Inter-Dependence Day
Sermon preached Sunday, July 3, 2005
by Chris Paige
Over the last 6 months, the hardest thing for me about moments like this has been figuring out how to talk about the church trial without letting it take over my life. So I hope you'll bear with me…
For those of you who may be visiting, my life-partner, Beth Stroud, is a Methodist minister, who came out to her congregation as a lesbian, was defrocked in a December church trial and then re-frocked in April by an appeals panel. There is one final stage of the process due this October - a hearing before the Judicial Council (which effectively serves as the Methodist Supreme Court). It's been a life-changing process for my family, in ways that may take years for us to understand. It has been the context of my life and has impacted how I think about and respond to just about everything - from politics to spirituality to relationships.
Having said all that, several things have moved me to talk about repentance today. The most obvious is that lately, we've been inundated with correspondence and comments about sin and repentance - from both liberals and conservatives alike. Whether the conversation is about homosexuality as a sin or about homophobia as a sin, these demands for repentance are passionate and prolific.
While this is the language of our common faith tradition, it is often used in ways that evoke emotions such as shame and guilt, blame and judgement - rather than reconciliation, healing, or deeper understanding. Yet we continue to use it because of the power it holds. At the core, this concept of repentance has to do with a longing for right relationship. Repentance is about wanting to make things right with one another and with God. We may be moved to repent when we recognize our own role in the brokenness of our world. And we call for repentance from others because we long for some acknowledgement of a wrong that has been done.
For instance, the language of repentance can be seen in an emergent trend towards American institutions apologizing for past racial sins. Whether this comes in the form of statements from the U.S. Congress or from religious institutions that sponsor services of racial reconciliation, the language of repentance is intended to bring a long overdue opening for healing and reconciliation.
But in Christian tradition, repentance is just a starting point. What comes next is a complicated theological concoction of words like grace and forgiveness, discipleship and transformation, justification and salvation. And here's where it gets really slippery. What is it that needs to be transformed as we seek to follow Jesus? How is our individual and collective brokenness actually made whole?
- Does it require that we affirm a particular ideology, doctrine or faith statement?
- Does it require that we take up or put down a particular "lifestyle"?
- Does it require submitting to a particular set of authorities?
- Or perhaps resisting a certain set of principalities and powers?
Don't worry, I'm not going to try to sort all of this out in our short time together this morning. But I do want to sketch out a few concepts that have come to my attention in recent months as I've reflected on the role of repentance in our faith tradition…
Traditionally, confession was followed by pardon, which was then followed by penance and finally restoration. While it has some history of abuse, penance was not originally intended to be some form of a punishment or pay-off, but rather a phase of restorative justice - the phase where we seek to make amends for our wrong-doing. Penance is what moves us out of some meaningless hamster wheel of guilt, repentance and forgiveness; guilt, repentance and forgiveness; guilt, repentance and forgiveness… into a new life of healing and reconciliation. Penance is a process where our failings are transformed - not by a magical disappearance into denial, pretending that our mistakes have no consequences in the real world. But by incorporating them into our story, redeeming them and making them into something new.
It's as if repentance were the seed of restoration -- a basis and a starting point for healing. God's grace and forgiveness comprise the soil that accepts this seed and gives it space to grow. But without something more, our repentance never grows to blossom and bear fruit. The field of God's Grace lies barren. Penance is where we add water, sunshine, nourishment that helps the seed of repentance to grow into the healing of what was broken.
As you know, I live with a self-avowed, practicing United Methodist. The Methodists have this word "sanctification." Sanctification is the process that happens after repentance whereby God works transformation in our lives, perfecting us in faith. Each of us has places within us where we can resonate with Paul's words:
While I have no trouble making up my mind to do what is right, I still can't do it. I fail to follow through on my good intentions, and instead find myself doing something crooked - the exact thing I wanted so much to avoid.
Our best intentions just won't get us there. But the Gospel message is Good News that empowers us to move forward, even through our most troubling limitations and failures. We are accepted and forgiven, not because we have already attained perfection -- but rather while we were still sinners. It is in the community of faith where we remember that God is not done with us yet.
Penance is something that we do, but the important thing about sanctification is that it comes from God. Not from hard work. Not from good intentions. Not because we felt bad enough about our former selves. Sanctification is the power of God's Grace working in our lives, changing us.
At a workshop sponsored by the Interfaith Center, I learned a listening technique designed to help find common ground in potentially volatile inter-religious conversations. It involves listening carefully to try to differentiate the facts being presented, from the feelings being expressed, from the values that are being represented. I've found this to be a useful framework for me in reading through some of our trial related correspondence.
While I deeply disagree with their blanket judgement of lesbian and gay relationships, I do respect some of our correspondents' apparent commitment to a life of faith and discipleship. I agree that a Christian's life ought to be transformed through our experience of faith -- and that this transformation is not just a private matter. Our faith journeys are bound up in the life of community. Personally, I don't feel that sending emails to strangers I've seen on television is a particularly effective way to build authentic relationships of accountability. But I do appreciate the impulse to move beyond polite acceptance of sin to concretely encourage one another in the work of transformation.
In progressive circles, there is a way that we prefer to talk about this change in terms of systemic justice. Too often, we are more comfortable lobbying public officials about policy decisions than we are talking with our own friends and family members about unhealthy choices that might be affecting our lives together. Pushing ourselves to be better activists can actually become an obstacle to talking honestly about our own lives and struggles.
In an essay called "Recovering Repentance," Barbara Brown Taylor talks about noticing how her well-intentioned repentance in church sometimes seemed to have little influence on the daily choices she was making in her life. She writes this about one effort she made to go deeper in her personal life:
Several years ago, I decided to try and bridge the gap. I asked another woman to enter into a support partnership with me, and together we designed a routine. After deciding to start small, each of us chose one area of our lives that needed work. We clarified what we wanted to change (I wanted to be on time for my appointments) and we clarified why it was important (I wanted to be a person of my word, and I also wanted to do something about my compulsion to cram too many things into too little time, which is how I act out my idolatrous fantasy of omnipotence). Next we picked one or two specific actions that would support us to make the changes we wanted to make (I set all my clocks five minutes ahead. I will also get in the car ten minutes earlier than I think I need to, even if it means that I arrive early and - gasp - waste time). Finally, we agreed to call each other every Sunday to report on how things were going.
The last step turned out to be the kicker. There was a huge difference between saying (to myself), "I want to be on time for my appointments this week" and saying (to someone else), "I will call you on Sunday to tell you whether or not I was." My partner never badgered me. She knew that was not her job. Her job was simply to keep reminding me what I had said I wanted, and to help me explore my enormous resistance to change.
What I learned through that process was that I was used to being sympathized with for my failure to change. There were plenty of people I could talk to about being late who would say, "Oh, I'm late all the time too. Isn't it awful?" I was used to being punished for my failure to change. At least one person pushed to the edge finally said, "I get so tired of waiting for you to show up that sometimes I forget why I wanted to see you at all." What I was not used to was being supported in my bid for new life by someone who said, "You want to do things differently? Great! I'll help you with that." When all was said and done, it was easier for me to receive sympathy or punishment from other people than it was to let one other person uphold me in the hard work of transformation.
But the truth is that groups like Alcoholics Anonymous do a better job than many mainline churches in terms of creating this kind of a community of support and accountability -- a space where we are encouraged not only to come as we are, but to also let the truth be known about our deepest struggles and failings. Not with a goal of humiliation or judgment or punishment, but because we recognize that the journey towards wholeness is too hard to make alone.
And this is a place where the Christian faith tradition is fundamentally at odds with the American Way. Tomorrow is the 4th of July. Independence Day. The mythology we celebrate is that of an America built by rugged individuals who have taken control of their circumstances. But this ideology of self-determination fails to highlight the web of dependencies involved in creating our wealth and status in the world. For instance, we have obscured the role that countries like France and Spain played in securing the United States as a sovereign nation. And when we celebrate our "Independence," we ignore the persistent way that our economy relies on imported slave labor, on cheap immigrant labor, and increasingly on an international web of low-wage labor pools, including the American prison system.
What would it mean for the United States if, instead of Independence Day, we celebrated Inter-dependence Day - if our country repented of this radical individualism and fundamentally affirmed the notion that our national identity is grounded in our connection with one another?
- There's nothing wrong with a good picnic or barbeque. So perhaps, a central theme of Inter-Dependence Day would involve celebrating the web of relationships that nurtures, challenges, and sustains us in our daily lives.
- Maybe on Inter-Dependence Day, we would give up our obsession with Bombs Bursting in Air long enough to tell stories and sing songs about the hard but worthwhile work of healing the wounds of our history. While it doesn't always have to involve a million people on the steps of the Art Museum, yesterday's Live 8 event does seem like a good starting place for understanding how this kind of shift could change the way we think about our world.
- Dr King's line, "None of us is free until all of us are free" could become a national holiday slogan as we use the day to recommit ourselves to facing the rich challenges of a creating a more perfect Union.
And what would this kind of shift mean for Tabernacle? What would it mean to recommit ourselves each year to making Tabernacle a model for Inter-Dependent living? A place where we are willing to go deep enough to risk failure with one another… where we are open enough to let ourselves be forgiven and encouraged in the raw struggles of our lives. While I'm not so interested in developing deep relationships of accountability with those email correspondents I mentioned, I do want to be accountable to other people in my life who can help me to make my repentance real. People like you.
Some would say that Beth and I have been courageous, but we are works in progress just like you. We have been empowered by a knowledge of God's love for us and an overwhelming community of support that embodies that love in our lives. I pray that, with God's grace, we will all continue to find new ways to take more risks together.
Amen.
© 2005 by Chris Paige. All rights reserved. Please consult the author at tabernacle@tabunited.org if you wish to use the text of this sermon, in whole or in part.
