PC(USA) moderator!

This has been a particularly good week to be a Presbyterian in the Bay Area. We had a visit from the co-moderator of the Presbyterian Church (USA). What’s a moderator?  In our system of governance, the office of moderator is something like adding together the roles of a President plus a Pope, minus infallibility, and divided into two people as co-moderators. Well, and besides not being infallible, moderators don’t get to wear the kind of fancy regalia that popes and bishops get – though they do wear an impressive cross, which is actually three similar crosses that were famously riveted together in a single stroke by a gifted metalworker at the General Assembly in 1983 when the three Presbyterian churches, divided since the Civil war, were united into the church we now know as the PC(USA). This year the moderatorial honors, responsibilities, and crosses are being shared by Cindy Kohlmann and Vilmarie Cintron-Olivieri, the co-moderators for 2018-2019. You can follow them, by the way, by looking up @gamoderators on social media.  Cindy spent half a week in the Presbytery of San Francisco and because of my role with the Meetings Working Group (the meetings that plan the meetings – quel Presbyterian!) I ended up getting to tag along for much of her stay.

It’s great to spend some time looking at the big picture. What are our congregations doing, how are they changing, and how are we as a Church hanging together through it all? How can we as a denomination effect change in our nation and world for the better? Cindy and Vilmarie, from their position of privilege, are bringing to the center issues of race, immigration, and injustice. Cindy challenged us in her sermon at Presbytery on Tuesday night to respond gracefully when “called out,” especially if we’re called out on race issues. Racism is all around us and we internalize it without realizing it, so we need to learn to be grateful for learning opportunities when someone points it out to us, rather than reacting angrily and defensively. How do you respond when “called out”?  And on another note Cindy did call us out on our ecological issues. We, as a Presbytery have petitioned and demanded for the national church, its Foundation, and its Pension plan, to divest from fossil fuels as a statement of care for the earth and its climate. But our own money is still invested in funds that include fossil fuel companies. Is divestment only worth the effort if it’s a huge sum of money?  Or is it just easier to divest when we can remotely delegate and direct someone else to do the work for us? Shouldn’t we go ahead and divest our money now? I raised a motion to that point, and our presbytery will tackle this question at our next meeting in November.

I’m grateful for the opportunity to have our moderator preach to us, converse with us, and share table fellowship with us at the Presbytery. I’m grateful that I got to serve as her chauffeur and thus to hear on a more personal level how she felt God calling her to serve as moderator. And I felt so enormously proud, on Tuesday night, to be a member of the Presbyterian Church (USA), gathering together to try to do God’s work in the world.