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As I began to think about what I might say to you, I realised that, while your organisation was new to me, and indeed the intentionality with which you affirm your interchurch identity is new to me, still the phenomenon of marriage between persons of different churches, together with all that means, was not new to my experience as a pastor.
Delighted you are here
I began to reflect on those couples or families I Knew about. I thought of the instances in which they all but turned cartwheels, usually around weddings or baptisms - occasionally funerals - trying to please everyone, meet all the demands, sometimes asking me to do things that, as pastor, I couldn't do for them.
I thought about Lily and Mike back in Brooklyn. Mike was the Trustee everybody could count on to see to building repairs, to keep the old boiler running, to shovel the snow off the sidewalk. Mike was at every meeting, he was loved and respected, and he was a powerful voice in that congregation. But I never saw him on Sunday morning.
Lily, on the other hand, was always there. She was president of the women's group, she was the church treasurer, she'd been a Methodist all her life. It took me most of a year to figure out that Mike wasn't there on Sunday morning because he was Catholic. They'd been married for nearly 50 years by the time I knew them, which meant they married in the late 1920s.
At the time, their families were appalled. Their churches were appalled. In those days you just didn't do that. Somehow they made it work despite the dismay on all sides. They would be delighted to know that you all are here. I don't suppose they thought of themselves as an interchurch family, and there certainly wasn't much of anybody around to affirm what they did, nor to question the role their churches played in exacting the price they paid for marrying one another.
I do know that Mike got a lot of satisfaction about being a pillar of that Methodist congregation - which by our United Methodist Book of Discipline he wasn't eligible to be as a non-member. But there had been a lot of pastors through the years who had looked the other way, and I was certainly not about to do otherwise.
My story
Then I thought, too, of my own experience - growing up in an interchurch family of sorts, a family that was about as dysfunctional, religiously speaking, as one could ask for. On one side of the family tree was my step-father's family, Scottish immigrants who were members of the Plymouth Brethren. They worshipped, not in churches, because churches were papist trappings of the devil, but in Gospel Halls, where hellfire and damnation were preached. They were pretty clear about who was in and who was out. It was summed up in a little song I remember singing when I was maybe five or six. I hadn't thought of it in forty years at least, when I came across it in Martin Marty's newsletter, Context, under a heading something like "Tunes Not to Hum Along With":
- The bells of Hell go tingalingaling, for you but not for me.
- The little devils all singalingaling, for you but not for me.
- O death, where is thy stingalingaling, where, grave, thy victory?
- The bells of Hell go tingalingaling, for you but not for me.
Now on the other side of the family tree were my mother's parents, one raised Baptist, the other Methodist, but both having decided that they'd seen too much orneriness among church folks and they wanted no more of it. So they never darkened the door of a church. Their daughter, my mother, became Roman Catholic in her early twenties, then married my stepfather.
The Plymouth Brethren side of the family was incensed, first at the marriage itself, and second at my attending Ascension School, the two-room parochial school in our neighbourhood. I remember being prepared for First Communion. I remember being assigned one of the supply of white veils - it was a poor parish and they didn't do white dresses, but we were all to make sure that the pin-on white collars and cuffs on our school uniforms were clean. And I remember that I was to receive my very own rosary.
And I remember that there was a lot of tension in the air over dinner that evening, and that when we left the house after dinner we got in the car and drove somewhere else - and that was when I found out that I wasn't going to church that night. It also stands out in my mind as the night when I concluded that religion was something best not discussed in my family. The stakes were just too high.
However, those Plymouth Brethren grandparents cleared up one thing for me. It was the other grandparents, the live-and-let-live agnostics, with whom I spent the most time, the ones I loved dearly. So when my Plymouth Brethren grandparents advised me that the others were surely headed straight for hell, I agonised a bit - but not for long. I loved those hell-bound grandparents, and it didn't take me long to decide that I would prefer hell with them over heaven with the others.
As I reflected on all of this, particularly in the light of some of the exciting things I see happening today, it saddened me to recall all of the pain and alienation caused by religion - a force one hopes will serve to undergird, not undermine.
Signs and symbols
I see you as an enormous source of hope for the church, and, yes, for the world as well. I will also suggest to you that, because you incarnate - you put flesh on - what is at the heart of our faith, you are both sign and symbol for church and world.
Let me first begin by defining how I am using the terms "sign" and "symbol". The Random House Dictionary of the English Language defines "sign" as a token or indication, an omen or portent, it names that which gives evidence of an event - past, present or future. A sign signifies, means, points to …
A symbol, on the other hand, is something used for, or regarded as, representing something else. A material object representing something, often something immaterial. A word, phrase, image or the like, having a complex of associated meanings and perceived as having inherent value separable from that which is symbolised, as being part of that which is symbolised.
Now, before we look at how that might apply to you, let me first establish a context. I want to say a few things about the world in which interchurch families exist - and the church in which they exist.
Baptism
It seems that between the energy of Vatican II and the remarkable convergence reflected in the World Council of Churches document on Baptism, Eucharist, Ministry, remarkable things have begun to happen. Once we agreed on baptism - if the right words are spoken over you, the right people are around you, and you encounter the water in some fashion - then it was a done deal. The ball game was essentially over, and we began to move in a direction that is irreversible.
And what of baptism? Remember your baptism - and be thankful, we say. We wade into the Jordan with Jesus. We drown with him - we die and rise with him. We descend into the water, whether literally or metaphorically, as the old human, with all our vices, all our seeking after status, all our divisions of grace and class and gender - all of our "isms".
We sink to our watery grave, we are instructed by God's good news, and we arise from the waters to newness of life - reclothed in the gift of God's Spirit. But we are gifted with more - much more. Unity replaces the old roles and divisions. Virtues replace vices. The new human is joined to the Body of Christ. Together we are the Body of Christ.
You know all of that, as interchurch families. You take your baptism seriously, otherwise you would not have chosen this role. Otherwise you would say like generations before you - like my parents did - it's just too much, and it doesn't matter that much. We won't go to any church. Or, alternatively, I will go to my church and you will go to yours, and we'll figure out something to do with the children.
Harbingers of a new paradigm
You, in that divide between the committed and the casual believers, come down in the committed camp, beyond the radical break Kathleen Housley refers to, after which "the simplest decisions in one's life are made in a sacred rather than a secular context". You are, it seems to me, people who are breaking the old mould. You are harbingers of a new paradigm - living life outside the box, outside the lines, in some sense on the margins, because what you are doing is a new thing, and I suspect that a lot of church folks don't know what to do with you.
Gary Peluso, a researcher with the Lilly Foundation, in his study on local and regional ecumenism, says that "ecumenical organisations live at the boundary where the church meets the world, especially the world-that-is-coming-to-be". I think that is also true of the smallest form of ecumenical organisation - the interchurch family.
There is a sense in which you live at the boundary - precisely that boundary where the church meets the world - and it is your day-to-day lived reality with which the churches must deal. It is what you know, what you are learrning, that the churches need to know if they are to be of any use to the world.
It is the lived reality of toothpaste all over the bathroom mirror and weeds threatening to choke out the tomatoes in the garden, of poopy diapers and "Where can we afford to go on vacation", of "Because I'm the parent, that's why", and "Honey, we've spent the last three Christmases with your family." It is being together through unutterable bliss and unspeakable sorrow, through crushing defeat and joy upon joy.
It is all of what it means to be a Christian family. It is to be family, with all ups and downs and backbreaking labour that entails - to be family, in the face of the deterioration of the family as an institution. And it is to be Christian, in the face of cultural indifference, if not outright hostility from the culture - and lack of understanding and support from the churches. Surely it would be easier to walk away - but you haven't done that, and I hope you never will.
Hope for the church
Because you are a sign. You are that which gives evidence of an event, past, present or future; you point to what is happening now and will continue to happen. People will find one another, the right one another, and will marry and establish households and raise families. And they will do it across all kinds of lines. And sooner or later they will weary of life in the box, of trying to please everyone and will opt, instead, to do what in their hearts they know is right - that pleasing God is what matters most.
The world needs to see that sign. The church needs to see that sign.
And you are a symbol. You are who you are in yourselves, but you also represent something else - you represent the unity of the Church for which Jesus prayed so long ago. You put flesh on that immaterial reality - the oneness of the Body of Christ. You are, in the words of Vatican II, the domestic church - "the primary place in which unity will be fashioned or weakened each day through the encounter of persons who, though different in many ways, accept each other in a communion of love".
It is its Christian identity and mission that makes the family ready to be a community for others, a setting in which the Gospel is transmitted and which radiates the Gospel (Pope Paul VI, in Evangelii Nuntiandi, quoted in Familiaris Consortio, #52) and it is mixed marriage families that have the duty to proclaim Christ with the fullness implied in a common baptism, as well as having "the difficult task of becoming builders of unity" (Evangelii Nuntiandi).
You give me hope for the church, and I believe you deserve the church's support. That may require further conversion on the part of the churches. I like the way that is talked about in the book For the Conversion of the Churches, produced by an independent group of Catholics and Protestants in France. It challenges the churches to recognise that Christian identity rests on conversion - "the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news". That conversion is required by the coming and the resurrection of Jesus Christ, and its absolute nature opens on to a process which is never accomplished fully in this world. It is initiated and celebrated in baptism, it includes an "already there" but also a "not yet". It is - and this is such a wonderful phrase - a grace which opens on to a task.
And this conversion is ongoing, in all its diverse forms, in individuals - and in churches, where collectively Christians come to recognise the sinful attitudes they share. Their conversion as churches is their constant effort to strive toward their identity as churches.
Steve Rudasill, a United Methodist pastor, has been a participant in an ongoing United Methodist/Roman Catholic dialogue. He spoke of the intimacy that built within the group, as they grappled with the very real pain of separation, and its impact on families. That in itself is something of a miracle.
He tells a story about another participant, one of our bishops, Bill Grove, who shared with the group in tears that his daughter had married a Catholic. "It doesn't bother me that she married a Catholic," he said. "It doesn't bother me that my daughter will become a Catholic, and that their children will be raised Catholic. What bothers me is that in my lifetime I will never share the Eucharist with my grandchildren."
Christ invites all to his table. Christ reaches out to include all - even the most unlikely - in his love. Christ is not the problem. We are the problem. We are the problem because we forget that we have been empowered by our baptism to live in the unity of the Body of Christ. The sacrament of baptism, in the words of Ut Unum Sint, represents "a sacramental bond of unity linking all who have been reborn by means of it."
The glue that bonds us
Poet Adrienne Rich has written:
My heart is moved by all I cannot save, so much has been lost … so much has been destroyed. I must cast my lot with those who, age after age, perversely, with no extraordinary power … reconstitute the world.
If one is to reconstitute the world, one must begin at the beginning, with human relationship - with the ability of one human being to bond with, commit to, care for another human being. The ability of two or more Is to look at each other and see WE. Human relationship, indeed, divine-human relationship, begins for us, Biblically speaking, in the Garden. It begins, of course, with our ancestors, Adam and Eve.
Let me remind you now of a few verses of Scripture, from Genesis - not the version of the creation of Adam and Eve that my feminist heart prefers, but the version that is most useful to us right now. It follows the completion of the rest of creation, and Adam's naming of all the creatures:
The man gives names to all cattle, and to the birds of the air, and to every animal of the field; but for the man there was not found a helper as his partner. So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and he slept; then he took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh. And the rib that the Lord God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man. Then the man said, "This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; this one shall be called Woman, for out of Man this one was taken." Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and clings to his wife, and they become one flesh.
Now, never mind the ways in which this passage has been used by the Church to justify women's secondary role. Never mind that it is still being used in that way. I want to suggest that we do not look at this passage as being about women and men, nor even about the institution of marriage, because the idea that two people can become one needs a few caveats before it becomes viable.
What I want to suggest to you is that those words - you are bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh - describe the "glue" that bonds us to one another at the most intimate level of our lives, and by extension, to the degree that we can say it to one another, it is also the "glue" that makes human community possible.
You have, through your marriage vows to one another before God and the church, promised to look into one another's eyes and say, we are so intimately bonded to one another that you are indeed bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh.
And what is it that the church needs, but for fundamentalists and evangelicals, charismatics and liberals, Catholics and Presbyterians and Methodist and, yes, Metropolitan Community Churches, to look into each other's eyes and recognise therein a sister or brother in Christ - and to say, you are bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh.
And what is it that the world needs, but for each of us to be able to look into our neighbour's eyes and recognise there our common humanity, and to say - you, too, are bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh.
To you who know the hard work and the deep joy of embodying the unity of the Church, continue to be empowered by your baptism and surprised by God's grace. You are a sign of what is and what will be, and symbol of the love of our people-making God who yearns with us for community.
The world needs you - the Church needs you. May your tribe increase!
The Revd Dr Judith FaGalde Bennett, Associate General Minister, Virginia Council of Churches
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