Oh, the gay thing once again. Here I go...

As The United Methodist Church continues to struggle with divisions within our connection that strain the fabric of our covenant, once again I feel the need to speak up and out.

This blog post will not cover the "rights" and "wrongs" of biblical exegesis relative to sexual orientation. I have already expressed my feelings of futility for that approach. Rather, this is to serve as a public witness of who I am and how I intend to minister.

First, to all of those who are bone tired of fighting, I apologize on behalf of a church that is making you weary. Our inability to conclude this decades long struggle has taken a toll on everyone - on those who advocate for "traditional" marriage and understandings of gender and sexual orientation as well as on those who continue to press for wider and wider inclusion and a more generous expression of acceptance within the church. No one is exempted from the pain of this fight. However, while many may be exhausted, I only apologize to those who are LGBTQI and their allies. As the ones talked about, derided, judged, called names, shut out and down, and set on the margins, your pain is especially acute. Your weariness is especially overwhelming. I am sorry. I am sorry that your church can feel like a foreign place, that policies of exclusion do not match the generous and supportive community found in your local congregations, that your core selves and your most precious and holy relationships are denied, ignored, and marginalized in the one place that should most honor, support, and uplift them.

As I pray for those who feel as though there is not enough energy left in them to take the next breath, I am reminded of the beautiful poetry from the prophetic tradition of Isaiah,  which was probably written near the end of Babylonian exile for a people in need of hope and comfort.

 Why do you complain, Jacob?    Why do you say, Israel,“My way is hidden from the Lord;    my cause is disregarded by my God”?
Do you not know?    Have you not heard?
The Lord is the everlasting God,    the Creator of the ends of the earth.
He will not grow tired or weary,    and his understanding no one can fathom. He gives strength to the weary    and increases the power of the weak. Even youths grow tired and weary,    and young men stumble and fall; but those who hope in the Lord    will renew their strength.
They will soar on wings like eagles;    they will run and not grow weary,    they will walk and not be faint (Isaiah 40:27-31).

As much as you feel alone, dispirited, weary, and dejected, you are not alone. This path that is fraught with disappointment, frustration, exile, and struggle stands among many such paths toward homecoming, safety, justice, and new life. You are not alone historically. Our sacred story is one of exile and homecoming, of death and new life. And, you are not alone today. There are many, like me, who stand with you and who can hope for you when hope seems so very elusive.

Second, I want to be clear about one thing. This pastor will baptize, confirm, comfort, welcome into membership, minister with and to, marry, and bury people who identify within the LGBTQI communities. I will do all that I can to ensure that your spiritual community is safe, boundaried, healthy, and mature. I will listen to your pain. I will challenge you to live faithfully with God and your loved ones. I will pray for you. I will help you prepare for marriage and I will stand unapologetically with you and offer God's blessings upon your life shared together. I will baptize you and your children. I will treat your relationship as normative and wonderful and beautiful. I will visit you in the hospital and hold hands with you and your partner in times of distress. I will anoint you with oil and pray for your healing. I will wait by your bedside until your last breath is exhaled. And, I will stand by your grave and offer God's blessings upon your life lived in eternal peace with Christ and the saints who have gone before you. 

These actions should not need to be considered prophetic. This is the calling of a pastor. We are called, trained, and set apart to bear witness to life's most precious moments. We hear people's stories of deep guilt. We bear witness to the wounds of shame. We see humankind from birth to death and through all points in between. This is a holy vocation. And, while we are called to be prophetic, these acts were never supposed to be prophetic. Yet, as a consequence of abiding marginalization, the deeply pastoral is today something also essentially prophetic. If someone were to ask me if I perform such and such action "out of a political stance or a pastoral one," I would have no honest answer except, "Yes." Sadly, the pastoral is also prophetic for pastors in this church - for pastors who dare to bear witness to the fullness of life's holy, painful, and wondrous moments that visit the lives of LGBTQI parishioners and community members.

As marriage equality becomes more prevalent in the United States, more clergy will be forced to come to a peace about how he or she will be present in the lives of people who are LGBTQI. Will they preside over weddings of same sex couples? Will they welcome families with LGBTQI members? Will they baptize, confirm, and welcome into membership LGBTQI people and their families?

Peace visited me on these issues years ago. I am not tired of the fight because I am not fighting. I am at peace. My calling is clear. How I will minister is without struggle or confusion. I am completely at peace with how to minister with and to people who are LGBTQI and their families and friends. If the United Methodist Church seeks to punish me, I am at peace with that process. If the denomination seeks to silence me, it will be disappointed. If I am wrong in my theology or exegesis or anthropology, I trust in the compassion and mercy of God, but I do not think that I am wrong. The church is.

To my colleagues facing trials, administrative processes, and uncertainty, please know that I pray for you, for your families, your congregations, and your vocations. As an Elder in relationship with you, I hold you in my heart.

I pray for the day when the words of Isaiah's prophetic tradition sound like simple poetry that points to a quaint and distant time. But, today, they are poignant and needed. Exile is not forever. Our exhaustion will never overwhelm the goodness and strength of our Creator. The tumultuous path toward justice and compassion may be walked by us, but God goes before and behind us. God has not disregarded our cause. God has not abandoned us to the wilderness alone and vulnerable. And, in our most despairing moments, we can take comfort that God gives us wings like eagles that we might soar to new heights and glimpse new vistas as yet undreamed of by our limited and constrained imagination. God is with us all leading us home. God is with us leading us to new life.

 

This Gay Pastor Responds to General Conference

Over the past couple of weeks the internet has been replete with articles, blog posts, facebook updates, and tweets about the decision made at General Conference of The United Methodist Church to maintain language stating that "homosexuality is incompatible with Christian teaching." I actually don't want to rehash most of what has been said. Whether it's Chuck Currie (a UCC pastor preaching at First UMC in Portland), Sandy Brown (pastor at First UMC in Seattle), or others across the nation, most of what needs to be said has been said. Simply put, the decision to continue the marginalization of LGBTQI people is wrong. It is not about biblical authority or holiness. Rather, it is about power and fear of difference. For those who hold a theology that is challenged by fluid sexual identity or sexual orientation, there is more graciousness and kindness in stating that good Christians of good conscience disagree. Those who won't name our disagreement are much more interested in being right than loving, more interested in having power over than being in community with, more invested in shoring up their world views than being changed by the Other. These are my thoughts and they belong to no other person. I own them all.

My facebook wall has been filled with responses to General Conference - responses which range from disappointment to outrage, from the uncertainty of whether people can continue inside this polarized and broken denomination to deep sorrow because the bigotry of the general church is at odds with and doesn't reflect the love and welcome people have personally experienced in their local congregations. A number of these posts have been made by young adults and others who tuned in or attended General Conference for the first time this year. Others have been slogging through the debate on human sexuality quadrennium after quadrennium and they despair of any motion toward inclusion.

To be honest, I am more heartbroken over how other people have been hurt by General Conference than I am directly wounded by it. If I weren't somewhat inured to the issue by now, I would have left this denomination a long time ago. And, trust me, I've thought about it. Long and hard, I've thought about it. Today, however, I feel freed from the marginalization of the church (well, most of the time I do). A while ago, I decided to be honest about who I am, what I believe, and what I'm called to do; if the United Methodist Church provides a place for me at the table, so be it. If not, so be it. I don't say this flippantly. You see, my family is a generationally Methodist one. Not one, but two of my ancestors were Circuit Riders back in the early days of the movement. I can trace my family back to the very beginning of the Church of England. The Anglican way is part of me. The Wesleyan movement has left indelible marks on me. The Wesleyan Quadrilateral, Wesley's sermons, our hymnody, the idea of itinerating clergy, free will, prevenient grace, practical divinity - these are all deeply rooted in how I experience God and how I mediate God to others. However, I do not bow down to The United Methodist Church; I bow before God, and none other (at least that is to what I aspire). So, when I see this glorious movement, this wonderful heritage, wasted in worthless acts of evil and oppression, I hurt. When I hear young adults wonder how their church as a global body can differ so much from their local congregation, my heart breaks. When clergy who haven't been able to leave their closets come to me and cry in uncertainty about their place in this denomination, I cry with them.

There are those who like to quote scripture - five to seven specific scriptures - about how homosexuality is against human nature and God's plan for humankind. And, I don't want to parse those scriptures here. I'm willing to say, "Okay. Let's say that's right. So what?" That usually throws people off. They expect me to try an explain those scriptures away or to step into church apologetics, to get my "revisionist exegesis" on. I certainly can do that because the scriptures trotted out and put on display have absolutely nothing to do with homosexuality, but I very often choose not to do that because arguing won't change people's minds. Rather, I have found that I have to step away from the debate, not because I am afraid of "losing" or because I can't match them scripture for scripture (I can), but because experience (one of the four components of the Wesleyan Quadrilateral) has taught me that debate and argument do not equal holy conferencing; they do not change anyone's mind. And so, I reply with the question, "So what?" There are no biblical literalists. There aren't. There are biblical fundamentalists, Evangelicals, charismatics, and so forth, but there aren't literalists. The Bible is always interpreted. We have made many decisions over the past two millennia about our relationship with scripture. It is our holy book. It is our story. It is God's Word. It is not something to take literally, not if we take it seriously. My question of "so what" is not a challenge to scripture; it is a challenge to the person abusing it. I simply call them on their arbitrary use of God's word, which I believe is a violation of the first three of the 10 Commandments, which leads all too often to the violation of the sixth and ninth commandments.

Instead of arguing, I pray for the salvation of those who say unspeakable things about me. I pray for those who enliken me to someone engaged in bestiality, pedophilia, murder, rape, and torture (all of which have been used in comparisons directly to me). At General Conference in 2000, an African delegate actually said that homosexuality results from a witch's curse, to which American delegates in opposition to homosexuality nodded in agreement and applauded. I had no choice except to believe that a significant portion of the Southern delegates believe in witchcraft or they were willing to use an African delegate to promote their own political aims. I left and prayed for them all. The narrowness of their heart must be a burden. I have come to believe in something I once deeply resisted for both theological and linguistic reasons: I have become a prayer warrior.

The United Methodist Church failed to live into something better, something more humane, something more Godly. It decided to stay locked in a pattern of fear, scapegoating, and namecalling. What it - what WE - did this General Conference was to contribute to the death of every LGBTQI person who commits suicide. Their blood is on our house. Every time religious language is lifted as a club used to spiritually bludgeon a beautiful child of God who wants to live fully the way in which God has created them to be, it steals something of their soul until too many hurting and soul-weary people take their own lives or live in fear, or they hide in dark and cold closets (a form of living suicides). We - The United Methodist Church - have decided through debate and democracy to participate in aiding their deaths.

In response to our decision, I feel the need to state here in public what many already know about me. But let this be a clear statement of what I think, who I am, and how I intend to minister:  To LBGTQI people and those who love them, the church is wrong. You are beautiful and wonderfully made. You are a child of God. This pastor will baptize you, confirm you, commune with you, perform your weddings, bury you, and invite you into positions of leadership. I will continue to lift my voice and offer my body as a witness to God's radical welcome. To delegates feeling dejected, thank you for all you have done for me. I am reminded that the central image in our faith is a cross, a symbol of systematized pain used to shame and humiliate. In order to love, Jesus gave up power. I choose to continue to love and walk the way of the cross with him.

The Bully Project is Coming - Check it Out!

In October of 2010, two other United Methodist clergy and I posted an "It Gets Better" video on youtube. Over the course of the past year, I have heard from many people about how moving it was for them to hear three pastors apologizing to queer youth for damage done to them by church. Even my more theologically conservative colleagues and friends agree with me that a child should never be bullied for being LGBTQI (or simply perceived to be LGBTQI). Bullying is not a Christian virtue!

We made the video because 2010 was a particularly bad year for queer identified youth. A helpful move is that attention is being paid to all kinds of bullying, not just bullying of queer identified youth. The horrible tentacles of bullying extend far beyond the LGBTQI community. Kids are bullied for all kinds of reasons - for being fat, thin, dark, freckled, pale, tall, short, male, female, poor, rich, smart, dumb, physically challenged, socially awkward, introverted, shy, or any other thing that sets them apart from whatever the dominant culture is in their particular situation. If a kid is Jewish in a Protestant area, odds are that he or she has been made fun of, even bullied, for being Jewish. If a kid is African American in a predominantly Euro school, odds are that she or he has been pushed around, been told at best insensitive things and at worst been subjected to painful verbal assaults. Being "different" puts us in the position of being examined, and all too often that results in awkward, insensitive, and even threatening situations. Let me say once more to any one who reads this blog: If you are different (whatever that means), it doesn't mean that you are less than those around you. If you are gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, or intersex, you do not deserve to be demeaned, threatened, or harassed. Ever. Period. And, for all of those who mistreat you in the name of religion, I am both ashamed and deeply sorry. If you are mistreated for being an ethnic minority, a girl, poor, shy, awkward, or anything else, I hope you find a safe adult and tell them their plight. There are more of us out here than you might think.

I find it amazing that any of us make it through childhood and adolescence. Even those of us with loving families and mostly easy lives still go through growing pains, awkward adolescence, body image issues, and confusion about the world. For those kids who do not benefit from loving and supportive homes or who suffer silently with secrets or in fear, the situation becomes much more complex. Despite the awkwardness of growing up, let me be clear, bullying is not a normal part of growing up. It is not a normal stage of development. It should not be expected or tolerated in our homes, schools, faith communities, or community groups. Adults who become aware of bullying behavior have a duty to stop it in the moment and to make it crystal clear how very unacceptable the behavior is. That's our job as adults.

In their new documentary, filmmakers Lee Hirsch and Cynthia Owen focus on the stories of five families who have lived with the effects of bullying. These are just five families out of an estimated 13 million kids who are bullied every year. Simply entitled "Bully," the documentary will be released in select theaters on March 30 with a wider release in early April. Check your local listings. If you live in a small town, encourage your local theater to show this movie. Some movies are for entertainment; others are for life. This is the latter. For more information, the website for "Bully" is at www.thebullyproject.com.