FIRST PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH, ATLANTA, GEORGIA
Sermon by Dr. George Bryant Wirth
August 12, 2001
Scripture: Acts 15
In the Women’s Bible Classroom, there is a painting on the wall by El Greco which depicts “The Apostles Peter and Paul” at the Council of Jerusalem. This is the painting, but don’t be alarmed – I didn’t take it from the Women’s Bible Classroom! This is a copy which I have hanging on the wall of the pastor’s study, and it is one of my favorite works of art. It shows these two great apostles of the early church as they attended the Council of Jerusalem, which is recorded in the 15th chapter of Acts.
Notice please the serious, somber look on their faces. I think El Greco depicted them that way because both men were involved in a complicated and controversial debate together with the other leaders of the early Christian Church. The central issue was whether or not Gentile converts from the congregation in Antioch of Asia Minor where Paul served as a missionary, would be required to follow the Jewish rules and rituals that were observed by Peter and his fellow believers back at “headquarters” – the mother church in Jerusalem.
As former opponents in this divisive struggle (read Acts 10 and Galatians 2 for the background), Peter and Paul had finally found “common ground.” And being joined by James, the brother of Jesus and Paul’s missionary colleague named Barnabas, those visionary disciples helped to lead the Council of Jerusalem toward a compromise decision which welcomed the Gentiles into the church and at the same time upheld the basic tenets of their religious tradition. Had the decision gone the other way, you and I as Gentiles all these years later, might not be Christians today.
Now, I want you to look again at the painting of Peter and Paul, and observe once more the look on their faces. Somehow El Greco perceived, that although a compromise decision was reached and they must have been relieved, nevertheless those two men and all the rest of them had been worn down by the struggle to seek and discover God’s will for the church.
And as you look at their faces, I want to suggest that you are seeing the mirror image and reflection of the face of our Presbyterian Denomination in America today.
I.
Over the past 25 years, since my own ordination in the early 1970’s, we Presbyterians, like almost all other Protestant communions, have been living through a difficult era of increasing frustration, declining membership statistics and an ever-widening gap between so-called “liberals” and “progressives” on one side and so-called “conservatives” and “evangelicals” on the other side. I say “so-called” because those labels are often misleading, not always helpful, and sometimes used in harmful ways to describe people with whom we disagree. I think we’d do well to simply call each other Christians, and leave it at that.
But simple solutions, even the way we refer to one another, have not come easily over the past quarter of a century. What once seemed somewhat clear to us as Presbyterians about our identity and vision, our sense of ministry and mission, our connectional system between sessions, presbyteries, synods and the General Assembly and our Biblical and Reformed tradition – all of that has been exposed to the shifting and turbulent winds of the culture around us, to the changing attitudes of many Presbyterians among us about issues and ideology, to the resistance of many other Presbyterians who want to hold on to stability and to the promptings of the Holy Spirit who calls us to be the people and the church God wants us to be.
Strangely enough, as some of our statistical numbers related to membership and local congregations have gone down, our financial giving has continued to go up…which caused one wag to say that by the year 2025, there would be just one Presbyterian left in this land contributing $800 million to headquarters in Louisville! Well, I doubt that will happen, but looking toward the future, it appears that much of what lies ahead is still very uncertain.
Looking back, what I remember, starting off in the ministry, was a recurring phrase often used during session, presbytery or General Assembly meetings. After discussion and debate, someone would stand up to say, “Mr. or Madam Moderator, if the way be clear, let us proceed to vote and move forward.” But I don’t hear that phrase anymore, because, more often than not, the way isn’t clear. We Presbyterians are not all of one mind about the controversial issues we face, we don’t have an overwhelming majority opinion about the direction we should take and we are praying and hoping and still struggling to know the will of God and the way the Lord wants us to go.
So it seems that we have come full circle to the way it was back in the first century A.D., when Peter and Paul and all the others met in Jerusalem to try to decide how Jews and Gentiles could embrace and love and live alongside each other in the church. That was the tough issue they faced, and nearly two thousand years later, we Presbyterians are dealing with a similar situation today.
II.
When the 213th Presbyterian General Assembly met in Louisville, Kentucky last June, 568 commissioners – lay people and pastors – from all over the country who were elected by their local presbyteries, they affirmed on the first night at the opening worship service (Saturday, June 9) that “Jesus Christ is my Lord and Savior.” That public declaration of faith created the context and set the atmosphere for all of the committee meetings, Assembly deliberations and subsequent decisions which followed. There were no defiant demonstrations, relatively few open outbursts of anger and from what I have heard and read, reported by those who attended the Assembly, the spirit of Jesus Christ was evident in the way the commissioners conducted themselves…”decently and in order”!
Rev. Trisha Senterfitt, one of our associate pastors, was a commissioner from this presbytery, and she has given you her own insights about what happened in Louisville through her sermon two weeks ago.
Dr. Ted Wardlaw, moderator of our Greater Atlanta Presbytery, pastor of Central Church in the city and a close personal friend of mine, said to his congregation in a sermon preached just a day after the Assembly was over, “I can’t begin to tell you how many votes we took, how many global efforts we began, how many dollars we agreed to send to this and that point of need in the world, how many missionaries we commissioned and how many new church developments we made possible.” (From a sermon entitled “A More Excellent Way,” preached on Sunday, June 24, 2001, at Central Presbyterian Church.)
All of that and so much more in the Assembly was good and positive and projected hope for the future. But as most of you already know, there were two debates and some important decisions that engaged the controversy and reflected the division in our Denomination.
The first focused on several Presbytery overtures about the Lordship of Jesus Christ, brought on by a statement that one of our church officials made at conference last year which inferred that Jesus Christ might not be the only way to salvation. After considerable debate over theology, Christology, evangelism and other religions, the Assembly adopted the following position:
“We confess the unique authority of Jesus Christ as Lord. Every other authority is finally subject to Christ. Jesus is also uniquely Savior. It is His life, death, resurrection, ascension and final return that restores creation, providing salvation for all those whom God has chosen to redeem. Although we do not know the limits of God’s grace and pray for the salvation of those who may never come to know Christ, for us the assurance of salvation is found only in confessing Christ and trusting Him alone. We are humbled in our witness to Christ by our realization that our understanding of Him and His way is limited and distorted by our sin. Still, the transforming power of Christ in our lives compels us to make Christ known to those of other faiths and of no faith, even as we are challenged by them to be more like Christ and receive from them wisdom which deepens our understanding of what God wants.”
As far as I can tell, that statement is consistent with our Book of Order, the Apostles’ Creed, the Nicene Creed and the Presbyterian Book of Confessions, including the Westminster Confession of Faith (1646) which has given us theological guidance for more than 350 years. Even so, some commissioners wanted that statement to be more definitive, and following the Assembly, one Presbyterian Para-church organization declared in a newsletter which some of you have received, that this declaration of our General Assembly – in fact, the entire meeting of the Assembly was “apostate” (editorial in The Presbyterian Layman, July 2001, page 22). That word means, literally, “the total repudiation and abandonment of the Christian faith.”
My friends, I believe that the commissioners of the 213th General Assembly were and are faithful disciples of Jesus Christ who sought to find and follow the will of God this past June. They and the decisions they made are not apostate. But we are a divided church. And the issue which is tearing us apart and I think, breaking God’s heart, is homosexuality.
The General Assembly voted, by a 60 to 40 percent margin, to recommend to our presbyteries that we rescind Amendment B, the so-called “Fidelity and Chastity” amendment which was put into our Book of Order in 1997, and to nullify the “Definitive Guidance” of 1978 – all of which means, that if our presbyteries, over the next 8 to 9 months, vote to ratify what the Assembly affirmed in June, then the ordination of gays and lesbians will neither be prohibited nor required by the Book of Order. Each local session and presbytery will have the final authority to discern and decide, under the guidance of God, what to do as the candidates for ordination come before them.
During the past five years, in the General Assembly and in our presbyteries, over and over and over again, almost every vote has reflected the sad and painful division of our church on this issue. Many of us are weary of the struggle and wish it would go away. Some of us are preparing with fervor for the next volley of the battle, ready to “take a stand” on one side or the other. A number of us are confused and just don’t know what to do. And there are those of us who are thinking about giving up and getting out of the Presbyterian Church – including a number of homosexual men and women and their families and friends who cannot see a resolution or an end to this hard-fought and heart-wrenching situation. To them and to anyone else who has thought about leaving, I say “Hold on and stay with us, especially here in this local congregation at the corner of 16th and Peachtree, where you are loved and where you belong.”
What I cannot say, because I do not know the future, is how this is all going to turn out. There are people who think we are headed for a schism – split right down the middle – two churches to be created out of one. There’s a book I’ve read, and I commend it to you, entitled “The Divided Church: Moving Liberals & Conservatives from Diatribe to Dialogue,” written by Richard Hutcheson who describes himself as an “evangelical,” and Peggy Shriver, who describes herself as a “liberal.” They have written a book to help us understand our divisions, but sadly, they say the “future is uncertain and in some instances there may be outright schism. In others there may be a gradual schism through the erosion of members on the losing side of some sort of resolution when it is finally reached.” (“The Divided Church: Moving Liberals & Conservatives from Diatribe to Dialogue” by Richard G. Hutcheson, Jr. & Peggy Shriver, InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, IL, 1999, page 100) They pray, I pray and I hope you pray that will never happen.
That is why I am in complete agreement with the statement of our Session three years ago, which says, in part, that we “will seek to provide leadership by abiding by the Book of Order – in both its current form and in its processes for change – and by working diligently for the peace and unity of the church” (From “A Statement Concerning Amendment A and Amendment B, adopted by the Session, First Presbyterian Church, Atlanta, Georgia, January 20, 1998)
And I am wondering this morning what might happen if we decided, really decided, to listen carefully to each other and to the voice of the Holy Spirit, to keep our hearts and minds focused on Jesus Christ, to let go of our agendas and our win-lose mentality, and to pray, as we have never prayed before, that God would show us the way through to the other side, where we could finally abide by His will and live together in His reconciling love.
It happened you know, a long time ago, at the Council of Jerusalem. And if we are faithful and open to God’s direction, it can happen again when “the way is clear” in the Presbyterian Church, USA.
In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.