Good evening, and the blessings of the renewing Holy Spirit to you, as we near the end of a long day.  I am Michael Kirby from the Presbytery of Chicago.

 I am Ellen Acton from the Presbytery of Detroit.

And I am Deana Reed from the Presbytery of the Redwoods.

On behalf of the 19 presbyteries that sent us to speak to you about Item 04-01 on deleting G-6.0106b, and on Providing a New Authoritative Interpretation, we begin by giving thanks to God for your service to the church and for the opportunity to participate in the vital work you are doing.  You have just heard from other advocates for this overture, and as they did, we want to assure you that we are all working toward the same goal. 

We come before you as women and men who love Jesus Christ, and seek to serve and follow him, placing all of our hope and trust in our Triune God, the Sovereign of our world and our lives. All of us at this Assembly have that in common. We love the Presbyterian Church; we celebrate our Reformed ideals, particularly those that remind us that the people of God are called to come together, to discern the will of God in our collective encounter with the Holy Spirit, and then to live humbly into that will. We are people of the Book—the Bible.  Together, we lift up Scripture as the unique and authoritative witness to Jesus Christ and God’s Word to all of us.

We are also people of thebooks—the Book of Order and the Book of Confessions, our Presbyterian Constitution.   We are guided by the wisdom, traditions, and understandings of the past, even as we are open to the reforming work ofthe Holy Spirit seen in today’sworld and church. We are young and old, cradle Presbyterians and adult converts, pulpit dwellers and pew sitters, women and men, straight and gay, from small towns and big cities, tiny congregations and large ones. 

The Gospel of Jesus Christ is the center of allour lives.  Though we falter and fail, and though we may disagree on some specifics, we seek to make our lives and our church ever more faithful, more loving, more open to the movement of the Holy Spirit.

We invite you to reflect with us as we share the stories and convictions, the frustrations and hopes, the revelations and insights that collectively compel us and the thousands of faithful Presbyterians who have sent us here, to urge you, after prayerful discernment, to send item 04-01 to the floor of the Assembly with a recommendation that it be approved.

We turn first to Holy Scripture because of its authority in our lives as Presbyterians. Many good and loving people who acknowledge the gifts and calling God has given to gay and lesbian people still insist that the church cannot ordain those people because of one interpretation of a few passages of Scripture.  Because of our time limits, we refer you to “The Whole Bible for the Whole Human Family,” prepared by a majority of the Biblical Scholars teaching in our seminaries.  It’s at the end of this book, Sexuality, the Bible and the Church.  We’re sure you’ve read this already, since you don’t have anything else to read!  But if you didn’t get to the end, just look at p.  119.  In the time we have here, we want tofocus on the highest standard Scripture gives us – the life and witness of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.

The very first page of our Book of Order affirms that Jesus Christ is the head of the Church, that Christ gives the Church its faith and life, its unity and mission, its officers and ordinances. It goes on to say, “Insofar as Christ’s will for the Church is set forth in Scripture, it is to be obeyed.” [G-1.0100] Wherever Scripture clearly sets forth the will of Christ, we obey it; but our first obedience is to Christ Himself, whose will may not always be as clear as we assume.Jesus’ own wordsin the Sermon on the Mount show that His will is not always the same as the familiar words in the text: “You have heard that it was said ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’  But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven.”  The issueis not simply what the Bible says, but what Jesus would say about it.

As we prepared for reunion in 1981, The Plan for Reunion emphasized this theme, echoing the PCUS document A Declaration of Faith, which states: “When we encounter apparent tensions and conflicts in what Scripture teaches us to believe and do, the final appeal must be to the authority of Christ. Acknowledging that authority, comparing Scripture with Scripture, listening with respect to fellow believers past and present, we anticipate that the Holy Spirit will enable us to interpret faithfully God’s Word for our time and place.” (Chapter Six, The Word of God, lines 66-74)

The distinction between all of Scripture and Christ’s will as revealed in Scripture is important, because parts of the Bible have been used to justify practices that most of us would agree are far from the example and teaching of Jesus.  In our recent past it was not uncommon for parents to beat their children.  For authorization they could point to Proverbs 13:24: “Those who spare the rod hate their children.”   Do we honestly believe this reflects the will of Christ?

In our Presbyterian Church, Scripture has been used to justify slavery, the continued oppression of African-Americans, and the silencing of women.  We are celebrating only the fiftieth anniversary of the ordination of women as ministers, because it took too many centuries for us to understand that Jesus valued women as leaders among his followers.  In an age when other rabbis had all male disciples, Jesus encouraged Mary, the sister of Martha, to sit and learn with him. [Luke 10:38-42]  And on the day of resurrection Jesus made Mary Magdalene the first apostle, sending her to tell the others that he had risen from the dead.  [John 20:17-18] It took too long, but we learned.

We have no word from Jesus about gays and lesbians. Paul alluded to certain forms of same-sex behavior, but Scripture reports nothing from the mouth of Jesus.  Let’s consider what Jesus did talk about.  In his command to love God and neighbor, Jesus interpreted God’s laws in the light of compassion.  In the parable of the Good Samaritan, Jesus responded to the question, “Who is my neighbor?” by comparing t he purity laws, which cause a priest and Levite to pass by on the other side, to the unfettered outpouring of love and concern given by a despised Samaritan. [Luke 10:25-37]

Jesus also interpreted the Sabbath as a gift instead of a burden.  He said humankind was not created to be narrowed and restricted by Sabbath laws; insteadthe Sabbath was created for the benefit of humankind, to provide space for healing and rest. [Mark 2:27] So while it was a technical violation of the Sabbath to provide healing for the sick and gather food for the hungry, Jesus taught that doing so was a fulfillment of God’s law.  In other words, Jesus interpreted the law so that it served grace and mercy.

Jesus broke the social conventions when he encountered a Samaritan woman at Jacob’s well.   A Jewish man was not to speak to an unrelated woman on the street, or share drinking cups with unclean Samaritans. But Jesus did both.  Because he established this relationship with her, she came to know herself to be loved and called by God and therefore was motivated to minister as one of his evangelists.[John 4:7-42]

Jesus often stepped beyond traditional understandings of Scripture and defied the conventions of society, sometimes against great opposition. Following Him was a struggle then as it is now. On a rooftop in Joppa, Peter was told in a vision to eat food that was unclean.  Being raised to keep kosher, the thought must have turned his stomach.  But the next day in the home of Cornelius, it came clear to Peter that God had not been referring to food.  It was unlawful for a Jew to be in the home of a Gentile, yet Peter declared “God has shown me that I must not call anyone profane or unclean.”  This wasn’t easy to explain, being so contrary to the tradition.  But Peter knew what God had revealed to him:  “If God gave them the same gift that God gave us when we believed in the Lord Jesus Christ, who was I that I could hinder God?” [Acts 11:17]

I am Jean Southard, from the Presbytery of Boston.  Jesus had high standards for all of life, including sexual relationships. He challenged adultery, lust, and divorce.  I believe that’s because these represent breakdowns in the love, commitment and fidelity that are Jesus’ will for us.  This morning you heard from some very brave individuals who told you that they came to Jesus Christ and were cured of being gay.  I am here to tell you the other side of that story.

When I was twenty years old I married a gay man. I didn’t know he was gay, and he hardly knew that he was gay or even what that meant, because in the early 1960s we didn’t talk much about such things.  He knew he was attracted to men, but since church and society agreed that this was wrong, he married me in the hope that he would change.  We were married for fifteen years.  The last thirteen of those years were celibate.  Let me tell you what that did to me.  It left me feeling unattractive and undesirable, and left both of us vulnerable to seeking love outside the marriage bond.  We went through much counseling, therapy and prayer while he made every effort to be straight.   Finally, three years after John fell in love with another man, our marriage ended.  John and Richard are still living together in a committed relationship after more than 25 years. 

For my part, I was called to ministry as a divorced and remarried woman.  It humbles me to think that the church has accepted me as worthy despite words on the lips of Jesus that a divorced woman who remarries is committing adultery.  The churchonce considered divorce unacceptable, but in its wisdom and mercy the church determined that Jesus would not condemn me.  The church has not declared me to be profane or unclean in its understanding that divorce is sometimes necessary in a broken world. I understand brokenness to mean in part that the world did not accept my first husband as the good person he was and continues to be, causing much pain to him, to our children, and to me.  I long for the day when all our relationships will be judged not by the gender of the partners, but by how well they reflect Jesus’ demand to love one another as we have been loved by God.

I am Terry Davis from the Presbytery of Southern New England.  Reflecting the love of God in Jesus Christ is the fundamental ethic out of which Jesus calls us to live.  For a gay man named Keith, that ethic was real.  He grew up in our denomination and loved it, but the Church did not fully welcome him, so he eventually dropped out of organized religion for years.  When at last he reached out for spiritual help, he found a welcome at First Presbyterian Church in Hartford.  Each Sunday he sat in the sanctuary and met the people around him, including several elderly ladies.  When one of those women fell and was in the hospital, Keith went to visit her and discovered her greater problem –  she was dying of cancer.  For the next year he visited Olga almost every day, in the hospital, back at home, in a nursing home.   He was with her when she died.  They were as unalike as they could be, an elderly white widow and an African-American gay man, but he ministered to her on behalf of the Church, on behalf of Christ.  When the nominating committee was looking for people whom God had called and gifted for the ministry of deacon it was little wonder that they asked Keith.  The congregation elected him unanimously.  The question before you in this committee is whether the session should have approved his ordination

[Ellen Acton speaking:]  I ask you now to think about our church’s Constitution.  It says “These confessional statements are subordinate standards subject to the authority of Jesus Christ, the Word of God, as they bear witness to him.” (G-2.0200) That’s how the Book of Order describes the Book of Confessions, a collection of historical documents which reflect the times and places from which they came, and speak to us today as a “Church reformed, always being reformed.”  We take our confessions very seriously.  Because we do, we must challenge G-6.0106b.  This paragraph gets it wrong when it comes to the function of the confessions in our life and faith.

The third ordination question asks, “Will you be instructed and led by the confessions...”  However, paragraph b requires us to conform to the confessions, which is different than being “instructed and led.”  According to the ApostlePaul we are to be “conformed to the image of God’s Son.”(Rom. 8:29), so that 6.0106b actually asks us to subordinate scripture.  Neither our church’s ordination questions nor Scripture asks us to conform to confessional statements.  In fact, the confessions themselves warn us about using them that way.  The Westminster Confession of Faith says “All synods or councils since the apostles’ times, whether general or particular, may err, and many have erred; therefore they are not to be made the rule of faith or practice, but to be used as a help in both.”  (6.175) 

No candidate and no current deacon, elder, or minister conforms completely to the confessions or repents of every one of over 225 practices the confessions call sin.  To cite one example, the Westminster Confession calls it sin to make “any representation of God, of all, or of any of the three Persons, either inwardly in our mind, or outwardly in any kind of image or likeness of any creature whatsoever.”(7.219)   This means we could all be disqualified because we refuse to repent of the Presbyterian seal or our pictures and mental images of Jesus.

Continued....