15 for 15 VIII: Why I Must Be Out

"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 IV: Gaining My Religion

"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

"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.

"The Stone that the Builders Rejected"

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

I.

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.

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

I.

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.

A Spontaneous, Inexhaustive Lutheran Credo

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.

ELCA Churchwide: One Year Later, and Still Waiting

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 Sinful Man

“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.

Follow Now the Spirit's Lead

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

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.