“Courage,” she said as she stood before those assembled. “The church needs to have courage.”
The Rev. Cynthia Kohlmann, co-moderator of the 223rd General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (USA), paid a visit to a joint meeting of the Arizona Presbyteries of Grand Canyon and de Cristo. She addressed the presbyteries on Friday with strong words about what it means to be the Church of Jesus. It means following Jesus into the dark recesses of the world, where pain and suffering are everyday realities, where 
Courage has become a watchword in our denomination in recent years, especially since the election of the Rev. Dr. J. Herbert Nelson as stated clerk of the General Assembly. He has brought a strong evangelically progressive vision of the church serving on the front lines of social justice with compassion and grace. In 2018, Dr. Nelson led commissioners and observers at the 223rd GA on a march through the streets of St. Louis to protest against the unjust practice of issuing cash bail bonds against people being held for minor offenses, arguing that this practice disproportionately hurts the most vulnerable poor in our communities and are applied most heavily against people of color. The protest raised over $47,000 to provide bail for people who had been prescreened for release.
In response to challenges from the 222nd and 223rd assemblies, the PC(USA) has sought to embrace Jesus’ call to “take our living faith into our communities and world.” The PC(USA) has launched an initiative based on the parables of Jesus recorded in Matthew 25, particularly the one in which the Son of Man (or “Human One” in the CEB) tells one people, “I was hungry and you did not give me food; I was naked and you did not clothe me.” To another group the Human One says, “I was hungry and you gave me food; I was naked and you clothed me.” Both groups ask, “When did we see you hungry or naked?” Jesus responds, “The Human One will say, ‘What you do the least of these you do to me.’”
The Matthew 25 Project has three foci that Rev. Kohlmann masterfully unpacked for the presbyteries: 1) building vital congregations (to do the work and mission of Christ); 2) dismantling structural racism; and 3) eradicating systemic poverty. In other words: Courage. Rev. Kohlmann asked if the church has the courage to step out from our traditional ways of doing things, outside the boxes of our fears and limited vision. At one time even those ways were strange and new.
Do we have the courage to change the way we worship, to push against those “golden calves” to which we often give more reverence than to God; those idols to which we hold on and believe if dismantled the entire the system we have built to make ourselves feel safe and comfortable will fall apart? Are we ready to move into news way of learning and seeing the world through lenses that have been developed through our children who have been raised with the internet and a world of information in their pockets? Are we ready to step out of our positions of privilege and risk losing that privilege so others might survive and be able to provide for their families? Are we ready to approach the hungry, thirsty, naked, or imprisoned without fear and with the love Christ had for those considered “the least of these”? Are we will to risk the glaring eye or hateful words of those who not like the compassion we are embodying because they do not think the recipients of our compassion are worthy of it? And who are they to decide who receives our compassion?
Rev. Kohlmann carried the Matthew 25 lesson even further in her sermon later that evening. Moderators were installed in both presbyteries under the mandate to share in the calling of “all the nations” to answer for their behaviors toward the poor and hungry. “Will we be divided by nations?” she asked, with nervous laughter from the congregation.
“There’s no language about a person’s worth,” she preached.
It’s not about who deserves love, care, or compassion, because no one “deserves” it.
“This parable of the judgment of the nations calls us to go deeper.”
It’s not the ones we pass by who will receive judgment. It’s we who do the passing by who shall by judged by God’s grace.
“If we live into what Jesus said is the greatest commandment…if we actually gave space for that…if we truly loved our neighbors…with no language of value or deserving or wicked neighbor or righteous neighbor, just neighbor…then we would be the sheep. We would have been living what we believed, without having to think about it.”
Knowing whether or not it is Jesus standing before is irrelevant. Loving our neighbor becomes a “natural” response—our lens shapes in such a way that we see everyone as our brother or sister Jesus. But, as Rev. Kohlmann suggests, that is a lot easier said than done—or else we’d already be doing it!
We are not taught to really live this way, she said, especially not in America where success and doing better are the values to which we aspire. “We are called as a church in this Matthew 25 invitation to be rewired again to actually claim the words of the Bible as if they were real and made a difference.”
Wait, what? As if they were real and made a difference? You mean, these stories are supposed to make a difference in our lives? (Snark)
“And then begin to apply them to our daily lives—change how we look and talk to and about one another, and change how we treat one another. … What if we lived in a world where churches didn’t have to have food pantries or offer shelter because everyone had what they needed? … What if we lived in a world where we didn’t need prisons anymore because no one needed to steal to survive? … Jesus at that judgment day saying, ‘Look at you learning! That ‘loving your neighbor,’ letting your heart be broken, it didn’t diminish you, it didn’t make you or your neighbor any less.’”
Presbyterianism has not been known for charisma. “Decently and in order” has been our clarion call for centuries. But these last few years I’m hearing our leaders say something different. I’m hearing from those whom our Church has discerned to lead us say, “We need to get a little messy, a little disorderly. We need to let go of our decorum a little so that we might love deeper and wider, and see the bigger picture here.” More and more we are hearing charismatic preachers from Presbyterian pulpits calling the church to let go of its obsession with personal salvation and any decency or order that gets in the way of truly loving our neighbors, “letting our hearts get broken,” as Rev. Kohlmann preached.
I love our denomination because I feel empowered by what we have stood for for so long. I feel empowered by the intensity of our deliberations and corporate discernment. I feel empowered by the places our denomination has gone, the courage we have shown during critical moments in the history of humanity. Now, we are way passed and chin deep in one of those moments again. It’s time for the church, the vast majority in the middle, to get messy, get into the fray, and speak up for the sake of those whom Jesus loved. It’s passed time and serious damage has been done in our absence on the public square. It’s way past time for us to back out there, to stop resting on our laurels, and to have the courage to risk everything we have for the sake of God’s holy kin-dom, which has indeed come near.