems dark we never walk alone.

David: We reject the false doctrine that would build walls around God’s grace as if darkness could defeat light. Moreover, we reject the cynicism that denies the light.

3.  John 10:9: "I AM the door. If anyone enters by Me, he will be saved, and will go in and out and find pasture."

David: We affirm that the door to God’s abundance is always open, and that the work of the church lies in affirming, proclaiming and practicing that openness and that abundance.

Peg:  We reject a church whose door is open only to those acceptable to the people inside, closing the door to some and refusing to acknowledge that all are welcome by God.

4.  John 10:11: "I AM the good shepherd. The good shepherd gives His life for the sheep.

Peg: We affirm that Jesus is a shepherd who fervently cares for His flock, who will lay down his life for his sheep.   He cares for us, who resist His leadership, and forget whose church this really is.  Jesus leads us to green pastures where we can become the people we are called to be.  We joyously share this unconditional love as we try to model our lives after His.

David: We reject the false doctrine that imagines faith without risk, life without struggle, community without diversity, and that thus reduces God to good-luck charm for the insiders, rescuer of the blessed, or mascot for our side.

5.  John 14:6: Jesus said to him, "I AM the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me.

David: We affirm the way of Jesus – the manger of his life, death, and rising to new life – and we aspire to live lives such that we might be called people of the way.

Peg: We reject the false doctrine where the church places any other event, person or power at the center of its faith statement.  We must live our lives, in the church and in the world, with our faith in Jesus Christ at the center, not leaving it in church each week.  It is how we live that matters most, not what we say we believe.

Returning to Germany at the time the Declaration of Barmen was written, Martin Niemoeller was one of the first to speak out against the Nazi regime and continued to speak publicly until he was seized.  He spent seven years in a concentration camp.  After his release from Dachau in 1945 Niemoeller  preached to the church leaders.  You’ve heard his words in the anthem today but they are worth hearing again and again.  He said:

In Germany they came first for the communists, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a communist.  Then they came for the Jews, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew.  Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a trade unionist.  Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn’t speak up because I was a Protestant.  Then they came for me. And by that time no one was left to speak up.

Because Jesus is the way, the truth and the life we must continue to speak up for those around us as we try to live faithful lives filled with God’s love for each one of us.

Amen