How My Mind has Evolved

A Personal Reflection on
Faith, Biblical Interpretation, and Homosexuality

Stephen R. Montgomery
Idlewild Presbyterian Church
September 21, 2005

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It was fascinating to watch the judicial hearings for Judge John Roberts last week.  Memos were dug up that were written 20-25 years ago when Roberts was but a young, straight-out-of-law school assistant in the White House.  The senators spent a lot of time asking him if he still believed some of those things that he wrote. Has he changed his mind? Has his thinking evolved over time?

I for one would hope that anyone’s thinking evolves over time, whether it is a judge or a preacher. Sometimes the change can be rather dramatic, a U-turn going in another direction. More often, it evolves, changing almost imperceptibly, but resulting in a different person years later. Such is the case with me.  And several people thought it might be helpful for me to share a little of that journey as I reflect on how my views of scripture and interpretation have changed over time, especially as it relates to one of the most controversial issues in our denomination, the ordination of gays and lesbians who live in committed, life-long relationship. This is not a “How do Presbyterians Interpret Scripture” address. Denton will be doing that in a few weeks. It is not a sermon.  I intentionally did not want to address this from the pulpit. Rather I wanted to combine some biblical reflection with my personal journey. I simply offer this as a gift, not as a “Thus saith the Lord,”  but rather the continuing of a discussion, “Come, let us reason together.”

 Many of you are aware that I grew up in a church very similar to Idlewild, the Grace Covenant Presbyterian Church in Richmond. Roughly the same size as Idlewild at the time, that was the church that Paul Tutor Jones served before coming here to Idlewild. It was there that I received my first Bible, still one of my most prized possessions. I got it when I entered the third grade. I put it by my bedside, was very careful not to get any food or anything on it. I remember initially committing to reading it straight through, a chapter a night. I never even made it to Leviticus. But it was, in a sense the beginning of a faith pilgrimage. Our family was one of those that had devotions at the table every evening. We’d take turns reading the scripture and reading the lesson from “These Days.”

But the first time I ever remember anyone outside Sunday morning or the dinner table using the Bible took place when I was a teen-ager, when the Poor People’s March came through Richmond. Some of you remember that, a few months after Dr. King’s assassination here in Memphis. Thousands of poor people walked from the delta and the southeast to Washington D.C. to press for economic rights as well as civil rights. We lived just off the campus of PSCE and Union Seminary, which opened up its quadrangle for people to pitch their tents for the night, and feed them before they made the final trek to our nation’s capital.

You can imagine the criticism that was leveled at PSCE, and especially Dr. Charlie Kramer, its president. But then Dr. Kramer wrote a letter to the editor of the local paper, saying that they were simply trying to follow Jesus’ example in offering hospitality, and then he quoted, right there in the paper, Matthew 25: 31-46….”For inasmuch as you did it unto the least of these, my brothers and sisters, you did it to me.”  And for the first time it struck me…the Bible had relevance for today. It wasn’t just a pretty red book by my bedside, or a bunch of outdated laws and stories from centuries ago, it was a living story, a living book.

The following year, my senior year in high school, I got involved in a small but vibrant youth group at another church, All Souls Presbyterian. (If truth be told I went there because Evelyn Bradley was a member!) The youth group  called itself “Nogapsallowed.”  (That’s “no gaps allowed” without any gaps.) It was probably the only integrated youth group in the entire city back then, and they would form little groups to go to speak to other youth groups, with roll playing and such, and try to heighten the awareness of racism among young people, to help people understand people of different races. But I’ll never forget one discussion we had. I don’t remember all the details, but somehow we started talking about how different people read the bible in different ways, and how their experience often shapes their reading. The discussion was being led by an older African-American man and we were talking about the birth narrative in Luke. He said, “Now when you hear ‘there was no room for them in the inn,’ what do you think that means?”

Well, just what it says. “There was no room for them in the inn. The inn was full.”  And he said, “Now let me read it and see what you think it means.”  “There was no room (he paused) for them in the inn.”  And it hit me. Here was a man who had grown up in the south in the 1940’s and 50’s and had gone by many an inn that had rooms available, but not for them. And later on when I went to seminary and studied scripture in a little more depth, lo and behold, there was no less a scholar than Raymond Brown in his The Birth of the Messiah saying that Mary and Joseph were a part of the “anawim,” the poor ones, the lowly. There was no room “for them” in the inn.  It made me thankful that we have African-Americans in the Presbyterian Church (USA) to bring their eyes, their experience to the reading of scriptures, for it was through their experience and their honesty and their reading of scripture that my God became a lot bigger and a lot more just. It was hard to believe that for years they couldn’t even sit next to us in a sanctuary. And when our eyes were finally opened to what was already there in scripture--the equality of all God’s children-- we were not abandoning the authority of scripture. Rather, we believed that the Spirit of God was moving in our midst.

Several years later when I was at the College of Wooster and I had the privilege of serving on an associate pastor nominating committee for the church there on the campus. We came up with a job description and started pouring over the resumes, and you’ll never guess what happened. We narrowed the list down to three names, and all three were women! Now, that doesn’t sound radical today, but this was 1973, and I had never heard a woman preach up until that point. And all three of these just blew us away!  (One of those, incidentally, became the moderator of our Presbyterian Church (USA). Another is a president of one of our seminaries. Neither one got the job, which says something about my wisdom and insight!)

It was hard to believe that only a few decades earlier, we would take verses from the bible, out of context, with a disregard for the greater themes of scripture and throw them around as though they were the gospel truth. “A woman should be silent in church.” Says so right there in the Bible. That settles it.

And since I served on that PNC, my ministry has been influenced as much, if not more by women, as by men. I shudder to think of where I would be without the gifts of women in ministry, or where the Presbyterian Church would be without the gifts of women in ministry. My God is a bigger God, a more tender God, a more just God, a more hospitable God, a more motherly God, as a result of women’s eyes and experiences that they bring to their reading of scripture. Those images were there in the Bible all along, but we didn’t see them for 2,000 years. And when we opened the doors of the church more fully to women, there were those who cried, “We are abandoning scripture!”  Yet now, looking back, we believe that it was the Spirit of God moving in our midst.

There was another experience I had once I got out in the field and was serving a church in Atlanta. I was invited to be a part of a group to go down to Nicaragua during the height of the contra war. Most of you might remember that? Well, we spent some time in what was called a base community. These were little communities that would get together and just read the bible and talk about it. That’s it. They didn’t have seminary educations, or even college for that matter. A few were even illiterate. But they knew their bible. And they gave me an education that I couldn’t have received at Yale.

One of their favorite stories, of course, was of the exodus. They knew all of the details. And I was right with them. “Way to go, Moses. That’ll show ol’ Pharaoh a thing or two.” But once we got beneath the details, they started bringing their experience to this story, about where they stood in the story, who they identified with, and about who Pharaoh was in their lives, about their desire for freedom. And you know what?  In their eyes, I represented Pharaoh! I couldn’t believe it! I always thought I was on Moses’ side! They began to talk about their suffering under Somoza, who was supported by the United States government. And I knew all of this was true…I was a Latin American history major, but I had never had applied all of that to scripture. It took some people with totally different eyes, totally different experiences for me to see my own complicity in the bondage of the Israelites!  I didn’t like what they said, but when I got home and did some more bible study, I found out that they were speaking the truth.

God loves us all, but I saw in a new way that God has a special place in God’s heart for those oppressed, those suffering, the poor. And I couldn’t see it without the help of my Latin brothers and sisters.

Now I’m not going to say that the Presbyterian Church has closed our doors to Hispanics like we have with women and African-Americans (although we do a rotten job of partnering with them!), but I do hope you can see a theme emerging. My spiritual growth (and I hope what little wisdom I have) has been at its greatest when people with different eyes, different experiences, and different cultures, and especially people without power, have spoken the truth in love with me about what they see in Holy Scripture.

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