THE MIDDLE WAY A sermon preached by Galen Guengerich All Souls Unitarian Church, New York City November 16, 2014 Chester Wenger is a 96-year-old former minister in the Lancaster Conference of the Mennonite Church. The Lancaster Conference is a traditionalist faction of Mennonites, though not as old-school as the Conservative Conference, in which I grew up. For his part, Wenger s credentials as a Mennonite are impeccable. His father was a president of a Mennonite seminary, and his mother was the daughter of a Lancaster Conference bishop. Ordained in 1949 for mission work in Ethiopia, where he served in leadership roles for many years, Wenger later directed domestic missions for Lancaster Conference, and then became pastor of Blossom Hill Mennonite Church in Lancaster. Wenger and his wife of 70 years had eight children, one of whom has died and another of whom is gay. When their gay son came out 35 years ago, he was summarily excommunicated from the Mennonite church. Wenger reports that the episode caused him and his wife deep pain and anguish. They asked themselves, What would Jesus do with our sons and daughters who were bullied, homeless, sexually abused, and driven to suicide at far higher rates than our heterosexual children? Earlier this year, Wenger had an opportunity to answer this question personally. In a recent open letter to the Mennonite church, Wenger writes, When the laws of Pennsylvania changed in July, our gay son and his committed partner of 27 years went immediately to apply for a marriage license. Subsequently they asked me if I would marry them. I happily agreed. We held a private ceremony with only six persons present. Our son and his partner are members of an Episcopal church, but they chose my wife and me to share with them in this holy covenant of marriage. After performing the ceremony, Wenger dutifully reported the event to the leaders of the Lancaster Conference, who revoked his ministerial credentials. Actually, the term they used was retire they retired his credentials, which amounts to the same thing. After 65 years of faithful ministry, Wenger has been defrocked for officiating at a same-sex marriage. I have two things to say about this episode. One is that the Mennonites are not what s wrong with the world. For the most part, these are profoundly good people. The Mennonites have few equals in their commitment to making peace in times of conflict, serving justice in situations of oppression, and extending compassion in places of human need. Having grown up Mennonite, I know this tribe well. My first real girlfriend was the daughter of a Lancaster Conference bishop. We were both 19 years old and both ~ 1 ~
Mennonite preachers kids. And I have no further comment about what I mean by real girlfriend. The other thing I have to say about the Wenger episode is that something is profoundly wrong with this picture. When kind and compassionate people act in severely hurtful and judgmental ways, something is wrong. If bad decisions emerge from good people, the likely culprit is the standard they use to decide. In the case of Lancaster Conference Mennonites and gay marriage, the culprit is a literalist interpretation of the Christian scriptures a puzzling error. After all, biblical literalists today would be horrified if their physicians consulted the writings of Galen of Pergamum, known as the Father of Medicine, to determine their treatment. Yet Galen lived about the same time as some writers of the New Testament. If that era sets the benchmark for theology, why not for medicine? This double standard also bedevils Jews who interpret the Hebrew Bible literally, as well as Muslims who interpret the Koran literally. Less conservative Mennonites, on the other hand, like most Americans of all persuasions, increasingly reject the direct application of biblical texts to our situation today. According to a Public Religion Research Institute survey conducted earlier this year, the foes of gay marriage no longer outnumber its proponents in any region of the country, including the south. Overall, 53% of all Americans now support gay marriage (41% oppose it), up from 32% only ten years ago. Among Millennials (ages 18 to 33), support now stands at 69%, nearly double the support among Americans age 68 and older. This dramatic generational shift on gay marriage has prompted the well-known theoretical physicist and cosmologist Lawrence Krauss to surmise that religion itself might soon go the way of homophobia. Religion as we know it, he says, might be gone within another generation. In August at the Victorian Skeptics Café in Australia, Krauss said, Change is always one generation away, so if we can plant the seeds of doubt in our children, religion will go away in a generation, or at least largely go away. And that s what I think we have an obligation to do. It will not surprise you to learn that I disagree with Krauss. I don t think religion is going away anytime soon, and I don t think it would be good if it did. Krauss is one of the world s leading scientists, and he should know better than to commit category mistakes. He treats religion like a horse and buggy, not like a means of transportation. As technology has evolved, our need for horses to haul us around in buggies has diminished to tourists in Central Park and Amish in Lancaster County. But our need for transportation has endured and even increased. In a similar way, our need for the consolations of religion continues to increase, even as our reliance on ancient sources of revelation declines. As we accumulate more and more knowledge, the challenge of accumulating sufficient wisdom to know what we should value and how we should live becomes ever more daunting. As we learn more ~ 2 ~
about our universe and its past, our questions about humanity and its future become ever more perplexing. At its best, religion isn t mere fealty to an ancient text or creed. Rather, it s the process of taking everything we know into account as we forge a way of life that enables us to flourish each of us as individuals, as well as all of us collectively and the world we inhabit together. It s a way of life that recognizes our utter dependence on the people and world around us, and thus our responsibility for them in return. It gives us a sense of moral clarity, spiritual purpose, and shared destiny in a world that increasingly lacks any of these. Our challenge, then, is not to banish religion, but rather to adapt it to meet the needs of our time. As it happens, Queen Elizabeth faced a similar challenge in her time. Tonight s Musica Viva concert will showcase the music of Queen Elizabeth s Court compositions by Thomas Tallis and William Byrd, among others. Misa Iwama has brilliantly interwoven the music with actors reading letters by Elizabeth and her nemesis Mary Queen of Scots, speeches by Elizabeth and leading politicians, and sonnets by Shakespeare. Allow me to sketch Elizabeth s religious back story. The 16 th century was a time of unprecedented religious and political turbulence in Western Europe. For a thousand years, the Roman Catholic Church, led by the Pope, had held a monopoly on truth and salvation. Individual believers had access to salvation only through the church. But the church had become increasingly irrelevant to the spiritual needs of the people. Economic and political life had become fragmented as well, the result of the feudal system falling apart. City-states and nations governed by kings began to emerge, made possible in part by the development of national languages. The catalyst for many of these changes was the Renaissance, a rebirth of interest in the philosophy and literature of ancient Greece and Rome. The Renaissance gained impetus when Constantinople fell in 1453. Many Eastern scholars fled to Italy, taking with them important manuscripts and a tradition of Greek scholarship. This source of knowledge gave Europeans an alternative to the religious orthodoxy they had submitted to for so long. Renaissance thinkers, like their Greek and Roman predecessors, began to champion the individual as an instrument of reason and a source of knowledge. With the invention of printing and the growth in literacy, this trend soon spread throughout Europe. The Renaissance infused new confidence in human reason, a confidence that became known as humanism. It did not involve rejecting God, as humanism often does today, but rather embraced the promise of human potential. Humanism insisted that reason could vie with orthodoxy as a source of authority. Eventually, this newly-rediscovered emphasis on the individual sparked a religious revolt. In 1517, a monk named Martin Luther nailed a list of 95 complaints on the door of a church in Wittenberg, Germany. His protest against abuses in the Roman Catholic Church started what came to be called the Protestant Reformation. In an ~ 3 ~
incisive theological move, Luther short circuited the process of salvation, leaving the church out of the process. For Luther, salvation was a matter between God and the individual. By the time Elizabeth became Queen in 1558, England had been buffeted by succeeding waves of Catholic and Protestant sentiment for decades. Henry VIII began his reign in 1509 as a Catholic. But in a frantic effort to procure a male heir, Henry divorced Catherine of Aragon and married Anne Boleyn. When the Pope refused to legitimate these arrangements, Henry declared himself head of the church in England, thus severing England s ties with the Roman Catholic Church. Henry s successor Edward VI reverted to the Protestant faith, but Mary Tudor, Edward s half-sister who succeeded him, restored Catholicism as the state religion and the Pope as head of the church. Then came Elizabeth. For her part, Elizabeth liked many of the trappings of the Catholic faith the symbols, the music, the rituals, the vestments but she generally favored Protestant doctrine. Beyond her personal preferences, however, Elizabeth knew that her religious choice would have serious political implications. If England remained Catholic, Elizabeth would surrender ultimate power to the Pope in Rome and ally England with other Catholic states, such as France and especially Spain, which was then the most powerful nation in the world. England s main trading partners, however, were the Dutch, who were Protestant. In order to secure peace and prosperity of England, Elizabeth needed to find what her Privy Council Nicholas Bacon called a middle way forward. Elizabeth s solution turned out to be elegant and auspicious. She retained much of the outward form of the Catholic faith, which she preferred, in order to lull the Pope, as well as the powerful Catholic nation-states around her, into thinking she was on their side. At the same time, she revised the Book of Common Prayer the church s primary manual for faith and practice so that the Catholic-looking forms contained mostly Protestant theological content. The liturgy became simpler, focused more on the sermon than on communion. People had easy access to English translations of the Bible. Elizabeth also allowed for a great deal of variation in the practice of local congregations. Along the way, Elizabeth insisted that the practice of faith in England be led by the English monarch, not by the Pope. In this way, she fully established the Church of England, and she reigned long enough to establish it firmly enough that it has endured ever since. Also known as the Anglican Church, its American branch is the Episcopal Church. Thomas Tallis, who served under all four monarchs from Henry VIII through Elizabeth, composed music that met the liturgical and doctrinal demands of the time. Whatever his personal theological proclivities, and they remain unclear, his music embodied the spirit of humanism. Tallis knew the power of the individual human voice. He became a master of the use of polyphony, which is music comprising two or more relatively autonomous voices ~ 4 ~
or parts. Tallis s crowning musical achievement, by many accounts, is a monumental piece written for 40 voices, each of which has its own musical part. Fittingly, the first word of the piece is the Latin word for hope. On the cusp of the modern world, surrounded by the cacophony of religious and political turmoil, Tallis united 40 different voices into one glorious sound. It gave him hope. Our world today is no less turbulent than it was in the 16 th century. Religious convictions vie against secular certainties, and together they conspire to make our world a brutal and dangerous place. Biblical literalists would imprison us in a dungeon of orthodoxy, while secularists would free us into a trackless moral desert, devoid of any inherent meaning or transcendent purpose. Like Elizabeth in her day, we need to chart the middle way in ours. We need to fill the outward form of faith our daily spiritual practice and weekly worship, as well as our view of God and our ethical commitments with content that s relevant to our time. We need to worship what we know to be praiseworthy, proclaim what we know to be true, and practice what we know to be beneficial. With gratitude as our watchword and compassion as our compass heading, we need to walk the middle way with a song of hope in our hearts. When Chester Wenger conducted his gay son s wedding, he was doing God s work in this world: filling the timeless form of faith with fitting content that is praiseworthy and true. Blessings on him and his family. And blessings on all of us who, in our own place and time, faithfully walk from what s past to what s possible. ~ 5 ~