Rites, be they Civil

Fred & Hans: A 95-year Mystery from the "Great War"

2011-11-11T23:13:00.000-06:00

"Hans Bach, from his sincere friend, Fred. J. Livingstone, Corporal R. A. M. C., Netley Hospital England. Mar. 25th 1915."

Nearly 15 years ago, when I was poking around in a curiosity shop in Cologne, Germany, I found this picture. The young man's beauty first caught my eye, in his simple military uniform, and a look on his face that I cannot describe--lips slightly parted, head slightly tilted, eyes open to the world, light on one side of his face and darkness on the other, and fully relaxed, almost in an ecstatic, somewhat removed reverie. I have wondered all of these years who this beautiful young man is, and what became of him during or after the war to end all wars.

More than that, I wondered how this picture of an English soldier made it into the hands of someone who, by all accounts, looks to have been on the side of the enemy. Who was Hans Bach? Was he a young student that Fred befriended before the hostilities broke out that perhaps put them on opposite sides of the fence of mortality?

Were they friends, brothers, lovers, star-crossed, brought together by a fate that so soon turned as would put them in each others' harm's way?

A little digging on the internet today puts Laffutte, the photographer, at 184 Western Road in Brighton & Hove, about 60 miles from Netley, where Fred was serving in the great hospital there with the Royal Army Medical Corps, in which he was a Corporal in 1915.

Which makes me wonder...was Hans an enemy soldier that Fred met, and perhaps helped nurse back to health, while he was a patient at Netley Hospital, having been wounded in the war?

The Royal Victoria Military Hospital at Netley was opened under Queen Victoria's rule in 1863, after 7 years of construction, being then the largest military hospital in the world. During WW1, it was the site of over 50,000 patients, some of whom were perhaps German prisoners of war as was the case 25 years later during WW2, although the hospital also treated American soldiers in vast numbers.

We will likely never know what the relationship was between Fred and Hans, what became of them (despite searching British military records for someone whose name and age would have matched Fred's), or whether they met at the hospital or before.

But what is certain is that they lived, that they served, that they had a fondness of some kind for each other, and that they found themselves as a part of one of the bloodiest, yet most hopeful chapters in the history of the human struggle of battle.

In that we may honor their memory, and the memories of millions who served, fought, loved, and died, today, 11.11.11, 93 years after the first Armistice Day.

Eight is Enough

2011-11-11T22:13:00.002-06:00

Three months plus since I started writing a 15-entry series on 15 years of being out of the closet, I've finished only eight of them. I wanted to finish what I started, but so far have not. And it's gotten in the way of writing further entries, even though there's been much to write about in the meantime. Well, eight is enough, and now starts some new material!

15 for 15 VIII: Why I Must Be Out

2011-07-09T23:49:00.004-05:00

"You must remove any mention of your sexual orientation from your paperwork, resubmit for assignment elsewhere, and not mention it in any interviews with churches."

--ELCA Official, recommending the only way she saw me being able to get a first church

I.

I am resuming my series of 15 meditations on 15 years of being out today, because on this of all days, I understand more deeply every LGBTQ person's obligation to be out, if they can: because we can.

This ability is definitely not available to everyone. But if there are to be fewer people of all ages who are forced by our society, by their religions, employers, civil governments, families, friends, and other major factors of their lives to be in the closet, those of us who can be out must be out.

One year ago today, Justin Aaberg took his life in Andover, MN, not 20 miles from the gay mecca of Minneapolis. I cannot, nor can anyone, ever know the despair that Justin felt that led him to the point of ending his life. Organizations such as the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, which lead in suicide research and prevention, caution against drawing too strong a line between being bullied, harassed, raped, humiliated, and taunted, and one's suicide.

The reasons for suicide are complex. But it cannot be disputed that Justin suffered significant ill treatment, not because he was gay and out, but because those who could have helped prevent this abuse did not, and because those who abused him were pushed in that direction by their parents, their religions, their popular cultures, and yes, in some cases their educational system and civil governments.

Because Justin can no longer be out, I must be, because I still have a voice, and that voice must both speak and be heard for my own dignity and that of others.

Because Justin was out when he could be, he was able to be a friend to those who, along with him, underwent this kind of abuse at the hands of those who knew all too well what they were doing, and did not stop to consider what they were doing meant to someone who did not deserve such treatment.
That kind of friendship is vital to those who live in fear and persecution. It sometimes does mean the difference between life and death.

II.

I have not always been able to be out. And because I have not always been able to be out, I must be out now, whenever I can be.

At some point in my life, it no longer became possible for me to acquiesce in this system of oppression that said I had to be in the closet. The closet was never a safe place, because it has its own side affects, and sometimes what is meant to save actually can help to kill. But the closet remains, its door ajar, every time a new person comes along and I face the challenge of opening or closing that door. It becomes all too easily a default position for one's whole life, even in our country, where homosexuality is no longer criminalized in our laws.

Still, in dozens of countries throughout the world today, one can literally be put to death for being gay. Uganda is not the only country that has contemplated, or even passed, strict laws against homosexuality.

In the countries in which one's life is literally at risk for being LGBTQ, the closet may be one's only means of survival. When it is, it should be used.

But for those of us who have passed the age of majority, live on our own in countries that do not actively seek our destruction, and can make choices about where and how we live, I at least put the question to those who are not out but could affect much positive change in their circumstances if they were: Why not be out?

Ultimately, the choice is up to each person who could be out whether or not actually to be out. There regrettably still are consequences, in employment, in housing, in family life, in vocation, and in other fundamental aspects of our lives, to being out. Being out is not simple, and is sometimes problematic.

That said, I am convinced that the more people who are out who possibly could be, the less these systems of oppression will have the opportunity to tell us who we are, where we can work, where we can live, whom we can marry, and what we as human beings are worth.

And the more who are out here, where we can be, the more support there will be for those who are being persecuted throughout the world, and the more voices speaking from a place of personal authenticity will be raised to shout to the world that such violence against people cannot continue.

This is why we must be out.

III.

I have paid my own price in being out in terms of my vocation to the ordained ministry. I actually did hear the words spoken above, by an official of my denomination, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA), that if I wanted to live into the vocation for which I'd been educated, trained, and in which many people over the years have supported me with their prayers, money, time, and energy, I would have to forsake the part of my personhood that got me there. I would have to deny the animating energy that puts life into my living. I would have to be dishonest, and that was that.

Yet that was much higher a price to pay than not getting a church, indeed, much too high a price for me to pay. And true to her word, to this day, not one church has interviewed me to be their pastor.

The same person later told me, after the rules of the ELCA were changed to allow open and partnered LGBTQ people as ministers, that she deeply regretted ever having to say such a thing. I can understand that regret. But I’m not the only one who has been told these things, and the church should be the last place to encourage duplicity.

Beyond the actual harmful messages that those in the ELCA and in many other church bodies have told and still tell those who are LGBTQ, these churches yet have to atone for encouraging their own ministers of the Gospel to lie in order to become ministers of the Gospel of truth.

And the church ought not to be in the business of making liars out of its leaders.

IV.

On the civil and societal front, being out is key to ever securing our rightful place at the table of full citizenship, and to make it impossible for political leaders to use me and people like me as political fodder to scare their like-minded constituents into getting them elected and re-elected.

In Minnesota, my home and current state, we are now known for the wacky anti-gay politicians that we are producing. Rep. Michele Bachmann, and her unfortunate husband, Dr. Marcus Bachmann, are using LGBTQ people and the fear of some around same-sex marriage in order to help launch their presidential campaign.

But I have a deep feeling that if he could be out, Dr. Marcus Bachmann would be out.

Instead, he runs a clinic that seeks to change LGBTQ people by telling them that they do not have to be gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender, in fact, that these ways of living are wrong and contrary to God's word, and that they are even "barbarians." One man went undercover to discover and communicate the truth of what Bachmann's clinic practices, which you can read here.

Because Dr. Marcus Bachmann, and other purveyors of anti-gay "research," "therapy," and anti-gay religious-based rhetoric, such as Dr. George Rekers, whose research helped ruin lives while he got to vacation with paid gay companionship, cannot be out, I must be out.

For in order to stop such therapy from having legitimacy in the eyes of many as it still does now, those many must know who we really are as LGBTQ people. And when they cannot know who we are from us, they must take the word of people who wish us erased from the pages of history, from the present, and from the future.

V.

There are many reasons to be out, and many reasons why I feel I must be out. But being out and coming out, as a complicated, ongoing, and life-long process, still presents times when I could say that I'm gay but I don't, because in the moment it feels too hard to do so. In offering to elderly people why I am not married, for example, I don't say it is because I cannot marry, or because I don't have a boyfriend, but simply that I am not married, end of story.

These sorts of moments, which are moments of truth that pass as the proverbial ships in the night, are so important because they are where real change happens, and where, once frankness defines the basis of a discussion, real connection can possibly happen on more than an intellectual level.

Of all the reasons why I must be out, perhaps greatest reason is the prospect of those deep, personal, and connected conversations, and the relationships that can ensue from them.

My hope, for myself and others, is to find the strength in the most difficult moments to speak out the truth of our lives to those for whom that truth might effect the most ultimate good.

Together, we can achieve that good, for ourselves as individuals, and for those whose voices cannot be heard.

15 for 15 VII: Pride, or Anti-Pity

2011-05-24T01:17:00.006-05:00

"What have you done today to make you feel proud?" --Heather Small

"You can take away my job, my vocation, my marriage, my home, and my life, but you can't take away my pride." --C. W.

I.

"I'm on my way, can't stop me now. And you can do the same." Pride may be one of the seven deadly sins, but frankly, there are a lot of deadly sins that are not counted among these seven sins, such as hate, fear, and pity.

I say, let's redefine these deadly sins. What have you done today to make you feel proud?

To say I'm fan of Showtime's series "Queer as Folk" is an understatement. When my friend, David, a fellow Minnesotan and a life mentor, first lent me his recorded episodes on VHS tapes back in New York City more than 10 years ago, I knew I loved this rag-tag bunch of metro-homosexuals. It is sexy, edgy, real, funny, semi-pornographic at times, but that is the reality of our lives. No apologies, no regrets.

Just now, I finished watching the series finale (the last scene is in the link to the above quotation), which ended with the song above--"What have you done today to make you feel proud?" Not "make me feel proud." Not "make God feel proud." Not "make your parents, your teachers, your employers feel proud." But you. The very you who is reading this sentence right now, and who is typing it. Because feeling proud is something new every day, like God's manna from heaven, something not just to re-live, or re-make, but something that comes up as a requirement for us to live as flourishing, loving, proud, and fierce human beings.

II.

I've taken a few weeks' sabbatical on this series of writing 15 reflections on 15 years of being out. In the meantime, I visited the scene of my coming out, my alma mater, Lawrence University. I hadn't been there in nearly 10 years, and many people have come and gone since then. Many buildings are new, many people are new, but as I approached college avenue and rode past Main Hall, the cobwebs fell from my eyes, and I saw the place that was so formative in my life--not just my intellectual life, but my emotional life, and the life that I found worth fighting for after so many years of fear.

Every corner of this university, especially the Conservatory of music, had a memory, or many memories. The friends I made, the friends I lost, the people I loved, hated, the people I passed who have themselves passed on to another dimension, those places that are now silent, that used to be the center of activity. "Mozzi sticks!!!" I could hear one saucy Union kitchen lady yelling as I waited for one of the dearest friends in my life that I haven't talked to now in 10 years. Now, silent, a closed door, like that friendship feels.

But pride is on the other side, waiting to open the door.

I wasn't exactly proud of myself when I got to college at age 18. My parents were proud of me, and for that I'm both grateful and fortunate. The pathway to 18 and beyond is filled with so many possible wrecking points, that in some ways I think it is a miracle that as many people make it to that one, lone spot as do. But the hardest times do not pass when one makes the first forays out onto one's "own."

It's coming to own one's own that can present some of the tightest spots of our lives. And the road there is lined with those who have made it only part of the way, not because of their own faults, but because others made the road so damned impassable. But the road is not *necessarily* impassable. There are angels who can help you get through, if you can open your eyes when they are most tightly closed and see.

And we need to help those angels along, and to be those angels of our better natures.

III.

I put writing this entry off because in many ways it is the hardest one to write. The time I've taken getting here mirrors the time I've taken getting to any place in my life where I can be proud both of who I am, as well as what I've done.

It's hardest, sometimes, to cut oneself some slack, let alone others. In fact, I think we often treat ourselves with harshness that would make us go to the mat for our friends and loved ones if we saw them being treated the same way that we sometimes treat ourselves.

So pride is not such an easy thing, for a number of reasons, for a number of people. Being told you're worthless, scum, lowest of the low, perverted, wrong, abnormal, sick, damned, and a whole host of other horrible things, seems to sink in with some time, and sinks us. A lot of people who are not themselves LGBTQ have experienced this kind of soul-murder. So why does so much of the animus come to those of us who are LGBTQ?

Because, I sense, we expose the beauty and diversity that is each person's in this life, that so many are afraid will give them such fulfillment, that it will literally blow their minds.

People are diverse, they're not of one mind, they know themselves often much better than they are known, in short, people are not on one standard track of being recognized, comfortable, productive, and beneficent to themselves first, as well as to others.

And the LGBTQ community, as far as we are a community, is the exemplar of this diversity. While our sexuality, "lifestyles," and the choices that we make to live more fabulously every day make us part of who we are, we live, each of us, being "repairers of the breach," reconcilers, and living those lives away from the quiet desperation that makes people die a death much worse than that of the body: the death of their spirits in their limited time in this life.

IV.

Those who wish to say that our relationships, that our lives, in all their color, do not count as much as theirs, miss one of the greatest gifts of this brief life: that life does not all have to be the same, and that we have agency in making of our lives what God would, I don't just think but am certain, want us to make of our lives: as absolutely much as we can.

Many of those who couch their opposition under the name of the God of all life, look at gay pride parades and festivals as the exemplars of our shame: leather daddies, open sexuality, sodomites laughing and parading their difference through the streets, people who are one step away from taking us all down the fast road to hell.

Well, I have a message for these purveyors of doom: those who fear the rainbow are bound to be crushed by it. Not crushed by the triumph of "fag enablers," but by their very own, human, and misguided fear. And that makes me pity them, although I know that fear as well as they do.

I remember my first pride well, in the summer of 1998 in New York City. It was the first time in my life that, for just a few hours, in a small part of the world, I felt like everyone in the world was LGBT or Q, where nobody had to explain anything about what I had felt all my life, where I could feel, even if briefly, the home that is so common to so many people, where I came home from a lifelong exile. And that feeling is not something to fear, but to celebrate.

This pride is the pride that we take in our own lives, in our own feelings, in the exultation that each of us and a human being can feel in our humanity, not in the humanity that is imposed upon us, but in what we ourselves know is our truth.

V.

Pity, not humility, is the antithesis of pride.

I know pity well--I'm prone to self-pity, one of my deepest flaws. Self-pity, in feeling that I have not made enough of my life, that I have not attained my calling as a minister of the Word of God, that I have not sustained a long-term relationship or marriage, that I have not yet peaked in the arc of my living, afflicts me as it does many, and seeks to quash the beauty that my life can, and often does, have and has to give. This feeling of self-pity almost kept me from going back to Lawrence, the goal of which was to celebrate the awesome life and contribution of one of the most fabulous Lawrentians ever, our late archivist, Carol Butts.

I am eternally glad that I opposed the poisoned source from which these impediments derived, to avert what would have been a true pity: missing out on this fabulous celebration and reunion.

I was proud that day that we gathered Carol's family, friends, and colleagues, to celebrate her memory and contributions, as she has so long deserves. I only wish she could have been there with us to enjoy a well-deserved honor.

Now, this is hard to say, but I think it is the truth: LGBTQ people are often trained more in pity than we are in pride. We are made the victims of people who cannot accept the truths of their own lives, let alone the lives of others, and we cry out altogether too often in the pain that others inflict on us, and that we inflict on ourselves. But we also shout from the rooftops, and within the halls of power, that God indeed does love us in equal measure, that we are human in equal measure, and that our relationships are equal, not because we fight for them to be, but because they just are.

I had the chance to be proud for a while last week, in the midst of fighting against a vote by the Minnesota State Legislature to hand off for the people to decide what rights we should all have under the law. I am grateful to Rep. Debra Kiel, freshman representative of district 1B, my home district, for hearing me out. I hope truly that she thinks and prays about what I had to say to her.

The most important thing I had to tell her was this: We are equal in our humanity, and we are equal in our baptisms (those of us who are Christian), but we are not equal under the law, and the law is very important, and something that our representatives, such as herself, have in their hands.

Hundreds who protested this anti-gay constitutional amendment made me proud, standing, singing, and shouting for our rights at the very door of power. Organizations like OutFront Minnesota, Project 515, and the new Minnesotans United for All Families, are all helping to gather the power of our communities around making justice for all families a reality in Minnesota.

A few Republican representatives made me especially proud, most notably Rep. John Kriesel, whose experience in the war in Iraq, and particularly serving with a gay soldier who was killed, made him see that this anti-gay amendment must be opposed at all costs. (His speech is here.) He said "I'm proud of this, because this is the right thing to do." And he was absolutely right.

My parents, each in writing their representatives, made me proud as well, just one of many times.

VI.

Pride is not just doing what you're told. Pride is knowing that you are worth more than others say you are, that your worth is from a source beyond yourself, beyond your own family and community, beyond your own accomplishments, from a source that reaches out to all of humanity, the wonderful and the awful, that for those of us who believe reaches to God and comes from God.

This kind of pride feeds our lives and gives them meaning. It's not a sin. The hate that challenges who we are, that hate is a deadly sin, literally. And that is what Jesus came on this earth to oppose.

We hit the mat for a moment when the MN State Legislature passed this sorry bill (a.k.a. SF 1308 and HF 1615). But we are not going to stay down.

We're going to kick such ass on this anti-marriage amendment. Not because we're going to be louder, tougher, and more determined than those who oppose our relationships, but because we're simply going to love them more than they hate us.

We are going to love their scared selves into a place of salvation.

Jesus is not going to come down from the sky to save them from us, but, rather, Jesus is going to work through us to redeem them, until there is no more "us" and "them," but only "we."

And that's something to be proud of.

An Open Letter to Jim Wallis on LGBTQ “Civil Rights.”

2011-05-10T10:13:00.002-05:00

I am taking a break this morning from my meditations on coming out, which shall continue soon, to express my disappointment in Jim Wallis & the Sojourner's Board's decision not to run an ad supportive of LGBTQ people submitted by the Believe Out Loud campaign.

10 May 2011

Dear Jim,

I was among those who were disappointed by your response to the Sojourners Magazine’s “editorial” decision not to run the Believe Out Loud ad that is supportive of LGBTQ Christians. Unfortunately, a lot of people who call themselves progressive seem to have taken this as an opportunity to give you and Sojourners the old heave-ho as having anything to do with progressive Christianity. This is unfortunate, as was your response that attempted to backtrack and promote a position that is, in fact, contrary to the one that you and Soujourners has taken with this ad. You state:

"Given the time Sojourners is now spending on critical issues like the imperative of a moral budget, the urgent need to end the war in Afghanistan, and the leadership we are offering on commitments like immigration reform, we chose not to become involved in the controversy that such a major ad campaign could entail, and the time it could require of us. Instead, we have taken this opportunity to affirm our commitment to civil rights for gay and lesbian people, and to the call of churches to be loving and welcoming to all people, and promote good and healthy dialogue." (This is taken from your longer response, found here.)

The Believe Out Loud ad is merely proclaiming that we, too, as LGBTQ people, should be welcome in Christian churches of our choosing, and that we have as much of a place in pouring forth our ardent prayers, and bearing the mutual burdens of our brothers & sisters in Christ, as those who would keep us from the altar and deny us God’s means of grace. Although many could agree with the feeling of being excluded or looked at funny when they newly enter a church, this is especially the case for LGBTQ people.

It is unfortunate to see that words mean more than actions to you and the Sojourners Board in this case. Not only because you seem to think that the only urgent needs lie outside of the realm of sexuality, but because you would say that you’re in favor of civil rights, while seeming not to care that millions of individuals are using the name of Jesus to torment and even to kill LGBTQ persons here and throughout the world.

This is a teachable moment, Jim. It is a moment in which you can publicly state that what is happening in Minnesota with our legislature near a vote to ban same-sex marriage in our constitution is wrong not only from a civil standpoint, but a moral one as well.

This is the moment in which your voice should be the voice calling Uganda to account for its seeking to introduce a law that will lead to a holocaust of LGBTQ lives in that country, and should be condemning the use of Jesus’ name to condone and even initiate the deaths to come in that country. Is this something that would embarrass you to say, and detract from your work of justice in other areas?

It saddens me to say, Jim, that your words of support have no currency with those to whom they would count as long as your actions do not match them.

But, if you wish to be helpful, but cannot be, Jim, don’t worry: We are working tirelessly to liberate you and thousands like you who do not yet feel you can help us, for reasons of controversy or whatever other business considerations you might have.

We are also tirelessly working to liberate the Gospel of Jesus from the hands of those who would use it to condone violence here and throughout the world. Because it is a matter of justice that the Lord of Life not be used as the Demon of Death.

You are needed, Jim, and so is Sojourners. The welcome of the Christian Church here and throughout the world is not ornamental to the cause or justice, nor is it merely a civil matter. The name of Jesus is at stake here, as are the lives of those who could perish under it.

I will be praying for you.

In Christ,

Chris Wogaman
Minneapolis, MN

15 for 15 VI: The First Time, or I'm Finally Out!

2011-05-07T01:51:00.003-05:00

The day had to come.

Earlier that day, I was agonizing, as I did every day, over the guy I was in love with but didn't, or couldn't, tell. When he told me that he was in love with another guy, I told him how I felt about him, and there it was.

Out.

Finally.

I.

But the one to whom I am out and whom I love loves another. I want to laugh and cry and vomit.
--May 6, 1996

Those were the hardest years of my life, so far, both preceding and following that statement.

Since that time, I've come to think that emotional puberty, which happens around age 20, is harder than physical puberty. I went into a cocoon, psychologically, and to some degree physically as well.

Like many young men of that age, I grew out my hair, on my face as well as on my head. I actually had hair to grow out back then.

Along with this growth of hair around me, I continued growing barriers around myself psychologically to keep people out. I became so good at it, that by age 21, I could say that I hadn't kept any friends consistently since I was a kid, and although I made friends in college, it would be some time before I worked on those friendships at all. Mostly, I was insecure, overly-competitive, and didn't want anyone to know I was gay.

It all ended that night.

II.

My view of the world has changed so drastically, I can't. This is the night I have been waiting for for so long...

I knew after that night that something more than my sexuality had come out. I had come out, started to destroy the cocoon of secrecy that I'd built around myself with hundreds or thousands of "saves," putting my mind to work several moves ahead of where a conversation might be going so that I would not have to answer certain questions or lie.

The piano had been my adolescent lover, and the eccentric pianist Glenn Gould had been my "virtual" lover, long before the idea of virtual had come to my mind. I was safely hidden behind an intellectual exterior in which I could be busy thinking about things, or practicing the piano. I became enveloped in the works of Ayn Rand, who, from her physical and emotional grave, egged me on to be different and alone. Being an individual was the most important thing to me, so much so that when I went to college, I wanted to do an "individualized major," which at the time was kooky, although has caught on since.

Through all of the nights that I had gone to sleep for 10 years wondering if I was hopelessly lost, or if I was "the only one," I knew in those moments, on that night 15 years ago, that I was never going to be the only one again.

The first time I came out was like returning from a long, lonely exile in a foreign land, whose customs I sort of knew, and whose language I spoke with great difficulty because I kept tripping over the words, but whose food I didn't enjoy, and whose oppressive culture I could not wait to escape.

This feeling of exile, of not being welcomed in your homeland, is perhaps common to a lot of people for a lot of reasons. People can challenge this feeling only in the company of those who are "like" them, or perhaps in books, movies, other media, or characters of their own making. But it's not the same as connecting in person, with real, live people whom you know are enough like you so that you don't have to mouth a barely familiar language that everyone else seems to know fluently.

My whole perspective on the world changed, because that night I no longer had to think in terms of dynamic equivalence, translating the lives of others, and particularly the loves of others, into something that made sense to me in my own mind and deeply felt experience. My world changed that night because it finally became my world.

III.

I'm so confused and elated and nervous and sick and ecstatic. Sleep seems light years away.

A million feelings went through my mind and heart all at once, so powerful that I felt like I was going to go insane or literally explode, internally combust, go up in the flames of gay fabulosity before I knew what those even could be.

I felt, in that moment, that I had crossed over a threshold of experience that I thought I would never cross, and entered a world I could only sense existed, but had been there all the time. And what I wanted felt further out of reach than ever, because my feelings were not returned.

Feelings are a funny thing--substantial, but not quantifiable; ephemeral, but lasting; they are the ultimate paradox.

And feelings seem to give us permission to act in any way that we wish. I did that, and was not proud of how my feelings affected the object of those feelings. Objectifying another, especially one about whom we feel strongly, seems impossible to avoid, but in the cold light of long reflection, I would have acted quite differently. At that time, though, I simply could not. One learns not to repeat certain mistakes, even though some of those mistakes seem to fall into a pattern of action that, no matter how many times one tries to reason his or her way out of them, seems to keep coming back the same way. It is almost like an addiction, and the effects can perhaps be just as harmful.

Still, I came to value those feelings only by finally experiencing them, and putting them out there in the world. If they are returned, that is somehow a bonus, but there is no way in which one can or should force another person to feel what one does not feel.

Being forced into feeling what one does not feel is precisely the aim of the closet. It is not only a place of privacy and safety, but it is a place that often compels people to feel that that is the only place in which they can be safe. And that is not right.

IV.

Many first times have come since that one those many years ago: first lovers, first boyfriends, first poems, first culinary delights, first times being without a home, being on my own and unsure of what to do next, first trips to Europe and Africa, first times walking the streets of Paris and New York and San Francisco, dreamlike places that I never thought I'd be, but that have come to define my personality and my life in ways similar to this lived sexual orientation.

First times are indeed very special, even if they aren't anything special in and of themselves. I remember the first time I changed a headlight on a car, the feeling of accomplishment that I had, and the feeling of empowerment. First times can, but do not always, empower us to try for higher levels of experience, and make us realize that what never seemed possible actually is something we just haven't tried yet. Of course, that doesn't go for everything. Like eating liver.

Tonight, I celebrated these many years of being out, and all the gifts and challenges that have come with it, at the lovely Nicollet Island Inn restaurant in Minneapolis. Here was one of the fabulous courses with which my table was adorned:

The colors, the flavors! This was living. And this is what life can be like: a colorful, delicious feast.

For we are called to the great feast, to the Gospel feast, to the feast of honesty and integrity that adds all of the flavor to life. Facing one's areas of pain and struggle honestly, and for a long time, can yield much greater treasures that can be bought and paid for with money.

And you are always welcome at my feast.

15-for-15 V: Who I Am, or Identity, Equality, and Value

2011-05-06T16:16:00.001-05:00

I know who I am. More or less.

I.

It's easy to say that sexuality is just a small part of our lives, that it's not "who we are." It's also easy to say that sexuality is our entire life, that it's all we are.

When I say that I am gay, and thereby oppose the words that headline the first entry in this series, I equate myself with my sexual orientation, I own that part of myself, and I use it to define myself. I am Chris, but saying that is not quite the same way of defining self, because "Chris" doesn't have a definition in itself.

Saying "I am cold," similarly, describes a passing state or feeling. "I am rich," or "I am poor," too, might get at something true for a while, which shapes who we are and how we are, but these descriptors are not necessarily identity characteristics. Our "net worth" does not come in how much money we have in the bank the day before the stock market crashes and wipes out our assets.

Yet people debate the extent to which sexuality is a passing phase, essential to our beings or a choice, or a product of our doing.

I think that sexuality is a very big part of our lives, because it affects how we relate to ourselves, others, our society, religions, and to every huge factor in our lives. Sexuality goes far beyond those with whom one has sex, far beyond one's private domain, and indeed beyond one's "personal preferences" or "lifestyle choice." The term "lifestyle choice," in fact, has always been both nebulous and insulting, highlighting an ornamental, act-based idea of sexuality that somehow people might chose out of boredom with the "normal" way of life. It doesn't get at such a large part of what I think is connoted by the term "sexual identity"--the source of one's passions.

What "turns you on"? What "floats your boat"? What gets your blood pumping, and what paints your sky? What brings a flush to your cheek, or a spring to your step? Sexuality is in our blood, and blood is thicker than water. The sinoatrial node might physically produce the electrical force behind the beating of our hearts, but sexuality is the metaphoric animating principle behind that and every aspect of our creative lives.

Sexuality goes a long way beyond T & A. (Especially if you're gay.)

II. Defined by Difference? Enlivened by Equality?

Being different gives a person the opportunity to spend a lot of time thinking about things that people who are not different probably don't think much about. Some might take exception with my use of the term "different." But when you're defined in ways that lead to a different set of rules for how you can live your life, you're different.

Difference, in the case of sexual identity, means that you do not necessarily follow the life patterns and roles that are set in place for you when you're born. The consequence of that difference is that society sets out for you the same expectations, but a different set of rules.

I'll be the first to own that sometimes those of us with this difference of sexuality, or any difference, spend too much time thinking and talking about it, and not enough time living it. That is because justice has not yet come for many of us, and because our siblings in difference around the world and on our own shores are still being mocked, beaten, assaulted, shamed into self-hatred and worse, and indeed put to violent death. We think about this difference because our world won't let us forget.

In thinking about this difference, we often talk about "equality." Frankly, the more I think of it, the more insulting the idea of asking for "equality" is.

It is insulting to argue for equality, because we are equal, and we don't ask anyone else to be equal to us. I would never look at someone and say, "Prove that you are equal to me." People who don't realize that LGBT people are fully equal in our humanity and our relationships are fully equal in their legitimacy will not do so because we say they are.

We spend so much time defending, and that leaves less time actually to live.

My leap came when I realized the value of my own feelings, at least to myself, not that they were equal, but that they were valuable.

III.

Sexuality is a value. And one person's sexuality is no more a value than another's.

Sexuality is a value in what it does to enliven and paint the skies of our lives. It is also a value in how it challenges and points out our brokenness. Everyone has a broken aspect to their sexuality. This is one of the chief reasons why same-sex attraction scares people--because thinking of it as an attraction that is fully broken, wrong, diseased, or criminal, gives people who think like that a way to avoid confronting their own brokenness.

It's hard to name all of the discrete experiences of our lives that name our sexuality in one way or another. Holding hands in the movie show, as one old song put it, is something that people without a difference would not think twice about doing, and might indeed take pleasure and gain social status by being seen "together."

One can name one's sexuality in any number of subtle ways, in a look or a few carefully placed words, in whose names one mentions casually in conversation, in pictures that adorn one's public spaces, or in the stories that we tell about important experiences in our lives that involve other people.

People who cannot be public about their sexuality find any number of ways to avoid it becoming known. My most potent memory from my high school years involved sitting in the library on a study break with some guys who began talking about how a girl was admiring another guy's ass. I interjected, without realizing that I was in danger of totally outing myself to some of the not nicer people: "Oh, she could do better." Snap!

This comment did not escape their attention. One shot back with a look on his face that I've seen a couple of other times, in dangerous situations where they see the gay within you and don't like what they see. The words exploded, "Oh yeah?? Who??!"

A breathless moment passed. It seemed like they had gotten me, and that all I had feared would now come to pass.

From out of nowhere, the word came into my head and out my mouth with as little thought as I had given when I initiated this crisis just seconds ago:

"Me."

And with that, they laughed their asses off, and I breathed an internal sigh of release. Way too close for comfort.

That's such an innocuous experience, and yet given the context of being forced to avoid saying any little thing that might "tip them off," I had just dodged what I feared would be metaphoric and literal bullets.

Just imagine all of the experiences, in all of the years, that all of those who do not want to be "found out" go through, and the weight that puts on one's shoulders.

Every experience that one might have to pass through in order to stay in the closet is an experience in which sexuality makes itself known outwardly in our lives.

Who I am, who you are, is partially defined by the weight we carry, what we do with it, and what we let it do to us.

But we are also defined by what lifts us.

And someday, hopefully within my lifetime, the widest part of our society will support the enlivening force that takes us through each day, that connects with the Holy Spirit and taps us into God, that is our muse for writing, singing, and creating beautiful things, the enlivening force that makes our relationships live, and our words take flight, that sends our rockets to the farthest reaches of physical space, and gives us the energy to dream a better world, while living with greater fulfillment in the one we have.

Who will we be then?

15-for-15 IV: Gaining My Religion

2011-05-03T21:35:00.005-05:00

"God hasn't brought you this far just to let you go now."
--Loretta Hernton

I.

Somehow, I got dragged back into church after foreswearing it for Aristotle.

It was going to be so neat and tidy: Let God be whatever God was supposed to be, which I supposed wasn't much, pray when I really needed something somehow expecting that would work, and stay in my rational mind as well as I possibly could. That was my "lifestyle choice" for a good long time. Looking back now, I mouthed the words of atheism, but my heart wasn't in it. It was like me trying to be heterosexual.

This is not to say that atheists, agnostics, humanists, and persons of dozens, if not hundreds, of world religions do not have a heart, and, indeed more of a heart than I. But I could never have come to the religious belief I have without being openly gay. Indeed, some of the most "Christian" people I know, and some of the better theologians, are atheists, and some of the beastliest things I've seen and heard have been done in the name of Jesus.

I've always been a doubter and a sceptic when it comes to faith. Indeed, faith without doubt is like pig iron; it is brittle, and breaks at the least trial. Doubt to faith is like the carbon that turns iron into steel, making it strong and pliable enough to shift without easily falling down.

II,

In college, I never felt like the church was any place for me to be. After I left home, I left the church as well, as many young people do, except to earn some money playing organ or piano for services here and there.

My family attended a Methodist church quite faithfully, each Sunday, so it was a part of my upbringing. In fact, I've not lived a day without being baptized, as I was baptized the very day I was born. It was a lifestyle choice, yes, first made by my parents, and then myself. But I never wanted to be a part of the "Christians" that I saw at college, because I knew that their company was no place for the likes of me. But "my religion" has become far more than a casual choice or accident of birth.

Strangely enough, in coming to understand the part of myself that had to come out of the closet, especially in the context of what really mattered in my life and in the universe from my vantage point, I couldn't escape the many elements that had affected my life through religion. Yet, even though I am certain I never went to a church service in which the pastor or priest said that homosexuals were going to hell, somehow I got that message through the air, or the airwaves, because enough other people were saying it: God condemns gays. I know that to be a lie, in some cases very carefully manufactured for maximal political effect, but it was a lie that helped keep me in the closet.

My first summer in New York, where I have lived 5 years of my adult life, I recall a subway evangelist (there were many) approach me on the uptown platform of the A train at 42nd Street. He said to me, "Do you have Jesus?" I answered, and can still clearly see and feel what I felt when I said it, "I already know I'm going to hell."

That frame of mind, however, is not where I would stay.

III.

As someone who went through seminary, I learned how to tell my "faith journey" while standing on one leg, like Ayn Rand claimed she could do and recite her whole philosophy (which I'm sure she could). And not only did I go to one seminary, but two: Yale Divinity School/Institute of Sacred Music for my "Masters of Divinity," a title to this day that makes me laugh with images of donning leather and picking up a whip to recite the Word of the Lord, and Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary, which granted me a CATS, a Certificate of Advanced Theological Studies, which sounds like something between a pet and a medical procedure. Altogether, I became a Master of Divine Cats who could whip out a faith journey narrative like last-minute pancakes for unannounced company.

My path was somewhat untraditional, lacking a particular influential mentor, but common as well to others who went to seminary. I was raised in the church, left the church, left God, found out that I hadn't left God, got peppered with dreams and "coincidences" that forced me to think about God, as well as felt an increasing desire to know more about religion, to experience more, to become a pastor, at which I would have laughed when I was in college, and, after a time, to go to seminary.

I first came back to the church in Harlem, at the Convent Avenue Baptist Church on the corner of 145th and Convent Avenue. There was a big pink cross up in front, and a fiery preacher, Minister Grant, who along with the choirs made the Word of God come vibrantly to life. They let me use their piano to practice as I hadn't one of my own at the time, and it helped get me in the door on a Sunday morning when I wasn't doing anything else in particular. Piano of God #1.

Later, after I moved north of Harlem, I found the Lutheran church down the street from where I lived while looking for a piano to play. Piano of God #2. Something seemed to be at work to unite the place where my heart resided during my teenage years, in music, and where it was starting to find itself more and more, in a wider place within my being.

My interest in Greek, my undergraduate major, led me to pick up a Bible for the first time in years when I was shopping at the Chelsea Salvation Army in New York one Saturday afternoon. The teller gave it to me, saying, "We don't sell Bibles; just take it." The beautiful Greek characters brought the Scriptures to my mind fresh and alive, and made me want to know and experience more.

When I picked up that volume and looked at the title page, I saw the name of Bruce Metzger, who had led the committee that edited that Bible from the Greek manuscripts. Since he was still living in Princeton, where he taught for many years, I resolved to go and meet him. This desire led me to my first experience at a seminary, Princeton Theological Seminary. Before that visit, I hadn't even much of an idea what seminary was.

A dream during my visit to that seminary convinced me that I must go to seminary, but not yet, so soon after coming back to the church. I later learned that I dreamt a verse from the Book of Jonah (also found in Psalm 42):

and the flood was round about me;
all thy waves and thy billows
passed over me. (Jonah 2:3; RSV)

I passed through the overwhelming flood in that dream, which I had seen Fantasia-style, in the 3rd person, encapsulated safely in a gleaming crystal case. The waves rolled a mile over my head, but I was safe, as the waves all went over me. I woke feeling as though I had been washed deeply, like in a steam bath but without the sweat. It was as though I had been baptized again. It was if I had been Jonah, running from God, and right into the belly of a whale.

In these formative years, I learned to appreciate the energy and deep commitment of those in the National Baptist tradition at Convent Avenue. I also spent time with extremely conservative Mennonites; formed a small Bible study in which I translated the Greek version of the week's Gospel passage, complete with long footnotes describing theological concepts; took several courses at Fifth Avenue Presbyterian's Center for Christian Studies; discovered writing poetry there through a course on Modern Poetry and the Book of Hours; celebrated communion every day at St. Bartholomew's Episcopal Church on my lunch breaks; and hung out at Union Theological Seminary, all while starting to worship at a Lutheran Church.

Perhaps most powerfully, every morning in New York, I would also shut my eyes and pray on the A train on the way to work, envisioning myself encapsulated in a ball of light. Everyone in the train was part of that prayer, wishing them peace, healing, and love. It was the only time in my life I can say my prayers were regular and absolutely transformative. Not so after seminary.

IV.

Religion in America seems often to chase LGBT people away with dreadful visions of a tortured afterlife based on our particular "sin" in this life. I believe instead that these religious voices are simply making for a tortured life for us here on earth, and have nothing to do with the possible afterlife.

Shortly after my denomination, the ELCA, voted to allow open and partnered LGBT people to serve as ordained clergy in 2009, a series of articles popped up on the LGBT news-blog Queerty.com written by Lutherans about the changes voted in, which many in the church had been working hard to get enacted for many years.

Given the voices of hatred towards LGBT people from people calling themselves "Christian," it is no wonder to me why many would be forced away from the church, indeed run screamin. Personally, after the last several years of waiting for a church and wondering if this vocation to the ministry will ever pan out, or if I will just look like I was aimlessly drifting for 10 years, I can genuinely empathize with the feeling that churches can seem at best irrelevant and at worst actively, vocally, and indeed politically harmful, even deadly in their narrow and rigid messages of wide sin and narrow salvation.

So why go back to a religion that has spent so much energy on actively opposing me and millions of LGBT people?

Because God bewitched me, "jokester that she is," as one of my clergy acquaintances says.

V.

The brain in me that worked so hard to keep me in the closet for my first 10 years of knowing I was attracted to my same sex, which worked so hard on problems of philosophy, music theory, and politics, which reached out to the farthest reaches of the universe and tried to reach beyond, to the other side of the universe into whatever might be beyond, and that dismissed the possible reality of God, ended up taking a back seat to my gut and to my heart after I came out.

Why do we do what we do, think what we think, and feel what we feel? When I was younger, I thought that we human beings functioned best when we did not let our emotions get involved, but used as pure of reason as we could, unclouded by the irrational heart. But when my heart and mind connected, which I strongly feel was not until after I came out for the first time to other people, I dropped my insistence on pure reason, and learned I was a gut sort of person.

The heart has its own knowledge, the brain its own, the gut as well, the soul another, close to the spirit. If all lie in separate containers all the time, and do not converse, they can grow lonely, proud, and dictatorial, as each of us becomes without the benefit of kind and challenging human interaction, hearing various points of view, and feeling closely how our opinions affect the lives of others.

God works through our minds, but surpasses the bounds of reason. Sexuality, as well, cannot be the sole concern of one organ over another.

In coming out, I set myself on a path to connect with God in a way that never would have happened if I'd attempted to make sense of life with whatever share of reason I was given between my ears and behind my eyes.

And that path is not over yet. God hasn't brought me this far just to let me go now.

15-for-15 III: Honesty

2011-05-01T22:44:00.145-05:00

"It's not lying if they make you lie."
--Brian Kinney (Gale Harold), "Queer as Folk" (Showtime)

I.

Now, be honest. You might not rejoice in the death of Osama bin Laden, but is there no part of you that was at least relieved to hear that he had finally been killed? And if relieved, grateful? A seed of inappropriate glee, perhaps, that would taint you as someone who can't quite live up to the great martyrs of peace of the past?

The last thing most of us would want is for people to know all of our true feelings all the time, because a lot of those feelings could affect our relationships, jobs, and general reputations should they be known. So we have to be selective in what we tell others. Honesty, true, unadulterated, 24/7/365 honesty, is nearly impossible to have within the recesses of our own minds and souls, and quite impossible to achieve in dealing with others.

But some level of honesty, with others, about ourselves and our views, is absolutely essential to who we are. We must select what we will present, and in presenting, create the "I" that others see through their eyes.

Honesty is central in coming out of the closet, but it is not simple. It begins with people being honest with themselves about their true feelings, and that may lead into a crisis that may or may not resolve itself with becoming honest with others. Some may come out, at an early age, without any complications in their own minds--I've met people for whom this is the case. But for many others who are gay or lesbian, a wide variety of complex factors and fears affects this kind of honesty with others.

II.

Foremost are the factors of one's fear of losing close relationships with people they think might not take this news well and decide to end the relationship. And this has indeed happened with a number of people who have come out as gay or lesbian, particularly before the last two decades. It has happened with me.

At one time, not long ago, and indeed still to this day, the economic factors of losing one's job or not being able to gain employment were key to keeping people in the closet. I worried, and am not proud of doing so, that I would be disowned if my parents knew I was gay, and I did not see how I could pay for college if I were to come out when I was still in high school. I sensed anyway that I would become like Stephen King's Carrie had I come out in high school, with a bucket of blood hanging over my head at every turn, ready to end forever any cool factor that I had built up.

The fear of being beaten or abused has also been central to people not coming out, for this is still a realistic fear for many who are young, and more who have moved on into their own lives, yet live within tight restrictions on their expression within those lives.

Even in a society as tolerant as ours, we are far from living in a "safe" place as openly gay and lesbian people everywhere we go. Where we might choose to hold hands, might give in public the most innocuous signs of affection towards those for whom we feel affection, things that I would guess every heterosexual person takes for granted, is still greatly limited, in many cases only in those establishments that openly accept or cater to gays and lesbians or the neighborhoods immediately around them.

In vast parts of our country, we're still sitting in the Stonewall Inn on June 26, 1969, when the police could come in at any moment and take everything in our lives away at their whim. Police raids have famously happened within the last few years in Fort Worth, TX, and Atlanta, GA, hardly small and conservative towns.

The fear of not being able to follow out one's calling in life, whether as a pastor, a professional athlete, a teacher, an actor or actress, musician, business person, or in many other walks of life that still carry a heavy expectation of being heterosexual for the sake of those for whom the business or organization is run, still keeps people in the closet and in relationships that begin as relationships of "convenience," though might develop into more.

One of the hardest things to do is to be honest with oneself about the hard things within oneself, let alone to be frank with others. But both are essential, I would say, to living other than a life of quiet desperation, in the words of Thoreau.

III.

I first was compelled to be honest with myself about being gay because of an overwhelming sexual attraction I had to someone, who although I didn't know, I knew was gay. I saw him every day on the bus that I took from the St. Paul University of Minnesota "farm" campus to the main campus in Minneapolis, on the east bank, when I was there in the summer of 1994.

Perhaps it was his mannerisms that first tripped my nascent gaydar. Perhaps it was the sticker on his bag that said "I fuck to come, not to conceive." But soon I heard him talking about being gay to someone else on the bus. That cinched it for me.

I remember getting off that bus and walking behind him, trying to come up with even a lame pick-up line. But I was afraid of sex, and afraid of contracting HIV, which in 1994 could still be a death sentence for many who were living with it, before the arrival of most anti-retroviral drugs. Fear of many kinds kept the lid on a boiling pot of hormones and emotions for yet another period of time when it could have come off. The result was the journal entry that I shared in my first entry in this series.

Later, I was compelled to be honest with others about what I felt, because I learned that those feelings went beyond mere sexual attraction. I learned that I had feelings for someone else that were just like those feelings that I had watched in most every movie ever made, and that were described in the vast majority of songs ever written. If people could make those movies, and sing those songs, then I deserved to value and honor those feelings in myself, as imperfectly even as I expressed them at that time, as well.

I became honest with others when my heart connected, perhaps for the first time, to my head, and I could no longer deny that I, too, had a claim to my feelings and had needs that issued from them, and not only from my penis or my brain. I still hadn't experienced anything that I longed to experience physically, but I knew what it was that I wanted, to be with another man, and what I could never have: a Jane to my John, a Mrs. to my Mr.

As deeply as I had tried to feel romantic attachments to girls, and then to young women, nothing could connect with my deeper reality. No kiss with a girl could do anything more for me than leave me feeling weird, and that wasn't fair to either of us. No amount of visual stimulation could have any effect beyond moving my retinas from one part of a page or screen to another.

For a long time, I thought there was just something wrong with me, that I needed to try harder, and I'll be honest, I never prayed to God that things were different--I didn't even think to do so. Some have described this feeling as noticing at some point that you had boarded the wrong airplane, flying to the wrong destination, yet without any way to alter the course.

It would be a long time before I sat back and enjoyed the flight.

IV.

The quotation above, which the character Brian Kinney says several times in the TV series "Queer as Folk," resonates with me on many levels. Lying, and the moral approbation that might be attached to it, is morally wrong only so long as you have any other option at all. It is like the legitimate defense of killing only when one's life is in immediate danger, only in the case of outing oneself, it's everything that attaches to one's life, and in some cases, one's physical life itself. This is a fear that some gay and lesbian people carry with themselves every day.

I tend to judge those who have not come out most especially when I do not remember what it was like before I came out. It's easy to cast such stones when you forget that you were once (and perhaps sometimes are still) afraid of being hit with them yourself.

If everyone who could come out would come out, in all circumstances, to all people, all the time, there would be no closets, not because there wouldn't be anyone in them, but because there would be no need for them. That area of privacy in one's life is there almost exclusively because of the possible repercussions and fears that I stated above.

"It's nobody's business but my own" only so long as were that business to be made known, there would be negative consequences. Inconsequential business has no need of privacy. Otherwise, why not put up that picture of your hottie love muffin in the office, like everyone else does, or talk about your weekend, or mention your wife or husband in your sermon, or talk about that experience that changed your life and the person who was there to hold your hand when it happened?

But reality remains: it's not safe for everyone to come out in every circumstance at all times. The closet is still a place of cold refuge for many, many people.

V.

I do carry a rather unattractive chip on my shoulder about the consequences of honesty I have faced in my own calling to being an ordained Lutheran minister, as one who is yet neither ordained, nor a Lutheran minister. I have the same training, with the same professors and mentors, as dozens of my seminary colleagues who are now ordained and in church calls. Yet, my last four years of waiting for even an interview for a first call in my present denomination looks like this:

Make sure you file everything on time.
Thank you for filing everything on time and completing your requirements.
We approve you for ordination and think you will be an excellent pastor. You have wonderful gifts for ministry.
Why did you have to put your sexual orientation in your paperwork? Nobody else does.
No church will give you an interview unless you "fly under the radar," "don't lead with your sexual orientation," and "feel things out as far as their attitudes go before you say anything about being gay."
We don't have any churches for you, but your name comes up all the time in our conversations about churches looking for first calls.
That church would be great for you, but it is not a first call church.
We gave that church to someone as a first call even though it wasn't a first call church--it just fit them.
There are no churches at the moment that would be open to someone like you.
We're afraid of even recommending you to that church, so why would you want to interview there?
Any church would be lucky to have you as its pastor.
The bishop has said that he can do nothing for you.
The bishop has your paperwork and will follow up with you shortly.
You're too outspoken.
All of the bishops admired your integrity, but they cannot do anything as long as you say you will not be in compliance with the rules.
There are too many other candidates waiting for a first call for you to be considered in our synod.
We gave that church to someone who wasn't in our synod because it was a good match for them, even though we have several other candidates waiting for call.
You have demonstrated maturity, compassion, and extraordinary patience throughout this process. We admire your consistent positive attitude.
A lot of people are affected by the economy because pastors are not retiring since they have lost their pensions. But we still placed 5 of 6 candidates whom we received in the Fall draft in first calls.

It goes on like this, and it is little wonder that a part of my spiritual life has atrophied. But, to be honest, that is also my responsibility to say "enough is enough," and move on with my life.

Honesty has not been the best policy in my dealings with the church, and something seems wrong with that.

Thankfully, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America has moved into a new period of honesty in which it can value the honesty of its clergy and commissioned lay persons and stop forcing its pastors and candidates for ordination to lie about being gay or lesbian, as it did for more than 20 years. Before August 21, 2009, a pastor could be brought up on trial for publicly admitting he or she was gay or lesbian and in a relationship, and a church could be completely removed from the ELCA in an expensive and embarrassing church trial; thankfully this is no longer the case.

Yet the pre-change reality remains in the ELCA, and no change has happened in many other denominations. And gay and lesbian persons are by no means the only people who are disadvantaged in the current ELCA system of approval, call, and ordination.

VI.

Being honest, as being a bully, is not a simple issue. It's not the picture of George Washington and the cherry tree, or of "Honest Abe," whose early business practices, though unsuccessful, were apparently unflinchingly honest. These stereotypes of being honest are not such that any mortal can attain, just as no human besides Jesus could be sinless, and I question what that meant for Jesus.

The issue of marriage, beyond being an issue of civil rights for gay and lesbian people, is an issue of honesty: being able to be publicly honest about who your better half indeed is, as well as being honest about the limitations and realities of any marriage.

The main argument that I would lift up in favor of same-sex marriage is not even equality, because we are equal, and to debate our equality and the equality of our relationships is an insult. I think a better argument is to state the honest reality: that conservative moralists are imposing unreachable expectations on those marriages that they do allow, while at the same time, by opposing same-sex marriages, they suggest that these "traditional" marriages could be blown over by the first stiff gay wind to hit them. I want to think heterosexual relationships are stronger than this.

There are also a vast number of people who vote against same-sex marriage, and a vast number of politicians who introduce this as a wedge issue into political discourse, who are far from being honest about their motives.

Each Minnesota legislator who has voted in favor of advancing a constitutional amendment against same-sex marriage, as in all 30 states that ban same-sex marriage in their constitutions, and each citizen voter, should face a crisis of honesty on their position against same-sex marriage. Is a same-sex marriage going to "destroy" opposite-sex marriages, or are a host of factors already in place, from no-fault divorce, to economic injustice, to exceedingly high societal demands, threatening these marriages?

Bad relationships, impossible demands of perfection, and economic adversity, among other things, destroy marriage, not gay and lesbian relationships.

VII.

Perhaps death is the most honest thing there is. There's no saying it is anything that it is not. There may be many varieties of death, but when someone is stone cold dead, that's that. Which is why it is so important to live your life while you have it.

I wonder sometimes what it would be like if honesty were more constitutionally a part of who we are. It's not a natural human state, but must be taught by instilling a guilty conscience as constant punishment for not being honest.

Being who one is honestly should not entail being guilty. Some things about ourselves could benefit from change. Sexual orientation is not one of them.

What, for you, are the most difficult things to be honest about with yourself, dear reader? And what in your life has initiated a crisis of honesty in dealing with others? I think we all have substantial experience in debating these questions within ourselves, and some of these parts of ourselves have forced us into our own versions of the closet. Closets are not just for people of a particular sexual orientation: there are endless varieties of closets.

My hope is that we might someday very soon reach a new level of honesty in our national discourse on sexual orientation, race, gender discrimination, and a host of other issues that can get better only when we start being honest with ourselves and with others about what we think and how we feel, without descending into banning people's relationships constitutionally, breaking off relationships because we disagree, and falling deeper into a pit of partisan tar.

15-for-15 II: Bully, or It Gets Better

2011-04-30T23:57:00.002-05:00

My first crush was on a bully. And it was probably not you.

I.

Last Fall, the nation was gripped by reports of young gay and lesbian people committing suicide. Although this is sadly nothing new, this was the first time perhaps many people became exposed to the issue of higher rates of suicide for LGBTQ youth. A report by the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force recently profiled even higher incidences of abuse against Transgender persons.

"Bullies," such as Dharun Ravi, Tyler Clementi's roommate at Rutgers University, whose abuse helped to incite Tyler's death, have had their actions come to greater prominence and national disdain. Some of the other prominent suicidal deaths have also focused on the actions of others who abused them. In light of these deaths, schools have reviewed their anti-bully training and policies, and calls have gone out from all corners to end bullying as we know it.

I, too, became involved in the anti-bullying campaign supported by some parents, teachers, and students in the Anoka-Hennepin School District, which I wrote about last year in these pages. But I did not pause to remember at that time that when I was 12, I developed a crush on a bully.

II.

He wasn't the first bully I knew, by any stretch of the imagination. I remember one of my childhood acquaintances, a year younger than myself, gutting a living toad with a fork when I was about 5 years old. It was one of the worst things I have ever seen in my life. Several years later, this same fellow walked up to me in the hallway of our elementary school with a strange, big smile on his face, and proceeded to punch me, hard, in the stomach. And what do you think he turned out to become? A serial killer who had his start with small animals? No. A dentist. Bingo. Mind you, a few years after that, I hatched a scheme not much better, and tried to pay 2 friends a quarter each, to catch frogs so that I could cut off their legs (the frog legs, not my friends' legs) and sell them to the local grocery store. I doubt that I would have found any humane way to have done in the frogs. Thankfully, they refused the money, and saved me from becoming a frog murderer.

This bully wasn't perhaps even the first boy I had a crush on. That could conceivably have come as far back as age 3, when I had a fascination for an older boy on a dirt bike. Once, when I was about that age, I remember going up to him and his friends, who were sitting in a grove of trees, and announcing to them that my Mother had told me I could spend 5 minutes with them. I don't know if she had actually said that, or if it seemed to me like a convenient lie. As soon as I sat down, I heard, "Well, time's up." I'm sure many wouldn't think of this as a "gay crush," but there you have it.

I did have a number of crushes on girls throughout my younger years, at about the same time most boys were just interested in playing baseball and riding dirt bikes, which I enjoyed very much as well, but when the boys started to take to their bike rides with girls, I turned inward and started playing the piano, which carried me sexlessly through my teenage years.

III.

I met this particular enthralling young bully while playing baseball, probably when I was about 9 or 10. I don't remember him being such a particularly dreadful person at that point in his development, but my memories are sketchy. He was my age, and liked baseball too. He also liked to beat kids up. I hear that once he beat up someone's kid sister.

In a few years, after my hormones started going completely kerplewie with puberty, I remember watching him walking down the hallway, in a white button-down shirt, like he had been enveloped by a cloud. I had a feeling of exhilaration, fear, and a longing that caught in my throat. The next year, in gym class, I saw him without that shirt, or anything else, on. I had an electric shock go through me that I have since heard described as a spontaneous orgasm. The only time in my life. It was literally shocking, and told me this was no ordinary feeling I was having.

Needless to say, I never said a thing about this crush, to him or to anyone else in my class. This is the first I've put it out there, not quite "Boys in the Band" style, sitting around by a phone late at night and calling our old crushes up, but it has met your eye, dear reader. This was a big part of my life for a few formative years.

When we were sophomores, he used to stab me with pens in my legs. I guess I was hoping it would have been something else besides pens with which he was stabbing me. My health teacher gave me permission to beat the shit out of him, but I didn't. I was still somehow in his thrall, and at the same time I couldn't hurt someone to whom I was attracted like that.

IV.

How do we come to be attracted to people who treat us like shit? At the very least, the issue of who is a "bully" and our relationship to them, is complex. I can only think that I knew what I was, a little gay homosexual faggot, and that somehow in my complicated understanding of myself at that age, I deserved to be beat up. This wasn't long after Boy George, one of the first gay cultural icons, released "Do You Really Want to Hurt Me." Boy George creeped me out, and I didn't want to be anything like him. But something resonated with me and this song, even at that age. The names of derision for people who looked at other boy like I did, as well, resonated in me, and I sat in it all like a lobster starting to be steamed in a deadly stew.

I hear from people of all sexual orientations this inclination to fall for those who hurt them, especially from women who endure physical and emotional abuse for years, from one person or from a variety of lovers or partners who seem to be similar. Women still often don't receive the best messages about themselves from society either, particular as sexual beings.

Reader, whatever your age, race, gender identity, sexual orientation, whatever your place in life, if this is you, nothing in you deserves to get you beat up. Nothing. Ever.

It wasn't as though I was never the bully myself. I will never forget kicking a little kid, maybe 2 years younger than myself, in the gutter in front of my house. He annoyed me, but he didn't deserve that.

I was a bully to the first boy who kissed me too. It was such a surprise, standing at the top of the stairs of the house I grew up in. I don't remember what I did at the time, but I did not react well. And a few years later I beat him up in an elementary school fight. He wasn't the only one, and I got beat myself a few times. And elementary school isn't that last time I could be said to have bullied someone.

But, seriously, nothing, no thoughts, desires, impulses, ideas, that take place in our minds, hearts, or emotions, deserve to get us abused. We do not bring abuse on ourselves. We do not deserve it. Nor do we have permission to abuse others. Ever. From anyone. Not even from God.

V.

Many people are hurt at some time by other people labeled as "bullies" of all ages--random people, acquaintances, neighbors, professors, lovers & spouses, bosses, road ragers, clergy--and we are, sometimes, ourselves those who practice harassment, violence, humiliation, intimidation, and a variety of other horrible things against those we know and don't know, and sometimes even against those we love.

Is "bully" really a helpful term for those who are beating up, abusing, sexually harassing or violating, calling horrible names, stalking, embarrassing, and doing all of these things against someone in person, by text message, on Facebook, and in a number of other media in this media rich age? Isn't "terrorist" perhaps a better title, given that what they are doing is inciting terror?

It's easy to hate these people, especially when each of us probably has a seed of being one of these people inside of us. I know I do.

VI.

"It gets better" is an apt message--but it must go further. It must add the word "when." "It gets better when..." for example, when we treat ourselves with the respect, integrity, and love that we don't get from everyone else, and when, perhaps, we see that bullies are not necessarily a monolithic "other."

A recent scene in the TV series Glee's episode "Born This Way" features a reconciliation of sorts between Kurt and Dave Karofsky, whose violent abuse and threatening of death to Kurt forced Kurt's transfer to another school. Dave, as viewers know from pervious episodes, is dealing with some sexual orientation issues himself. But Dave can never again abuse Kurt, and must give himself some breathing space in his understanding of his own sexual orientation. He sees that he cannot continue to do what he had done, and admitting to that and following through were key for that reconciliation to work.

In real life, the abuse of Jamie Nabozny, profiled in the recent terrific documentary "Bullied," led to a nationally-profiled court case that turned on the honesty of one of those who had tortured Jamie on a regular basis, confessing his torture in open court, which honesty came even after high-ranking members of the Ashland, Wisconsin, school system had sought to cover up their complicity in Jamie's abuse by claiming never to have heard of it.

In each case, things got better when the truth was told, or at least understood by those who committed acts of violence, and when those who were abusers had an opportunity to step out of that role, which can be as stifling and life-draining as the role of "victim" that seeks to complement "bully." But sometimes even reconciliation cannot be possible or even desirable. Sometimes it gets better only when we can get some distance, and peace within ourselves.

We should not be our own judges, despite the fact that we often judge ourselves far more harshly than others would, and yet we should not destroy each other with judgment either. Yet there must be justice, for the person who is bullied, and for the bully.

Moving beyond the easy categories of "bully" and "victim" might be one way in which we can start to get that justice for both. Admitting truth of wrongdoing and seeking reconciliation may be another. The work of the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation is central to bringing to light this kind of truth about wrongdoing towards LGBTQ people on local and national scales.

Tomorrow I will explore the idea of honesty, admitting truth, in more detail, and how this has impacted my own journey in these last 15 years of being openly gay.

15 for 15: 15 Meditations for 15 Years of Being Openly Gay

2011-04-29T23:57:00.011-05:00

"Mourn your losses, because they will be many. But celebrate your victories, because they will be few."
- Debbie Novotny (Sharon Gless), Queer as Folk (Showtime, 2003)

I.

I don't know whether this line, which I know from the Showtime series "Queer as Folk," is actually original to it, or quoted from elsewhere. But it is right on the money.

There are few occasions for celebrating anniversaries in our lives: marriage or relationship, sobriety, the opening of a successful business, and ordination are the ones that immediately come to my mind. As of today, I cannot celebrate any of those in my life. But there's one I can celebrate, which is coming up a week from today.

15 years ago, on May 6, 1996, I came out to another person as being gay for the first time in my life. I had come out to myself, actually admitted to myself that I was gay, only two years before. The homophobia that I had learned over my first 19 years, which came from many sources, was deeply a part of me when I wrote:

I have heretofore not revealed my most innermost thoughts and secrets, not to these pages, let alone anyone else. I'm afraid that the pages may fall into the hands of others, after I have written what I shall write and my secret will be revealed to all. For now, I will reveal it only to these pages--a large step indeed.

I have known since puberty that I am attracted to the male, and not the female, body....It is definitely not a choice that I have made--not as some homosexuals, I would choose not to be one. My attitude would bring me severe reprimands from most other homosexuals, and my inclinations would obviously bring me nothing but hardship from all of my friends and family.

...I am definitely not gay, in the strict sense of the word. I do not act faggishly.... I merely find the male body sexually attractive. ...I do not particularly want to form a true love relationship with another man. I do not want to marry another male, just as I do not want to become involved in the traditional gay causes--the psychotic activities of many of these politically active homosexuals sickens, surprises, and depresses me. --6.24.1994, 9:45pm.

To look back on these words, as I have from time to time over the years, both saddens me, that I ever felt that way, and gives me a feeling of empathy for so many who "struggle" with homosexuality, whether because they are gay or lesbian themselves, or because they oppose even the slightest positive mention of homosexuality. They also give me an imperfect empathy for others who struggle because others seek to marginalize them.

How I get from that day nearly 17 years ago, through the anniversary whose original day came some two years later, to today, is complicated, and yet it is part of the most important work I have done in my life: coming to terms with something in myself that up until 2003 in these United States, could be punishable under the law. I have come a long way personally, and attitudes across the nation have changed significantly, in these 15+ years.

Thankfully, as Dan Savage said, it gets better.

II.

I write these following meditations over the next 2 weeks to recognize this journey of my own, which is the journey of so many, even those who are not gay or lesbian, for the closet, the suffocating privacy that we impose upon ourselves because we fear what will happen if we don't do that, is the reality for many who suffer through their lives in silence.

I don't mean these meditations to be a judgment on those who do live in the closet--they must do what they must do, as I must do what I must do. If anything, I would want any invective here to go towards those who enforce the closet on others, because my guess is that many who inhabit this liminal place between being secret and being known would choose to be who they are in public, if they felt, as I did not at the time I came out to myself, that they would not incur wide wrath, loss of key relationships, jobs, homes, personal injury, and even death. Death and significant harm still comes to people who are gay and lesbian for that very fact alone.

III.

Over the next 15 days, from tonight until two Fridays for now, I will write one meditation each night on some aspect of this journey. In each case, I will not identify the others who are a part of my journey at this time by their real names.
My plan for the structure of these writings will occur as follows:
1. 15-4-15: 15 days of meditations for 15 years of being openly gay
2. Bully or It Gets Better

3. Honesty

4. Gaining My Religion

5. Who I Am

6. The First Time
7. Pride

8. Why I Must Be Out

9. Coming Out Everyday

10. Stereotypes: Lonely & Sad

11. Stereotypes: Promiscuity: Fuck Them All

12. Stereotypes: The Homosexual Menace

13. Self-Acceptance

14. Other-Acceptance

15. Anti-Bully or Walk Hand-in-Hand

This exploration will be framed by the experience of bullying, and working against bullying, which is ongoing work for me and for many. The way we treat others does depend to a great degree on the way in which others treat us, and in the way we treat ourselves. The crisis of anti-gay bullying is something that has become much more public in the last 6 months, but is something that goes back millennia, and something that may take more than a lifespan to repair.

My ultimate aim, besides making this experience public and, hopefully, resonant with some others, is reconciliation: self-reconcilation, other-reconciliation, and communal reconciliation. I don't know how I will accomplish some of that at this point, and some is just part of a long-term process that cannot be completed in a couple of weeks.

It is my hope that any who choose to read this will find it in some way helpful and worth reading. Even if that is not the case, it will be a helpful exercise for me, and, I hope, might inspire one or another person to undertake a similar project with themselves.

Ultimately, love, of self, others, community, and God, takes leaps as must faith, and, in the words of one of my favorite spiritual figures, Father James Huntington, "Love must act as light must shine and fire must burn."

I appreciate your company, dear reader, along the way.

Christ Without a Cross Dies Twice

2011-04-22T20:33:00.007-05:00

"For me, kind Jesus, was thine incarnation,

thy mortal sorrow, and thy life's oblation;

thy death of anguish and thy bitter passion.

for my salvation." --Johann Heermann tr. Robert Bridges

Our culture denies death. Our culture denies death's power by saying that it is nothing, only a change. Our culture denies death's sorrow by making of it a celebration. And our culture makes of death's horror a cheap cologne that smells more like bacon than decomposition.

The challenge of Christ's death and resurrection is the greatest gift that the Christian church can give this culture, indeed any culture. But Christ without a cross, especially among his followers, dies two deaths: the actual death, and the death of relevance, for Jesus as just another man who died, another sucker whom the state overpowered, another dupe of the Caesar, no matter how many nice things he did or good things he taught, is doubly dead.

II.

The doctrine of atonement, the idea by which the death of Jesus makes good for the sins of the world, for our sins, is problematic for many to say the least. The idea that this act of Jesus, casting aside his Messianic crown for us, was in fact an act of divine child abuse, God killing God's own son, or the act of a political prisoner alone, seems to me fairly pervasive.

One powerful idea given me in seminary was that instead of a Mel Gibson-style pornographic torture fest, Christ's torture and death on the cross was an interchange of God's justice for our constitutional human injustice, happening through Jesus as through an electrical conduit. More than a felix culpa, a "happy fault," that "allows" God to build something better out of our faults, this interchange is an exchange of all that is just in God for all that is unjust in a creation that goes its own way. We get a better deal.

III.

I'm hardly a heavy-duty theologian, or a student of literature and art and cinema who can quote all of the concepts that I'm referring to here in the history of human achievement. But it seems pretty clear to me that many in the church, uncomfortable as we are with death, might seek to hide Jesus's death behind bunnies, eggs, candy, and parades.

What is an age-appropriate explanation of the crucifixion and resurrection to children? I'm by no means an expert, but talking directly about Jesus dying, and God bringing Jesus back from the dead, seems like it could be very powerful for those whom we often forget about when tragedy happens, because it seems even more difficult to explain it to children, who know something bad when they see, hear, feel, and experience it.

It seems to me that Christ without a cross dies twice, as I said above: his actual death, and the death of his relevance to us as Christians and to our or any culture, time or place. Our culture is not exclusively Christian, but it is one to which we might share a word from this perspective of death and resurrection, and at that a word of hope. Jesus without resurrection is Jesus without hope.

Perhaps we are ashamed because we cannot explain God's place in evil, either the evil of the crucifixion or the evil of natural disaster, war, famine, and other engineered acts of evil that we humans perpetrate on other humans?

Perhaps it is so difficult to believe in the resurrection that it is easier to sugarcoat it than try to explain it to others, much less ourselves and our own people? I can't say I understand the death and resurrection of Jesus all that well, but something in me believes beyond the need to sugarcoat my own impending death with the cross, to use the cross as a means of escape from reality, as must appear to many who do not share this same belief.

A church that sugarcoats the death and resurrection of Jesus with the candy of culture may well be as odious as a believer who uses the cross to deny his or her own death. But as Dietrich Bonhoeffer said famously in Cost of Discipleship:

"As we embark upon discipleship we surrender ourselves to Christ in union with his death--we give over our lives to death. Thus it begins; the cross is not the terrible end to an otherwise godfearing and happy life, but it meets us at the beginning of our communion with Christ. When Christ calls people, he bids them come and die....In fact every command of Jesus is a call to die, with all our affections and lusts. But we do not want to die, and therefore Jesus Christ and his call are necessarily our death as well as our life. The call to discipleship, the baptism in the name of Jesus Christ means both life and death" (Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship, 89-90. New York: Macmillan, 1959, Touchstone ed. 1995).

There is a broader point of forgiveness and mutual burden-bearing to Bonhoeffer's message here, but the necessity of death, and of death in Christ for a Christian, is of central moment.

Any version of Christ that can escape the tomb without the cross is not the Christ. Any version of Christ that gets caught in torture without the work of God in resurrection from the tomb is not the Christ. But my sense is that our human tendency is more to liberate Christ and ourselves through him without taking the hardest steps to and through the cross.

IV.

I wonder if a failure to encounter Jesus in all of his shame on the cross, around the crucifixion, and jumping right to the resurrection, may not be an element of what has chased people away from church by the droves?

Not only has there been a cultural shift since the 1960s that shows a marked decline in the relevance of church in much of American society, but perhaps the church itself has aided in people leaving it through downplaying its own relevance through its core concepts, and through becoming a place of trying to make people feel good about themselves in a way that a gin and tonic could do much better.

As a kid, and as an adult, direct talk has engaged me much more than beating around the bush. I don't want to hear about a Jesus who is merely a glory-machine, triumphing over death without experiencing it. That kind of Jesus doesn't make much difference to me or anyone else.

I want to hear about a Jesus who went all the way, who experienced everything I have experienced, and who came through it in a way that I can know meant a lot to him, not only an insignificant key change in the tune he was whistling, but a whole shift in the reality of what death and our relationship with God means to me and to humanity.

We crucify Christ again by forgetting the cross. We crucify Christ again by forgetting the tomb. We crucify Christ again by forgetting the resurrection. It is only with each of these elements, and by accompanying Christ in these places, and in teaching this to our children, and in insisting on our reality to the wider culture, challenging first its denial of death, that we respect most profoundly the God who has given us Godself in human form, and who has loved us so much that even death can't separate us from God.

Loving Jesus, the tomb awaits, but not yet. Nor your glorious resurrection. Not yet. Keep me for a moment from it, that its power and glitter not overwhelm me. Keep me for a moment with you in death's embrace. Amen.

(Photo credit: http://www.mrbramesblog.org/2010/07/weekend-in-new-york-part-1-cloisters.html)

"The Stone that the Builders Rejected"

2011-04-19T13:58:00.005-05:00

"The stone that the builders rejected has become the chief cornerstone." --Psalm 118:22

For some reason, I thought this line appeared at some point during the Holy Week readings, but as it is, the only time we who follow the Revised Common Lectionary will be hearing it this year is on Easter.

Yet this phrase informs the whole Holy Week leading up to the crucifixion of Jesus, and particularly what happens through God's raising of Jesus on the third day. The stone, which didn't look like much, which was mis-shapen, mistaken, mis-heard, the stone that rolled the wrong way down the hill, that didn't quite seem to fit the tomb, those stones from which God would raise up children, all these stones were rejected. Those in charge, the builders, didn't happen to think the stones would fit, or that they should properly be included in the plans for such a magnificent building.

Not only did the rejected stone end up being used, but it became the most important stone of all, on which the entire edifice was built. What this edifice is, who the builders were, who the stones were, is all part of the Christian faith tradition, and important questions to wrestle with. But for now, simply, I'm hearing the stone that was rejected, and marveling at how it became a cornerstone.

II.

It's hard not to read myself into this line, and perhaps a bit perilous at the same time. We all experience rejection, and few are probably really spectacularly happy at being rejected. I fear reaching out to people whom I think might reject me, because that has happened plenty. I'm cautious of putting my written work out there in the fear that it might be rejected, which is pretty much what generally happens to written work for which people seek publication. I'm self-conscious about talking about a faith in a loving and graceful God that challenges the view of God and Jesus presented by many who go by the name "Christian," even though sharing that graceful vision of God is more vital now, more life and death, than ever.

The stone has been rejected. Accounted unworthy by those who are supposed to know what is worthy and what isn't. Rightly tossed to the side, and thankfully out of the way.

I would not be the only person who has been at some point rejected, in many ways, not least of which by the church. I have also been accepted in many ways, by many people, and not least of which by the church.

But instead of the rejection stopping the stone, it becomes the cornerstone. It risks everything and comes out ahead. I don't know if I'm that adventuresome, or just wish to hold on to what I have, modest as it might be. The stone could have stayed stuck.

The time comes to risk it all does come, and at that point, rejection cannot be a defining issue.

III.

I've been questioning lately whether that time is coming for me. My job, at which I'm gratefully accepted, will not last forever, and I must find new employment in the next 6 months. Plenty of time not to have that end come as a shock, but I need to get serious about ministry, if that is to become the calling in reality for which I've been called, educated, and sent into a land of limbo. This is not so different from a lot of people who have been affected by the down economy of the last 3 years. To have employment has been a blessing that I am not unaware of.

Many of us, no matter our sexual orientations, have faced this challenge of being rejected in many ways at many times.

I've recently become aware that a lot more people than just myself have been waiting for years for their first calls to become pastors in the ELCA. A number of these people mention how difficult it has been to piece together a life while trying to retain hope that God indeed is back there somewhere, having something to do with this lengthening road that seems not to be leading anywhere.

In times when you still hear that there's a clergy shortage, we would be hard-pressed to understand why, when sitting as rejected stones next to the road. But perhaps we will become the cornerstones of the new buildings, the new ways in which the church will need to be in the time to come?

IV.

Many question, rightly, the place and shape of the church in the years to come. My work church is joining my worship church and another church in a 3-way configuration in which each church will have its own worship space, retain its own identity, and share space. The reason is because each of these churches built their buildings and envisioned their futures with about 90% more people than they have now. The old ways, as the old buildings, are crumbling. New people with new ideas are going to be key in bringing the Gospel to new generations who will not be content just to debate the curtains in the library or whether or not mums should be the flower on the altar Sunday mornings.

What are the words that we stones, whether we've been rejected, included, or are yet becoming, can speak to a church that often seems to stand in stone-deaf silence to the needs of its people?

I was grateful the other day to share an idea for a welcoming church start in an area that has no LGBTQ-publicly welcoming Lutheran churches with the bishop of the local ELCA synod here. He listened patiently, kindly, and said that my idea would be hard to implement. I responded that truth that what would make it a hard proposition is what would make it especially necessary.

Congregations that proclaim their welcome most earnestly, and are often welcoming in many ways, often fall short when it comes to LGBTQ people. That is one reason why there are still only about as many ELCA congregations that are publicly welcoming of LGBTQ people as there were congregations that left the ELCA in order to be particularly unwelcoming or because they felt the ELCA had abandoned its Biblical principles.

What God will make of us stones is yet to be seen. But our church needs us, as it needs every potential leader, ordained or lay, who prayerfully feels compelled to make a difference, because the time for that difference to be made is passing us by.

If we do not wish harsher varieties of Christianity to control the public perception of "Christian" for good, some of us have to start speaking up more, and some of our churches and denominations need to get behind us and figure out how best to use our gifts.

In the meantime, this stone is open to being included, open to listening to other stones that have been or have felt rejected, as well as to pushing his agenda for God's grace and justice onto the builders who need to hear it.

Gracious God of all that we are and all that we can ever be, lift us up to be there for your people who are lost in the night, who wait for you as watchers wait for morning, who feel that you hate them, that your are angry at them, that you wish them destruction, that you are damning them to an eternity of torment for some arbitrary reason. Is this your will, God, that people doubt you because you seem cruel and whimsical? I have a harder time believing that than that you do not exist at all. In whatever way you can, work through each of us to raise up another dear stone who has felt rejected, that we might build up your cathedral of grace on earth as it is in heaven. Through Jesus, the rejected stone who became the chief cornerstone in your plan for reconciliation, we pray. Amen.

My NOH8 Story on a Day of Silence or Meditation on my Namesake

2011-04-15T21:55:00.003-05:00

Back in February, I had the chance to attend one of the most wonderful gatherings of LGBTQ people I've ever had the chance to attend: the Creating Change Conference, in Minneapolis. What made this gathering so great was that it best represented the whole "tent" of queerdom: young and old, men, women, and people who didn't cling to one binary gender, gay, lesbian, bi, and a rainbow of transgender persons, genderqueer, poly, allies, intersex persons, you name it, and persons from the group were beautifully, wonderfully represented.

Among the activities that weekend was the opportunity to become part of the "NOH8" campaign, the brainchild of young gay celebrity photographer Adam Bouska, originally in response to the Prop 8 campaign (which likewise spawned this blog), but now reaching far beyond California and the issue of anti-gay prejudice.

For a mere contribution of $40 (far from a pittance for many people, and an unfortunate bar to the full representation of people who would best represent this campaign), anyone could feel like a supermodel for justice for a few seconds, and come out with a professional portrait of their own activist selves.

At first, I didn't think I could justify this price and this indulgence, as cool as it was. But then I looked at my special shelf, and saw on it my clerical collar, gathering dust, and my Great-Grandfather's watch, a prized heirloom that my Father has let me take care of. Both of these items are very special to me, the one a signature part of my vocation to the Lutheran ministry, and the other, a prized possession of one after whom I was named. The combination of the two inspired me to have that photo taken, and to represent fully who I am to this cause for freedom and equality.

What follows is the description that I provided Adam in helping to understand the meaning behind this pose. I don't know that it will gain any kind of wider audience, and so I share it here for the few of you for whom it might be of interest. I love my vocation, and I love my Great-Grandfather, even though we could never have met. I respect his hard work and dedication to his profession, which the watch honors after 30 years of service. And I am proud of his name, Elsworth, which is my middle name and my Father's middle name, as I am of the man who gave it to me.

Love should never keep one from being honest about love; yet that is what Prop 8 does. May that proposition, in time, fall to the ground as an embarrassment to those who supported it, as much as the pride I feel in opposing it with my whole being.

"My pose for the NOH8 campaign was filled with symbolism both personal and of wider-reach. This pose represents family, time, tradition, my personal and our communal struggle for equality and justice. I wore around my neck my Great-Grandfather's watch given to him for 30 years of service in 1953. I also wore one of my clerical collars.

My calling is to the ordained ministry of Word and sacrament in the Lutheran church, the faith into which my Great-Grandfather was baptized on his deathbed. Yet being openly gay has prevented me from getting a church and being able to wear the collar as an ordained person.

Time, literally entangled around my neck, is therefore represented on at least 3 planes in this image: 1. The time of tradition, weighing physically and metaphorically on my vocation (as it has on many others); 2. The time (4 years) I have been waiting to become a pastor; 3. The duration of our movement for Gay and Lesbian rights, which began in America around the time that this watch was presented to my Great-Grandfather.

I never knew my Great-Grandfather, but am proud of his work and love him. I am, along with my Father, his namesake. Our middle name, Elsworth, was his only given name. Yet past, present, and future meeting in one place on this point is bittersweet. I have encapsulated this experience in the following poem:

Time Entangles Our Necks

Time entangles our necks,

breathing life and death

past years of pressured peace and silenced dreams.

Great our Grandfathers'

wishes, ambitions for

Their Unseen, a gleam

of semen stretched

through several faltered

beams of forced omission.

Faith of our fathers,

stopping still

cockblocking their sons,

frockboxing their daughters

behind a god who pressed in law

what certain ancient lawyers saw.

Faith remains, lifeglue,

more than a living,

or escape from dying,

shining too from the

eyes of the future who

know what the sins

of the past could do:

a lasting screw.

If our great grandfathers only knew.

Ideas Percolating: The Church, HIV/AIDS, Poetry & Community

2011-04-14T23:31:00.012-05:00

I had a few good new ideas at the beginning of the year, most of which seem to have passed on for want of development and conversation. The main energy this year was around community. It's time I got my butt in gear and started to write about them.

The element of community was central in the Anoka/Hennepin School District controversies that I briefly joined in the fall. The District has made its position quite clear on matters of LGBT equality, e.g., having been sued into allowing a lesbian couple to walk together in a high school pep rally last January, canceling performances of a play written by youth for youth for 7th and 8th grade students in Anoka because an anti-gay adult complained about a segment of the play where a young person comes out, and denying any connection between anti-gay bullying and any of the suicides of the previous year in the District, which went against testimony they received over a period of several months in their meetings.

While I continue to support the cause for justice for students in this District, I pulled back from involvement as it became clear that my involvement wasn't directly helpful. But I have other ideas in the works that may be. Time will tell how those will pan out.

Perhaps this community orientation, the need for one community to call itself on how it treats a segment of its population, helped illuminate other thoughts.

II.

Here are three ideas I wish to resurrect with the Easter season:

1. Positive portrayals of Christianity are vital to communal well-being, especially for young people. The voice of condemnation, which belongs rightly to no person, has been too prominent for too long in the church's voice in our society among others. Challenge of culture is one thing; condemnation, or condemnation veiled in "concern," is another. Does one condemn the condemners? This is a good question that begs some further consideration. Progressive faith voices have leveled challenge against judgmental Christianity and judging Christians, but it's still yet to stick on a wider level. But we owe our society the best voices that our faith can provide, and those voices do not preach hate in any form.

2. HIV prevention needs a new focus on the role of community. It's not enough to tell someone to wear a condom, to scare people into abstinence or safer sex by telling them what will happen if they don't, or by shaming people about sex and sexuality. The latest study from the Gay Men's Health Crisis in New York, Gay Men and HIV: An Urgent Priority, highlights the rise in HIV contraction by gay and bisexual men over the last 5 years (particularly between 2005-2008), and one of the highest risk groups is, bingo, "among white MSM (men who have sex with men), the bulk of new infections are occurring among men in their 30s and 40s" (p. 6), which happens to be my age/race group.

The report offers some ideas for this rise, among which are the factors of social isolation, homophobia, and drug use. I could offer them my perspective on why for some of us staying HIV negative seems an ever-increasing struggle, and for others a lost cause. There are a lot of assumptions and judgments around HIV that still carry the prejudices of the 80s, the ideas of "innocent victims" (or victims at all), of certain people deservedly being punished for having the "wrong" kind of sex or for being "promiscuous," and of honest discussions about sex, its meaning in our lives, and our actual practice of it being still to a great degree taboo. These prejudices and judgments must continue to be challenged as they are killing us.

Can we have an honest conversation about barebacking among gay/bi males? It would involve us being honest about the judgments we have around sex and, more importantly, around each other. Gay men can, it's no secret to ourselves or others, be fairly judgmental at times about whom we would choose to relate to from within the gay universe. Age is a factor, money, accomplishment, ability to exclude or include certain people, HIV status, and most certainly body type. These are not hard and fast reasons for being included or excluded in one group of gay men or another, but they often do influence who will talk to you.

The reasons why people have unsafe sex are not just because we're stupid, uncaring, amoral, disgusting people who (according to some with whom I don't agree) flout God's laws and bring upon ourselves and others destruction, and not just because people outside of the gay community are spewing homophobia. Some of that homophobia comes from within, and needs to be faced honestly and together in smaller and larger levels of gay community, and some of it comes from within ourselves, and must be honestly faced there, with a leading edge of grace in both situations that is sometimes harder to use with oneself than with others.

Can you imagine having an honest conversation about some of these issues in church? Now that we have finished fighting the battle for whether or not Gay and Lesbian people can become pastors or have our relationships blessed in the ELCA, to what further conversations about sexuality, which have been forestalled around these other issues for so long, could the church aid in shedding its grace and commitment to honesty? Long and still a proponent of much homophobia, not only does the church have AIDS, as we have said even in our churchwide assemblies, but the church helps to cause AIDS and HIV transmission, and that still needs to be faced.

There's much more to say on this, for another time. But think about how, if you're HIV negative, HIV is not just someone else's burden, and how, if you're HIV positive, you can work claim the support that was there for you in the community during the hardest years of the AIDS holocaust. That support is there, if only from people like me, who don't always know how best to lend it.

3. Poetry can help build, enliven, and liberate community. This idea came to me as part of a Lutheran Poetry Project, which still has yet to be realized. It came to me as a way to put my own negative energy around being marginalized in my long wait for a call into something positive, and something that all those who have felt marginalized by the church could tap into. You don't need to be a professional poet, published, recognized, lauded, or even much cared for, in order to write poetry, and put your situation out there in your own voice. And your voice may be the one that speaks a needed word of truth and consolation to another who is struggling out there in the night.

I heard something last year that I've not been able to verify, but I would not have difficulty believing to be true: African-American women typically wait 5 years for a first call in the ELCA. Is there a way to verify this? There are not a lot of African-American women who are in training to be pastors in the ELCA.

I had a very dear friend in seminary who was an African-American woman who passed away before the end of her seminary training; she would have been a spectacular pastor, and indeed was to me and many others in our year as neighbors in the seminary apartments at PLTS. I miss her terribly, especially her wisdom and strength. The loss for the church of her ministry is as well incalculable. But are there women like her whose voices are ready to be engaged, yet are being left to the side? That, too, is an incalculable loss for a church in need of its best, strongest, and most graceful voices.

What could these voices, the many besides my own who have felt dishonored in waiting so long for the church to implement or even realize our love and capacity for ministry, have to say to a church that is struggling to define its future in a landscape that does not see Jesus or the church as central, as some have called "post-Christian"? Christianity is itself now marginal in a way that it probably has been at many times in the past, yet is only coming to our consciousness in the last 40 years as being marginal, forgotten, unnecessary, even many times either unhelpful or hurtful to Christians and those who believe other creeds or faiths or profess no particular faith alike.

The stone that the builder rejected will become the cornerstone. This was as true for Jesus himself as it is for his disciples along the way and today whose voices are being forced out of the church due to neglect or more aggressive challenge of the central truths of their lives.

Yet these voices may yet become those who have the most to say as we continue to live lives of faith and honesty, perhaps redefined in some ways in this new age, but close as always to the heart of Christ, which beats most strongly for those most forgotten.

These voices could speak powerfully through poetry, and perhaps are. An effort to bring these voices together into one prophetic source is sorely needed.

III.

All of these ideas have community, our interrelations with others, as well as our self-community, the internal dialogues that we carry on with ourselves, at the center, and see that how we talk together will determine how we as individuals will fare. For far too long in the past, and with renewed vigor in the present through the Tea Party, society has been seen as nothing more than a bunch of individual blips moving past each other on an increasingly complex and desolate screen.

How can new landscapes of conversation and interrelation help inform our future together and individually? I'll be thinking of some of these things more out loud here, and would be grateful for your thinking through them, perhaps in conversation, or at least in your own way.

Our only way forward as a country, church, as families, and as individuals, is with more, not less, care for community. My hope is to stir up a few new directions in finding some ways to approach that building of community. I'd value your effort in this direction as well.

Here Comes Spring!

2011-04-13T12:40:00.004-05:00

In the last few days, the ice has completely melted from Lake Calhoun and Lake of the Isles, both 2 minutes out my apartment building's back door. This means that Spring is finally here. But of course, Minnesota winter always promises a late relapse, happening as late as June some years. So we Minnesotans enjoy what Spring we can, especially after such a dreadful Winter.

Here is my little bit of Spring in a bottle, refracting sunlight through my flask of maple syrup (yes, that is what it is!) against the backdrop of the newly melted Lake of the Isles.

A Spontaneous, Inexhaustive Lutheran Credo

2011-03-28T16:25:00.002-05:00

One of my friends posted a question on what her statement of "What Lutherans Believe," and in thinking of it, I was struck with a flurry of spontaneous Lutheran credology. My favorite statement here is the last. Here it goes:

Lutherans believe that Christ is the center and the center will hold.
Lutherans believe that no sin is original--they've all been tried before.
Lutherans believe that Christ showed his true colors on the cross, and we showed ours, yet God is above all seen in a rainbow of all colors.
Lutherans believe that "Love your neighbor as yourself" does not mean to keep using Jesus' name to attack that neighbor for any reason whatsoever.
Lutherans believe that the New Commandment doesn't supplant the 10 Commandments, but rather interprets law through the prism of the Gospel.
Lutherans believe that God forgives you first, and then you respond with works of charity and compassion out of thankfulness, rather than trying to buy God's favor through good works, which doesn't work anyway.
Lutherans believe that faith is a gift of the Holy Spirit and not a work that one Christian is better at than others.
Lutherans believe that humans are not fully good or fully bad, but fully both.
Lutherans believe that Jesus, and not Rob Bell, emptied hell of all sinners past, present, and future.
Lutherans believe that human beings struggle and are not perfect.
Lutherans believe three solas ("alones"), grace, scripture, and faith, but these are neither mutually exclusive nor exhaustive.
Lutherans believe that doubt is an asset, and not a liability, to faith.
Lutherans believe that Jesus really is present in communion, not just a memory.
Lutherans believe that God is gracious, even in judgment.
Lutherans believe that the Holy Spirit works today, and that God was not buried in the Bible.

And, most importantly:

Lutherans believe that God is still speaking, even if some Christians never shut up.

Glenn Gould: Queerly Normal

2010-12-27T22:57:00.010-06:00

Glenn Gould was the wizard of my adolescent years.

His playing first blazed into my imagination through a rebroadcast on CBC's "Sunday Arts Entertainment" of his performance from the 60s of Beethoven's Tempest Sonata, which I was then learning, which he played without notes and so crisply, cleanly, and inexorably that I grabbed a VHS tape and got about 2/3rds of the first movement and the rest of the second and third. On the same program, perhaps, or soon after, his performance of Beethoven's Op. 69 Cello and Piano Sonata in A major with Leonard Rose was aired, again with him playing from memory, somewhat involved in theatrics, and playing with a deep passion that seemed to reach beyond the music. This reaching has inspired in me a life-long search for what it was he saw, what any true artist sees, just beyond the edge of our perception, yet firmly grounded in our abilities and capacities as humans.

I don't know at which point Gould crossed the line in my life from a performer to something akin to a soulmate, a personality preserved in film and recording and written and spoken words, which seemed more alive to me than some people who actually were alive.

In his projection of alienation there was intimacy, an intimacy of the kind that I was denied through the social convention that said boys had to date girls and vice-versa that was prevalent when and where I grew up. Gould transcended the need for such relationships by bringing you so close to the center of music that it was like opening a beating heart and seeing a level of reality that was astonishing, ugly yet enticingly beautiful, different from conventional representation, and life-changing in its realization.

The artificiality of his playing was yet honest, deeply probing, and provoking in a way that merely another lovely, let alone a so-called "correct," performance could never have been. Music lived for him and through him in a way that bewitched some, enraged others, and cheered still many more.

The ecstasy of his playing, so clear in even his latest recordings, seems to rise to a new, reaching level just as his star was eclipsing (listen to the Brahms Ballades Op. 10, recorded in February of his last year, 1982, especially the middle section of Op. 10 #3).

And yet his personality was paramount for me.

II.

Perhaps for years I figured that Glenn Gould was gay too. There was little evidence to the contrary, and those who knew him best guarded his privacy like good friends would, denying any such rumors that he was gay. The reality of Gould's relationships came out to the broader public only very recently, in the last few years, and most recently in a recent broadcast of a fairly new documentary about him, Genius Within: The Inner Life of Glenn Gould.

I first saw this documentary in a theater a few months ago, and many things were revelatory, such as his relationship with Cornelia Foss, not something that was part of the broadcasts on Sunday Arts Entertainment years ago.

Yet the reality of Gould's sexuality does not detract from his fundamental queerness, or his fundamental normality--he was a man whose eccentricities got the better of some of his relationships, and yet was one who, surprise!, craved human connection despite his growing need for electronic space.

Yet see, nearly 30 years after his death, just how much electronic space has come to define our relationships? This medium of self-publishing random thoughts to random people, the connection to social media that was never even a glint in Glenn's eye during his lifetime, yet would have served his lifestyle well, have become the norm. Electronic space, via computer platforms, social media, Skype and other modern versions of telephony, gives each of our lives a distance and an intimacy that now defines a new, perhaps queer, normality.

Perhaps our whole era has attained a level of eccentricity through all of these new means of communication and social organization that makes each of us queerly normal in relation to those who have gone before.

III.

Another element of Gould's personality was the power of it to bring me through what easily could have been a time of extended despondency in those dark and frustrating teenage years; this seems to be something that he also unwittingly did for many. During my sophomore year of high school, when I was most frightened about people in my class, home, and elsewhere finding out that I was gay, and most frustrated that nobody else seemed to be like me, I listened to Gould's 1981 recording of Bach's Goldberg Variations nearly every night, it offering me 50 minutes of peace and structure in a life that felt chaotic and uncertain, the Variations beginning, growing, changing, and coming back to home base at the end.

Anyone who knew me in those years would recall my obsession with Gould, which I had hoped at the time might play out into a biography, as there was only one available in those years, Otto Friedeich's "Glenn Gould: A Life and Variations," which, though extensive, still left me wanting to know more. I voraciously ingested every fact, anecdote, or even reference to Glenn Gould that I could get my hands on. The biography never materialized, but others followed, both biographies and more creative works based on Gould and his personality and musical life.

During my senior year of high school, I used the proximity of Christmas and my birthday, as well as my graduation from high school, to wrangle a trip to Toronto in September 1992 as a "student delegate" to the Glenn Gould Conference, one of the most amazing weeks of those years and one of the more memorable weeks of my life. Not only was it my first time all on my own in a city, but it also put me in contact with dozens of people who knew, worked with, studied with, and even were related to Gould.

His assistant, Ray Roberts, was there, along with some of his fellow piano students from the Toronto Conservatory, some musicians with whom he'd made music, and, perhaps most poignantly, his father Herbert, then 90 years old. I will never forget, in particular, the day that we all went to Glenn's grave in Mount Pleasant Cemetery in Toronto. I had the opportunity there to pay my respects to Mr. Gould, and he graciously accepted my condolences on the death of his son 10 years earlier.

Later that year, I submitted a series of questions to Mr. Gould through Ray Roberts & Glenn Gould's lawyer, Stephen Posen, which related to Gould's childhood and experience in school. I've never shared these answers with anyone, not out of a sense of privacy, but because I never thought they would particularly interest anyone. If they might interest you, please let me know.

IV.

I don't know if Glenn Gould was conservative or liberal when it came to sexuality. One story related by one of his friends remembers some random stranger showing him porn in a restaurant once, and Glenn being quite undone by the experience. Who knows. I can imagine that his confidants, who denied that he was gay long before this recent documentary came out, might not want him to be labeled "queer," even though, in a very extended way, he was.

But at the same time, he was not quite in the same way "normal" as society still somewhat expects people to be. He could not become legal brothers with a close co-worker and collaborator. Yet why not, but for social convention not reaching that point of realizing that we're all cousins at some distant point in the past, and if cousins, why not brothers and sisters?

Perhaps "queerly normal" goes as far towards describing Glenn Gould as can be done. He didn't have to be eccentric, or distant, or isolated, or ecstatic to be who he was, yet all of those things contributed to who he was and became even as his problems with things that he did not want to state were problems grew in his last decade. Some have said, notably the violinist Yehudi Menuhin, that if he had married like most people do, and taken some of the energy he put into music and thought into a family, he might have lived longer. Who's to say?

I'm still turned on by Gould's playing, by the personality that made it what it was, which still in its strange way makes for a feeling of home.

My Ideas Should Not Depend on Yours for Their Validity

2010-09-11T23:52:00.005-05:00

Another nocturnal walk brings another epiphany: My ideas should not have to depend on your believing them as I do in order for them to have validity, and vice-versa. It seems so simple, something that I have heard countless times, but tonight it is clicking in a new way for me.

A friend of mine, Matt, helped me to realize this today when he wrote in his blog about why he does not, shall we say, see religion in the same way I do. Check him out at www.themindofmatt.com. We agreed, however, that we can respectfully agree to disagree, and remain friends, indeed are even more respectful as a result.

We live in a time, of which we are reminded every 9/11, indeed every day, of extremely dysfunctional political, philosophical, and theological relationships. The red states (counties, cities) are getting redder, and the blue states are getting bluer, and I think that makes all of us both red and blue in our own way. The culture wars ratchet up, and only seem to be getting more intractable day by day and year by year. Congress deadlocks, court decisions are discounted as "activist," families are torn apart, and friendships seem impossible to form with those who don't believe exactly as we do.

It hasn't always been this way, and it doesn't have to be this way.

Here is the epiphany: 1. Ideas (religious, political, or otherwise) become dangerous when we have to force them on others to validate them for ourselves; 2. If my beliefs do not depend on your believing them in order to gain their validity, and vice-versa, we can respect each others' independence of thought.

Let's play with this a bit. Suppose you are a Bible-believing Christian who does not allow for homosexuality as a variation of human sexuality because the Bible disapproves of it in at least seven passages (more, according to our friends at the Westboro Baptist Church). The Bible clearly states that a man who lies with a man as with a woman commits to'evah, an abomination, and the blood of the both shall be upon them; they shall both be put to death.

Short of actually working to carry out that rather horrific scene, what is wrong with believing this? As it turns out, plenty, if this belief is, as it often is, forced on others. Because this belief has had countless political consequences as a result of being "forced on" those who do not believe in this way. Parents have disowned their children, or rejected them, students have beaten and sexually abused other students, school districts, the military, churches, and other institutions have imposed a strangling code silence, and states have prevented marriage, all in the name of upholding the beliefs of some.

What would it look like to be truly "neutral" with regard to these beliefs?

It would look neutral if, and only if, I say to you that I believe this, but I am not going to impose this belief on you through curtailing your civil rights, insulting your personhood, tearing apart your families, firing you from your jobs, and preventing you from voicing your views. Why? Because you let me do the same as I let you: speak the truth as you see it.

Many things in the Bible are to'evah, not least of which is what comes almost immediately before Leviticus 20:13, the verse quoted above about men lying with men as being an act punishable by death. The act of which I am thinking is quoted more often throughout the Bible than "a man shall not lie with a man as with a woman."

Here it is in Exodus (21:7): "Anyone who curses his father or mother shall be put to death." Again, in Leviticus (20:9), "If anyone curses his father or mother, he must be put to death. He has cursed his father or his mother, and his blood will be on his own head (NIV)." Again in Proverbs (20:20): "If a man curses his father or mother, his lamp will be snuffed out in pitch darkness."

Even Jesus finds this verse important enough to repeat verbatim in Matthew (15:4) and Mark (7:10): "For God [or Moses, in Mark] said, 'Honor your father and mother,' and 'Anyone who curses his father or mother must be put to death.'" Jesus says this!! Nice, good Jesus.

How many children have cursed their fathers or mothers for any number of reasons? And how many of those children have we put to death, or driven to death by saying that we must hate their sin of cursing their father or mother, while loving them as sinners?

How many preachers are advocating that children, or adult children, be put to death for this cursing? How many "ministries" exist to "cure" children of cursing their fathers or mothers?

How many children are thrown out in the street for cursing their fathers or their mothers? And how many schools impose strict policies on their students and staff never to curse their fathers or their mothers?

I imagine the number is pretty low.

I wouldn't hate you for believing that your children should be put to death for cursing you. I'd think it an awfully strange thing to think, and I would oppose your imposing that thought on your children in a way that would damage them. I'd probably even say it's a good thing my Mom or Dad didn't toss me off a bridge at numerous points during my growing up. And I'm sure your Mom and/or Dad, or Mom & Mom, or Dad & Dad, would say the same thing about you.

II.

Why, I ask, must we force our views on others? Must we insist that if you do not believe as I do, that we should have nothing to discuss further? Must we insist that everyone throughout the world should live as we do, and should believe the same beliefs in the same way? Because there are indeed a large variety of beliefs, which, as long as they do not end up building walls of shame, walls of isolation, and literal walls around others, as long as they do not lead us to fly into towers or start wars, as long as they do not lead us to codify laws and policies to restrict others from expressing their own beliefs, as long as they do not lead us to think ourselves better people or more worthy of living than others, as long as they can be spoken in a way that do not start riots throughout the world, why not speak them?

I respect you, and you respect me, when we can agree to disagree on some things.

Building conversations on this basis, rather than on the basis of forcing each other to believe as we do, can build relationships, tear down walls, and save lives.

I cannot believe that my ideas are so weak that they must depend on your assent to them for validity, or vice-versa. I believe what I believe, from my experience, from what faith has been given me, from what my own human mind has been able to reason out, and there you have it: a thoughtful conclusion.

III.

I can see many ways in which people would disagree with me, or see this stance as being naive or untenable.

For one, people do, out of both fear and a will to dominate, impose their beliefs on others in countless ways. Whether it be through weakness of character or joy in domination, people seem invariably to fight to be right. I myself like being right and being agreed with when it comes to something that I find important. But, for example, because my friend Matt does not believe that this bread and this wine is the body and blood of Christ, that does not prevent me from believing that the elements are the real presence of Jesus Christ, the son of God, the savior.

For another, particularly from a religious point of view, those who do not believe as we do transgress, indeed break the law, that we ourselves must live by in order to have the kind of life that we feel we must live. But, for example, are heterosexual marriages so inherently weak that they cannot tolerate people living in same-sex marriages? Are same-sex relationships so inherently desirable that they will entice those who would otherwise be out making babies to stay home and make whoopee instead? Are your children so weak of mind and character that they will glom on to every view expressed to them, and try out every possibility floated in their direction?

It seems to me asinine, not to mention disproven by experience, that people will try everything and become anything to which they are exposed. If this were the case, we'd have a nation of rapists, drug addicts, and especially murderers, given the amount of this activity that is shown on television, let alone video games. I worry about how certain song lyrics and video games that extol violence against women give young people the impression that it is OK to rape. But I also fear the stance that mentioning a fun weekend at Valley Fair with your gay boyfriend will have any impact on a whole class of children's sexual development.

This is not merely a plea for tolerance, but for allowing others to live the lives that are given them, and trusting that, given plenty of lessons in respecting others, they will carry out that respect themselves.

"Leverage the Voice of Love"

2010-09-11T00:02:00.007-05:00

Nocturnal walks have always been helpful to me. Walking out in the rain tonight, just now, a phrase came to me, I have no idea from where, but it is something that quivers with possibility: "Leverage the voice of love."

What does this mean? What is the "voice of love," and how is it to be leveraged?

The need for the voice of love today is greater than ever. On this 9th anniversary of 9/11, we seem to be threatened from so many corners: terrorism, extremism, racism, homophobia, sexism, overpopulation, environmental disaster, natural disaster, and the list goes on.

And I hear: "Leverage the voice of love."

What a concept! The voice of love, which seems to have been drowned out by voices of fear and hate, needs help. It needs each of us who hear it to say that we're hearing it, and that it must be brought out from its closet of fear, from underneath its bushel, and placed where it will shine as a beacon in the night to all who live in despair.

"Leverage the voice of love." Don't let it go out. Don't let it get so quiet that it is no longer heard. Don't assume that it will speak for itself. Don't assume that it is not your voice, or that someone else will say what is in your heart to say.

The cadence catches my ear--the assonance, the meter, the symmetry. "Leverage the voice of love."

This is a call to act--and the action is one which does not take so much work or thought. It does not take a genius to be loving, or a master of divinity to realize that it is within our souls to speak at such a time that needs to hear the voice of love, reason, and grace. It only takes one to speak up and say, "I love."

II.

In particular today I am thinking about the need for this voice leveraged strongly in the Anoka/Hennepin school district area, where the suicides of 7 students, some of whom were gay or perceived to be gay or lesbian, have bereft dear people of their loved ones, much like several thousand were bereft on a 9/11 many years ago.

Tonight, I was fortunate, indeed blessed, to share the table of Tammy and Shawn Aaberg, and their sons who remain, as they and I were interviewed on the death of their son, Justin, to suicide, and to some extent the relation of his death to the Anoka/Hennepin policy of "neutrality" on matters of sexual orientation within the curriculum of the District. I brought the voice of a concerned outsider to their lives and the district, but they shared what was rending their hearts at the most personal loss anyone can experience--the loss of a child.

Their hospitality to me and the interviewer was as moving to me as their story. I, a stranger in their home, was treated as a welcomed guest. It is hospitality that was given to us freely and gracefully and lovingly as the hospitality that Jesus offers to his own.

I did not know Justin, but I would have walked through fire for him, to stop those who were tormenting him. Never underestimate the voice of love within you, and know that there are those out there who would walk through fire for you, whom you do not even know. Never forget that your voice might be the one to save a life.

The story of Justin's loss will soon be known more widely within the gay community through this interview, and in the Minneapolis/St. Paul community through a report that will be broadcast on WCCO news in the Minneapolis metropolitan area this coming Monday night (9/13/10) at 10pm. More will rise up who would walk through fire for Justin, for Tammy, Shawn, and their remaining dear sons, for every student of Anoka/Hennepin who still lives in fear and abuse and for whom despair is a daily diet, for each person who hears that God hates "their sin," which is indeed a message in the case of many that God hates them. You, dear reader, may be one to rise up.

"Leverage the voice of love."

The voice of love, that which has touched my heart through so many voices in my life, starting with my own parents and sister, through so many family, friends, teachers, mentors, ministers, and even through people I have hardly known, this is the voice that we must raise to the highest rafters of torture and pain, the voice that cuts despair, the voice that destroys terrorism by transcending it, because the power of love is stronger than the power of hate.

III.

The voice of love too is the voice that God speaks when God says, "This is my son, the beloved, in whom I am well-pleased." This is the voice that God speaks to each of us, in our desolation and torment, the voice that God was quietly yet persistently speaking as Jesus, God's own son, was dying on the cross, lost, isolated, forgotten, and ashamed, in his own crucifixion.

"Leverage the voice of love."

This is the voice that my cinematic hero, Father Barry in "On the Waterfront," raised from the depths of a death ship in which one was killed for the cause of justice. Father Barry said of that death: "That is a crucifixion."

Anytime a policy takes precedence over peoples' lives, that is a crucifixion. Anytime people put their ideas over the lives of others, whether those ideas are religious or political, whether those voices are Christian, Muslim, Liberal, or Conservative, that is a crucifixion. Lives will always be more important than ideas or policies, which should only serve to protect lives and not help to end them, although sometimes lives must be lost to defend the ideas and principles of freedom that our country was founded on, that all were created equal, all.

By the account of his parents and those who knew him, Justin's was a voice of music, laughter, and love for his friends, his parents, his brothers, and many others. A voice any one of us would have been privileged to hear. A voice that none of us will hear again spoken alive in this life.

But as the voices of those who could have spoken for him in the place of his torment, in his school, were silenced, so was his. For the neutrality on sexual orientation with respect to curriculum that staff are required to follow extends far beyond what the staff may or may not say or do with respect to curriculum, and, I think, far beyond what the School Board may realize as its intended reach. The consequences of this policy impact the lives of its students.

IV.

I appreciate that the Anoka/Hennepin district has begun to take concrete measures to stop the violence against its LGBTQ students. It is to be commended on beginning to take these steps. My last blog entry elicited the response from the district that I was acting on misinformation, which could be true to some degree, but I am not mistaken about the effects of their policy, one which existed over a year ago when two teachers were called out on their torment of one of their students, based on their student's perceived (and not actual) sexual orientation.

The district paid out $25,000 a full year ago to this student because of their torment of him, but did not admit that there was a problem beyond this supposedly isolated case, and one of those teachers in fact sought compensation for being "outed" as a tormentor. My hope is that her outing did not subject her to the same treatment that she visited upon her own student.

By treating this harassment as an isolated incident and not the result of a systemic problem, caused in great part by the neutrality policy, the District enabled the harassment of others to continue, which it does to this day.

The real kicker with this policy is the sentence: "Staff are encouraged to take into consideration individual student needs and refer students to the appropriate social worker or licensed school counselor."

Although this sounds wise and professional, unfortunately conversations with social workers and counselors are subject to a higher degree of confidentiality, unless these conversations approach topics of harm to self or others, while conversations with teachers are at a lower degree of confidentiality. Teachers could inform parents of warning signs and bad experiences far ahead of the time that social workers and counselors could. This was the case with Justin, and may have been the case with many others.

As long as the policy of neutrality exists, no step the district might take will be able to topple the wall of abuse that meets many in the course of their daily lives. No action will be sufficient to allow people who are experiencing despair to reach out in trust to their teachers and speak the words that they must speak to stop the violence from happening to them.

For, let's be honest, what really is a policy that enjoins its staff to be neutral on matters of sexual orientation actually saying?

It is not telling staff or students that they cannot mention matters of heterosexual sexual orientation. Because if that were the case, they could not talk about anyone, gay or straight. Sexual orientation is a deep part of everyone, no matter the particularity of their sexual orientation.

Neutrality on "sexual orientation" is a polite euphemism for not saying anything about homosexuality.

Imagine if teachers could not mention their opposite-sex spouses, girlfriends, or boyfriends in class. Imagine if they could not display a picture or wear a ring on a prominent finger. Imagine if their sexual orientation were considered by parents as a disease that their kids could catch.

This is the real meaning of "neutrality"--silence on homosexuality. And, as was said in the 80s when thousands were dying from AIDS and the government was doing far less to stop it than Anoka/Hennepin is doing to combat bullying, silence = death.

"Leverage the voice of love." The phrase continues to sing in my mind's ear. Who are the voices of love in your life? What do they have to say at this time of crisis, which for many is a crisis of faith as well--faith in others, in God, and in a system that proclaims itself a protector of each of its students? How can we work together to bring these voices together, to leverage their love and the power they have to transcend hate?

We've all got work to do in getting these voices of love together, of focusing them at a problem that will not go away by mere dint of thought. At the very least, we can raise our voice, to let one other person know about what is going on in the Anoka/Hennepin school district, or in the district closer to you, to raise the voice of love that says "I do not hate you, my brother/sister," or to say "I will not burn your sacred book," or to say "I will walk through fire for you."

As another of my heroes of faith said, "Love must act as light must shine and fire must burn." Father James Otis Sargent Huntington's voice of love speaks clearly some 75 years after his death. And he is right: Love must act.

Leverage the voice of love--of your love, and of the love of all whom you know. Bring these voices together into one powerful tool of healing, that will not let terrorism, whether it be from without or within, have the final say.

For this is the time when the voices of love must come together and act.

Anoka/Hennepin: Tear Down That Wall (of Deadly Homophobia)!

2010-08-31T14:56:00.003-05:00

In the last year, 7 young people in the Anoka/Hennepin School District have committed suicide, 3 directly related to being or being perceived as LGBTQ. The wall of silence, also known in the district as "neutrality," is creating some strange fruit hanging from the trees up there.

Because, although they say that these youth committed suicide, they were actually killed by those within their community, their schools, their churches, and in other contexts that should rather have held their tongues than spouted wounding words. It was merely a sleight of the District's hand that made it look like the young people killed themselves.

What a sleight of hand the Anoka/Hennepin School Board pulled by saying that the sexual orientation policy had to do only with curriculum, and not with bullying! As though they weren't able to see a connection between the wall of silence they created, the bullying by students, teachers, pastors, some family members, and other "concerned citizens," and the deaths that resulted.

The Anoka/Hennepin School Board had such a problem with hearing the truth about their policies in their August 23, 2010 meeting, that the recording of those proceedings was somehow glitched or lost. This was the meeting at which the mother and friends of Justin Aaberg, one of the gay youth who committed suicide in that district, spoke from their hearts about how his death affected them, and how the district is still a dangerous place for LGBTQ, and even hetero, youth.

This is a Berlin Wall moment.

The wall of homophobia that was built around these youth, the wall of hatred and bureaucratic nonsense that was built around those for whom sexual orientation was not the main factor in their deaths, must be toppled once and for all.

Anoka/Hennepin School Board, what is keeping you from saving the lives of your students? Is it the mis-named PAL, Parents Action League, which hides itself behind a wall of anonymity? Which cries about receiving hate mail, as though it has not been out to engender it? Which claims as its motto, "Education, not Indoctrination," when what is meant by indoctrination is enacting measures that will stop gay kids from killing themselves?

Anoka/Hennepin area Churches (of the variety that preach against homosexuality), is it your contention that God wants gay and lesbian kids dead? Do you believe that the heart of the Gospel is in Leviticus 20:13? Do you pride yourselves on the success of this message over that of the saving Gospel? Because the Gospel SAVES; it does not KILL.

To paraphrase Psalm 13, How Long, Anoka/Hennepin, will you lay waste to those who did you no wrong?

How long will you taunt, spit at, beat up, and terrorize young people who did nothing but get up and go to school?

How long will you preach that God is a super-terrorist, that the fulfillment of the Gospel is death of those you believe God would oppose, that Jesus was more concerned with where a person's penis was put than where a person's heart is?

How long will you justify yourselves with policies, when coffins continue to be draped in a sea of tears?

How long will you say that it is a "lifestyle choice" that leads to these deaths, when no different or discernible "lifestyle" was at the root of the hatred, terror, and brutality that actually led to these deaths?

How long will you seek your seat of power in a young man's coffin?

How long will you lose the evidence of your wrongs? (Update: video of the August 23, 2010, Anoka/Hennepin School Board Meeting, is now (9/12/10) available. See Tammy Aaberg at 15:20 here, and listen to subsequent explanation by the School Board Chair, and further testimony of abuse around the Neutrality policy.)

Consider, and answer me!

Answer for those who have fallen, and those who will continue to fall as long as your feet drag!

Answer for those families you have helped to tear apart, and those lives you have ended!

Answer for those careers you have threatened to end because your people have wanted to provide some small measure of support or solace!

Answer for those people who will hear the word "Jesus," and see a man with a gun!

Hear those, O God, who call out to you "Give light to my eyes, or I will sleep the sleep of death, and my enemy will say, 'I have prevailed.'"

Hear those, Anoka/Hennepin School District, whose voices are still crying out in pain.

Hear those who want only to live their lives in peace.

Hear those who want only to live another day, to see another sun rise.

Hear those who want only to love those who are in their hearts to love.

It is time for you to choose:

Your policies, or your people.

Your ideas, or your youth.

Your bullies, or your innocent.

Choose wisely. God is watching.

ELCA Churchwide: One Year Later, and Still Waiting

2010-08-23T16:23:00.000-05:00

Last Friday marked one year since last year's vote at the ELCA Churchwide Assembly on allowing open and partnered gay and lesbian persons to serve officially as pastors, without the fear of being witch-hunted out, put on trial, and defrocked ("derostered").

In reality, not a huge number of people or congregations have left the church, but although the laws of the ELCA have changed, the reality for gay and lesbian pastors, I'm guessing particularly for those awaiting their first calls like myself, is still "in process."

Today, Minnesota Public Radio's News-Q posted a series of reflections on what life is like in the ELCA now, at the One-year mark. It includes a brief piece on me, as I am three-and-a-half years into waiting for my first call, far longer than any of my seminary colleagues.

I will reflect more thoroughly in the next few days, but for now, here is the link to MPR's story. Each segment is worth a look: http://minnesota.publicradio.org/projects/2010/08/church-divided/new-welcome.shtml

A Repost Riff on "Bless Me Anyway"

2010-08-11T10:28:00.000-05:00

Recently, I had the chance to watch the HBO production of Tony Kushner’s “Angels in America” for the first time. It made me recall our Twin Cities Gay Men’s Chorus experience with some of Kushner’s most powerful words. This is a reposting from 2009, which also seems apt in these days that are hopefully gathering steam to overrule all of the divisive marriage laws, after Judge Vaughn Walker's masterly decision overturning Prop 8. Here it is:

So we in the Twin Cities Gay Men's Chorus have been singing a wonderful new setting by Michael Shaieb of some words by Tony Kushner from his play "Angels in America," centered around the phrase "bless me anyway." This phrase has affected me since we began singing it. It makes me think about those plucky figures in the Bible, Jacob and the Syrophoenecian woman, one in the Old Testament and one in the New, one going up against Godself, and the other against Jesus himself, who demand blessing in their beings from the deity who in some way created them, yet who have been told that they do not deserve such a blessing, or must fight to get it.

My life has been one in which I have both been the grateful and lucky recipient of unconditional love, from family and friends, as well as the need for years and years and years to defend my own being, sensitive, gay, or otherwise, against various people and institutions who have told me that I am deeply and existentially wrong. But, you know, bless me anyway, right?

The following are some words that came out after thinking about this phrase, "bless me anyway." This is yet a work in progress.

To the totality of the world's rejections:

The minor rejections of saying 'no' to liver and eggs;

the major rejections, hearing you say 'no' to me.

To the 'yous' who have told me who I am,

rather than letting me figure me out for myself.

Bless me anyway.

Even if you don't consider me worth it.

Even if my skin says "liar" to you.

Even if you think my dick should not go there.

Even if the folds of my skin obliterate

the smooth straight line

that you suppose would make me beautiful.

Bless me anyway.

What does a blessing cost you?

Does a blessing cost you your life?

Your job?

Your wife?

Does a blessing cost you your country?

Your place in the world?

Bless me anyway.

For I will have worth without it,

but with it,

we can love those we were meant to love,

in the open.

We can bless the skin that contains

our bones

our life

our blood,

if not our souls.

Bless me anyway.

It costs less than a tower,

less than a bomb,

less than a college education,

less even than an egg

from which life can come.

Bless me anyway.

But blessing is powerful.

Yes, blessing costs more than money,

more than position, power,

and all the water in the world.

Bless me anyway.

Bless the water that makes me more

than a pile of dust, more

than a pile of crap, more

than a pile of me that makes you weary,

that you wish would go away

sometimes.

Bless that shit machine

that embarrasses you.

Bless that $22.95 in basic elements,

not quite enough to buy Manhattan

four hundred and fifty years ago,

but enough to pay off the sum total

of a pile of humanity.

Bless me anyway.

More than the sum total,

more than the blue of my eyes,

more than the gnarled toenails,

the middling nipples,

the less-than-perfect hairline,

the zit on my left temple.

Bless me anyway.

The Jewish part of my heritage,

obscured by name-changes.

The happy sodomite that would do me, maybe.

The D-student wannabe.

Bless me anyway,

and I will bless you too.

I will bless your assumptions,

your experiences,

your attempts to reach out,

that get caught in your throat.

I will bless your struggle to live

in a world that kills us all,

that resolves as we do,

into a pile of minerals.

However it turns out,

Anyway,

I will bless you.

An Open Letter to Gregg Steinhafel, CEO of Target Corp.: You've Lost a Customer

2010-07-21T23:00:00.000-05:00

To Gregg Steinhafel, CEO of Target

Dear Mr. Steinhafel:

I wanted you to know that Target's move to support the far-right candidate for governor of Minnesota through a PAC has cost you a life-time customer.

Ever since I was a little kid, we went shopping at Target, first in the Columbia Mall up in Grand Forks, where I grew up, and then in several other places where I lived. When I moved to Minneapolis two years ago, I was really glad to see a Target downtown, because it was in a place I would be passing often, and indeed I have spent thousands of dollars there in the last couple of years buying everything from food to furnishings for my home. In fact, I've probably shopped at that Target on Nicollet Mall an average of twice a week for the last two years.

But Target's thinly-veiled support of Tom Emmer has ended my relationship with your store, probably for good.

It is not without a good deal of grief that I must end this relationship. Although your spokeswoman related that this move was purely for financial considerations, in order to elect the officials who were best for Target's business interests, you must know that any retail business earns most of its money from its customers.

We count.

And this action has told me that I, as a gay man, do not count anymore as far as Target is concerned. I, as a person, do not count more than your precious bottom line.

You, personally, have worked hard to make Target more than a corporation. You have stressed the "Gospel of Target," which has tried to encourage the "good news" that might be possible through yours sales philosophy, rather than supporting rapacious acquisition as so many retail companies do in their pursuit of the "bottom line."

Here's my bottom line, Mr. Steinhafel: You've lost me as a customer, and I hope that your action in supporting Tom Emmer has lost you hundreds, if not thousands of customers. Whether you care at all, or just laugh at our Quixotic antics, such decisions affect more than your bottom line. And eventually that bottom line will show it.

Sincerely,

Chris _____________

Reflections on the Word: from Readings for 5/30/10

2010-05-19T12:21:00.000-05:00

“I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now.When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth.” –John 16: 12-13a

What won’t Jesus tell us, that we can’t bear? This question has always fascinated me. Are these things about God, about himself, about ourselves? Does Jesus not consider us strong enough to know this truth? We aren’t ready to know all truth, but we are ready for some. Opening to the Spirit means opening to this way of truth, but it is vital that that be the truth from God, and not from some other spirit.

Vibrant Spirit, blow through us the truth that can come only from God, and give us the discernment to know when it is you bringing that truth. In Jesus’ name, Amen.

Reflections on the Word: Readings of April 11, 2010

2010-04-07T11:25:00.000-05:00

“[Jesus said,] If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.” –John 21:23

In amongst Thomas’s doubting Jesus’ resurrection is this fascinating line: forgive (release) sins and you let go; hold on to them, and you keep your grip, on both the sins themselves and the person who has sinned. This word for “retained” relates to the Greek word for power, κρατέω, seen, for example, in the word “democracy.” Holding onto the sins of others gives you power, but also takes power from you. Releasing these sins gives freedom to you and to the sinner over whom you have power.

Forgiving God, give us the freedom to release our grip on the judgment of others, and on ourselves. Judge us alone with grace and understanding, in the light of the resurrection. Amen.

Wake Up and Smell the Spikenard!

2010-03-22T10:21:00.000-05:00

Sermon on John 12: 1-8; Salem English Lutheran Church, Minneapolis, MN; March 21, 2010

[Note: the scent of spikenard was an essential part of this sermon as it was preached. It is available in essential oil form, or could be found cheaper in Indian groceries, as the plant is harvested mostly in India and China. I used essential oil and both diffused it throughout the worship space, as well as passed it around the congregation in its bottle for people to get a closer smell.]

Let us pray: Creating God, you have given us our five senses to appreciate your wondrous world around us. In this Lenten time, help us to walk in love, as Christ loved us, and gave himself for us, a fragrant offering to you. Send now your Spirit into our midst, we pray, that we might come closer to that blessed and eternal mind of Christ. Through his name we pray, Amen.

It seems so basic to living, these five senses that we are given. Some live with challenges to them, some live without one or more of them. One constant throughout life is that we experience the world through the senses we have. And yet it seems rare that we stop to appreciate our senses in their relation to our faith lives and journeys.

Age may dull or sweeten some of our senses. Surgeries or other correctives may fix flaws and allow us to see or hear what we have been missing. We might lose one or another sense through illness or injury. The sight we might have relied on more as a young person may grow into deepened sense of hearing in later years as that sight fades. We might develop new tastes that we never thought we would have, or lose such basic abilities of sense that we always thought we would have. Senses, so basic, are yet vital and changing.

This week, one sensuous line from today’s reading particularly struck me: “and the house was filled with the fragrance of the ointment.”

Here in the house of Lazarus, Jesus was being prepared for the last and most difficult leg of his journey to the cross. This moment in Jesus’ life is so important, that it appears in all four Gospels, although with some significant differences in each account. Indeed, only here in John do we get this detail: “And the house was filled with the fragrance of the ointment.”

In John’s telling of it, Jesus is being given a dinner party in his honor after raising Lazarus from the dead, which he had just done to the glory of God. Mary and Martha are there, and Lazarus himself, quite the greatest miracle of Jesus’ brief ministry. Those who mourned Lazarus have been comforted by his being raised from the dead, and many are now believing that Jesus is indeed the son of God through this very miracle.

Mary does what Mary does best—she immediately goes to sit at the feet of Jesus. But this time, she goes way overboard, and pours a whole jar of expensive perfumed oil on his feet—more than an extravagance—and something that probably made everyone present gasp in surprise. I can hear more than one of them saying “What is this woman doing??!?” Indeed, Judas feigns moral outrage at such an apparent waste. But no, this is no wasteful time: it is the time of anointing the “anointed one” with precious oil to prepare him for his ultimate, inexorable fate.

II.

“And the house was filled with the fragrance of the ointment.”

Smell seems to me the most neglected of the senses. If you were given the choice of what sense to keep, your sight, hearing, or smell, I cannot imagine many would sacrifice sight or hearing for the ability to smell. And when have you ever heard of one who provided “nose-witness testimony” in a court of law? We can be just as mistaken in what we think we have seen, as in what we think we have smelled, so why is it not given equal status as eye-witness testimony? We know the geniuses of painting and sculpture, of music, of cooking and cuisine, but who are the smell geniuses? Where is their place in the pantheon of human greatness?

In contrast to the great importance placed on all other senses, I would say that smell is the most evocative and powerful of all our senses, reaching the deepest parts of ourselves, bypassing our rational understanding and going straight to the most elemental, animal part of ourselves, awakening deep memories, or opening up new worlds in our imaginations.

When I think of it, this last week was the first time I’ve ever gone out of my way to get a particular fragrance, when I ordered through the internet some essential oil of spikenard, the smell that you are smelling now, the one which filled the house that Jesus was in.

I got excited thinking about being able to make that deepest of sense connections with the place where Jesus was that night. Because, think about it: even though the house itself can no longer be seen, the voices of Jesus and his friends can never be heard, the dinner can never be eaten again, and the feeling of Mary’s hair wiping in the ointment can never be felt exactly in the same way, the two things that exist still about that night, besides the eternal living Christ, are what was written about it, and this particular scent. What we are smelling now is without any doubt the same scent that Jesus smelled that night, a smell that no doubt stayed with him through that last, memorable week of life as we know it. Through this scent, we enter into the mind of Christ in a way no other experience can bring us.

III.

“And the house was filled with the fragrance of the ointment.” Smells can fill a space, in pleasant and unpleasant ways, much like light and sound, transmitting barely-visible particles from their origin to deep into our bodies. Smell transcends time and space with an immediacy that no other sense can match.

Take a moment in your imagination just to be with Jesus in this time and place, imagining what it would be like to be there with him, what the light, flickering low that evening, lighting less of the house than the smell would reach, with those surprised guests who thought they saw something wasteful, when actually they saw Jesus in life being prepared for death. Let the sense world of this scene come alive to you as I read this passage once again.

[Read John 12: 1-8]

Question: How does your sense of smell, or your other senses, help you on your journey of faith? What scents particularly make you come alive, or link you to other times and places?

Reflections on the Word: From Lectionary readings for 3/21

2010-03-10T13:28:00.001-06:00

“Mary took a pound of costly perfume made of pure nard, anointed Jesus’ feet, and wiped them with her hair. The house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume.” –John 12:3

The beautiful smell that pervaded Lazarus’ home was that of Jesus’ death to come. The sense of smell is perhaps our strongest and most meaningful; it goes to our deepest places and memories. What about your faith life engages your sense of smell? For some, incense powerfully symbolizes God’s presence. But for many of us, this sense goes unused in spiritual practice. Why is that? What prevents multi-sensory worship?

Creating God, you have given us our several senses with which to engage the world around us. May they help us to appreciate the splendor of your creation, more and more each day. Amen.

Reflections on the Word for 3.7.10

2010-02-23T13:44:00.000-06:00

“Jesus asked them, “Do you think that because these Galileans suffered in this way they were worse sinners than all other Galileans? No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all perish as they did.” --Luke 13: 2-3

Reflection: “Repent or perish” frankly scares me. Lent is about reflection and change, but my unease persists around these words, because as soon as I repent, I sin again. This is the human condition. Jesus says here “their sins were no worse than yours, but you all must change.” We are often aware of the need to change, but the means can still elude us. “Lord, have mercy” remains our refrain each day.

Prayer: Lord, you love your entire creation, and hate not that which you have made. When we stray, gently correct us, that we may live into the promises you have made, which remain faithful even when we are not. Amen.

© 2010 CW

Saturday Night Forever

2010-02-14T00:45:00.001-06:00

This image has been coming to me for years. I put it together on my Saturday bus ride back from St. Paul this evening. It is so vivid in my mind's eye, and so persistent.

An image haunts my mind's eye,
but only on a Saturday:

A subway station on the west side,
maybe 145th st., maybe 42nd,
on a Saturday evening,

minutes before I was shot to death,
21 years before I was born.

The subway looked felt & smelled
much the same
there and then
as it would 50 years later.

But it shook
like quaking, quiet earth.

I could feel the blood start to overcome me,
even before I was hit.

Nothing before and nothing after was relevant.

There was only that time,
the dying time,
precious and violent.

What mattered in life was only
appreciating some of the small experiences:
a touch
or
a Schubert song,
the nearness of waning sehnsucht.

I had no idea of how much I earned,
of who might have done this,
of what the afterlife may or may not be like,
or whether I was “saved.”

Only the white, glazed tile,
bricks leading up from the floor,
people buzzing by on their way to an evening’s pleasure,
or fleeing pain,
or just plain bored.

And the moment
of taking in eternity
the size of a slivered silver dollar

OUF!

The blood running up from the floor,
the glaze bright over my eyes, just like the tile.

No life flashing before me.

No thought of a strange future memory
in some fifty years' time.

No pathetic regret.

Just empty and walking up the tile
tile by tile...

And the sense that
this would be
Saturday night

forever.

-CW, 2.13.10
©2010

A Sinful Man

2010-02-06T23:23:00.001-06:00

“But seeing this [great haul of fish], Simon Peter fell down at Jesus’ knees, saying, “Go away from me, because I am a sinful man, Lord.” --Luke 5: 7b-8

I.

This line has struck a chord with me this week, after using it in the devotional you may find below this entry. It comes only once in the Gospels, here in Luke Chapter 5, and is yet one of those compelling, heartbreaking, transient moments that shows us how one of the disciples really felt about himself in relation to Jesus.

We ask so often, what would Jesus have thought of this? What would Jesus have done? What would God want me to do? Here we find out.

To Peter’s statement, Jesus says, as he so often does, “Do not be afraid.” He follows it up with the famous line from this passage, “ἀπὸ τοῦ νῦν ἀνθρώπους ἔσῃ ζωγρῶν.” Now things are different, Peter. Now, from this point on, you will be catching people.

What was the fear that Jesus was responding to in Peter’s reaction? His fear of the fish? His fear of what he would do with his life? Or of being sinful?

I have a great fear of being sinful. I am afraid of driving people away if they get to know me too well and don’t like what they see when they look too close. Is this not a pretty common fear, the same one that Peter confesses to Jesus? It is a rather silly and condescending fear. Of course I am sinful. Duh! Like anyone isn’t? simul iustus et peccator, simultaneously saint and sinner. This is the human condition.

There is no intimacy without honesty. And yet, I think a great block to an intimate relationship with Jesus is a fear of confessing who we really are in all of our glory and shame, to our very creator, who already knows these things about us. As though being honest with God will somehow scare God away?

Yet this is just how people have been taught to be before God: clean, upright, upstanding, and stultifyingly nice.

The next reformation of the church will be one of honesty.

“Go away from me, for I am a sinful man, Lord.” I am a man who is, by his nature, a sinner. Unclean. Unworthy. Unjustified. Nasty. Dirty. Out of the norm. Out of bounds. Out of control. Out of luck. Dingy. Ditchy. Switchy, and itchy. I am shady and skanky. Ridiculous, rank, and somehow *less* than holy.

Christian self-abnegation is no more attractive, nor particularly any more effective, than any other variety, just because it is in relation to Jesus. Peter begged Jesus to leave him because of his sinfulness. But Jesus said, “No, Peter, you have some work to do.”

II.

I have often felt like this sinful man during my process of feeling called to the Lutheran ministry. I have been this sinful man. And those along the way have at various times assuaged my sense of sinfulness, and ratcheted it up at others.

I have been waiting for three years for my first call as a minister in the ELCA. In that time, I have received not one interview. My training is the same as my colleagues who have been ordained and in churches for years. My vocation has been tested according to the same standards, and certified according to the same standards. It has not, however, been affirmed by the same standards.

“Go away from us, Chris, for you are a sinful man.” You are an open homosexual. You are defiant in the way you present your sexuality, the way you lead with it. We think our churches will just conclude that you are a sinful man.

This is the reality of what I have felt and at times heard from this process since I was assigned for first call. Not from each of those involved in it, because there have been some wonderfully supportive people, who have affirmed what Jesus said, “There is work yet to do.”

It is easy to get self-righteous, to let the chip on my shoulder, more embarrassing than any other kind of sin, lead, as it were.

Go away from me, Lord, for I have been a proud man, whose pride has not been in you but in my own accomplishments. Go away from me, Lord, for I cannot pray consistently, but I can tell people what I think is wrong with what they are doing. Go away from me, Lord, for my heart wanders far from you.

These are things that should make Jesus go away from us? That would make God cast us off?

III.

Sin is not the definer of who is in or not in relationship with Jesus. And Jesus is not going to depart just because we ask nicely, ashamedly, or any other way.

Jesus says, “Do not be afraid.” Luther puts it another way—“sin boldly! But pray more boldly still.” Pray as if you expect Jesus to stay, rather than to run away.

I’m about as inconsistent of a pray-er as it gets. I do much better when in monastic community, which I have had the pleasure to be on a few occasions for weeks or months. But I don’t know that this is my calling.

I get pretty raunchy at times with Jesus. I just let it all hang out with the Lord, because let’s face it: Jesus knows us already. We ain’t got jack to hide from Jesus, particularly the sinful sides of ourselves that we hide from each other.

“Come close to me, Lord, for I am a sinful man.” Come closer to me, let me speak my truth to you, which you have given me to live. Give me the words to speak it to others, and to give them the space to speak their truth to me. Speak your truth to me, which is above all others. For however we understand things, your understanding is greater. You are the source of our love, hope, and reconciliation.

Reflections on the Word for 2.7.10

2010-02-04T12:40:00.000-06:00

“And they came and filled both boats, so that they began to sink. But when Simon Peter saw it, he fell down at Jesus’ knees, saying, ‘Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man!’”

--Luke 5: 7b-8

Reflection: Sin was thought of in Old Testament times like a disease that could be spread. This is seen in Leviticus and other books of law, and some today still feel this to be the case in their moral concern. Peter worried about contaminating Jesus with his sin. But Jesus came to show not so much that our sin is strong, but that his love is stronger than our sin. Forgiveness first, then repentance.

Prayer: Lord, cast us not off from you as sinners, for sinners we are. Yet take us in as those you have redeemed for your own love’s sake. For though our sins may overwhelm us, they cannot overwhelm you. Amen.

© 2010 CW

Note: I'm not sure if I've posted any of these here yet. I write them for the church newsletter of the church where I work. Since I tend toward long-windedness, these brief reflections are a valuable exercise in being concise! I will try to include them going forward.

Towards a More Perfect State of the Union

2010-01-28T00:13:00.000-06:00

“Abroad, America’s greatest source of strength has always been our ideals. This same is true at home. We find unity in our incredible diversity, drawing on the promise enshrined in our Constitution: the notion that we are all created equal, that no matter who you are or what you look like, if you abide by the law you should be protected by it.... We must continually renew this promise. ...This year I will work with Congress and our military to finally repeal the law that denies gay Americans the right to serve the country they love because of who they are.”

--President Barack Obama, State of the Union Address, January 27, 2010

When Barack Obama’s words, in his first State of the Union address, started to venture into the area of equality and fairness under the US Constitution, I grew more and more hopeful that finally he would stand up to the law and practice that has made it impossible for me to serve in this country's military, that has cost tens of thousands their jobs and service to our country, and cost our country qualified defenders in this time of great need.

That moment came when President Obama said that he would work with Congress this year to strike down “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.”

But we have had this long moment of promise for a year already. This promise has hung in the air as more and more people whose service to this nation has not only been damned, but wasted under the existential strangulation of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. People whose service is not only needed, but is effective, indeed vital, to ensuring our national security.

The hope continues, but so does the biting at hearts that wish only to be equally respected and defended along side of their heterosexual equals, hearts that pump the same blood and feel the same sense of duty to protect our homeland, and have been encouraged emptily in the past. President Obama, working with Congress in their Constitutionally-mandated capacity as directors of military policy and conduct, could still bring about a full and complete repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” I live in hope that this will indeed happen in the next year.

II.

It might come as a surprise to people who know me, and indeed somewhat surprises me, that I would think of being in the military. There are many ways in which I am not standard issue.

I am, in my deepest personality, for example, somewhat antipathetical towards leadership. It is more than ironic that I would be called to Christian ministry, but such is the calling that I have received. I’m not much of one who likes to follow rules, but at the same time, something in my bearing and personality has led people to ask if I’m in or have been in the military. I’ve often wondered myself what it would be like to serve in the military.

I might not agree with the rationale of our nation’s presence in Iraq, and I might question our wisdom of being in Afghanistan, a war that wore the Soviet Union down for years before we got into it, but our troops are there, and they need many levels of support.

Among the very important levels of support given our troops is the support of chaplains, whose presence is not only spiritual, but also psychological. Chaplains are not psychologists, but they are sources of confidence, both in terms of supporting and boosting the confidence of those who are carrying out our campaigns in many capacities, as well as keeping confidences and building trust and morale. Given my theological and ministerial training, being a chaplain would make the most sense for me. It would be an honor to support those who put themselves in harm's way to defend the cause of freedom.

At this moment, however, I could not be a military chaplain. I am way out of the gay closet, and cannot and would not go back in for a job, a calling, a career, relationship, or for any other reason. That makes some people very uncomfortable. That choice to be open has thus far cost me a first call as a Lutheran pastor for three years, when I have been told that I need to “fly under the radar” if I want a church, “feeling [my] way out” as I entered a parish in the closet. That is advice that I cannot heed, and it comes at a cost. But the closet has a much higher cost.

III.

The closet kills, in a free society as ours is, moment by moment, lie by lie, hidden relationship by hidden relationship. Like Act-up activists said in the days of AIDS holocaust, silence=death.

Being and remaining closeted is for some being complicit in this oppression. It is choosing not only one’s own silence, but helping to enforce silence on others as well.

Now, this is a strong statement, which sounds to my ears as judgmental as it sounds true, and I do know that being out of the closet is for others, in societies less free than ours, a luxury that their societies will not allow. Their lives and only sources of income are at stake in such a choice to come out. Their relationships with their parents, oldest and closest friends are hanging in the balance. In Uganda, in Iraq and Iran, in Egypt and Saudi Arabia, and elsewhere, the very lives of gay and lesbian people are at stake, and the closet is a chief means of survival. That is unfortunately still true for some in the United States as well.

Only by directly challenging this enforced silence in standing up and being counted, starting here in a society that attains to being the freest on earth, a country that tens of thousands have given their lives to keep free, starting here in the United States, and in other free societies, can those of us who have the luxury of being out and staying alive end the power of intimidation wielded by institutions and individuals who would prefer our invisibility, indeed, prefer that we did not exist at all, insofar as we are gay or lesbian, or as some prefer to be known, queer.

If silence=death, visibility=life and strength in numbers.

IV.

I recently heard the phrase “don’t let who you are now prevent who you might become.”

This phrase, when interpreted in certain ways, may indeed be very liberating. But it has been lived out in other ways that are ultimately harmful to the whole, as well as to individuals.

If every military chaplain, pastor, priest, minister, rabbi, imam, guru, prior, abbess, mother superior, or any other spiritual leader;

if every politician, congressperson, teacher, and CEO;

if every quarterback, centerfielder, guard, and goalie;

if every person who is gay or lesbian would come out who could come out, even to just a few people whose mind would be changed about gay and lesbian people, it would eliminate the need for a closet, a need imposed on us from the outside that stifles, silences, and strangles. It would finish the work started by the bullet that entered Harvey Milk’s brain, when it ended his life but didn’t silence his prophetic tongue.

There would no longer be any need to be in the closet. If you didn’t want to talk about being gay or lesbian, you wouldn’t have to talk about it. But at least you could share what everyone else can share about their lives without worrying that even one "slip up," one solitary mention of same-sex attraction, partnership, or inclination, would potentially cost you your job, calling, family, or life. And in a country where police raids on gay bars in the last year in Atlanta and Fort Worth have shown a scary turn towards the facism of years past, challenging those who would silence us is still a need.

Being out gives us voice. Being in the closet gives those who wish us out of existence voice and power. There would be no way that everyone who is gay or lesbian could be fired, kicked out, put down, defrocked, ground under, executed, or disrespected, because the voices would be too many to be drowned out with cries of “sinner” or “faggot.”

And the choice is clear: Existence over invisibility. Service over silence. Honesty over duplicity. And open love over overt hostility.

The next reformation will be one of honesty, and that honesty will bring down the walls of every closet from here to Uganda.

Pat Robertson's "pact with the devil"

2010-01-14T06:55:00.000-06:00

Note: I'm by no means an expert on the history or folklore of Haiti. This seems to me where at least one element of this "devil's pact" thing is coming from, but I'm open to being educated if I'm astray.

"The god who created the earth; who created the sun that gives us light. The god who holds up the ocean; who makes the thunder roar. Our God who has ears to hear. You who are hidden in the clouds; who watch us from where you are. You see all that the white has made us suffer. The white man's god asks him to commit crimes. But the god within us wants to do good. Our god, who is so good, so just, He orders us to revenge our wrongs. It's He who will direct our arms and bring us the victory. It's He who will assist us. We all should throw away the image of the white men's god who is so pitiless. Listen to the voice for liberty that speaks in all our hearts."

--attributed to Boukman Dutty, at the ceremony of August 14 (or 21), 1791, at Bois Caïman, Haiti

The words of the prayer above were interpreted yesterday by television commentator Pat Robertson as being a “pact with the devil.” Robertson said, on the show The 700 Club, “And you know, Christy, something happened a long time ago in Haiti, and people might not want to talk about it. They were under the heel of the French, ahh, you know, Napoleon the 3rd or whatever, and, they got together and swore a pact to the devil. They said, We will serve you if you'll get us free from the French. True Story. And so the devil said "ok, it's a deal." And ahh they kicked the French out of you know the Haitians revolted and got themselves free. But ever since, they have been cursed by one thing after the other, desperately poor. That island of Hispaniola is one island cut down the middle. On the one side is Haiti; on the other side is the Dominican Republic. The Dominican Republic is, is prosperous, healthy, full of resources, et cetera; Haiti is in desperate poverty. Same island. Ahh, they need to have, and we need to pray for them, a great turning to God, and out of this tragedy, I'm optimistic that something good may come, but right now we're helping the suffering people and the suffering is unimaginable.”

His voice was one of a grandfather telling family secrets that, though painful, were true, because he was there when they happened. Robertson pretends to have knowledge of something horrible, yet unquestionable. Yet Robertson's comments are very questionable.

In the words of a spokesman from the Christian Broadcasting Network, “[Pat Robertson’s] comments were based on the widely-discussed 1791 slave rebellion led by Boukman Dutty at Bois Caiman, where the slaves allegedly made a famous pact with the devil in exchange for victory over the French. This history, combined with the horrible state of the country, has led countless scholars and religious figures over the centuries to believe the country is cursed.”

The above prayer is the only text that Robertson might be able to point to in order to make his case, aside from the ceremony in which a pig was apparently sacrificed.

Fine. So we’ve got a dead pig, some fiery words that incite the overthrow of a horribly violent culture of slavery, and that’s supposed to be a “pact with the devil” that accounted for all of Haiti’s problems for the last 200 years, and underlies the death of thousands, perhaps even tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of human beings in the recent earthquakes?

Some will say that Pat Robertson is not worth spending time and energy refuting. I believe he must be challenged, because some people actually see him as the face of Christianity, a serious Christianity that must be respected, in which Haitians are indeed historically devil worshipers who deserve a horrible earthquake to turn them to God. Others will see this Christianity that Robertson claims to represent as a silly religion of the weak-minded, who, God love them, prove that God doesn’t exist, because Robertson’s version of God is just too stupid to survive serious scrutiny. To be clear: my concern is that some will look at Pat Robertson, and listen to his words, and say that on account of his words, God does not exist, and that Christianity is bankrupt of truth. This is why he must be challenged.

Pat Robertson apparently expresses something that “countless scholars and religious figures” also believe. He does not cite one credible source. Nor does his company defender cite a scholar who can point to a pact with the devil. Not one bit of actual evidence to back up such incendiary comments as appear above. Not one. Yet he claims to command the truth of God.

II.

Let’s take a look at this prayer, and do a little basic, good old-fashioned exegesis, and see if we can find the devil's pact here.

Here is a fairly lengthy invocation: “The god who created the earth; who created the sun that gives us light. The god who holds up the ocean; who makes the thunder roar. Our God who has ears to hear. You who are hidden in the clouds; who watch us from where you are. You see all that the white has made us suffer.” This is the creator God, who made the heavens and the earth, the oceans and the thunder. This is the God in heaven, who sees and hears the mistreatment of God’s creation: “you see all that the white has made us suffer.” And anyone who would dispute that slavery is interminable, inhuman suffering, cannot know that of which he or she is speaking.

The prayer continues: “The white man's god asks him to commit crimes. But the god within us wants to do good. Our god, who is so good, so just, He orders us to revenge our wrongs. It's He who will direct our arms and bring us the victory. It's He who will assist us. We all should throw away the image of the white men's god who is so pitiless.” One might point to two gods, one “within us” and one “hidden in the clouds,” neither of whom is “the white man’s god.” Is there, however, any realistic doubt that white men did indeed justify their enslavement of black men, women, and children by calling to their God to justify their actions, and seeking to justify ungodly enslavement through use of certain Scriptures, from the curse of Ham to the call of Paul (or pseudo-Paul) for slaves to be obedient to their masters? I will look up some contemporary citations for this if need be.

No doubt God has been used to justify any number of destructive social views and arrangements, particularly by the white race and in the name of converting "godless" individuals and peoples into "Christians." Would it be any wonder that people who have been oppressed in the name of such a god would repudiate that god? That does not mean that they are repudiating the actual God, but what has been put forth as that God--a force that sanctions slavery and all that comes with it: abuse, torture, killing, separating families, enforced labor, enforced sex and rape, and any number of other activities that any of us who claims to believe in God and worship God would never seek to justify in the name of God.

III.

The final line of the prayer encourages the voice for liberty, a liberty that those who uphold “God n country” raise up high as a golgatha cross: “Listen to the voice for liberty that speaks in all our hearts.” Where is the devil here? In the liberty from slavery, or in the hearts of those who are calling for their own (and others’) freedom?

What is plain is that Pat Robertson commands a cable broadcasting network, and is able to say whatever comes into his head while he is on the air, without any fear of being challenged from within his own network, of losing his sponsors, or of being taken off the air. He is fully able to repeat shaded truths and outright lies just as though they are truths right out of the Bible he professes to love so much.

And in so doing, Pat Robertson signs his own, admittedly metaphoric, pact with the Devil: he trades his own integrity for ratings, the truth of an admittedly fuzzy historical situation for fame, and a loving God of grace for whatever gets his name in the news, the Haitian people be damned, the Christian religion be damned, and yes, God be damned: For Pat Robertson would call God the devil in order to perpetuate a racist tradition that started with the overthrow of a colonialist oppressor and continues through to this day with a natural disaster on an unprecedentedly horrible scale. God love him, as our Vice President would say, but Pat Robertson needs to get some of that God that he suggested the Haitians might now get, whom they have, in his opinion, not gotten thus far.

God love you and bless you, Pat Robertson, and turn your heart to the true knowledge of a God who is familiar with the statement and meaning of “who sinned, he or his parents?” and what goes behind it. We each have our cross to bear, and we each have the railroad tie in our own eye. But please, for the sake of the God you hold dear, think about the words that come out of your mouth.

Follow Now the Spirit's Lead

2009-11-25T21:57:00.000-06:00

Sister church, forever changing,
follow now the Spirit's lead...

Much has happened in the 3 months since the ELCA Churchwide Assembly's decision officially to open the vocation of ordained ministry to openly partnered gay and lesbian individuals.

The latest news in the direction of implementing the Churchwide decisions was that the ELCA has waived the customary five-year waiting period for those who were removed as pastors because of the former policies excluding openly partnered gay and lesbians to apply for re-entry to the official ranks of the ELCA ordained.

In response, several congregations are removing themselves from the ELCA to form their own organization of Lutheran churches. They feel, however, that the ELCA has left them by abandoning traditional interpretation of Scripture, doctrine, and church tradition, and not the other way around. Either way, a time of parting beckons, and it is something to be recognized and, in my opinion, mourned.

My prayer for those who wish to split from the ELCA to form their own denomination, or who wish to redirect their funding away from a national church that does a lot of good in this country and worldwide, is that they go with God, not to defame the gay and lesbian faithful, but to live more fully into their understanding of God's direction for them. My heart for them is one of love and benediction, even though I do not agree wholeheartedly with their stances and methods of interpretation.

To that end, I composed this hymn last week, after learning of their deisre to form their own, "freestanding" synod. I have shared it with their leadership along with my prayers for their following of the Spirit's lead.

My hope is that this hymn speaks to you in some way as well.

Sister Church, Forever Changing

Text: Chris Wogaman
Tune: GALILEE, KAS DZIEDAJA

Sister church, forever changing,
follow now the Spirit's lead.
Always living, never ceasing,
open wide to God's own need.

When a time of parting becokons,
follow that which calls you out.
Christ's the body, we're the members,
calling to a world of doubt.

In a world of many dangers,
many terrors, many fears,
our ideas sometimes comfort,
sometimes cause a thousand tears.

God's commandments give us guidance,
Jesus' teachings light the way,
Spirit's leading levels temples
we construct to halt God's sway.

By God's grace we'll live together,
in the fields that Christ has sown,
through his body, blood, and toil,
heaven not for us alone.

Glory be to God our Father,
Praise be unto Christ the son,
Equal blessing to the Spirit,
show us, Lord, your race to run. Amen.

©2009 Chris Wogaman

Sermon after ELCA Churchwide Assembly

2009-09-01T11:24:00.000-05:00

I have neglected posting even though many amazing and wonderful things have happened in the last number of months: The Iowa Supreme Court's ruling allowing same-sex marriage, as well as the New England States either adopting marriage or clearing the way; the ongoing debates over healthcare, that show just how deep the rift is in our society between those who disagree; and two weeks ago, my denomination of the ELCA had its bi-ennial Churchwide Assembly, which turned out to be amazing on several levels.

I had the good fortune to be present for 4 of the 7 days of the recent ELCA Churchwide Assembly in Minneapolis, and am still in the process of preparing some thoughts related to those experiences.

In the meantime, I want to share the sermon I preached at St. Paul's Lutheran Church, Sanata Monica, CA, on the Sunday after Churchwide. My friend, Pr. James Boline, is the pastor of that church, and was greatly kind in accommodating my request to preach there after Churchwide. The inspiration to do so came about two months earlier, and it worked out well for both of us, I think.

Sermon on Ephesians 6: 10-20
St. Paul’s Lutheran Church, Santa Monica, CA
August 23, 2009

Let us pray: God of might and strength, mercy and grace, guard us from all that assails us, turns us against each other, and turns us from you. In the assaults of the devil on our souls, protect us. In the moments we doubt your wisdom, protect us with faith. When we are tempted to shout others down, hold our tongues. And when we need to speak, proclaim your mysterious, life-changing Gospel, through our living mouths. Through the One who has given us his body and blood as eternal food, Jesus your son, we pray. Amen.

I.

There’s an old ballad from the American south that has been on my mind lately, as a possible rift in our national church of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America around matters of sexual orientation has grown in possibility. The words of its last line convey the central message: “My home’s across the Blue Ridge mountains, my home’s across the Blue Ridge mountains, my home’s across the Blue Ridge mountains, and I never expect to see you anymore.”

And I never expect to see you anymore. How can I keep from crying? the song continues. It bites a deep part of me, this prospect of eternal separation, whether it be from people I will miss terribly, or even from those I don’t particularly care to see again. Many cried those on Friday, in such anticipation of separation, for what they felt was thousands of years of tradition overturned, and in joy for justice so long denied, and finally achieved. My home is across that great wide gulf; if you want to come to see me, you’ll have to go a long way to get there, and I’m hoping you will.

My home’s across the Blue Ridge mountains, and I never expect to see you anymore—across chasms that may be mountainous or psychological, political or theological. But, I have more than a tinge of sadness at the prospect of having to part, until that day when the circle will be completed in heaven, and even the unforgivable will be forgiven, through the body and blood of Jesus.

Devilish, overwhelming forces inside of me, and I think inside of each of us, sometimes strike out to bring on that separation, to widen that gulf, through saying callous and outrageous words at precisely the right time to hurt those with whom I am disagreeing, and bring on a parting. Whatever it is inside of me that would bring on that parting, something even stronger longs for conditions to change, to bring folks back together into one community, that respects consciences bound to disagree.

But we seem to be entering a time as a wider Christian body, and as a society as well, when staying together, in true relationship, is getting harder and harder to do. The fear built up around sexuality is that the traditions will be forgotten, Scripture ignored or thrown out the window entirely, and that the Body of Christ will start looking like it was donated to science for dissection. This fear is immense for some. “And I never expect you anymore” might just sound like the greatest self-fulfilling prophecy of all time in the Church of Christ.

II.

Well, as we say back in Minnesota, ya knoaw, maybe ya have ta change yoar expectations, then. And on Friday, the ELCA not only changed its expectations, but its Vision and Expectations as well.

The Minneapolis Convention Center would seem the last place for a battle of cosmic proportions to take place, but some say that is just what happened this last week as more than 1,000 voting members from throughout the Church assembled to debate the business of the Church, primarily the social statement on sexuality and a set of resolutions that would eliminate the gay celibacy clause found in this Church’s document entitled “Vision and Expectations,” in which this now infamous phrase occurs: “Ordained ministers,” it says, “who are homosexual in their self understanding are expected to abstain from homosexual sexual relationships.”

Well, then came Wednesday. If not thousands of people were there to see it, and media to record it, nobody would believe that just before the ELCA Churchwide assembly debated whether to adopt the Sexuality Social Statement, now about 8 years in the making, a tornado struck the very building in which the assembly was meeting, as well as the church across the street in which Goodsoil [the gay and lesbian advocacy organization that works with the Lutheran Church] would have an absolutely amazing worship service that night, where preacher Barbara Lundblad would call us to have faith, even when it seemed we were sinking in the middle of a storm.

This tornado, though a level Zero, came out of the sky like one of the Devil’s own flaming darts, as in our reading from Ephesians, and looked as though it might halt the proceedings at this crucial juncture. Not only did the proceedings continue, but the Sexuality Social Statement passed, with dead on exactly two-thirds of the vote. Many probably not only expected the roof to get ripped off of the building, but also one third of the assembly to get up and walk out.

Neither happened, yet this vote for the Social Statement preceded the truly feared vote on whether or not to allow “noncelibate” gay and lesbian pastors to serve openly and officially in the ELCA. I think everyone was expecting an even greater cataclysm to happen then.

Many expressed grave concern as to what would happen if this vote passed, particularly with respect to our worldwide Lutheran relationships and ecumenical partners. A man named Matthew from Africa, who lives in Michigan, said that if the assembly voted yes, then he and his African brother and sisters would have to leave the church. It doesn’t seem like we can expect to see each other around much longer, but can we change our expectations, perhaps a bit, and find a new relationship through reaching out in prayer and concern to those who would leave?

I don’t want Matthew to leave, nor many others who would not want me or your Pr. Jim to serve as an openly gay pastor in the ELCA. I would personally be diminished by his and his African brothers' and sisters' leaving, and the Church would be diminished as well. I want us to be able to agree to disagree, to respect the place where bound conscience honestly meets a deep sense of calling, and both can co-exist as a testament to the Christ that calls us into community with those we would not choose, but who have been chosen for us by the one who makes us One in him.

III.

A common link between today’s reading from Ephesians 6, and the literally cataclysmic events of the past week, is this fear of separation: separation from our traditions, from God, from each other, and from the promises given us in baptism.

This reading raises the prospect of separation to a whole, new, frightening level: that of a fearful separation from God through the overwhelming assault of evil forces. “Be on your guard,” I hear the text saying, “for you have a chasm opening up between you and God that could swallow you up forever.” Only God can bridge that chasm, can swallow up the assaults of the Enemy, can fit us for this battle to come. But what really is this battle? And whence cometh this fear? Seriously, why are people so afraid? Do people not believe that God reaches out after us time and time again? That the Holy Spirit can breathe new life into old skin, and that even the dead can be raised?

Yet there is somewhere a deep fear that our Church is opening the gates to an evil assault that threatens to destroy us individually along with the whole world, that, forget about the Devil, we are tempting God to strike us down. And that’s a whole lot of fear. Let’s take a step back for a minute.

Personally speaking, I was not born and raised a Lutheran; I became one by chance, and stayed one by choice. And the reason I chose to stay Lutheran, is because this way of understanding Christianity and human nature, more than any other I know (beyond some of the hymns I sang in childhood), acknowledges the struggles of life, and the struggle against those elements of ourselves and our society that threaten to bring us down or tear us apart, individually or corporately. The Lutheran way of understanding my own dual nature, sinner and saint, is real to me, if not especially comfortable and altogether cheery.

Lutherans are Lutherans, in part, because we are honest about the existence of evil in our own flesh, blood, & souls. Evil has breached and reached the very core of our individual and communal being in this life. Even so, this statement is hard, like the statement of Jesus to eat his flesh and drink his blood, and will turn some people off from hearing the Gospel that must be preached: that even the evil that invades our world and our own bodies cannot separate us from the love of God.

This love is where the mystery of the Gospel to which Ephesians alludes comes into play.

This love is where the evil that drives our souls from peace into war, magnified on city streets, battlefields, and even sometimes in our own homes, meets the unmistakable, unmovable “no” of God, which sucks out the ultimate power of evil to grind us down.

This love is where Jesus’s body becomes really present in bread, and his blood becomes really present in wine.

This love is where the dead are raised, and the hydras of death and disease that keep popping up over and over again are finally laid to rest.

This love is where the broken circle is mended, and the false peace is brought down with the sword of honesty.

And, as our author of Ephesians said, this Gospel love, over all of the cacophony of voices that shout out “BE AFRAID!”, this love must be spoken to the ends of the Earth.

IV.

I attended the Assembly this last week as a visitor, without voice in the Assembly, or influence to affect its conversation. If there were one message that I was convinced needed to be spoken to that assemblage, and to this assemblage, and to every assemblage of two or more persons who meet in Jesus’ name, a message which Bishop Mark Hanson spoke well after the vote on approving gay clergy was passed, it is this: the Devil will assault you with flaming arrows, dreadful days, heartache and heartbreak, humiliation, with disease, dissent, disunion, and finally, death.

But through this all, beyond disagreements and resentments that might be petty or profound, beyond rupturing relationships, schismatic churches, and a huge burden of fear that only seems to mount by the day, God gives us a few sure promises:

that we will not be left alone, for God does give us community;

that God will not destroy us, for God has sent the rainbow in the clouds as a sign of that promise never to destroy us again as in the overwhelming flood;

and that we will be safe, no matter what, for we have Christ as our ultimate resting place, our shield and strength in this life, and in the life to come.

We are given each other to love in Christ’s name, with a love that looks back to the God who sent us to be here in this world. This name is not some rabbit’s foot, that will make disagreement go away if we say it nicely or even repeatedly.

But I really do believe, that, like a mother who wants to see her quarreling children get together and continue to love each other after she is gone and not able to bring them back together, God cares that we live and abide in the love that has overflowed God’s own self into creation, with the words: “And I expect to see you once again, when I bring you at last under the shadow of my wing.”

When you feel the flaming arrows coming your way, may the power of Christ be your power to withstand. When the fears that seem to dominate so many conversations scatter your thoughts and cause you grief, may the center which is Christ be your center. And may the powerful love of God, which you can expect to see again and again, be a gift to you and through you, to calm a frightened, weary world.

Amen.

CA Supreme Court's Real Message on Prop 8

2009-05-26T23:58:00.001-05:00

"Please hold: your marriage is important to us. All of our justices are currently assisting the disgruntled majority."

Odetta & Loretta: In Loving Memory on a Day of Joy

2009-01-20T13:38:00.000-06:00

I.

My life has been deeply affected and shaped by many, many people, but most deeply by several Black women. Most are living, but some are gone from this vale of tears. And all I can sense are standing up and cheering this day for our new President, who will lead in a new era in race relations, and help to define a love that we can share as human beings of all races that takes into account the past, and shapes a future of the Beloved Community that past generations, and even our own today, could only have hoped for.

One passed 7 weeks ago, on Tuesday, December 2nd, 2008. Another in 2007, on the 24th of September. Both I wish could have lived to see this day, and are, I believe, watching from the place of their eternal reward.

One was one of the dearest people in my life, whom I never visited or telephoned enough, but who was always full of love for me and most everyone in her life. Another I did not know personally, and only met once in my life, but has given my soul a dimension of deep and loving experience as well.

One was famous and known throughout the world, traveling all over and affecting thousands and perhaps millions of lives. Another was known well to her friends and family, to her neighbors, to all whom her outgoing and dear personality endeared he; she was born, lived, and died in Harlem.

Both were women whose strength and souls were shaped by Jesus.

Both were women whose love was evident from most every word that I ever heard from them.

Both were women whose wisdom came through experiences I could never know or understand. But, in their own ways, each welcomed me into their lives in a way that I cannot repay but with gratitude and story.

One was Odetta Felious Holmes Gordon. One was Loretta Hernton. Odetta and Loretta.

II.

Loretta Hernton was born in Harlem Hospital on March 2, 1936. She grew up in Harlem, and was a memeber of Walker Memorial Baptist Church in the Bronx, which she joined in 1947. She worked and lived in Harlem her whole life. And she died at the Jewish Home and Hospital, only 30 blocks from where she was born, on September 24, 2007, at the age of 71.

I met her when I was filling in as protestant worship service leader at the Fort Tryon Nursing Home for a period of months before entering seminary in 2002. After one service, she had asked me if I might share with her one of the hymns we had sung during the service. When I came by her room at the Home to bring the hymn, she was in the process of being discharged. Brother Evans and Brother Russell had come by from the Prayer Team of Walker Memorial Baptist Church in the Bronx, where Loretta had become a member in 1947. But had I come by an hour later, I would have missed her altogether, and my life would have been much poorer.

Loretta loved. That is the only way I can say it. Every time I visited her, she would ask after my mother, my father, my sister, and my grandma. She would tell me whom she had been in touch with of our mutual acquaintance, from her roommate at Ft. Tryon, to Brothers Evans and Russell, to her sweetheart whom she’d met at Ft. Tryon, to aged Mr. Davis, who was, I believe, registrar at City University of New York many years ago, and a man who had followed FDR’s funeral train as a young man, after having been discharged from a recently integrated army unit.

III.

Odetta Felious Holmes was born on what would become my own birthday, December 31st, 1930. Although I’m a fan, I don’t know her life verbatim, and would commend you to the grand wisdom of the internet to learn about her. But this is what I know about her.

I know that she sang from an amazing heart that took in everything from segregation and true oppression, nearly to the heights of this inaugural day. This was to be part of the arc of her life.

I say that Odetta’s voice had the power to wound and heal simultaneously. The wounding was not one which she was inflicting, but one which she was uncovering. It was a moment of honesty that she could bring out through the sounds that her own body made, but were sung through years of silent tears.

Thanks by to God and Andy L., I got to see, hear, and meet Odetta once in my life, last April, when she came to sing with Pete Seeger and a group of wonderful 4th graders in Beacon, NY. It is an experience I will never forget, hearing her live and in person. Most moving were the songs “Something Inside So Strong” (“I know I can make it, but you’re doing me wrong, so wrong”), sung to challenge the society of apartheid in South Africa, and “Any Way You Can Make it, Baby” (“You gotta keep on movin' it on. If you can’t run, walk! If you can’t walk, crawl! If you can’t crawl, roll! Any old way you can make it baby, you gotta keep on movin it on.”).

I’m trying to think of the way to describe those places in Odetta’s voice that only she could make, those spaces in which you could meet her and generations of those who shaped her physical structure that could bring her to us, and those who for better or worse, made her who she was.

She had mansions in her body’s temple, and mansions in her soul. She had a place where you could enter and just sit and be.

She had spaces in her voice that would wrap you in velvet, and spaces that would wrap you in a bush of prickly cotton.

She could, in a breath, bring you into a space of discomfort that she has faced in her own life, and lay on the salve that God gave her and gave to us through her.

Odetta had long, thin fingers, and her frailty was stronger than my strength. She wished me all the best, and I will carry her benediction with me my whole life long.

IV.

Odetta and especially Loretta have been present in my silent tears since Barack Hussein Obama was elected and now has assumed the high office of President of the United States. They both came so close to seeing this day. Loretta would have been smiling and shouting, so happy in her bed, sending out a loud HALLELUIA! when he finally ascended to the high office of President of the United States.

They would be so proud, and I with them, holding the hands of their spirit and the spirits of those who have given their lives, both literally and metaphorically, to see this day arrive.
The words of the Sacred Harp tradition have also been nourishing to my soul, and I wish to let them join together the past and the present times in a song of joy:

Text by Charles Wesley:

O what are all my sufferings here,
If, Lord, Thou count me meet
With that enraptured host to appear,
And worship at Thy feet!
Give joy or grief, give ease or pain,
Take life or friends away,
But let me find them all again
In that eternal day.

AND I’LL SING HALLELUJAH!
AND YOU’LL SING HALLELUJAH!
AND WE’LL ALL SING HALLELUJAH!
WHEN WE ARRIVE AT HOME!

May this land of America once again be ALL our home, and a home in the world for the homeless, placeless, nameless who burn with the passion of self-definition and other-regarding love.

May this home be from here into eternity, that for which all being has longed, a place of dignity, a place of prosperity for the hungry, and poverty for the rich.

May this home be one of grace for all, enmity toward none, and a home where even in our hardest times is one of perpetual HALLELUIA!

This Land is Your Land! This Land is My Land!

2009-01-18T22:53:00.000-06:00

I.

"A voice was chanting,
As the fog was lifting,
This land was made for you and me."
--Woody Guthrie

I am listening in tears as Pete Seeger and Bruce Springsteen sing "This Land is Your Land." Seeger's nearly 90-year-old voice speaking out the wonderful words of Woody Guthrie's old song, and YES! This land is my land! This land is your land! Woody is present in song at Obama's inauguration. Odetta is here in great spirit. Would that her voice, that had the power to would and heal simultaneously, be cascading down upon the crowd in this very moment.

We are getting our country back, to give back to the world. That is the whole liberation that we have found in sending Dick Cheney and George Bush away. No more will that lip of Cheney curl in a strange mixture of disdain and frustration that he's not getting just what he wants when he wants it.

No more will we have to choose between cheering on George Bush against his many critics, and booing, laughing at, or generally deriding a man who seems not to have quite left the frat house on a squalid Sunday morning with a pile of stale beer-puke as his only pillow on a cold, hard floor, only to wake up in these circumstances as the most powerful man in the world.

We can both give thanks that there have been no more 9-11s, no bombs in the subways of New York, no planes crashing into the White House or Capitol building, but also regret that America has been greatly diminished in her power and grandeur, in her ability to broker peace and support nations in need, diminished in being a voice of tolerance and acceptance rather than high-handed moralism of a very certain and narrow stamp.

I find myself thoroughly ready to give Cheney the gentleman's boot out the front door and not mourning him landing on his foie-gras-padded ass bought with the blood of American servicemen and -women as well as tens of thousands of Iraqis, and yet not able to do anything but pity Bush, who, beyond his Ivy League-saturated anti-intellectualism, had some really good ideas that got lost in the shuffle of putting our Constitution to bed for a long midnight's nap.

But the dawn is now breaking above the fruited plain.

For eight long years, this land has been their land.

But now, "This Land is Your Land; This Land is My Land." There is a grandeur in these United States that is both dangerous to behold, and empowering to our own country and to the whole world.

II.

"America! America!
God mend thine ev'ry flaw,
Confirm thy soul in self-control,
Thy liberty in law."
--Katherine Lee Bates

This grand old nation could use a return to self-control and liberty through the law that was this country’s birthright, but has been flouted for seven years in the name of national security.

Self-control is both something we have lacked as a society, and also as individuals. If you can’t afford the mortgage, don’t buy the house, no matter how much you want your own home. Rent, for God’s sake. It’s not so bad. I've done it for years. If you can’t afford those SUV or car payments, buy something a little less expensive, or, God forbid, use public transportation if you can. If you can’t afford the flat-screen HDTV that is as big as the side of a barn, and costs as much as a herd of cattle, for goodness sakes don’t blow $5000 + on it—just get something within your means! Of course, there are health emergencies that could wipe out one's savings in the blink of an eye, no matter how hard one tries to save.

It’s easy to say, and not as easy to do. But with big daddy in the White House doing whatever the h-e-double hockey sticks he wanted, it seemed fitting that we should as well.

But now, America, this land is your land once again. And you’ve got some payments to make on it.

III.

"O beautiful for heroes prov'd
In liberating strife,
Who more than self their country loved,
And mercy more than life."

Many have given their lives in down payment out of love for their country. I am a mere armchair citizen, but they are those who go out when the rubber hits the road.

You know, I would like to serve in the armed forces as a chaplain, but it is not allowed under the current “Don’t ask, don’t tell” policies. I’m not one to not ask, nor not tell. This land may be my land, but it’s yet to fully embrace me.

Barack Obama may help us get to that promised land of full participation in this land that puts the realities of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness as bedrock rather than mountaintop experiences. But he can’t do it all by himself.

IV.

"This land was made for you and me."

And you know, dammit, the man is right. This land is not just George Bush’s, Dick Cheney’s, Rick Warren’s, Gene Robinson’s, Barack Obama’s, Caroline Kennedy’s, Bill Gates’s, not just the land of those who have large bank accounts and vast connections and high name recognition, who are inheritors of great legacies or forgers of their own legacies, damn the torpedoes.

This land is the land of a lot more people. The “you” may indeed have much more potential breadth than we’ve ever felt possible. And the “me,” notice how it is preceded by “and,” and comes second, not first, may too be much larger than just each of our individual selves.

The coming of Obama is not the coming of a savior, but the turning of a page in a long book whose last chapter has yet to be written. Hope comes in many ways.

We have taken some, perhaps well-deserved, licks. We have not lived up to the potential that this society has always kept as a problematic possibility, rather than a crystal-clear reality. We have, in the words of a rather harsh New Zealand Episcopalian liturgy, “violated your creation, abused one another, and rejected your love,” but instead of doing this towards God per se, we have done it to the rest of the world as well as ourselves.

But there is a new chance not to do that quite as much as we have. There is a new possibility to take some of the God-shed grace from one end of this beautiful country to the other, and from one end of this needful world to another.

May the fog lift from this land, and may the hungry for food, freedom, and equality, be well fed. May this land truly be yours and mine, and may we give it as a gift of great price to those yet to come who will share our dreams and ideals.

Rites, be they Civil

Fred & Hans: A 95-year Mystery from the "Great War"

Eight is Enough

15 for 15 VIII: Why I Must Be Out

15 for 15 VII: Pride, or Anti-Pity

An Open Letter to Jim Wallis on LGBTQ “Civil Rights.”

15 for 15 VI: The First Time, or I'm Finally Out!

15-for-15 V: Who I Am, or Identity, Equality, and Value

15-for-15 IV: Gaining My Religion

15-for-15 III: Honesty

15-for-15 II: Bully, or It Gets Better

15 for 15: 15 Meditations for 15 Years of Being Openly Gay

Christ Without a Cross Dies Twice

"The Stone that the Builders Rejected"

My NOH8 Story on a Day of Silence or Meditation on my Namesake

Ideas Percolating: The Church, HIV/AIDS, Poetry & Community

Here Comes Spring!

A Spontaneous, Inexhaustive Lutheran Credo

Glenn Gould: Queerly Normal

My Ideas Should Not Depend on Yours for Their Validity

"Leverage the Voice of Love"

Anoka/Hennepin: Tear Down That Wall (of Deadly Homophobia)!

ELCA Churchwide: One Year Later, and Still Waiting

A Repost Riff on "Bless Me Anyway"

An Open Letter to Gregg Steinhafel, CEO of Target Corp.: You've Lost a Customer

Reflections on the Word: from Readings for 5/30/10

“I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth.” –John 16: 12-13a

Reflections on the Word: Readings of April 11, 2010

Wake Up and Smell the Spikenard!

Reflections on the Word: From Lectionary readings for 3/21

“Mary took a pound of costly perfume made of pure nard, anointed Jesus’ feet, and wiped them with her hair. The house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume.” –John 12:3

Reflections on the Word for 3.7.10

Saturday Night Forever

A Sinful Man

Reflections on the Word for 2.7.10

Towards a More Perfect State of the Union

Pat Robertson's "pact with the devil"

Follow Now the Spirit's Lead

Sermon after ELCA Churchwide Assembly

CA Supreme Court's Real Message on Prop 8

Odetta & Loretta: In Loving Memory on a Day of Joy

This Land is Your Land! This Land is My Land!

“I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now.When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth.” –John 16: 12-13a