Bishop Gene Robinson’s Keynote Address at MLP Dinner

Bishop Gene Robinson, Diocese of New Hampshire, addressed over 300 people at the National MLP Celebration Dinner in Pittsburgh, PA. “So the real question for your church and mine is this,” he said, “If you’re not in trouble for the gospel you preach, is it really the gospel?”

It was not that many years ago when our churches, yours and mine and most others were absolutely certain what God thought of us…Because of your courageous work, there are a lot of confused people out there. That is a huge step forward…

I like to think of it as holy chaos…pretty much what has happened in families all over America. Kids come home and they say, “Mom, dad, I’m gay,” and the family is thrown into confusion and then the parents have to decide how deep, how broad, how high is their love for their child. So the gay kid, the Bishop of New Hampshire, came home to dad, the the Archbishop of Canterbury and said, “Dad, I’m gay.” And now the Anglican Communion is in confusion trying to decide how deep, how broad, how wide God’s love really is.

That is holy confusion and chaos.

Media Coverage

From the Pittsburgh Gazette:

“This is hard work, but we can do it because it is worthy work and it is Godly work,” Bishop Gene Robinson, 65, of New Hampshire told those attending a dinner hosted by More Light Presbyterians, a pro-gay rights group of the Presbyterian Church (USA), in the Westin Convention Center Hotel, Downtown. “We will live to see the day that the church of Jesus Christ, in whatever form it is, will repent from what it has done to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people the way it has repented for slavery.”…

Robinson, who plans to retire next year, said he finds inspiration from the civil rights movement of the 1960s. He called what is happening now in the Episcopal and Presbyterian churches “holy chaos.” Gay equality work in both denominations has caused a sense of confusion, which he called a step forward from the certainty that most Christians felt when it came to what God and churches thought of homosexuals.

Christian history teaches that standing for the right thing often comes with a price, Robinson said.

“So the real question for your church and mine is this,” he said, “If you’re not in trouble for the gospel you preach, is it really the gospel?” 

From Unbound: An Interactive Journal of Christian Social Justice:

On Saturday, More Light Pres­by­te­ri­ans – work­ing for the “full par­tic­i­pa­tion of LGBT peo­ple of faith in the life, min­istry, and wit­ness” of the church – gath­ered for their National Cel­e­bra­tion Din­ner. I got to sit at a table reserved for mem­bers or alumni of BGLASS, Prince­ton The­o­log­i­cal Seminary’s LGBTQQI and allies stu­dent orga­ni­za­tion, and the recip­i­ent of this year’s National More Light Chap­ter Award.

As I sat there, sur­rounded by friends, I real­ized that, despite the tran­si­tions and mobil­ity so com­mon to our gen­er­a­tion, we take our com­mu­ni­ties with us. BGLASS was always more than an orga­ni­za­tion for me. It was fam­ily. And like fam­ily, the peo­ple of BGLASS helped me know my own iden­tity and my call­ing. In 2009-10, I had the priv­i­lege of co-moderating BGLASS. That year, we decided we weren’t going to be on the defen­sive any­more; we were going to cel­e­brate and to advocate.

Those two words, cel­e­bra­tion and advo­cacy, set the tone for the More Light gathering.

Just like the night before, this was a time for shar­ing sto­ries, hon­or­ing allies and LGBTQ lead­ers, and review­ing the Gen­eral Assem­bly oppor­tu­ni­ties and chal­lenges to equal­ity. More Light par­tic­u­larly hon­ored Michael Adee, found­ing MLP Exec­u­tive Direc­tor and Orga­nizer, who will soon begin work lead­ing the Global LGBT Faith Project and whose love for peo­ple is unmistakable.

Later in the evening, the room became sud­denly quiet, expec­tant, as Gene Robin­son, the first openly gay Angli­can bishop, took the podium to deliver his keynote address. When he opened by say­ing that we have done an amaz­ing job, we were all expect­ing that sen­tence to end with some­thing like, “of mak­ing the church a more inclu­sive and wel­com­ing place.” Instead, he said, “You have done an amaz­ing job of… cre­at­ing con­fu­sion in the church.” He referred to this con­fu­sion as the “holy chaos” of peo­ple begin­ning to ques­tion what they once held certain.

Chaos is of course not always pop­u­lar among the “decently and in order” Pres­by­te­ri­ans, but this was a night for a new kind of church.

That new church, though, needs to own up to its past before it can move for­ward. Bishop Robin­son was frank: 95% (a sta­tis­tic he admits to mak­ing up) of the hate, dis­crim­i­na­tion, and homo­pho­bia has been caused by reli­gious peo­ple. “We,” he said, “taught them to hate.” And so it’s up to reli­gious peo­ple to turn the tide.

More Light Pres­by­te­ri­ans ral­lied at the call to take back the Bible. The Bible, Bishop Robin­son said, was orig­i­nally given to African Amer­i­cans in order to keep them docile and quiet. The prob­lem was that they actu­ally read it! They read a Bible of free­dom and dig­nity, of lib­er­a­tion and covenant. “And we gay peo­ple,” he added, “are read­ing our Bibles too.”

So, friends, wel­come to the church of holy chaos, the church of bold love and even bolder grace, the church you might not remem­ber, but the church we were always meant to be.

The change is not com­plete; there is still much work to be done. But, to bor­row an image from Bishop Robin­son, we are danc­ing to the cen­ter of the church, where we have known we always belonged.    

Learn more about More Light Presbyterians

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Image Wikipedia Gene Robinson