Michael Reid Trice
ELCA-Mennonite Church USA
Mennonite Church USA Convention
ELCA Greetings
Introduction:
Good morning Mennonite Church USA! Thank you for this invitation to speak with you this morning. I see so many youth delegates here throughout the Convention that I wonder if you might be the youngest church in the United States. I congratulate you all on this inclusion of your youth as a visible sign of your witness to the world.
I have been asked by Bishop Mark S. Hanson, Presiding Bishop of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and President of the Lutheran World Federation, to greet you this fine morning, at the opening of your convention, in the name of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Many greetings today in fact. . . .
I want to bring you faithful greetings – if I may be so bold – from all of the synods and congregations that stitch together the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. And finally I want to say good morning to you from the individual members of those congregations whom you pass on the street every day, who are your neighbors in Christ down the block, and across this country, who stand with you at water coolers and soup kitchens, to whom you spoke a kind word last week, or for whom you will share a gesture of peace tomorrow.
Some of you might even have a Lutheran in the family. In fact, will those in the room who have Lutheran family members please raise your hand. Don’t be shy, we’re going to purge a bit here together. Thank you. You’ll know them by the kind of beer they drink. Please be nice to them. They mean well, really. Promise.
Now allow me to be more serious at this time. In the 16th century, our forebears – those emerging Lutherans and Anabaptists of their day, had a complicated relationship, to say the least. Invectives against Anabaptists were treacherous and produced serious harm and death to the historic members of your community. Even when we may forget the specific trespass that affects our Christian identity, the cost of that forgetting can be great indeed. For instance, Lutherans by and large developed a historical amnesia about this part of their Lutheran heritage. As Lutherans, if we had confronted the complicity of our 16th century atrocities, perhaps those of the 20th century would have been quite different indeed.
With the past in tow, in 1999 the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America established a liaison committee with the Mennonite Church USA, after two ELCA synods urged this church to publically reject the invectives of Martin Luther and other Reformers against Anabaptists. This liaison committee met, beginning in 2001. It should be remembered that the first meeting of the liaison committee was scheduled for September 13, 2001, and was in fact cancelled due to the September 11th attacks.
Fast forward to 2006, when a document aptly titled The Declaration of the ELCA on the Condemnation of the Anabaptists notes where signatories of the 1577 Formula of Concord identified that “the power of the state should be used to eradicate Anabaptist teachings from Lutheran territories.” In contra-position, the Declaration affirms: “These statements are particularly problematic, because they suppose that secular authority ought to be used to resolve religious differences – a position especially dangerous in the light of much popular discourse since the terrorist attacks in September of 2001.” The Declaration continues: “No church should use the state to impose its own beliefs and practices on others. We [therefore] express our deep and abiding sorrow and regret for the persecution and suffering visited upon Anabaptists during the religious disputes of the past.”
On April 24, 2007 a letter from your Executive Director of the Mennonite Church USA, Mr. Jim Schrag, -- whom I have the pleasure of standing to his right at this moment -- arrived at Bishop Hanson’s office. The context of Mr. Schrag’s letter was in fact a public response to Bishop Hanson and the ELCA; Mr. Schrag’s letter recognized the significant step forward in relations between these two churches, and addressed the ELCA Church Council directly. Mr. Schrag wrote in his letter: “We receive this apology with gratitude for its honesty, courage and humility and accept it in a spirit of forgiveness. We all live many generations after these events and none of us has personally caused or suffered this persecution. Nonetheless, we pray that God will use this gesture to release both Lutherans and Mennonites from a past that may have bound us in ways we did not even know.”
Now, where we are today: The Lutheran World Federation will meet for its 10th Assembly in Stuttgart, Germany in 2010. A document is being crafted now that asks you, my Mennonite brothers and sisters, for forgiveness. The expression of a “deep and abiding sorrow and regret” that does not speak the grammar of forgiveness today would be a cheap visitation of history. Even when those voices and ears of our earliest communities no longer speak and hear the chords of forgiveness, our responsibility in the years to come will be exemplified in the activities of our hands and arms, feet and shoulders, in our common witness and work of Christ for the sake of the world. You see, forgiveness matters for the past as much as for the blessings of our collective future together.
Where we know our stories and their resolution yesterday, we will seek greater unity and transformation of human communities today.
I encourage you therefore to “keep all of the doors open.” Reach out to your Lutheran and other Christian sisters and brothers throughout this country. Your work and mission in the world is of central importance to our common calling of Christian unity, where all of our local relationships are irreplaceable aspects of the one greater unity of the Body of Christ. God bless you.
God’s peace be with you, God go with you, God bless you all through the discernments of your convention! And, thank you faithfully for this invitation to speak with you this morning. Amen.