Wandering Space: Practicing Charity Together
It was seven and a half years ago. I had finished two and a half years of seminary. Now, I had to show that I knew how to apply the learning of those years to different aspects of ordained ministry, and in particular, to the context of parochial ministry. It is something of a rite of passage within the ordination process but not really one that you look forward to completing. It is called the General Ordination Exams (GOE), and you are supposed to pass through this bar to move forward in the final steps of the ordination process.
I spent the majority of that Christmas break creating bibliographies with bullet point annotations of the salient points of each text so I could easily and quickly word search for different ideas within the document. The only good news about the GOEs that year was that all of the exams were open resource so we could at least refer to our growing theological libraries. After creating my bibliographies, I made copies of the questions from prior year GOEs and used them to study with colleagues as we prepared to respond to the new prompts for that year.
On the Feast of the Epiphany, we were faced with the exam for Theological Ethics. When I opened the prompt for the exam in my web browser, I encountered a question that, until this week, I thought was more or less academic in nature since the law of the land was clear. The prompt read, in part, “You observe two bumper stickers displayed together on a car in a university neighborhood. One says, ‘Save the Whales.’ The other says, ‘Keep Abortion Safe and Legal.’ Provide a reasoned, 750-word argument for how the messages of these two bumper stickers, taken together, do or do not represent a morally coherent world view, consonant with your understanding of Christian responsibility.”
As Bishop Reddall points out in her own blog post this week, a Christian response to the happenings of this past week, and in particular working out a morally coherent stance on the question of abortion, is not necessarily a straightforward thing. We need to wrestle with the notion of what is the best thing for the common good while also finding a way to maintain a coherent moral world view. Is it possible for us to have the two bumper stickers referenced in the exam prompt on our cars and maintain a morally coherent world view that is in keeping with Christian responsibility?
Though I have a direct response to this question, I am not so interested in giving you my argument one way or the other. (The truth is that you can answer the exam prompt in a myriad of ways that maintains a morally coherent worldview consonant with Christian responsibility.) Instead, I would like to invite you to take up the challenge for yourself. Bishop Reddall provides some helpful links to the diocese in her own blog post to help each one of us to reflect on where we stand on the question of abortion. I invite you to take some time to read through those resources and to create your own well-reasoned argument for your stance while also connecting that argument to your understanding of Christian responsibility in the world.
But, the challenge does not end there. The next step is to move into what it might look like for us to hold our opinions lightly enough that we are able to listen to the arguments of others who may have a different view of the question. The challenge is to be charitably present to one another as we wrestle with this and other questions of theological ethics that present themselves in our time.
We will confront complexifying testimonies, as theologian Anthony Baker puts it in his book Leaving Emmaus. We will need to encounter those testimonies with charity and with curiosity. We may find that some of those testimonies encourage us to shift our opinions on certain questions as our theological ethics grow and encourage us in new ways of discipleship.
As you take up this work for yourself, you may like to have a conversation partner, and I would invite you to find time on my calendar for us to consider these or other questions together. Let us create space at Epiphany that allows us to wander together, to encounter complexifying testimonies together, and to greet the risen Christ on the road. Let us open ourselves to the movement of the Spirit, and let us hold one another gently as we walk in faith together.
In Christ,
Hunter+
