The Rev. Ed Bacon: "It's
my great pleasure to introduce our first speaker. I know this man well. He was
the bishop of Atlanta when I was a Baptist preacher and looking for more
commodious space in which to do theology and also to do ministry. Bennett Sims
was a beacon in the state of Georgia, because of his clear and eloquent voice
on behalf of peacemaking, on behalf of justice, and on behalf of ecological
stewardship. His writing ability and his brilliant mind were recognized in all
corners of the Church, but were used particularly by the House of Bishops, for
it was his pen that wrote many of the pastoral letters that came from the
House of Bishops when he was diocesan bishop in Atlanta. After his retirement
from diocesan bishop seat, he was an adjunct professor at Emory University,
and later he founded the Institute for Servant Leadership, which has just
celebrated an important anniversary and had an overwhelmingly successful event
at Kanuga, with Desmond Tutu and others. Many of you who are here were among
the four hundred people who were at Kanuga this past weekend, and helped
celebrate the marvelous ministry of Servant Leadership. Bishop Sims lives for
the reign of God, particularly as it enters into history in the form of
peacemaking and in the form of justice and in the form of servant leadership.
I can think of no one in the Church who would be more appropriate and stirring
and illuminating as our first speaker than Bennett Sims. Will you please,
please join me in warmly welcoming my friend and teacher and bishop, Bishop
Sims."
Bishop Sims: Are there any
questions? It says here 10:30 to 11:45 for questions and answers. We get
a little head start on the questions...Well, thank you, Ed, for inviting me to
this auspicious occasion. And thank you, Rebecca, for inviting me to
title my own paper, From Convention to Conviction , because this
suggests an odyssey, a pilgrimage, an evolution, which I presume is almost
everyone's experience here on issues of sexuality even, of course, with life
itself. Teilhard du Chardin described evolution not so much as a process,
implying a smooth linear development, but as a "groping." That's his
word: a "groping" and a zigzag kind of feeling for the way
ahead. And I understand Teilhard to have meant not only an uneven series
of horizontal angles, but as well of lumpy ups and downs, so that it was in
all four dimensions that we grope. My presence here has just such a history.
It began in the unexamined shadows of cultural and moral convention, and has
groped its way out of the darkness into as much measure of light as I can
discern. The odyssey punctuated by flashes of illuminy. These flashes
convinced me that, however bewildering my own groping was, however
controversial and resistance-arousing it was, in Church and society, still it
felt like being on the right track.
My own story is in two parts. Part one has to
do with those important personal moments of illumining in the journey, and
part two will try to locate my personal experience in the larger frame of
public meaning. As you notice, I'm relying heavily on the manuscript, because
I was assigned to write a paper, but even more because in a talk delivered
five or six weeks ago at a little church in North Carolina, without notes, I
was talking about servant leadership in three parts, and I forgot the entire
third part! Any of us born in 1920 or before understands this failing. Douglas
Meeks, of the Vanderbilt Divinity faculty tells a story of a man who, with his
wife, went to a memory seminar for older folks, an enterprise to boost the
recall capacity of senior citizens. He was joined by his friends in a country
club setting, wives and husbands, several in a circle, in which he was telling
the story of how great this experience was, how it helped boost his capacity
for recall. One of the members of the circle said, "Well, now, tell me
about this place. Where is it, and what is its name?" He rubbed his head,
after faltering, and finally he said to the questioner, " What is the
name of that flower that's generally red, sometimes white or yellow? It's on a
long stem with thorns." "You mean rose?" "Ah, yes! Rose,
dear, what was the name of that seminar?" Here's my "Rose,
dear."
Part One: My personal illuminings.
I can date the precise years of four major moments in my zigzag odyssey into
the light. The first happened in my office in 1974, the year of the founding
of Integrity. With me in the office for a private interview, was Integrity's
founder, a gifted, young professor of English at one of the colleges in my
jurisdiction, Fort Valley, Georgia. Louie [Crew], who I had never met before,
had sought the interview to inform the bishop of Atlanta that he was a gay man
and expected to be respected as a full communicant in good standing, along
with all other Episcopalians in his territory, whatever their sexual
orientation. Well, until that moment, I had never given even a casual thought
to the issue, except a tacit consent to cultural and social and biblical
convention. That is my first moment of illumining. Metaphorically, a flash of
lightning and a roll of thunder, because you know how penetrating Louie is. It
was Louie's gift of a thrown gauntlet. 1974, the year of Integrity' s
founding. Those who have read my book know what came of Louie' s challenge:
three years later, I wrote a pastoral, long, labored letter to the diocese,
intended only for the diocese which, because of its defense of convention,
aroused an enormous chorus of applause all across the Church, even across the
seas. It became the official statement of the Church of Sweden, can you
imagine? Very conservative, and laced with all kinds of citations,
theological, psychological, genetic and dental, I suppose.
Well, illumining number two came just about two
months later in 1974, on the heels of the wide acclaim for the pastoral
letter. I expected, of course, a counter thrust from the gay community, an
angry attack. It never came. I waited for the shoe to drop. It never dropped.
Instead, I received an invitation to join the Integrity fellowship at its
regular worship in one of our churches in Atlanta. You see, what they did was
to counter my dismissal of them with a welcoming of me. That was a momentous
illumining. Had my pastoral been a defense of gay and lesbian identity, many,
many in the Christian community would have taken a vilification - as it
happened, predictably, over many years of opposing the Vietnam war, of
standing for the ordination of women, and then insisting on the regular use,
in every parish, of the Book of Common Prayer. But, you see, putting my shoe
on the conservative foot, in this case, giving advocates of the liberal cause
an occasion to throw their equivalent abuse, they countered only with
ideological disagreement, and a welcoming passion of good will. Here was a
community of Christians in my jurisdiction who honored Scripture by their
behavior: recall "Put away anger, wrath, malice, and put on as God' s
chosen holy and beloved compassion, kindness, and patience, forbearing one
another." They had every reason not to behave that way, but they took the
Scripture seriously by their actions. It was an illumining moment number two,
also in 1974.
My third illumining came in a totally unchurchy
place, as illuminings often come, just before I retired in 1983, in a French
restaurant on Druid Hills road in the Toko Shopping Center in Atlanta, over
lunch. A casual friend of many years came out to me in a very penetrating and
loving testimony. He made it crystal clear that sexual preference, in most
cases, and certainly in his, is not a choice, but an identity. A bestowed
ontological gift, on the order of racial identity, of facial contour, of
musical virtuosity. On the basis of this surety, pondered over time, I wrote
another pastoral letter to the diocese asking for my successor' s consent that
I could write to the diocese of Atlanta as bishop retired. Its essence was
that there could be no moral superiority or inferiority anywhere along the
continuum of bestowed sexual identity. Only for us everywhere on that
continuum as Christians, the moral imperative to love over contempt, of
fidelity over promiscuity, of respect for persons over exploitation. An ethic
more saluted than observed, and numerically more violated by straights than by
gays, simply because there are so many more of us.
The fourth moment of illumining dates to 1998,
just a year ago. Why does it so often take long for us to see something
clearly that' s been before our eyes and in our minds for years and years? I
suppose I have known the classic verses in Romans 1:26-27 since daily vacation
Bible School. The verses tirelessly used by traditional prohibitors of
homosexual legitimacy: "God gave them up to degrading passions. Their
women exchanged natural intercourse," etc., etc. Not once in these two
verses does Paul use the word, "homosexual." The operative term is
"natural." In the Greek, "Phooskos." On page 660 of
Thayer' s Greek Lexicon, "Phooskos" means three things:
"produced by nature," "agreeable to nature,"
"inborn." On the basis of what we now know about ontology, a
bestowed identity, the case is closed for me. We can now add a critical
addition to St. Paul' s catalogue of oneness in Galatians 3:28: "There is
no longer Jew or Greek. There is no longer slave or free. There is no longer
male or female." There is no longer gay or straight. "For all of you
are one in Christ Jesus." You see how far beyond inclusion this takes us.
Way beyond the implicit condescension of a member toward a guest at a country
club. If, by design of our redeemed humanity, we are made one, there remains
no room for either inclusion or exclusion, only for celebration of our shared,
embraced-by-nature' s God in Christ Jesus.
Now for some remarks about public meaning. I
want to sketch here the larger picture of our time, if I can. The human
odyssey now swings on a turning point, a huge hinge of history, marked by a
globalism that' s never been experienced before in human consciousness. Never
before have we been here. It takes the shape of globalism in our consciousness
in several surging currents that erupt across the planet: the feminist
movement; the environmental, ecological movement; the peace, non-violence
movement, which got expressed in an editorial this morning on the editorial
page of USA TODAY; the gay and lesbian legitimacy movement; the democracy
movement; the participatory management movement. All of these are global
realities, and the scenario gives my personal scenario a kind of place in the
public meaning. From Convention to Conviction fits, in my experience,
as part of the cosmic reality that is erupting in our times. The operative
word for the larger context comes straight from Scripture, and is confirmed on
a cosmic scale by the advancing frontiers of post-modern science, and the word
is "oneness." Contemporary quantum theory and researchers are saying
that we are all one, whether Christ is acknowledged or not. Oneness is,
itself, ontological, built into the structure of the cosmos. A vast,
comprehensive design of interwoven wonder in the world, in creation, from the
Big Bang 15 or so billion years ago to this very moment and beyond and beyond
in a cosmos still in process of creation.
Teilhard is the primary explorer of this domain
for me. By "primary," I mean it was he, who in his mystic grasp of
wholeness first opened to me a new world view. The question is new? No, I
don' t believe so. Only new to a western renaissance mentality deductively
derived as a portrait of a reality and brought to a pointed climax in
Cartesian and Newtonian reductionist mechanics. The material order for them,
and for us, for most of these three hundred years, has been the building
blocks of all foundational matter: atoms. The material order was the
basic and enduring make-up of the cosmos, and Spirit is simply a come-lately
attribute imposed from above with the appearance of humanity. A sequence,
incidentally, with scriptural warrants, in Genesis 1. You see, both Newton and
Descartes were devout Christians, and their influence shaped the most powerful
knowledge base the world has ever known until now. Modern science, so-called
modern science, taught me in 1936, in high school physics, that atoms, as the
cosmic building blocks, were the inert, lifeless, essentially disconnected
ingredients that floated in a void. Atoms-- they awaited manipulation and
re-arrangement by human ingenuity to create convenience and wealth. And they
did. Their influence shaped the most powerful knowledge base we' ve ever
known, and, of course, it' s brought wonders. Who wants to be a dishwasher
when you can buy one? The Cartesian theory of the cosmos as a clockwork of cog
wheels, and Spirit was parts and pieces from which machinery of the universe
we could fashion machines to do our bidding.
Henry Ford and the digital watch are my primary
symbols of reductionist physics and mechanics. Henry built a car so
efficiently that anyone with $585 in 1925 could buy a Ford. And a digital
watch can tell time so efficiently that it never fails to give a read-out on
"now." But both the automobile and the digital watch are reinforcers
of the disconnectedness of the mechanical world view. Cars isolate people,
making us competitors for ever-decreasing space on streets and interstates,
leading in extremis to that new disconnecting passion which we call "road
rage." Digital watches isolate us from both past and future. All you get
from their numbers is "now, now, now, now." Does anyone here have an
old fashioned circular clock in the car, with hands that tell time as we used
to be told to tell time-- a quarter to ten, and half past
twelve? Studebaker? The last one I had in a car of my family was a terraplay.
It' s just about the same vintage as a hutmobile. Teilhard, whose dates are
1881 to 1955, who died right here in New York, overlooking Central Park. His
dates are roughly parallel to C.G. Jung and Carl Sandburg. Teilhard intuited,
way back in the 1930' s, what later researchers and scientists now insist on
as the pulsing inter-connectedness of all life. From his research as a
paleontologist, paleoanthropologist, he deduced what he called the law of
complexity consciousness. What it means is that the material components of the
cosmos arrange themselves along the ascending curve of evolution, from mud to
humanity, on a complex arrangement of interconnecting and interdependent
components that produce a drive toward consciousness in all matter, from
humus, to humans. In other words, in every level of cosmic materiality, the
components of life and consciousness are present, says Teilhard. And that
consciousness in the ascending scale toward humanity is controlled by the
degree of structural complexity. That is, all materiality has structure, so it
follows, likewise, a consciousness is commensurate with the degree of
complexity of the structure. What that means for Teilhard, and for me
increasingly, is that there is no such thing as inert matter. No such thing as
brute matter. Doesn't exist, never existed. Every element in the universe
contains within it the germ of interiority, of life and consciousness. In the
1930' s he was saying that. This is a quote from his writing, "At the
level of the virus, which has a complexity of about a million atoms,
consciousness begins to be experimentally observable. It manifests itself at
higher levels by successive leaps. Finally, after passing through critical
points, and invisible processes, every entity in that ascending curve of
evolution possesses the same."
At the University of California at Berkeley, a
researcher in quantum physics says that a sub-atomic particle is simply
nothing but a set of relationships looking for relationships. David Baum, the
late David Baum, a student of Einstein, wrote a series of essays titled in
book form, "The Wholeness of the Implicate Order." "All is
one," he says. "Everything is connected to everything else." We
are not sure how this connectedness works, but it is a certainty that there is
separation without separateness. Francisco Valera, a student of David Baum,
says, "The idea of the complicate order is that everything is enfolded in
everything. This state of wholeness is available to us, and yet, as available
to all, it' s the loveliest and profoundest treasure. This state, where we
connect deeply with others, and doors open, is there waiting for us. All we
have to do is squint and see that it has been there all along, waiting for us.
All we have to do is see the oneness that we are." That' s a physicist. I
would add that sometimes we don't even have to squint.
Two police in a patrol car arrived at a
lookout point at the Poly, that great sheer cliff, a mid-island in Oahu in
Hawaii, that was a drop of hundreds of feet below. They arrived at this place
just in time to see a young man about to jump over. He' d leapt over the
guardrail and was about to leave. It's a place where people do commit suicide
and they arrived just at that moment when the man was about to jump to his
death. Instantly, the officer on the right hand side of the car jumped out and
went over the guardrail and grabbed hold of him and pulled him back, with that
super-human strength that comes to us sometimes in emergencies. Pulled him
back to safety. The next day, in a television interview, the interviewer asked
him why he had done that, why he had risked his life, to save this jumping
man. He said, "It took no thought at all. I saw the young man as myself,
and had I not acted as I did, I would have died a thousand deaths, regretting
my failure. It was as if I were the young man about to jump." "You
shall love your neighbor as yourself," which I begin to understand not as
a matter of equivalency, not as a mandate to love others as much as you love
yourself, because I don' t love myself all that well sometimes, giving into
the perversity of self-recrimination and self-rejection. Now Jesus commands a
love of identification with others, not equivalence, but identity. You shall
love your neighbor as if he/she were yourself. This is not a matter of
hyped-up morality, a resolve to do better. This is, I think, a high ontology.
We are one. We are one another, made for oneness at the baseline of life. And
we know this when, in seeing a child brutalized, we recoil somewhere in our
gut at the brutalizing. As when we saw the brutalizing behavior of Nazis in
"Schindler's List," as when we recoil in sorrow and pain in our gut
over the carnage in Kosovo. We hurt, we weep with what the New Testament Greek
calls oiktirmos and rendered in English as "compassion,"
which I understand means "feeling from the other side." We are one.
You see how far beyond inclusion this takes us, and in a glad and girding
embrace of one another. As Christians, we can now see the deep integration of
science and spirituality, and celebrate our shared identity in the one
household of humanity with all creation, and in the redeeming mercy of God.
Thank you.