It Gets Better: Seattle United Methodist Pastors

Two colleagues in Seattle joined me in making an "It Gets Better" video. I know that there are many theological understandings about sexuality in general and about homosexuality in particular. However, it is my hope that all reasonable people would agree that children, youth, and young adults should not take their own lives because they are bullied, made to feel "wrong" or "bad" about themselves, or because they think that somehow they are misfits ontologically.

I thank Mark and Kathleen for their help - for appearing in this video.

If you are lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender and are in need of immediate help, please call The Trevor Project at 1.866.488.7386.

If you are looking for queer friendly groups within your denomination, please know that almost all mainline denominations do have one.

American Baptist Church - Rainbow Baptists

Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) - Gay, Lesbian and Affirming Disciples Alliance, Inc.

Episcopal Church - Integrity

Evangelical Lutheran Church in America - Reconciling in Christ

Presbyterian Church (USA) - More Light Presbyterians

Roman Catholic Church- Dignity

Unitarian Universalist - Welcoming Congregations

United Church of Christ - Open and Affirming in the UCC

United Methodist Church - Reconciling Ministries Network

happy valentine's day

Like so many other holidays begun and sustained by the card industry, Valentine's Day is here to stay. So, last night I watched "A Charlie Brown Valentine" in order to get in the mood. I love this special! I love Charlie Brown! It's not sentimentalized at all. And, as anyone who's been around for a while knows, love is not a sentimental thing; it's scary and risky, and when it disappoints, it hurts!

There are a lot of us who are like Charlie Brown, Sally Brown, and Linus Van Pelt. I remember the anxiety of going to class on Valentine's Day. Like Charlie Brown, I hoped each year to be a member of the group, receiving a lot of notes telling me that I belonged. Inside, though, I still wondered if I would I get any cards. I often didn't get a lot of them. I was a little bit of an oddball - smart, read too much, and a little on the fringes of things. There have been times that I've been like little Sally Brown, so sure that the one she loves will love her back only to be disappointed. There she sits so proud to know that Linus will give her a big box of candy, but he runs out of the rooom to give it to their teacher. She yells, "Why is he in the parking lot with my box of candy?" And then there's Linus, reaching beyond his grasp to offer his love. He can't find the courage to offer his gift to the one who has captured his heart - his teacher. After finally settling on his presentation, he learns that she is gone. He runs to the parking lot to find her with her boyfriend, arriving just as they pull away in the car. He stands there with his heart in his hands - literally. What a genius cartoon. What a true commentary on life.

This Valentine's Day I am lucky to know where I belong and that I have special love in my life. I have places to offer my heart and people who will receive it in return. Too many of us don't, though. And, I don't think our churches are doing a good enough job to welcome love fully into our midst and share it freely with others. Our churches are too much like Charlie Brown's classroom where some are loved. some are left, and some are invisible. Good ol' Charlie Brown is a great prophet for our churches today. He reminds us of the deep marks that our thoughtlessness leave. I wonder if our churches change enough that one day I'll pop in my Charlie Brown movie and something else will show up on the screen with all of the kids loving and being loved without exclusion.

not because of fear: a god of wild love and wilder justice

This is a longer than usual post that comes in response to a couple of recent conversations. It deals with the importance of experience in our faith development. I meet more and more people - mostly people who fit in the "categories" of the GenX and Millenial generations - who would like to come to church, but the things they have heard in church keep them away. By and large I hear them say three things about Christianity that keep them outside of church doors.

1. They don't want anything to do with a God of fear. A God rooted in fear just seems too small. They have been told that the only reason to go to church, participate in Christian community, and learn the scriptures and traditions is to avoid a fiery pit in some other world. This makes no sense to them; fear doesn't speak to them. They have experienced some wonder in the world and have absolutely no desire to orient their lives around a belief system that begins with fear rather than this wonder.

2. Church has been a place filled with hurtful and meaningless platitudes. The concept that "it's all in God's plan" doesn't fit with their experience of the world. The sorrow they've felt in their own lives and tragedies they see around the world just don't fit with this view. If it's all in God's plan, God seems to be a pretty mean deity - sadistic even. They have heard, upon the death of a loved one, "It's all for the best." Or they have heard after some kind of tragedy that "It's all in God's plan." Wow! These platitudes hurt people and don't add meaning to life. People are looking for a place that will welcome honest and real questions about life, death, and all that happens in between. They are looking for a place that will welcome their doubts and offer a way to deal with them. They are not looking to have the most important and fundamental struggles of their souls dismissed.

3. The God of the churches they have known has been described as "all powerful." This means that God either makes all the bad things in the world happen or allows them to happen. This doesn't work with their hopes for a deity. It just doesn't seem right.

Of course there are lots of other reasons that people stay away from church, but these are some of the ones that I hear most about. And I have to say that if I had been raised in a church that promulgated them I probably wouldn't go to church, either. My experience of God - the Divine, the Ground of Being, the Source of All that Is, the Great I Am, the Creator, Redeemer, Sustainer, the Holy Spirit, the Great Love (you get my drift) is that our words will always be insufficient to capture the wildness of God. God is the wildness of love and the passion at the heart of justice. In them we find a holy combination that is magnificent and miraculous. God is personal and corporate. God is inclusive - radically so. And God convicts our sins - yes, I said sins. Sins of injustice, of apathy, greed, violence, fear, and hate. We do sin. We miss the mark all of the time, but my experience (thank goodness) is that that God's grace overwhelms my sins. God invites me into full communion with the universe and all that is in it. At the heart of Christianity is a radically inclusive and relational God who loves this world and burns with a passion for justice.

Here are some responses to the three reasons people stay away from church:

1. "Fearing God" - which is in the Bible quite a bit - is to hold the purity of God's holiness in awe. It isn't an invitation to be afraid. It is an invitation to hold God and all that God has made in wonder and to look upon it all with reverence.

2. My experience of God tells me that there are no easy answers to life, just an invitation to live. The sorrows that we experience aren't sadistic gifts from God, but through them we may find our ability to withstand grow stronger. Sometimes, though, they will almost destroy us. Our community is there to hold us up when we can't stand on our own. Christianity is a pathway and Jesus is our Way. Together we ask questions and stumble along.

3. God's power is overwhelming. I have experienced God's power is a lot of ways. Living the Pacific Northwest, it takes just a glance at Puget Sound, Mt. Rainier, or at the salmon making their way home to spawn to see God's power at work. When I see oceans spinning with hurricanes, I see God's genius at work as the Earth tries to right itself back into balance. But somtimes God's power lies in the tear of someone aching and mourning. God's power is not our power. It is divine. It is generative, invitational, convicting, and persistent. It is not coercive - at least not in my experience.

I have experienced God's love as something wild and God's passion for justice as even wilder. I tell those coming back to church - those who dare to step across the sanctuary threshhold - that God invites us into community to seek together what we haven't found alone. I tell them that church isn't perfect - it is political and flawed and filled with difficult personalities. Church isn't a place to come a order up a slice of personal fulfillment. Church is a community that stumbles together to discover over and over the wildness of God and ways for us to extend that love, grace, and justice into the world.

mlk day - the vision of the beloved community

Today is Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. Most people have the day off from work, but I have a meeting with the facilitator of our upcoming all church retreat to discuss our retreat's theme "The Beloved Community." The Beloved Community is a radical vision of the world that King challenged us all to embrace.

I love the vision of be Beloved Community; that may seem ironic when looking at my blog's title and reading what the the King Center's site says about Beloved Community:

"For Dr. King, The Beloved Community was not a lofty utopian goal to be confused with the rapturous image of the Peaceable Kingdom, in which lions and lambs coexist in idyllic harmony. Rather, The Beloved Community was for him a realistic, achievable goal that could be attained by a critical mass of people committed to and trained in the philosophy and methods of nonviolence."

I actually think there's not a large difference between the "utopian goal" of the lion and lamb lying down together and the US and Al Qaida laying down arms. Most days it seems more realistic to expect the lion and lamb to play chess together while lazing under a tree somewhere.

The Beloved Community is a real vision. When I talk to church people and ask them what their vision for their local congregation is, I am stunned at the lack of real vision. After allowing the silence to sit for a while, I use these follow up questions, "When you visualize your perfect church community, what do you see - actually see? A big facility? A modern facility? Lots of programs? What color are the people? How old? What are you doing together? What is happening in worship?" Too many of us - all of us - lose vision. We lose vision of vibrant, socially active, relevant, life-transforming Christianity. The Beloved Community reintroduces us to a beautiful vision of how the world (and our churches) might be. In the Beloved Community puts forth a vision in which the world's wealth is shared, war is unncessary, and all people are valued and valuable. The Beloved Community lies at the heart of social justice. It's a perfect start for churches to discuss the Beloved Community when trying to see their own possibilities and what the gospel calls us into.

While King did not originate the idea of the Beloved Community (he borrowed it from FOR's Josiah Royce), King is the one who popularized the notion. On this day of remembering the importance of Martin Luther King, Jr. I am spending today reflecting upon the Beloved Community, what its implications would be in our individual lives, in the workings of our churches, and in the midst of our world.

For more substance on the Beloved Community, I refer you to:
The King Center
religion-online

why isolation and church shouldn't go together...remembering our baptism

Church is a place where people come together to seek spiritual nurture and to offer themselves for the transformation of the world. If there is one thing that the church absolutely has to be it is a place of connection, care, and challenge. Yet time and again I witness the isolation of people in church and those who work in churches.

As a pastor in a church, one of the great privileges of my job is to hear people's stories. It is a sacred and holy experience to sit with someone and to listen to their dreams, their histories, their joys, and their struggles. On the days during which someone has honored me with their story I come home fully aware of the Divine that exists in the sharing of our lives.

During these moments of self disclosure we live into the fullness of our baptismal covenant. In the baptism liturgy we promise to love and support one another through all of our days. In the liturgy we remember the fierce faithfulness of God and we celebrate the many times that God delivered God's people from hardship. In our liturgy we vow to place Jesus at the center of our lives and to resist the evil and oppressive powers of this world. We bless water - symbolic of the powers of chaos and deliverance - and we mark our foreheads to seal the promises that we've made to one another and to God. This ritual initiates us into covenant life. It is our entry into radical connection with God, with one another, and with the church universal. When we open ourselves through the sharing of our stories - through the sharing of our lives - we make our baptismal vows real.

Why, then, do so many people who come to church remain isolated and wounded? Why, then, do so many people drift away from church worn out, tired, and weary? These are sad questions to ask. And I ask them not only of the laity but of the clergy. Too many of us do not feel the care we crave. We do not experience the nurture we seek. We do not find the connection that lies at the heart of authentic Christian community.

Today I feel the same isolation. Despite presiding over the holy and sacred ritual of baptism only yesterday, today I feel defeated, alone, and tired. I know that my feelings will soon pass, but I also know that too many people who sit in the pews in my small church have these feelings all too often. They are real describers of people's experiences. My heart weeps at the woundedness, and my soul longs for healing for my community, for the people I know (and don't know), and for my own sense of isolation on this day.

I wait for the day when Christians will believe in the power of our baptism and offer our woundedness to one another, trusting that care and nurture await us. People would find a deeper connection to God and to one another through the sharing of hurts and fears with each other. We might actually surprise ourselves if we dared to step into our baptismal covenant with trust in the promises that we've made.

Progressive Christianity struggles, in part, because many folks who identify as such tend to be individualistic and intellectual in approaching life (and faith). The problem, of course, is that our faith is communal and our God is a mystery. Sharing our lives together is part of what church invites us to do - even demands that we do. This is a challenge for many people. It takes time and trust; it requires us to extend ourselves in faith to one another. But I believe that we would all find something unexpectedly sacred if we would extend ourselves in this way, if we would open ourselves up to one another with faith in our baptismal vows. Through the sharing of our pain, I believe that we would find hidden strengths that would surprise and awe us.

If you, like me on this day, are tired to the bone...if you, like me on this day, wonder how things will figure themselves out...if you need something to act as a reminder that God is ever present, ever caring, and ever moving in our lives, remember the power of baptism - God delivers us from the evils, the sorrows, and the oppression of this world and the people who assemble (the church) has promised to offer needed strength and care during hard and painful times. Whether we're busy because we have young children, are sad because someone we loved has died, are weary of oppression and marginalization that never relents, or are struggling with the demons inside of our souls, we all need some care, connection, and strength from another from time to time. It's okay. That needed connection lies at the heart of our faith and is what holds us up when we know that otherwise we might drown. I know that I'll spend time this evening thanking God for my baptism and asking God for the strength that I did not feel today.

I hear too many church people express that they feel isolated while they sit in the gathered assembly. Somehow church has become broken. We need to fix it. And the only way to fit "it" is to open ourselves to one another. Remembering our baptism is a good place to start...