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10:30 am Worship

Thursday, May 2, 2024

Psalm 71: 1-5

¹ In you, O Lord, have I taken refuge; let me never be ashamed.
² In your righteousness, deliver me and set me free; incline your ear to me and save me.
³ Be my strong rock, a castle to keep me safe; you are my crag and my stronghold.
⁴ Deliver me, my God, from the hand of the wicked,
from the clutches of the evildoer and the oppressor.
⁵ For you are my hope, O Lord God, my confidence since I was young.

We seldom stop to recognize how the problems of the church, its most painful realities, are the very ground where we encounter the God of wholeness, newness, and grace in the most profound ways. I can’t count the times someone has spoken to me judgmentally concerning someone else in the church. That person, they say, thinks he’s in charge of everything. Or this other person, they say, represents the real problem. He’s the one driving others away from the church. Nor is this reality limited only to personal judgments.

Who, for instance, could see decades of anger and division over issues such as homosexuality, abortion, and the death penalty as a form of heavenly grace? The United Methodist Church split and shattered because of such a debate, and all we seemed capable of seeing was negativity and pain. We never stopped to think we might have been on a wilderness journey comparable to that of Israel, both in its Exodus and its exile.

Perhaps we should look to monks as examples. Some people, asked to consider monks, can only see some comic-book version of Friar Tuck, Robin Hood’s friend. Others may even view them as engaged in cultic practices, for their practice of Christianity seems so far removed from that of normal folk.

“The monk simply discards the useless baggage of vain concerns and devotes himself henceforth to the one thing truly necessary – the one thing that he really wants: the quest for meaning and for love, the quest for his own identity, his secret name promised him by God and for the peace of Christ which the world cannot give (John 14: 27).” [Thomas Merton, Contemplation in a World of Action, 36.]

Faith is not a simple thing.

We can’t find real faith only in peace, blessing, wholeness, and happiness. Real faith rises out of the storms of life, exists only within the turmoil of a life honestly lived in the face of threat, pain, suffering, and human brokenness. Real faith recognizes how God at times allows, indeed requires, pain and suffering. The challenge of real faith cannot rest just on the promise of some heavenly prize, given like a trinket from a crackerjack box. It will exist in the storms of life.

United Methodism shattered in the storm. Broke apart after decades of wrangling over homosexuality. Where, in all that storm, can we find grace? Perhaps in this – and I speak it not as some political viewpoint or some biblical affirmation about which we can continue to argue – that for the first time the church found itself able this week, without argument, to recognize the spiritual gifts of people who had been shut off all their lives from full participation in the worship of God.

The greatest suffering in my life rose directly out of the issue of homosexuality. My first wife, mother of my two children, left our marriage because she had fallen in love with a woman. I cried inside for years. I know what the Bible says, and I know what I have lived. When I was a young man, I separated from God and the church because of brokenness in my early life. My first wife brought me back to God. My ministry rose directly out of that call from her.  

How can I reconcile what I cannot understand?

I only know the terrible storm of our break-up saved lives, those of people both in my life and hers. Literal life-saving moments. She helped another woman find a road out of sexual slavery, and I helped a broken-hearted minister find his way back to God.  

Now, our church, having traveled through the desert and the storm, has voted, without argument, to allow homosexuals to fully express their love of God. To allow them to use their spiritual gifts in ministry.

I don’t want to argue, nor even to offer a political opinion. I only want, like the monks, to walk away from vain earthly division to find the path of love and meaning. That’s the path to real faith.

Hymn of the day: Be Not Afraid. Online at Rossford UMC - Media.

Rev. Lawrence Keeler