Reconciling Ministries Network

Devotion: Light breaking into the darkness

"What has come into Being in the Word was life, and the life was the light of all people."
--John 1:3b-4

December brought some snow to Chicago...for me that is a sign of Christmas coming.

Christmas is coming, coming soon. This is Advent, as we watch for Jesus to come, our hopes are voiced in the hymns, prayers and preaching of our local congregations. As LGBT people of faith we hope.

Advent is a time of the light breaking into the darkness. As we hope for inclusive church and community, the light may be the thoughtfulness that breaks down ignorance. The light will be those days when "Love your neighbor" activities break into complacency and idle confusion. For the ones who watch and hope in Jesus, the life and the light does come.

In my twenties, coming to full realization that I was lesbian, I turned to scripture not really sure how it would speak to me. As a Christian, naturally I began with the Gospels. Reading page by page in the book of Matthew I saw the stories that I knew from my childhood. Very early in the New Testament is the "Lord's Prayer", the Beatitudes and other stories of God’s love for us. This is Good News!

Thankfully the effort to hate myself for being gay was being healed by the scriptures themselves. The words reinforced my earlier positive experiences of church. Many Christian leaders, theologians and Bible scholars admonish us, "Read the scripture as if it were written to you." 

I distinctly remember reading Matthew 5 in those days. I smiled when I read...

“You are the light of the world. No one after lighting a lamp puts it under a bushel basket. In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your God in heaven.”

It tickled me to realize – Oh! This is where the song comes from!  “This little light of mine…” Today I also know that in my Bible is my name; Matt 5 says, “Sue, let your light shine.”

When Julie and I were married at the General Conference last May, the ceremony began inside the convention center. After the welcome, hundreds of us processed out of that place singing the children’s song that is so profound, “This little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine.” It was sung with passion and power as we brought our light into world. It is more than a children’s song, it carries the hope of Advent.

As Reconciling United Methodists we hope for a truly welcoming Church. We anticipate the joy of the moment when every person will know, and feel it deeply in their souls, that they are precious to God and precious within the human community.

Sometimes it feels like we live in a season of Advent no matter the month or day. We trust in God, we give thanks for the moments when we have seen this light and love, and we let God’s light and love flow through us into the world.

By Sue Laurie for the Grassroots Committee
Sue is the Outreach Coordinator for Reconciling Ministries Network.

What to Do When Your Pie Don't Love You

Dr. Pamela Lightsey

Friends, this one is just for your holiday joy!

---------------------------

I have just returned home from washing a ton of clothes.  Ordinarily, the day before Thanksgiving I would be busy preparing a down-home Southern feast.  But oh no!  This year I decided not to cook but instead to buy my vittles.  Right now I could be enjoying a pre-Thanksgiving treat, delighting myself in the fact that I have clean underwear to last until next year.  That alone would be worth a slice of sweet potato pie with a nicely chilled glass of Bailey's liqueur.  But none of that this year!  You see that monstrosity to the left is a hoax dressed up in tin pie pan clothing.  Hmmph!  I should have taken the wrapping off the box and looked at this impostor before I took her out the bakery.  Any connoisseur of sweet potato pie could look at her and tell she is a cheap impression.  Hell, all dimpled up like that!  A true sweet potato pie would have a richly earthly appearance.  The spices of cinnamon and nutmeg would be clearly noticeable yet blending into the color and tone of the authentic dessert.  When you sample a piece of real sweet potato pie, you tongue almost wants to reach out and slap your face as if the pie is speaking and demanding, "Say my name.  Go 'head, say my name!"  Instead, I bit off into something that had the texture of wet bread.  Uugh!  Lord help me, I'll eat peanut butter and jelly tomorrow before I spend another penny on faux-Thanksgiving fixings!  At least I have my gin and juice...

Book Review: Waiting for the Call

By Heather Murphy

Waiting for the Call: From Preacher's Daughter to Lesbian Mom

Jacqueline Taylor

University of Michigan Press

I was browsing through the nominees for the Lambda Literary Prize, as is my annual habit, and came upon this simple, sincere memoir.

The story will be familiar territory to many RMNBlog readers- Jackie, Godloving daughter of a Baptist preacher, has to find a way to reconcile her faith with her questions, a process that becomes critical when she falls in love with a woman.  She has to navigate the difficult waters of finding a way to keep her faith, stay connected with her parents, and help her daughters (adopted from Peru) understand their family and their place in the world.

I found a lot of ways to connect with this story; there was more than one passage in which I felt like I was reading my own life story.  But I found that my favorite sections were the stories about Jackie and her daughters, and the ways they used their family stories to make the very young girls feel safe, love, and connected within their family.  

Taylor's writing was simple, clear, and honest, and I think her book is well worth reading.

A Question on the Last Sunday of the Christian Year, November 23, 2008

By Peter L. DeGroote

1. The last Sunday of the Christian year is traditionally called "Christ the King" Sunday. Shucking the traditional language, we might say it is the day that we proclaim Jesus as our leader, the one whose values and teachings serve as the primary foundation of our way of life. I turned to the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5 through 7.

2. Matthew's authors understood that our faith is defined by our behavior. Specifically, that Jesus’ followers demonstrate their belief by living what many in the early church called The Way.

3. Critical to Jesus’ method was the creation of new communities living out a new way of life. Accordingly, some of the teachings in the Sermon are clearly addressed to the community as a whole. When the word “you” appears it is helpful to think “y’all” or “all of you.”

4. Two of those “all of you” teachings were the center of my Christ the King meditation. “You are the salt of the earth" and "You are the light of the world." Not addressed to individuals, it speaks to the church (gathering) as a community of believers (doers). The salt and the lightto which Jesus refers is not intrinsic to just any group. The salt is mined and the light is ignited by those relationships that grow out of following Jesus’ Way.

5. Another teaching: "A city built on a hill cannot be hid." Often used to claim that the Church is a special group that God has put in a prominent place for others to honor, something gets lost in the translation. Scholars tell us the statement is best understood in the following manner: "You should live so that you are like a city on a hill, providing an example to the world that cannot be ignored." Note again the emphasis on behavior, on the salt and the llight. 

6. Some call the Sermon Jesus’ inaugural address because it contains most of the themes of Jesus’ mission. By summarizing many of his teachings, and incorporating subsequent community learning, the Sermon presents a set of guidelines for The Way, what we might call The Christian life. That was the goal of those 2nd and 3rd generation Christian writers as they were working out how to be followers of Jesus in their time and place, a goal for all followers in any time and place.  

7. The sermon ends with a well-known parable that begins, "Everyone who hears these words of mine and acts on them will be like a wise man who built his house on rock."
   An old question came to mind: "Why do you call me Lord, Lord if you do not do as I say?" That seems to be addressed to the individual “you” as well as the communal “y’all.”

Marriage Should Be Defined by the Church

By David E Braden

Call me old fashioned, but I just don’t see marriage as a civil right. I think marriage should be defined by the Church.

We have beautiful language in our Scripture about the blessed nature of the marriage relationship. I love that in Genesis, God asserts that humans are relational creatures and that “It is not good that the man should be alone.” The description of Adam and Eve coming together as two individuals to “become one flesh” is powerful and sexy and actually quite intimidating (acknowledging that these stories are also very gendered in nature). What does it really mean to “become one flesh,” for two unique individuals to commit to one another and then somehow figure out how to work together as a cohesive unit, as an anointed team living out the rest of their lives together?

Marriage Isn't Easy

Although I do not know from personal experience, I do know that marriage is hard work. I look at my own parents who are divorced and my many friends who are married or in committed, monogamous relationships and I know that it is very difficult to constantly work at a relationship in order to stay healthy, mutually empowering, and in loving support of one another. With the constant coverage of sham Hollywood marriages, the glamorization of adultery, and the number of couples who get married because it seems like the natural next step, I just don’t think we give marriage the proper reverence and respect it deserves. And so, I think the Church should continue to play a significant role in defining marriage and cultivating covenanted, monogamous relationships.

Two Debates: The Church and Society

The problem with the marriage debate is that there are really two debates going on:

   1. The definition of Marriage in the Church and
   2. The definition of Marriage in Society

Far too often, I think we conflate these two debates. Personally, I believe that marriage is an institution ordained by God to bless the covenant partnership of two loving individuals. I see it as a responsibility of the Body of Christ to help gay and straight couples alike, united as One Flesh before God and the Church, to grow in their hunger for Christ and to grow in love and in covenant relationship to one another. If the Body of Christ can’t do this, what’s the point of being a community anyway?

In terms of secular society, it is just that. Not everyone in our country or the world knows God or the love of Christ. We thankfully live in a country, however, where our Constitution says that we have a right to be treated the same even if we believe different things. The problem arises in that we also live in a society that bases a significant portion of its tax system and hundreds of rights and privileges on a marriage certificate. To me, it seems innately unjust to claim that we have Separation of Church and State and then to define an institution, such as marriage, on religious terms and then deny access to the federal and state rights and privileges that such an institution affords, including tax benefits, rights of visitation, medical & legal protection, etc.

So What Do We Do?

If we want to be a country that treats all people the same and a country that continues to privilege couples in our tax code and elsewhere, then both straight and gay couples should be afforded the right to a civil union with all the rights and privileges that come with it. Give us all Civil Unions and leave the fight to define Marriage with our Churches.

Why are we so comfortable?

By David E Braden

I was in Aurora, Illinois last week at a church event. The church I was at is exploring a series they call, "Living Faith, Seeking Justice,” and I was asked to speak on a panel focusing on “Immigration, Diversity, and Inclusion.”

Aurora is one of the fastest growing communities in the entire state of Illinois. It also has one of the fastest growing immigrant populations in the state. This is probably a large reason why this church community was having this discussion in the first place – to discuss what it means to be in a changing community and what it means to be a Christian community under such circumstances.

What boggles my mind is that in a city that is growing with such speed the United Methodist Church is actually declining! How is this possible? How are we missing this opportunity for evangelism? And the larger problem is that this isn’t just a story in Aurora; it’s true across our Connection.

Somehow as a denomination, we’ve become so afraid of change. We look inside our own communities and we like what we see. Somewhere we got too comfortable. We got too comfortable sitting in our pews listening to sermons. We got too comfortable ministering to the same comfortable people who far too often look like us, speak like us, wear the same clothes as us, come from the same stock as us, and on and on.

Far too often, United Methodist congregations fall into the xenophobia of our country and close its doors to change and difference.

We don’t want immigrants in our community. What is it that we hear so often? “They’ll take our jobs,” “they won’t learn our language,” or “they won’t integrate into our culture.”

We don’t want people of color in our community. Actually, we’ll say that we’d love to see some color in our congregations; get some diversity in the ranks. But there are the old excuses of, “They don’t live here,” or “If only we could find some,” as if people of color are some commodity for which we receive more points on some politically correct scale.

We don’t want gay people in our community. Aside from being “incompatible with Christian teaching,” queer folks just aren’t polite dinner-table conversation. For some reason, we cannot think of queer folks without thinking of sex. And sex just isn’t appropriate in our puritanical Church.

We spend so much time making excuses for why we should stay the same or why we cannot change that we leave no time for doing the work of Christ.

The Aurora congregation I visited is taking a good first step in talking about what they can do to be a more welcoming and community-building people. But the next step is more difficult. The next step requires us to live in a posture of “intrepidness” that Ann Thompson Cook so beautifully describes in “Becoming intrepid.”

May we all take that deeper step into community with one another, “becoming intrepid,” and building a Church that more closely resembles the Beloved Community of God and our one family in Christ.

Review: The Secret Life of Bees

By Leland Spencer

When your favorite novel gets made into a movie for the big screen, going to see it is a combination of exciting and scary. Exciting because you get to see a wonderful story told in a new medium, but scary because you worry that the director, screenplay writer, or actors might have changed something you loved about the story.

I don't write in second person very often, and maybe I shouldn't have here. Perhaps those are my areas of excitement and fear, not yours. In any case, that's what I was feeling when I went to see The Secret Life of Bees. I've thought for five years--ever since I read the book--that it would make a great movie. I'm glad to say that I was right. I think this is a case where the book and the film are complementary; I cannot say I like one better than the other, and I'm glad to report that I don't feel one ruins the other. They're both great.

The movie and book tell the story of Lilly Owens, a teenager who runs away from her abusive father to find answers about her late mother. Along the way, she learns lessons about courage, hope, and love. I won't say more because I don't want to spoil the plot. I want you to see the movie and read the book, if you haven't already.

See the movie, and take a friend or two along. This is not a movie to see alone because it is about love, hospitality, and reconciliation. You'll laugh. You'll cry. You'll want to give someone a hug.

If I have one complaint about the movie, it is that the role of feminine spirituality is downplayed relative to the book. Most people probably won't mind, but one of the reasons I liked the book so much was that the characters are unashamedly feminist theologians. If you leave the movie hungry for more development on the characters' spirituality, definitey read the novel.

My favorite line in the book (delivered with perfection in the film by Queen Latifah) is "Every little thing wants to be loved." If you leave the movie with one idea, this is it, and what a beautiful theme it is!

Becoming intrepid

By Ann Thompson Cook

As I’ve thought recently about what’s needed in our movement, I kept thinking of the word “intrepid.” Once I looked it up, I realized why. According to several dictionaries, intrepid means audacious, invulnerable to fear or intimidation, courageous, bold, brave.

Many people come to me who are working toward having their congregation expand their welcome to lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender folks.  

• Frequently, they’ve already put on some classes or other events, and they’re frustrated.
• They say they’re just preaching to the choir.
• They hear that some people are uncomfortable, but “those people” don’t come for the scheduled dialogues.   

So, I wonder aloud, If they don’t come to you, how about you going to them? How about finding out what they’re thinking, and sharing what you’re thinking? 

Brief silence… and then people acknowledge their own worries:  

• I'd be pretty uncomfortable; 
• It would make the other person uncomfortable; and/or 
• The conversation sounds like confrontation, and I'm just not a confrontational person. 

Of course, if you barge in with all your righteousness blazing, not much will be gained. When we walk into any conversation ready to argue, unwilling to hear what another person’s concerns/fears are, or expecting to be angry or hurt, it rarely goes well.  

But what if you could invite people into the conversation in a spirit of love and respect, carrying with you the possibility of healing? Then could you be intrepid? 

Please note: Intrepid means audacious, invulnerable to fear or intimidation, courageous, bold, brave. It does not mean obnoxious, judgmental, critical, or mean. 

If you've been holding back from such conversations, imagine for a moment standing with another person in a spirit of love and respect, carrying with you the possibility of healing.  

• How would you set up the conversation, and how would it go?
• Who would do most of the talking?
• Can you imagine yourself really hearing the other person’s concerns/fears and also sharing your own experience and vision?  
• What would be possible in such a conversation? 

Standing in a spirit of love and respect, might you be willing to ask yourself and others into conversations you’ve not explored before? Could you be intrepid?

When fascism comes to America...

Rev. Gilbert H. Caldwell

Amidst my continuing joy in response to the election of Barack Obama, my joy is mingled with sadness about a nation that could elect its first African American president but the electorate of some states could also vote to deny marriage to same gender couples. It is time for us to cease being silent in the presence of a charade that pretends denying marriage to same gender couples "strengthens" heterosexual marriage, is biblically mandated and protects the "freedom of the pulpit". I am not a student of the writings of Sinclair Lewis, but these quotations from the writings of Lewis have resonance for me, a week following the election of Barack Obama and the denial of same gender marriage by California and other states.        

"Intellectually I know that America is no better than any other country: emotionally I know she is better than every country."

and

"When fascism comes to America it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross."

I have seen the burning crosses and the holding of flags of and by the Ku Klux Klan. I cannot comprehend how Americans reconcile their faith, their emotions, their intellect and their love of country by voting to deny civil rights to fellow citizens. I could not understand it as I was segregated because of my race, I can not understand it today as some would take away from couples in California, their right to marry that was granted by a Court decision.

America can neither be intellectually nor emotionally "better", when persons use what they claim is their "faith" to compel the state to segregate in 2008!

Did the Mormon Church break the law in promoting Prop 8 in California?

By Heather Murphy

My joy regarding the election of President Obama...

wait a minute.  I have to say that a few more times.  It's still sinking in.

President Obama
President Obama
President Obama

Okay, I'm back.  It's wonderful news for me.  But my joy regarding the election of President Obama is seriously clouded by the passing of Prop 8 in California, which takes away the right of same-sex couples to marry in that state. 

And I'm not alone. 

At the Mormon Temple, protestors are still marching.  Why the Mormon Temple, you ask?  I'm glad you asked.  It seems that the Church of Latter-Day Saints financed the campaign for Prop 8.  They paid for at least half the costs of the campaign, and, by some estimates, up to 75% of the campaign costs.  

Problem is, the laws governing tax-exempt organizations like churches don't permit a church to finance a political campaign.  From Section 501(c)(3) of US Code Title 26, the definition of a tax-exempt organization includes the phrase, "no substantial part of the activities of which is carrying on propaganda, or otherwise attempting, to influence legislation."  

Now, doesn't it sort of sound like the Mormons have violated the law in the process of robbing GLBT people of their constitutional right to legal equality?  Because it sounds that way to me.  

And I think it's important that the IRS imposes an appropriate penalty.  Like, say, financial remuneration to every gay person in California equal to the financial benefits that come from marriage, plus an appropriate amount for pain and suffering.  Or the revocation of their tax-exempt status.  

If you agree, why not send a message to the IRS letting them know about this violation of the law? This blog has some instructions on exactly how you could do that.