On Forming a More Perfect Union
Sermon by Cynthia A.
Jarvis
July 6, 2008, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill
Deuteronomy 30:15-20
I Corinthians 1:10-17; 3:1-9
“Now I appeal to you, brothers and sisters, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you be in agreement and
that there be no divisions among you, but that you be united in the same mind and the same purpose.”
Presbyterians and Anglicans have found themselves in the same leaking ship of faith this summer. You likely have read about the Anglicans whose dissenting
bishops grabbed the headlines by holding a counter assembly in Jerusalem before the Lambeth Conference in Canterbury. We Presbyterians likely will regain
our theological ballast without much public notice as various congregations take their leave. Three actions of our General Assembly will likely be cited as
the cause for schism. I quote from a letter all ministers and elders received this week written by our new stated clerk, our new moderator and the director
of General Assembly Council:
- By a 54% to 46% margin the assembly voted to change one of our current ordination standards…[replacing]…the current language that says officers of
the church must live by “fidelity within the covenant of marriage between a man and a woman or chastity in singleness” (G-6.0106b) to this new language:
Those who are called to ordained service in the church, by their assent to the constitutional questions for ordination and installation pledge themselves to
live lives obedient to Jesus Christ the Head of the Church, striving to follow where he leads through the witness of the Scriptures, and to understand the
Scriptures through the instruction of the Confessions. In so doing they declare their fidelity to the standards of the Church. Each governing body charged
with examination for ordination and/or installation establishes the candidate’s sincere efforts to adhere to these standards.
- By a 53% to 47% vote, the assembly adopted a new Authoritative Interpretation on [the sentence to be replaced in the Book of Order]. Interpretive
statements concerning [forbidding] ordained service of homosexual church members by the 190th General Assembly (1978) of the UPCUSA…and the 119th Assembly
(1979) of the PCUS…and all subsequent affirmations thereof have no further force or effect.
- By a 54% to 46% vote, the assembly adopted a new Authoritative Interpretation which restores the intent of the Theological Task Force on Peace, Unity,
and Purity of the church report (2006) to allow someone who is being considered for ordination or installation as a deacon, elder, or minister to register a
conscientious objection to the standards or beliefs of the church and ask the ordaining body to enter into a conversation with them to determine the
seriousness of the departure.
At the center of the new sentence in our Book of Order is our obedience to Jesus Christ and our striving to follow where he leads through the witness of the
Scriptures. Yet the text before us this morning from Paul’s letter to the “church of God in Corinth” reminds us that, from the beginning, conflicting
interpretations of obedience to Jesus Christ and his leading through the witness of Scripture have divided the church. With Paul’s letters before us for the
next few months, we would do well to consider our obedience to Jesus Christ in light of our understanding of the apostle Paul.
We know that Paul arrived in Corinth sometime between 49 A.D. and 50 A.D. where he labored for eighteen months to establish Christ’s church among a
disparate population of economically and socially challenged Gentiles and a few well-heeled Jews. Now less than five years after Paul’s departure, word had
come to him in Ephesus from Chloe’s people that the Corinthians were quarrelling with one another. Specifically, each faction claimed to have the exclusive
truth about God, the truth according to Paul or Apollos or Peter or Christ.
We need only a passing knowledge of the last two thousand years of church history to note how Christian quarrelling has continued unabated. Actually in the
light [or darkness] of that history, Paul’s words concerning church unity--that the followers of Christ should be in agreement and of the same mind and
purpose--sound naïve. The reality of such a communion has yet to see the light of…well…Christ! But equally egregious is the unintended consequence of Paul’s
appeal in our text for unity, an appeal that curiously has led the church again and again to schism.
According to many who, in obedience to Jesus Christ and their reading of Scripture (often their reading of Paul’s writings), have lead a congregation out of
the denomination, the only hope for a community of faith to be united in the same mind and the same purpose apparently is to divide into like-minded bodies,
thereby forming a more perfect union theologically or morally. Ironically, the theological justification for these divisions throughout history has
repeatedly been anchored in Paul’s letters, particularly his moral advice about women and slaves and homosexuality. One need not go outside the history of
our own denomination for evidence of this. Presbyterians have “walked” over the role of women, the integration of Blacks into white congregations and
presently over the ordination of gay and lesbian members. How is it that this apostle who admonished quarrelling Corinthians to be united in mind and
purpose has more often than not been cited at the center of the maelstrom of Christian rancor and separation?
In the first place, the church—her ministers and members--have failed to make Paul’s substantive wrestling with the gospel our own. That is to say, Paul’s
letters are filled with his own theological reflection on “the truth of the gospel” in relation to the issues facing the early church. That same reflection
and substantive wrestling is incumbent upon Christians in every age. But here is the rub: honest wrestling with the text can only happen in a community of
diversity! Like-minded exegetes of any stripe neither plumb the depths nor dare the complexities and contradictions of the Bible. Thinking unity to be the
human achievement of those who agree on every issue, our human efforts to achieve unity of mind and purpose through schism thwart the understanding and so
the unity given by God’s spirit to a diverse community whose only hope is Christ.
But if by God’s grace such a diverse community should go to Paul’s letters seeking a living faith that could compel a conflicted community to seek
understanding together, that community would likely encounter, according to New Testament scholar Victor Paul Furnish, “not a ‘Pauline ethic’ but Paul the
pastor/counselor, reflecting on how the truth of the gospel forms and reforms the lives of those who are in Christ, and urging his
congregations to be conformed to that truth within the particulars of their own situations.” The actions of the General Assembly challenge the church
to do just that! By refusing a categorical prohibition in favor of reflection on how the truth of the gospel forms and reforms our life in Christ, we are
challenged to do the work in our time that Paul did in his. Furnish goes on to note that “Paul nowhere claims that his counsels or directives are conveying
‘the will of God.’ To the contrary, he seems quite aware that the judgments which find expression in his appeals remain his.”
Having spent my last three nights in Maine watching John Adams, such modesty in the face of future interpreters brings to mind Thomas Jefferson’s
words anticipating later Originalist interpretations of the Constitution of the United States and judging what Jefferson considered—just forty years after
its ratification--a “stale veneration of the past”: “Some men look at constitutions with sanctimonious reverence, and deem them like the ark of the
covenant,” Jefferson wrote, “too sacred to be touched. They ascribe to the men of the preceding age a wisdom more than human, and suppose what they did to
be beyond amendment. I know that age well,” he writes. “I belonged to it, and labored with it….It was very like the present, but without the experience of
the present; and the forty years of experience in government is worth a century of book-reading; and this they would say themselves, were they to rise from
the dead.” This, I believe, Paul would say of our stale veneration of his moral advice were he to rise from the dead!
But he would say more and, once again, the interpretive history of the Constitution is suggestive. “It is one thing” writes Pulitzer Prize winning historian
Jack Rakove, “to rail against the evils of politically unaccountable judges enlarging constitutional rights beyond the ideas and purposes of their original
adopters; another to explain why morally sustainable claims of equality should be held captive to the extraordinary obstacles of Article V or subject to the
partial and incomplete understandings of 1789 or 1868.” Likewise it is one thing to rail against theologically vacuous positions that are unaccountable to
the church’s faith; another to explain why morally sustainable claims of equality should be held captive to the first century worldview of Paul.
Nevertheless for the sake of unity, some ask, should we not refuse the conflict that comes with a substantive wrestling over the meaning of the gospel in
favor of a sanctimonious reverence of Scripture (a stale veneration of the past) so that the church will not be divided? By no means, I imagine Paul writing
emphatically. Conflict among human points of view is par for the course, he would say, when two or three are gathered together. Rather the mind and purpose
that is destined to unite us, according to Paul, is the mind and purpose of Christ alone. Paul’s “counsels and appeals derive from the conviction that every
member of the congregation has equal status by reason of who and whose they are: a community of sisters and brothers for whom Christ died.” [Furnish]
Therefore in between our two readings from I Corinthians this morning is a sermon of Paul’s that I admonish you to read even if you are not reading through
the New Testament this year. Here Paul cagily pits the foolishness, the weakness, the shame of the cross over against the wisdom of the world which he takes
to be not secular wisdom but the human claim to know God and God’s will. To the Corinthians quarrelling about who knows God best or who follows Christ more
faithfully Paul says he has chosen to know nothing of God except Jesus Christ and him crucified: in other words, to know that Christ has died for all.
Therefore “Every boasting about a Christian position,” writes Presbyterian New Testament Professor Peter Lampe, “…whether this position is correct or not…is
already godless for Paul, because it hardens the respective positions as if they were never susceptible to challenge. An absolutizing of one’s own
theological position fixes God like an object, for it fails to take into account God as the powerfully acting subject who plunges the human speech about God
into a permanent crisis….”
In the end for Paul, “faith does not consist simply of what one ‘knows,’ however correctly.” Neither, I would add, does faith consist simply of what one
does, however morally. Faith is “the grateful and obedient response to having been known by God and to having been called by God into the koinonia
[the fellowship creating reality] of Christ” where “what is really important” about the other “is not how much he fails to understand or how [she acts] but
that [the other] is ‘the brother [the sister] for whom Christ died.’” [Furnish]
Even as our brothers and sisters in faith take their leave of us to form a more perfect union in the months ahead, may we remember only this: that each one
is one for whom Christ died, our brothers and our sisters with whom we will be reunited—clean apart from our choosing or doing—in the perfect union who
alone is God. Thanks be to God.
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