August 22, 1999

Douglas S. Long

North Raleigh United Church

As Harding has already explained so eloquently, we are in the process of writing the covenant for North Raleigh United. Today's sermon is one of a series to help provide food for thought as we do so. Two weeks ago I spoke in general about covenants and creeds in the history of the Judeo-Christian tradition, last week I approached ways of dealing with the Bible, and of not dealing with the Bible, next week I'll address the Economics of Jesus, and then on the final Sunday prior to our day of covenant writing on September 11^th I'll address some form of the question… Is Christianity the only true path to God?

I don't tackle these topics to give you specific answers so much as to offer some understanding of where I am in these important matters and then for all of us to wrestle with them, and others, the end result being the covenant statement by which we will define our community. (…and all of these sermons are posted on our web site so you can read them again and again and again… right!?!

There are other topics I could have chosen, and I want you to know I did consult the Interim Steering Committee in choosing these, but as much as any I believe these can help move us along in our wonderful new opportunity. So understand I'm speaking straight-forwardly about topics I believe to be crucial. Let me know what you think. (…and one more word of introduction. If some of these 'discussion starters' come across as a little too direct, I don't mean them to. If love is not at the center of all that we do, we have failed our God.)

So in consideration of our covenant, that which will define and bind us in community, we wrestle with these and other topics… our approach to the scriptures, our understanding of economic responsibilities, the person and place of the Christ, and for today… the long standing question of Christianity… who belongs?

I say it this way, 'who belongs', because in essence that is what I'm addressing. What are the boundaries of membership. Who receives an invitation to this party of God. …Not just North Raleigh United… but who is invited to be part of the world-wide Church, the greater Body of Christ?

The faithful have always tended to circle their wagons a bit too tightly... even before the time of Christianity.

Robert McAfee Brown, in his book Speaking of Christianity, shares a story from the Hasidic tradition:

"It is a day of rejoicing in heaven, there has been a great victory. The children of Israel have escaped across the Red Sea, whose waters have risen to engulf the pursuing Egyptians and drown them all. Not only a great victory, but a Jewish victory to boot, and how many Jewish victories has heaven ever had a chance to celebrate? So there is much rejoicing in heaven. The angles are dancing. A feast is being prepared.

And then Raphael, one of the archangels, looks at the divine throne. God is not only not rejoicing; God is weeping.

The archangel is mystified. So he goes over, kneels before the divine throne, and says, "Lord God, Creator of the universe, it is a time of celebration, a time of singing and dancing. Why are you weeping?"

And from the divine throne comes the anguished voice of the Lord God, Creator of the universe: "Why should I not be weeping, when so many of my children have drowned?"

Who are God's people?

This is a question that has certainly been central to the church from the day the Church began. The Church, and its predecessors, has always struggled with where the boundaries are.

To illustrate this, and then elaborate on it, I want to take the story that Harding just read from the Acts of the Apostles and explain part of what's going on in the story of Cornelius and Peter.

This my first sound irrelevant to some of you but I want to assure you that, when it comes to matters of the Church and inclusivity, this story is center stage.

One of the ways to understand the organization of the book, Acts, is to see how the understanding of who Christianity encompassed, ethnically and geographically, enlarged. You can literally create an outline of the Book of Acts by drawing successively larger circles around the city of Jerusalem. The farther into the book, the larger the geographical area it encompasses.

It would be a mistake to simply assume that the reason for this is it took time for the message to spread, though this is part of the dynamic. The more telling dynamic is that those who heard and believed the gospel story assumed that it did not extend to those outside their circle and it was only slowly, incrementally, that they understood the Gospel was indeed open to those outside their creed and culture.

Let me explain.

The first act of the Apostles was to retreat to the upper room in Jerusalem and collect themselves.

Even after the event of Pentecost, the defining birth of the church, the apostles first assumed that to be a Christian, you must 1) be Jewish and 2) live in Jerusalem. The first Christian community was Jerusalem based. ..And they were all Jewish.

It wasn't that they were all Jewish because they were the only people in Jerusalem… The earliest church understood that to be a Christian you had to be a Jew.

This idea did not dispel quickly.

The first nine chapters of Acts continues to tell the marvelous stories of the growth of the Church... but it only included Jews., Jews from neighboring towns, Jews from Ethiopia, Saul/Paul, a Jew from Tarsus… They may have been citizens of another country, but they were Jewish (much in the same way that Jewish people in this day are citizens of many different countries.)

It was simply an undisputed assumption of the earliest expression of the Church that you couldn't accept the Christ without a Jewish background. In its very earliest forms, Christianity was sub-set of Judaism.

Then there is Chapter 10. Along comes the story of Cornelius.

Cornelius was a devout man, we are told, a God-fearing man, but not a Jew. Cornelius is a Gentile,… and acceptance into the church was here-to-fore barred to Gentiles.

So at the same time that God is nudging Cornelius to seek the Church, God is nudging Peter to open the doors of the Church.

It took an amazing amount of courage on the part of Cornelius, and an amazing revelation to Peter (this impetuous and close disciple of Jesus, now the leader of the fledgling church) it took a vision from God, to open Peter's eyes to understand something that we now take completely for granted. The mercy and grace of God, the love of God expressed through the life of Jesus, was open to Gentiles as well.

If you read on in Acts you see that Peter, by accepting Cornelius, overstepped the bounds of the status-quo Church and was quickly called to the council of elders in Jerusalem (chapter 11)

Let me read you their accusation… "'So you have been visiting the uncircumcised and eating with them, have you?' to which Peter gave them a thorough account of the happenings. He had a vision, the messengers of Cornelius showed up… and the elders then say (11:18) this account satisfied them, and they gave glory to God. "God" they said, "can evidently grant even the pagans the repentance that leads to life."

Evidently.

Of course there was still a great debate, for years actually, about whether the Gentile had to convert to Judaism and then be allowed admittance into the church. For decades the male converts were first circumcised, and then baptized. …and this practice itself actually became a very heated debate among church leaders. In the Letter to the Church at Galatia, Paul is referring to some who make a great show about their willingness to observe the ritual of circumcision as testimony to their devotion to God, when actually they are, in Paul's eyes, flaunting themselves publicly… and so he writes to the Galatians about these trouble makers… "Tell those disturbing you I would like to see the knife slip." (Galatians 5:12)

The loving Apostle speaks.

We make a great mistake to not see that the church was rigidly exclusive and absolutely wrong on this score… What is obvious to us now, non-Jews are also accepted into the fold of God, was completely obscure to our forebears.

…And it's true not just of Jews and non-Jews.

If you glance once again at the story of Cornelius for example, this one who was so devout and God-fearing that his exemplary life was able to bridge the chasm, blaze a trail, between Jew and Greek… who did this righteous man God send with the message to Peter? His slaves.

The text had no problem with that. Peter had no problem with Cornelius's slaves, certainly Cornelius didn't, … nor did the Church of his day. Slavery was accepted as a status quo institution.

And not to mention that Cornelius's profession, as commander of an occupying army, was one that entailed the forced subjection of one people to another.

Later Christians would argue that slavery is in fact outside the realm of God, but it didn't occur to Cornelius.

Seems so obvious to us now.

The inclusive fold of God embraces all.

There has, in fact, always been a minority voice in the scriptures which proclaims that God is bigger than the dominant group's understanding…

Look at Isaiah 56 for example.

In the first eight verses God says "I will accept foreigners, eunuchs, and others beyond those already gathered."

Jonah, as I explained in an earlier sermon, is a message about a God whose fold extends even to the hated enemies of the Israelites.

Throughout the history of the church, the boundaries have been expanded… not because the message of the Gospel has changed but because the faithful have been able to understand its implications more clearly.

No one is excluded from the all-embracing love of God.

Still- for centuries women were treated as second class citizens… still are in some circles, but in the all-embracing fold of God…. well, they rank at the top… along with all others.

For centuries African Americans were held at arms length …or more by the Church. We don't want to even imagine the cruelty of white culture inflicted upon black just a few decades ago. Not that we've arrived... but my point is that the Church, for 19 centuries plus, had little reservation enslaving human beings. ..and there are few churches today that truly bridge the racial divide. I do hope we can work toward that.

It's ironic that the Church owes its existence to the grace of god, but has been terribly slow in extending that grace and justice to those beyond its own inner circles.

Today our culture is in a similar battle over the rights of sexual minorities. (It's easier to say sexual minorities than gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered).

Now as someone raised in a Southern Baptist culture, I need to tell you that I didn't come to this conclusion easily…

In fact, let me back up and tell you a story important to me in my journey from where I was to where I'm going. …One of my steps toward expanding my understanding of the boundaries of the church.

A few years ago, when I was in Oberlin, one of the former church organists returned to town to live. Larry was 37. So was I at the time. I did not realize he had come back to die. Eventually I learned he had AIDS, which was quite advanced. …and eventually he entrusted me with much of his agony. His partner, however, kept me at arms length, because he had suffered much at the hands of church folk. When everything finally went wrong and Larry entered the hospital, gravely ill, his parents and sisters came to northern Ohio from their Mississippi town. Vicksburg. The south doesn't get much deeper than that. Larry's mom was a pillar in her Methodist church, First United Methodist, I think. She sang in the choir, and was the president of the women's organization.

When I met her in the hospital she was sitting on Larry's bed with his partner and another friend, a gay man who had flown in from New York to be with them. Larry was dozing in and out of coherence.

She was sitting there, that Southern, Methodist pillar with her dying son and his friends and she smiled and said to me… "These are my sons. I've got two here in Oberlin, and one in N.Y."

I loved her from that moment on.

From Edna Cave, and her 'sons', I learned many things about love that week. (Actually, I learned from Larry's father and sisters who were there as well.)

..and I learned much about the real church.

The boundaries we've drawn, for whatever reasons, ignorance, fear, are wrong…

I firmly believe that the wider church is just as wrong by excluding gay and lesbian men and women today as the white church was wrong in excluding African Americans a few decades ago.

…just as wrong as the church was in requiring women to serve as underlings to their husbands.

…just as wrong as the church was in excommunicating Galileo for proposing that the earth was not flat.

May I quote myself? This is from the first sermon preached from this 'music stand' at NRUC. The Church cannot be fully true to the radical love of God proclaimed by Jesus, as long as it denies gay and lesbian persons into its life fully. While we have no intention of being a 'single issue' church, we every intention of not leaving a single person out. We will be inclusive.

We do need to be inclusive. We need to reach out to the Hispanic Community around us. We need to actively embrace people living below the poverty line. We need to learn from Asian Americans. We need to, for the sake of our community, and our integrity, and our spiritual health listen to the stories of people from cultures different from our own… because our understanding of God is strengthened and broadened in such a community… and we come one step closer to the real Body of Christ.

No one is excluded from full membership in the community of love.

The Gospel is open to all. Is inclusive of all… We are all safely held in the all-embracing fold of God.

So may it be… and so may we live… and so may this community evolve.

Amen.

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