(Photo courtesy Detroit News)
I’ve been thinking this week about brokenness, about being chosen and set apart–and being rejected and cast aside–and the value we place on those things in church settings, where those who are chosen lead in a faith centered on healing all who have been left out. More particularly, I have been talking with a new friend who has been studying theology at Oxford, thinking about the possibility of ordination, and recognizing that there might be no place for him in the Church, despite sterling qualities and vast sincerity. And several old friends have learned recently that the positions in the Church to which they aspired will not be offered to them, despite sterling qualities and vast sincerity, and I am feeling sad and a bit pensive about all those told by the Church that they are not to be ordained or called to preach, all those who are not chosen for committees and commissions, all those who are told that they are not needed at this time, all God’s people whose sterling qualities and vast sincerity are not rewarded with the thing they sought and to which they felt called.
I know a bit about this, as some of you know, since a year back the Church told me at last that it did not want me either. After being removed from the ordination process by a past Bishop of Texas, I was encouraged by clergy and by a church that valued me to approach our new bishop, and after a long wait during which both of us thought and prayed, the new bishop and I sat down for a talk last fall which was difficult for both of us. And at the end, he had–with gentleness and considerable wisdom–told me that he did not believe I was called to ordination.
In church life–and in several other spheres of life, unfortunately–I fall into the easy to cast off category that might be headed Badly Mangled Personal Life. When someone like me has made mistakes or been profoundly unlucky in the past, it’s easy to suppose that she or he might experience the same in the future. It’s past performance by which we judge race horses, dairy cows, and, unfortunately, people. I know I proved a failure in marriage and at most of my personal life in past decades–and I think it unfair but not unexpected that people might continue to judge me based on those events of ten, twenty, or thirty years ago. Past performance: I know of several priests and pastors who have self-destructed badly in recent years, and whose self-immolation took forms that should have been familiar to any who knew them and their history.
So I understand past performance as a measure of future possibility. But what this fails to take into account are the deeply Christian concepts of grace, redemption, and rebirth. Christians are said to believe that, in the presence of forgiving love, failures of the past may be left in the past. If we have expressed remorse for the things we have done, learned from them, demonstrated that who we are now is not who we were then, then it seems uncharitable to exclude people because of who they have been, what they believed, what they have done.
Today is the feast day of Irenaeus, a second-century bishop who was one of the first theologians of the Christian Church; he is perhaps best known for his work “Adversus Haereses” (”Against Heresies”), a book in which he singled out the Gnostics of his day (deservedly, I suppose) as heretics, thus arguing that some are in, and some are out. But it is also Irenaeus (ironically) who first argued that although most people and faith communities of his day employed a single gospel witness, we actually required four distinct gospels to understand the nature of Jesus and God’s saving work through him. This insistence ultimately led to the inclusion of the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John when the New or Christian Testament of the Bible was compiled, and Irenaeus had it right–if any of these narratives of God’s faithfulness had been excluded, the Church–and our knowledge of God–would be lessened.
So when someone is told by someone with authority to say so, “The Church does not want you for this thing at this time,” perhaps we could remember Irenaeus’ argument of diversity: each of us is necessary, and each of us has a story of God’s good news moving in our lives. In remembering this, perhaps we might also remember that God loves all, that even hurt and rejected as we may feel, God has great things for us, and that the Church is composed of imperfect human beings seeking the will of God the best they can.
I sit today in a residential library in Wales where I have been invited to read, think, and write, a fellowship that would not have been possible had I been accepted into parish ministry. The books I write and talks and teaching I do likewise would not be possible in a vocation where daily care for God’s people was my first responsibility. When my bishop Andy Doyle told me last fall that he would not return me to the ordination process, he told me two things that have been of lasting value. One, he said, he felt confident that this was all for the best, and that God had big plans for me regardless of whether the Church stamped me as its own and put a priestly collar around my neck.
And second–and perhaps most important when one is disappointed and rejected–he told me, “God calls people, not the Church. The Church tries to understand that call and what it means. Sometimes we get it wrong.”
And in my experience, sometimes that call is to something different, something that doesn’t fit into easy categories, something that messes with the heads of bureaucracies or gatekeepers, something that God will bless even if the Church doesn’t seem to.
So for all those who have been told “No” or “Not yet,” for all those who have been hurt by the Church, for all those wondering what’s next, I pray that the peace of God that passes all understanding might cover those hurts, the love of Christ Jesus bind those wounds, and the joy of the Spirit fill and move through you into a world that desperately needs healing and wholeness.
The Church may not choose you–but God has.
And, as always, there is work to do.
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