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A Sermon for DaySpring
By Eric Howell
“On Christian Marriage and the Life of the Church”
Part 2 of 3
1 Corinthians 12
January 24, 2016
Dearly beloved all, we are gathered here today together in the presence of God as
the church, the body of Christ in all its splendor and all its giftedness and all its
variety of people and personalities and members. “Just as the body is one and has
many members and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it
with Christ.”
So gathered here today, we continue our reflection with the Corinthians on
relationships with one another in the Body of Christ and, as we do, seek to honor
voices not always heard.
That first letter to the Corinthians is really a case study in how to have hope through
all that can go wrong in a church. When someone says, “I want to be part of a New
Testament church,” I sometimes want to ask, “Have you read the New Testament?
Have you seen what kind of churches they had then?” They were a mess. Yet there’s
part of us all that still imagines how nice it would be to be part of a good, normal
New Testament church.
Fred Craddock tells about a town whose Chamber of Commerce wanted an upgrade
for the life of their fair city, so they advertised they wanted some good churches to
come to town. Craddock says, “I’m sure they did not mean to cast any reflection on
the ones they had; they just wanted to have some good ones.” “Well, what is a good
church?” he asks, thinking about all the realities of a real, live church community.
“Some people,” Craddock observes, “[actually] expect the church to deal with their
desperate condition . . .There are so many people who walk out in the morning to go
to work, out of the total wreckage—domestic wreckage, personal, all relationships
just shot. Trying to hang on, but still feeling more and more a victim. What’s a good
church supposed to do?” (Craddock Stories, K.l. 1079).
You get the idea pretty quick that the Chamber of Commerce didn’t have that messy
stuff in mind when they advertised for good churches to come to town. Maybe they
forgot that churches are made of people who live lives, and lives are often pretty
complicated mysteries. They probably didn’t have New Testament churches in
mind either. Or, frankly, any church in mind once you scratch below the front page
of the website. What kind of church do you want? Just a normal, good church? At
the end, there’s just church, but there is, too, the splendor of the church.
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It’s really quite wonderful. St. Paul’s writings sometimes are quite challenging for
many people, but very often through his teaching and encouragement things broken
are made beautiful. Take the church in Corinth, a beautiful mess if there ever was.
All over the place, splintered into factions and factions of factions. Paul’s letter
gathers them up together . . . picture the designated letter-reader standing up in
front of everyone gathered round. “We have a letter from the Apostle.” He begins
reading, “From Paul, called by the will of God to be an apostle of Christ Jesus, and
our brother Sosthenes, to the church of God that is in Corinth, to those sanctified in
Christ Jesus called to be saints together with all those who in every place call upon
the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, both their Lord and ours: Grace to you and peace
from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.” The letter goes on to give thanks for
the people and then tries to sort through some of the problems they seem to be
having of a wide variety.
Then, later, the letter offers an insight that they and all churches will need for a long,
long time. Listen, y’all. “There are varieties of gifts here but the same spirit; and
there are varieties of service, but the same Lord, and varieties of activities but it is
the same God who empowers them all in everyone. To each is given the
manifestation of the Spirit for the common good.”
That last part was really important . . .and I wonder if the room in Corinth saw
themselves a little differently when they heard it. Paul took them back to the quarry
from which Christians were mined: you are a gift for the common good and so are
the people sitting around you.
He goes on to describe different kinds of gifts that serve the good of the church, all
those gifts we need from one another. The faces of particular people flash into your
mind at the reminders of those who have blessed your life: those who have wisdom
and those who speak knowledge . . .and those with great faith . . .and those who are
healers of the sick and broken. There are people who seem to work miracles (the
word there is dynamis—like dynamite), others who speak with prophetic power,
those with the power of discernment, and those who have all kinds of spiritual gifts.
All are gifts. All are holy. It’s nice to pause and be grateful for the way God uses
other people in our common life.
Then, with a master preacher’s illustrative imagination, St. Paul punctuates the
point: the church is like a human body, he writes. It’s just like the body; the foot
belongs to the body. So does the hand. And the ear belongs like the eye. If the
whole body were an ear, we’d lose something really important if we lost the nose
and sense of smell. We need one another.
“God has so composed the body, giving great honor to the part that lacked it, that
there may be no division in the body, but that the members may have the same care
for one another. If one member suffers, all suffer together. If one member is
honored, all rejoice together.”
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When you’re part of a church, it seems you’re bound with one another in the
mystery of the body of Christ. Beautiful.
Can ears and eyes really be together? Can those who teach and those who heal see
one another as gifts to the whole? Can hands and feet depend on one another? Can
contemplatives and actives?
Sure. In the church they can. Saints and sinners, contemplatives and the actives,
builders and busters and millennials, sopranos and tenors, Calvinists and Armenians
. . .all but the most prickly and insecure people can be part of a body that has others
from whom they are different and with whom they sometimes disagree and even
see the other as a gift. This is the beauty of church.
Last Sunday we reflected on Christian marriage inspired by Jesus’ sign, turning
water to wine, at a wedding at Cana. Now we take another step into this with the
church at Corinth as we consider the miracle that happens when individual people
become communal church with one another. All kinds of different people become
gifts to one another—hands and feet, ears and eyes, heads and hearts. So now we
come around to a similar question that is part of the tapestry we’ve started to weave
over the last couple of Sundays. What about gay people and straight people? Can
they be in church together? Well, sure, maybe, er, right?
Of course they can. The reality is you already are and have been, even if you didn’t
know it. The church has included, and indeed been blessed and led by, individuals
who experienced a lifetime of sexual attraction to others of the same gender.
Henri Nouwen is widely known and loved for his books like The Return of the
Prodigal Son, his reflection on the parable of Jesus and the hours he spent sitting in
front of Rembrandt’s master painting of the father and his two sons. Nouwen
describes how he contemplated every detail and came to identify with each figure:
the rebellious younger son, the dutiful older brother, and the compassionate and
welcoming father. The story became for him a kind of arc he could use to trace his
own spiritual journey.1
Nouwen is loved for this and his other writings about God and ministry and the
human heart. Beyond his life as a writer, Nouwen is remarkable for his life simply
as a Christian. At the age of 53, in 1985, he left his prestigious teaching position at
Harvard to serve as pastor-in-residence at L’Arche Daybreak community, a home for
persons with mental and physical disabilities. He was assigned to care for Adam, a
25 year old, who suffered from epileptic seizures and could not speak or move
without help. Nouwen shared a house with Adam and four other persons with
disabilities.
“Every day Henri would wake Adam, dress him, bathe and shave him, make
breakfast and help feed him, brush his teeth, assist him in getting into his
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wheelchair, and push him out of the house and down the road for the program
Daybreak had scheduled for him. Henri said, “Adam’s heart, so transparent,
reflected for me not only his person but also the heart of God . . .after my many years
of studying, reflecting, and teaching theology, Adam came into my life, and by his life
and his heart he announced to me and summarized all I had ever learned. [Through
Adam, Nouwen learned] “what it must be like for God to love us—spiritually
uncoordinated, [stunted], able to respond with what must seem to God like
inarticulate grunts and groans.”2
Appreciation of Henri Nouwen’s Christian witness through his writings and at the
L’Arche community becomes more complete when you also consider that he had
been a “celibate homosexual3 and wrestled intensely with loneliness, persistent
cravings for affection and attention, immobilizing fears of rejection, and a restless
desire to find a home where he could feel safe and cared for.”4
Phillip Yancey writes about Nouwen, “I know of no more difficult path for a person
of integrity to tread. [With the knowledge he was a celibate homosexual] I go back
through his writings and sense the deeper, unspoken agony that underlay what he
wrote about rejection, about the wound of loneliness that never heals, about
friendships that never satisfy.”5
With that in view, Nouwen’s most well loved book title, The Wounded Healer, takes
on a new dimension of meaning. And he’s not alone. The beloved poet Gerard
Manly Hopkins was also a celibate homosexual Christian who has inspired the faith
of so many.6 Tim Otto, whose book we’ll be reading in a few weeks, and Wesley Hill,
from whose book I have been quoting extensively this morning, are two others,
contemporaries of ours, brothers of ours, who have had such a meaningful ministry
in our time.
Hopkins in the 19th century struggled mostly in isolation. Tim and Wes, living in this
current time, have a little more freedom to write and talk about their identity and
their faith. I feel grateful for this, whatever else you think about the current
atmosphere, that we can talk about these things without stoning or condemning
people. That’s a good.
Wes Hill admits it’s not easy being a gay man who believes in the church’s
traditional teaching about sexuality. He speaks for himself and many others when
he confesses: “At times, for me and many others, the weight of the biblical witness
and the church’s traditional teaching against homosexual practice can seem rather
unpersuasive. The list of Bible passages and the statements from [church leaders]
just don’t seem compelling enough. In fact, not only are they not compelling, these
biblical texts and Christian pronouncements appear out-dated, perhaps slightly
cruel, and in any case, not really workable or attainable.”7 At times, Christian
traditional teaching on sexuality “seems out of character with the Christian message
of love, grace, and abundant life.”8
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These are some real-life, hard challenges. It’s a fairly easy weight for someone like
me to say carry. It’s a heavy weight for someone like him actually to carry. But he
does with grace. I can’t say for sure that the yoke is easy and the burden is light, but
he finds strength within that causes me to stand in respect.
Addressing these challenges, he gives insight to the spiritual source of his strength:
“Could it be that if I place [the church’s teaching on homosexuality] into a larger
story, then perhaps—just perhaps—it won’t seem as irrational, harsh, and
unattainable as it otherwise might? Could the Christian story of what God did for
the world in Christ be the framework that makes the rules . . .make sense? These
questions have been the deciding factor in my choice [to be celibate]. It’s not
individual proof texts or the church’s traditional teaching. “Instead it is, I think,
those texts and traditions and teachings as I see them from within the true story of
what God has done in Jesus Christ—and the whole perspective on life and the world
that flows from that story as expressed definitively in Scripture.”9
What Henri Nouwen, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Tim Otto, and Wes Hill all have in
common with one another and other anonymous men and women in the church is
that they are homosexual Christians whose lives are disciplined by the church’s
historic understanding that human sexuality is expressed in faithful marriage or in
abstinence by those who are unmarried.
In the church’s sometimes messy deliberations and debates about homosexuality
and same-sex relationships, often overlooked have been the voices of homosexual
Christians who practice celibacy as a call of their faith. As we continue in these few
weeks on these matters, I wanted to let their voices speak to all of us. 1 Corinthians
12 tells us that those parts of the body that seem weaker are actually indispensible
and on those parts of the body we think less honorable, we bestow the greatest
honor. I hope we’ve done that today. We need them as honored members of the
body of Christ and to listen to their voice in this beautiful, messy body we share.
For with them and with one another, in God’s grace we all depend upon the mercy of
Jesus Christ, for only . . .
In this hope we are saved,
hoping for what we do not yet see,
waiting for it with patience,
so often not knowing how to pray,
yet helped by the Spirit in our weakness,
the Spirit herself interceding for us
with groanings deeper than all our words.
Amen.
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Henri Nouwen, Return of the Prodigal Son: A Story of Homecoming. Doubleday:
New York, 1992.
2 I’m quoting extensively from Wesley Hill, Washed and Waiting: Reflections on
Christian Faithfulness and Homosexuality. This quote is from page 85.
3 Since preaching this sermon, I have been cautioned by one congregant in this way:
“While the term [homosexual] is technically and scientifically correct for describing
people with a same-sex attraction, it has become an offensive term in the LGBT
community over the last ten years. I would caution against using the term, because
like the “N” word, it carries a lot of bigotry and pain with it. If I could humbly suggest
some better terminology, it would be the following: gay and lesbian Christians,
LGBT community, same-sex attraction.”
4 Hill 85
5 Hill 89
6 Since preaching this sermon, I have been cautioned by one congregant that
Hopkins’ sexuality is contested among scholars. I found this insight helpful: “Indeed,
most of the terms that we bandy around so freely (homosexual, heterosexual, bisexual) would not have had the currency we now give to them. Now, Hopkins might
have (probably had?) a same-sex attraction, but he was a long way from being ‘gay’
(in almost all senses of that word). But alas, this is what happens when we try to
apply our categories out of time.” I am no serious scholar of Hopkins so I must rely
on the insights of others. My inclusion of Hopkins here is following Wes Hill who
includes Hopkins as an inspiration to him directly along these lines. See Washed and
Waiting, p 124f.
7 Hill 54
8 Hill 56
9 Hill 60
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Copyright by Eric Howell, 2016