Elder Meditation–Michele Ready

For those of you who don’t know me– I have been a member of Rivera since 1994 and an elder since 1999. I have served in many capacities, for many years. Then for a complicated set of reasons, I took a break from almost all of it, and now I am returning to service. So, I feel like today is a milestone marking the past 20 years, but also looking forward.

“Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

Kierkegaard’s quote pretty well sums it up for someone like me in their mid-50s. Straddling the halves of life, hoping that what we’ve done in the past has prepared us for a good future. Of course, this is true for ourselves, our families, our church life and our civic life.

In order for me to be willing to “re-up” I had to wrestle a bit with some of my earlier issues. One of them was how to honestly and with integrity answer the first constitutional question:

Do you trust in Jesus Christ your Savior, acknowledge him Lord of all and Head of the Church, and through him believe in one God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit?

Maybe? To be honest, my understanding of the term “my Savior” and for that matter the concept of “Salvation” was . . . shall we say under construction. I just couldn’t extrapolate what this arcane word meant in 1999, probably because I didn’t have the mindset of the Ancients, who believed in a three-tiered Universe, replete with a physical “hell” & “heaven.”

I could tell you that my questioning was just a side-effect of being a young lawyer insisting that all these vague terms and phrases be clearly defined. But, actually, this was really an existential question for me– a Christian existential angst that persists in one form or another for me still.

In 1999, I was willing to risk being myself with Session, and I think we had some good conversations as a result. Now, 20 years later– in the same spirit, I am here to share some experiences, questions and dreams. Don’t worry, not all of them! I do want to be very clear that I am not speaking in anyway on behalf of anyone or anything other than myself.

For your maximum comfort, I have decided to rein myself in by using the lectionary.

The lectionary presents a wonderful mash-up of three well-known texts:

• The New Commandment: love one another– pretty self-explanatory.
• Peter’s Vision: In which he is told ‘What God has made clean, you must not call profane.”
• Revelations 21: See, I am making all things new

The New Commandment– Love One Another–

So simple. So hard. It seems like a spin of the Ten Commandments– putting them on a slightly more abstract level. But, really, I think that this commandment is more than the Ten Commandments because it is all about relationships. It is about loving and being loved. That requires community and vulnerability.

[Mystics tell us that their goal is to recognize that love is the ground of all being.] Let me tell you a Riviera Love story:

I think all of you know Sandy Barrow. She is amazing– truly a “creative” spirit. She also has a capacity for love and sorrow that goes along with that type. She’s  a very talented artist, cook and musician– she’s sung tenor in our choir for probably 40 years or more!

You may not know that her mom, Betsy Scherer, was a member of this church as well, and Betsy raised four kids– three boys and a girl right here in South Miami. One of the boys was Glen– he was just as creative as Sandy– he was an artist/carpenter and an actor, and very handsome. They had a special connection.

Glen was also gay in a time and place when that was very hard, and he turned to self-medication in order to survive, until he couldn’t anymore. He committed Suicide just before Holy Week in 2002.

Sandy was strong enough to share her grief with the choir and the full depth of her pain. She said her pain was the price of loving. She taught me that deep loving and deep suffering are portals to different depths of understanding.

And on Palm Sunday, with the rawness of suicide surrounding us, the choir sang the Faure Requiem. We love this piece. And I remember the tenors behind me.1

Mid-way through the Requiem, the Tenors began to sing the gorgeous melody in the Agnus Dei. Somehow, my heart and mind were ever so briefly opened to a place of knowing that I cannot explain. The Tenors surrounded our beloved Sandy– Sandy who rose to sing, though her grief was transparent– and in their singing I felt a flow of love and compassion that was like an embrace of souls.

The tenors who were the sectional home of Michael Willis, who was for many of us was the person who introduced us to gay culture and who died from AIDS after returning to church for many years. The tenors who at that time included Steve and John– a wonderful gay couple that brought joy to our lives. Steve was an organist and psychologist, John was a retired elementary school teacher, and a hoot! And Bryan Page, who had been in this church almost as long as Sandy, and whose heart is a big as he is.

In this glimpse of transcendent love, which was corporeal love – not individual love – I see the metaphor of the Body of Christ as being the essence of healing, which is to say salvation. The New Commandment– Love One Another– is how we are to create and sustain the Body of Christ in the here and now.

Expanding the Covenant

With this understanding of Christ as the head of the church, we turn to Acts and the story of the early Christian Church.

Acts 10 and 11 tell the story of Peter’s Vision. Peter was praying (and possibly fasting) when he entered a trance-like state and had a vision: essentially, a picnic blanket of “unclean animals” is put before him. This is a feast, and he is hungry! . . . but nothing on the picnic blanket was clean enough for a good Jew to eat. Peter says in effect “Thanks, but I’ve always been a good Jew and I would never eat traif.” And this whole scenario repeats three times– Picnic blanket comes down out of the sky, filled with tempting, but taboo treats, and Peter says, thanks, but no thanks, I couldn’t possibly. Eventually, Peter gets it: “What God has made clean, you must not call profane.”

This is such a great story. For years, this was the story of how the early church expanded beyond the Jews and included the Gentiles.

Let me tell you a Riviera Justice Story–

At some point in the 1990s, Riviera became an open and inclusive church. Leading up to that, Church-wide study groups led by Elders Susan Krehbiel and Jack Admire were held. Over the course of months, we studied both scripture with the proper (read Presbyterian) approach to interpretation, including learning words like “hermaneutics” and

“historico-critical method.”2    In the end we decided that the arc of the Gospel outweighed

the handful of “clobber” texts in the bible. This was consistent with The Rule of Love in the Presbyterian guide for interpretation.

But more significantly, in large part as a result of the work of a variety of advocacy groups3, personal relationships developed between LGBT members and straight members of the larger PCUSA. It was because of the relationships that certain biblical texts took on completely new meaning– and Peter’s Vision was one of them.

The analogy between the way the PCUSA was excluding LGBT persons from the life of the church, and the early exclusion of Gentiles from the covenant of God was so clear! But that clarity came as a result of our relationships. The covenant did not change– our understanding of the expansiveness did.

Peter’s vision revealed that we had no business calling profane what God had made clean. When the barriers to ordination in the PCUSA were finally removed on May 10, 2011, Riviera rejoiced because the Body of Christ was built up by the expansion of God’s covenant to include everyone.

2 If you want peruse it– of course there was a 1999 “position statement” entitled “Presbyterian Understanding and Use of Holy Scripture.”

3 Of course, Covenant Network and More Light and TAMFS etc.

It has been one of the great joys of my life to see the extension of civil rights both in society as a whole and in the Presbyterian PCUSA in particular.

III. Being Open to the New

As our understanding evolves, are there other arbitrary barriers that we should overcome? I am not a visionary and I speak with no authority. But as I am here at Kierkegaard’s Crossroads, I imagine that we are not done expanding. There is so much to be done, but I’m grateful to be in a denomination and a congregation that has already worked on gender issues and sexual orientation issues, and continue to struggle with racial, economic and environmental justice.4

The third lectionary text is from Revelations 21: I am making all things new.

Many progressives are reconsidering how we understand what it means to be a Christian in the postmodern era. One example is the Franciscan Priest Richard Rohr. I know that Missy, and other here, have often made reference to him and some follow his daily meditation emails.

For this year’s meditation theme, Rohr says he was inspired by the verse at the end of Matthew, “Every disciple of the kingdom is like a householder who draws out from his storage room. Things both old and new.” (Matthew 13:52). This is how Rohr phrases the question that I want  to ask:

How can we again present what we call the perennial tradition? By recognizing that it’s always old and always new. If it isn’t new, which means that it speaks to the soul now, then it doesn’t work. We don’t want the church or the Christian tradition to become an antique shop just loving old things. But we’re going to build on old things, because my assumption is this: if it’s true, it’s always been true, and it will just show itself in different ages, in different vocabularies, in different cultures. So, we hope we can take our Christian tradition, which I know a lot of people are very tired of and even angry at, and recognize that when we honor the old that was good and perennial, but say it in a way that makes sense.

My hope is that Riviera will continue to foster a loving and authentic community, committed to all forms of justice, and being relevant witness to the Christian tradition.

Amen.

4 But, our work is not done– the recent incredibly harsh and misogynistic laws passing as “pro-life” legislation have been called out by Serene Jones, the female President of Union Seminary. She tweeted Friday: “There is a direct line from patriarchal theology that says women cannot preach and should be subservient to men to Christian theocracy that forces women to bear children they do not want.” Thank Goodness there are Presbyterian clergywomen who can bring balance and perspective to these discussions.