The 1st United Methodist Church of Napa

⁹“And you, my son Solomon, know the God of your father, and serve him with single mind and willing heart; for the LORD searches every mind, and understands every plan and thought. If you seek him, he will be found by you; but if you forsake him, he will abandon you forever. ¹⁰Take heed now, for the LORD has chosen you to build a house as the sanctuary; be strong, and act.”

¹If then there is any encouragement in Christ, any consolation from love, any sharing in the Spirit, any compassion and sympathy, ²make my joy complete: be of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind. ³Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves. ⁴Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others. ⁵Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, ⁶who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, ⁷but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, ⁸he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death—even death on a cross. ⁹Therefore God also highly exalted him and gave him the name that is above every name, ¹⁰so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, ¹¹and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.

I am, first and foremost, a theologian; so I care deeply about what we say that we believe about God and the Bible. We are engaged in a struggle for the very soul of the church. At a number of different places in the Annual Conference Session this past week, this was startlingly apparent. It began with our opening celebration marking fifty years of ordained ministry of women in our church, and these words:

Women have always engaged in ministry, the great majority of them as lay women in local churches and as committed disciples in occupations and professions. … Prior to 1956 women were serving the Church in many professional capacities. Deaconesses filled a variety of roles…[n]evertheless, the granting of full connection to United Methodist clergywomen was a momentous step. Otherwise why did it meet such resistance?^¹

For far too long the answer to that question has been the ways in which men in leadership positions of the church have misused the Bible in their desire to remain in positions of power and influence over women. Witness these:

(As in all the churches of the saints, ³⁴women should be silent in the churches. For they are not permitted to speak, but should be subordinate, as the law also says. ³⁵If there is anything they desire to know, let them ask their husbands at home. For it is shameful for a woman to speak in church.

²²Wives, be subject to your husbands as you are to the Lord. ²³For the husband is the head of the wife just as Christ is the head of the church, the body of which he is the Savior. ²⁴Just as the church is subject to Christ, so also wives ought to be, in everything, to their husbands.

The history of such misuse of the Bible has roots as ancient as the scriptures themselves. Listen to these:

³²When the Israelites were in the wilderness, they found a man gathering sticks on the sabbath day. ³³Those who found him gathering sticks brought him to Moses, Aaron, and to the whole congregation. ³⁴They put him in custody, because it was not clear what should be done to him. ³⁵Then the LORD said to Moses, “The man shall be put to death; all the congregation shall stone him outside the camp.” ³⁶The whole congregation brought him outside the camp and stoned him to death, just as the LORD had commanded Moses.

⁹Tell slaves to be submissive to their masters and to give satisfaction in every respect; they are not to talk back, ¹⁰not to pilfer, but to show complete and perfect fidelity, so that in everything they may be an ornament to the doctrine of God our Savior.

I shall prove in [this book], by the most unquestionable authorities, that slaves and slaveholders were in the Church from the beginning; that slavery was held to be consistent with Christian principle by the fathers and councils, and by all Protestant divines and commentators, up to the very close of the last century, and that this fact was universal among all churches and sects throughout the Christian world.

The situation then, concerning slavery, was as it's been at any time in our collective history over most issues of politics and theology. A minority on one side holds one view; a small group on the other holds the opposite view. Between them lies the majority, whose general sentiment always seems to support the status quo. It seems the right way to structure society, "the way God ordained it to be" – i.e., depending upon the religious leaning of a community and its vested interests.

Jennifer and I are called to stand with both feet firmly planted in the church and in society. The Book of Discipline gives us these instructions:

Our theological task is both critical and constructive. It is critical in that we test various expressions of faith by asking: Are they true? Appropriate? Clear? Cogent? Credible? Are they based on love? Do they provide the Church and its members with a witness that is faithful to the gospel as reflected in our living heritage and that is authentic and convincing in the light of human experience and the present state of human knowledge?

Our theological task is constructive in that every generation must appropriate creatively the wisdom of the past and seek God in their midst in order to think afresh about God, revelation, sin, redemption, worship, the church, freedom, justice, moral responsibility, and other significant theological concerns. Our summons is to understand and receive the gospel promises in our troubled and uncertain times.^³

To quote Dr. Virginia Mollenkott, who addressed some of us on the last day of Annual Conference just yesterday:

A struggle that is not joyous, is the wrong struggle. … Unplug your life from whatever is draining it of joy!^⁴

Where will you stand – you who may be part of that great majority in the middle – so that the church becomes, in fact, all that we believe Jesus intended it to be? I leave you with this:

³⁴When the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together, ³⁵and one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him. ³⁶“Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?” ³⁷He said to him, “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ ³⁸This is the greatest and first commandment. ³⁹And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ ⁴⁰On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”

1 from the "Introduction" to Recollections on the Way: Clergywomen in Full Connection in the California Nevada Conference of the United Methodist Church, 1956 – 2006.

2 All of these page numbers were references to pages in the pew Bibles so that the congregation could follow along – or check me out on my accuracy!

3 "The Nature of Our Theological Task," The Book of Discipline 2004, p. 75

4 Virginia Ramey Mollenkott, from an address to The California-Nevada Annual Conference Committee on Reconciliation, June 17, 2006.