Let's make the sermon into a conversation

I really appreciate the comments shared by Jessica, Jen and Tom on the lectionary passages for today's service. They helped a lot as I thought about today's sermon. Given more time and the chance to preach three different sermons, I could have made better use of them!

Whenever I hear a sermon, I often think of things I'd like to say to or ask of the preacher. Ever feel that way? Here's your chance. This is an invitation to anyone who attended the service on Sunday to comment on the scripture readings and the sermon. Also, feel free to comment or ask questions about the liturgy, as well.

(Of course, speaking to me in person or by phone is fine, too, but in this forum, everyone can participate together.)

And you don't need to agree with everything. Challenge is good. So are illustrations from your own experience or reflections. Readers may get more out of your examples than they did from my preaching.

Link here if you'd like to read the sermon text: Hope and Transformation

With Advent hope and expectation,

Arlie

Mourning the death of Anthony: God Save Us from Some of Those “Well-intentioned Religious Believers”

I want to share a column with you written by Dr. Susan B. Thistlethwaite, President of Chicago Theological Seminary.

The column was originally written for the "On Faith" feature of the online version of the Washington Post. (By the way, "On Faith" is an unusual example of a much-needed venue for intelligent and respectful conversation among religious thinkers of all faiths on today's crucial issues: Washington Post: On Faith.

Susan re-published her column at Wide Open Thinking, the CTS Blog, where access is a bit easier.

Anthony Hollins and I were classmates, and I learned a lot from him because he was not afraid to tell it like he saw it. Because of the world we live in, he saw things that would have been forever invisible to me.

Advent, preaching, and finding something new to say...HELP!

I'm preaching again this Sunday. And I'm wrestling with the lectionary scriptures this week. Wanna get in on the wrestling?

It would be particularly pleasing to know what folks in the Broadway congregation would care to contribute. What would we want to say just now if we were to follow Jesus' advice to "Go and tell John what you hear and see!" Of course, there's Bible study Wednesday evening during which we'll consider these same passages. All are welcome to come join in the conversation then, as well. Come for the Advent reflection "Blue Christmas" at 6 and stay for the potluck and study from 6:30 until about 8:15. Broadway United Methodist Church

The full text of all lectionary readings in New Revised Standard Version is available at
Lectionary Readings for third Sunday in Advent

Isaiah 35:1-10 Isaiah speaks to an exiled and defeated Israel proclaiming a hoped for future where all is transformed into abundance and justice and the way will be wide and inclusive for all God's people. There are repeated images of water in the desert causing new life to spring up from bone-dry ground.
Matthew 11:2-11 John the Baptist is in jail. He sends his followers to ask Jesus, "Are you the one?" Jesus answers, "Go and tell John what you hear and see!" and names all the ways that he is turning things upside down, all to the good of the most vulnerable and marginalized. Then he talks about John and asks whether people are ready to hear from such a wild, uncouth person or whether they expected someone in "soft robes."

What do these passages bring to mind for you in personal, congregational or public life just now?

Good thing it's Advent, because I'm waiting and expecting. Short and sweet is as good as long and complex. Concrete examples are good, too. But don't be surprised if your ideas are referenced in Sunday's sermon!

Arlie

Advent: Why LGB needs T

In November, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the Employment Nondiscrimination Act (ENDA). If it passes the Senate and becomes law, it will protect employment rights of lesbians, gay men and bisexual persons. Though the bill originally included transgender persons, that language was stripped from the bill because supporters in the House felt it would not pass with the gender identity inclusive language intact. Representative Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin fought to the end to keep the bill inclusive; Human rights Campaign (HRC) said it would not support the less-inclusive bill, but it did not actively oppose the new version of the bill, either.

ENDA is a promising development and, in a way, a monumental step forward. For all of us, the possibility of having workplaces that don't discriminate based on sexual orientation means more openness, more honesty and less fear. Many more people will be able to do their work free of the fear that they may lose their jobs if someone finds out they are gay. Individuals will have some protection against discrimination in hiring.

But for our transgender sisters and brothers, the passage of this less inclusive version of ENDA must feel like being left behind. The door to the party has been slammed in their face before the party even got started. Jamison Green and Donna Rose, two transgender members of the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) Business Council, resigned in protest, saying they cannot continue working with HRC, citing the organization's "apparent lack of commitment to healing the breach it has caused." (see Two Transgender HRC Members Quit over ENDA) HRC, on the other hand, argues that this was a politically necessary compromise and that passage of ENDA, even without the gender identity protections, will move us closer than defeat would have to full inclusion in the long run.

It's interesting that this disappointment is being felt so acutely now, during the season Christians celebrate as Advent. Advent is a time when we remember how God breaks into our world and brings the unexpected, the transformative. The nativity of Jesus, as told in Luke, describes the birth of a baby that seems to be nothing but a poor child living under the occupation of the Roman empire, experiencing the mess of birth in a really inconvenient place and situation. But in some mysterious way, the writers proclaim, this child is breaking into the world, into normality, and bringing something new and radical. The gospel stories that describe Jesus' life and teaching portray him as always on the side of the outsider, extending a radical welcome to those who made other people uncomfortable. He welcomed all and he did not hesitate to challenge the oppressive systems that had seemed ordinary in a brutal world. What the followers of Jesus discovered was a powerful, creative and transforming reality brought about when Jesus kept opening doors, broadening boundaries, making room at the table and building communities that could live free even in the face of the brutality.

We could spend a lot of time discussing the vulnerability of the trans community. In our mainstream culture, there are few allies for this group of God's children. While it's hard enough being, say, a gay man, there are layers and layers of privilege that separate my experience from that of my transgender sisters and brothers. But it's also true that the workplaces will be the poorer. I don't mean to exoticize transgender persons. Transgender individuals are who they are, from odd to ordinary, like the rest of us. But each time I meet a trans person, my life is enriched through a new connection to someone without whom I would know less about the reality of the richness of God's world.

For the transgender community and their supporters, it is a time to cry and rage and critique. This is a wrong-headed and mean-spirited act of exclusion, a door slammed in the face of people who should be invited in. And workplaces will be less diverse than they could be, less authentic, less rich, less expressive of the true diversity of God's people.

Is there anything of the Advent experience in this? Perhaps not, since Advent will bring us the gifts of the very outsiders that would help us correct our myopic and limited vision. (Remember the Kings from the East?)

Masen Davis, Executive Director of the Transgender Law Center, believes that the unprecedented solidarity of organizations that joined forces in a strong effort to keep gender identity in the ENDA House Bill will not be wasted. Though the end result was disappointing, Davis believes that the critique that will now follow, the solidarity that was built throughout that fight, and the educational efforts that were made will eventually make a difference as people keep working, speaking out, and strategizing. Masen Davis on ENDA
and
Transgender Law Center Disappointed by ENDA Passage

And Advent is like that, too. Always opening a door where another has been shut. Always calling us to look to the future, hoping, working, building the radically inclusive kin-dom of God, a God who is too big and too holy to be limited by the lines we humans draw so insistently between the genders.

See Trans-cendental, the Website of my seminary classmate, Cindi Knox

Advent: Seeing beyond the big screen gospel

This week I was required to view The Passion of the Christ, Mel Gibson's aggressive poke in the face of progressive, peace-oriented Christian theology. Until then, I had avoided it. I don't do well with graphic movie violence. Few of my friends agree with me, but I find something morally numbing about watching people blown to bits and torn apart on a movie screen. Anyway, I'll concede that Jesus' death as described in the scriptures was violent. But Mel and I don't see eye-to-eye about the meaning of that violence. I don't believe violence is redemptive and I still get chills up my spine when I remember the night I heard George W. Bush using the words "washed in the blood" in a speech that hinted at the eventual attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq.

Gibson claimed that he was simply portraying what was written by the gospel writers. (Really? The gospel writers described a feminized version of Satan wondering among the Jewish leaders as they heartlessly witnessed Jesus being butchered? And the Bible tells of Mary repeatedly looking out at the crowd, as if to remind us that we were responsible for this bloody outrage?) Come on, Mel. Editorializing about the gospel happens all the time. It's called preaching (or teaching). But if you're going to do it on the big screen and make millions of dollars at it, you owe people something more than a claim that you're simply illustrating the Bible without a point of view.

It's important to be able to claim our theology—and perhaps our Christology in particular--and see clearly what it will say to and for us. Scriptural interpretation and theology are not neutral. We bring our baggage and we bring the baggage of centuries of argument. The arguments were always won by someone and the argument losers often lost their lives. (And lots of people, like women, were rarely if ever invited into the arguments in the first place.) Today, we don't get executed for teaching heresy, but the point is that theological disagreement is nothing new and marginalization of the views of the less privileged is not new, either. Progressive Christians must not apologize for the fact that we may come up with a different argument and/or outcome than did the theologians of past centuries (even the twentieth). It may be that the time has come when our global context and our intimate community life reveal to us that we can no longer afford to hold onto a belief in an angry God whose thirst for a blood sacrifice drives him to facilitate the murder and torture of his own Son so that he does not have to murder and torture all of the rest of us for breaking the law or for being tainted by original sin. I accept the potential criticism that I am oversimplifying the concept of substitutionary atonement. And, as a pastor I must say that I know and love many people for whom the idea holds a lot of meaning.

However, theological choices have consequences in our churches and in our culture. Perhaps no one knows that better than women, people of color and lgbtq folks. The title of this entry suggests that Advent invites us to expect and to seek that which may not be easy to see at first. In a response to my last blog entry, Phil remarked that the earliest versions of the meaning of the crucifixion and the resurrection arose out of the crucible of the experience of those first followers of Jesus. They had witnessed the torture and execution of their teacher, brother, rabbi, friend, the One who had changed their lives, the One whose transformative witness to God’s love and justice and liberation had inspired them to take great risks and to move into a fuller experience of life and of community. Now, given the new and devastating reality of the crucifixion, from where would their sense of meaning come? That struggle to understand has played itself out now for two millennia. The enduring nature of the struggle to get our minds and souls around that question indicates its vital importance for Christians.

We, in our current context, continue to witness and experience devastating violence which causes many of us to ask this same vital question: From where shall we derive our meaning now? For those of us still in church, back at church again, or discovereing church for the first time, we are constructing answers to that question or to equally gripping questions, whether we realize it or not.

What answer will we receive this Advent? How will our own understanding of the significance of Jesus change or become clarified this season?

Here is what the Advent Spirit has surprised me with over the past two and a half decades or so. And this year, as in all years past when I've been paying attention, something new will come to flesh out a bit of the story. I own this Christology and do not demand allegiance to it. Rather, I share it and invite others to tell of their own understandings:

The life of Jesus is what matters, not his death. His very incarnation as a human being is God’s proclamation that human beings are good and beloved of God. The incarnation does not bring God down to our level but, rather, pulls us up out of our mistaken notion that we are alone and that our lives are either meaningless, hopeless, or evil. The crucifixion was not God’s intention for the world. It was a result of an audacious life of love, justice, inclusion and liberation. The Empire could not tolerate this life, and some of the religious authorities were complicit with the Empire for all kinds of reasons. But the end of the story is not death. The end of the story is the resurrection of the body. This affirmation that the good that God creates, the life that God so loves in us, the love from which we cannot be separated will not be obliterated by death. Whether you believe in the resurrection as a literal one or as the way in which we embody Christ in community now as we work for the Reign of God, it proclaims first and foremost that we are loved by the God through whose creativity we came into being and through whose life we will be raised up from every death.

It's not that we're not broken. I do believe in sin. How could I witness endless war and abuse of women and children, and enduring racism, and heterosexist exclusion and hate crime and grinding poverty and the simultaneous exploitation and persecution of immigrant workers and the stingy refusal to secure quality health care for everyone, and NOT believe in sin? But perhaps it's the goodness that God knows is most basic in us because we are made in God's image, perhaps that is what brought the Christ into the mess of the world. God with us. A God who suffers with us . A God who desires to reconcile and heal, to liberate and transform, who comforts the oppressed and challenges the oppressor and still insists on relationship and community.

Advent points to a new reality, a reality that has come to us but, mysteriously, has not yet fully arrived. And so we keep the vision alive. Not through empty hope, but by our hopeful engagement with one another and with this world, a world that is good and, in many ways, quite ugly and badly broken. But it is God's world and, therefore, much loved. The incarnation of the Christ tells us that God is with us in the beauty and the ugliness, and that we--all of us--matter.

Waterboarding and Crucifixion

Vague answers to questions about the legality of water boarding, an interrogation technique that has at least sometimes been viewed as illegal torture in the U.S. and had been prosecuted as a war crime after World War II, did not finally block senate approval of Michael B. Mukasey to the post of attorney general of the United States last week. After expressions of widespread concern over his noncommittal answers, he declared that he thought the practice "repugnant" but did not have the information to determine if the practice is illegal. (If a lawyer with his qualifications would not know, who would?) Water boarding has been called "simulated drowning," but I am inclined to agree with someone who recently declared that there is nothing simulated about it. Unlike drowning to death, this drowning is prolonged for as long as necessary to get the information or for as long as considered tolerable by the torturers, though it often leads to a confession--true or made-up--in a short amount of time. The lungs take in water and the victim has the terrifying experience of being unable to breathe anything but water, becoming unconscious and sometimes regaining consciousness. The appeal of waterboarding in a democratic society, apparently, is not that it is not torture, but that it does not leave traceable evidence like scars and broken bones as other forms of torture do. (See an article on the history of waterboarding at NPR.org: Waterboarding: A Tortured History.)

I've been struggling with the meaning of the crucifixion lately. I recently read a chapter of the compelling book, Proverb of Ashes: Violence, Redemptive Suffering, and the Search for What Saves Us by Rita Nakashima Brock and Rebecca Ann Parker. In the first chapter "Away from the Fire," Reverend Parker, a United Methodist pastor, describes how her experience counseling and pastoring with women and children who are victims of domestic violence has brought her to a place at which no redemptive meaning can be ascribed to the brutal violence of the crucifixion. (I'm betting she did not like Mel Gibson's telling of the story. Neither do I. Not because I don't believe Jesus' suffering was extreme, but because I believe Gibson's version of the crucifixion revels in blood and gore but is inexplicably removed from the ongoing experience of crucifixion among God's abused and tortured children. It also leans dangerously close to projecting blame onto a group of people who have suffered at the hands of Christians who have viewed them as "Christ-killers" time and again over nearly two millennia.)

Reverend Parker's conclusion about crucifixion is that the saving grace in the story of the gospel is not in an act of sacrificial violence. She does not even buy into the argument that I have found most comforting, that in that violent and painful death, God experienced the worst of the human experience and so is intimately present with us in our own worst suffering. For Parker, even this sanctifies violence rather than liberating from it. Rather than a sacrifice of son by father to meet a legal debt made necessary by original sin and rather than an image of how pain and suffering bond us with God, another way of understanding the heart of the gospel is in the way Jesus lived. His death was also a result of that way of living. Jesus may not have chosen to be an enemy of the Roman state for the sake of being an enemy, but by choosing to be radically obedient to the Reign of God. By living the way of peace in the shadow of a regime for which violence was an idol, Jesus at once offered hope to those who had lost hope and caused suspicion among those who would rather rule over the hopeless. By violating all kinds of societal restrictions that separated the sexes, the religious groups, the rich and the poor, the sick and the well, the "righteous" and the suspect, by at once honoring the religious law and at the same time recognizing that it was only valid so far as it affirmed human beings, by humanizing people whom the empire would rather keep dehumanized, Jesus put himself in harm's way. The occupying empire could not tolerate his subversive behavior and his popularity among those who responded with the whole of their beings to the affirming and liberating and saving message he taught and lived.

Waterboarding is a crucifixion and there is nothing redeeming about it. Torturers might get truth from someone by using it, but they are also likely to get lies, even self-incriminating lies, otherwise known as coerced confessions. The electric chair is a crucifixion, too. And so is detention of suspects without trials and without access to judicial review of their cases for months and years at a time. At various times, each of these has been found to be against what a strong secular, democratic society stands for. For me, they must always be unequivocally un-Christian. Reprehensible to a God who we claim is ultimately concerned with human good. And when we stand against crucifixions used in the name of our nation or our security or our freedom, we are not simply protecting the crucified. We are protecting ourselves from the distortion and violence the practice works on the perpetrators. Am I justifying terrorists, you ask? No. I'm arguing that if we become terrorists ourselves, claiming that the victims are too evil to be given the normal rights we give to the more "ordinary" criminals on the home front(even though many suspected "enemy combatants" who are detained and tortured for information have no damning evidence of their guilt), then we de-humanize ourselves. We profane the high vision of our highest national ideals. And we are "lost," unable to envision the Reign of the God of Jesus.

Tears for My Late Brother Tom on National Coming Out Day

I'm ashamed that I forgot the double significance in my life of October 11. It's been a crazy week. Today was no exception. I left work at 9:15PM after working on my annual report and then hurried home to participate in the online course I'm taking and do some other homework, but on the train ride home I remembered: October 11, National Coming Out Day. There are a lot of memories that should remind me why this day is so special and so important: The sad, lonely feeling I had one Sunday when I was 12 when the young minister I adored said the word "queer" in a sermon; The day when I was sixteen and I lied to my father when he gently (for him) asked me if I struggled with "homosexual desires"; the sick-with-fear feeling I had the first night I went to a gay bar and dared to have a conversation with another man; the day a Methodist minister told me I needed to change my theology so that I could be myself; the exhileration of my first March on Washington; the knowing smile and warm hug shared with Cindy when I ran into her on a visit home (the now "all grown up" lesbian had been a childhood pal); the first time I really believed what the poet wrote in Psalm 139--I am fearfully and wonderfully made; the pride I felt while being driven off to jail along with my pastor, Greg Dell, and the United Methodist Bishop in Northern Illinois at the time and James M. Lawson, Jr., a civil rights preacher and activist who worked with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. back in the day. (We were being taken off to jail for participating in a protest against anti-gay denominational policies at the General Conference of the United Methodist Church.) But most importantly, I remember my brother Tom, whose birthday is October 11, National Coming Out Day.

When I am tempted to get smug and tell myself that the days of fear and self-loathing and oppression are over for gay people, I remember the day, when he was 43 and I was 36, that my brother Tom whispered these words to me on the phone: "I'm tired of hiding. You're the first person I've ever told." The sound was like air spewing out of an overinflated tire. I can't imagine the pressure that had built up over the decades that he kept that secret. I had been out to him for thirteen years and to the rest of my family for over six. But he had been married, raised two daughters, worked like a dog, and then gotten quite sick in his late thirties of kidney disease and other complications from diabetes. After that painful but freeing phone conversation, Tom came out to everyone he knew in his small southern Illinois town and elsewhere: our parents, his ex-wife, his daughters, his best friend (a straight guy), the women that he'd dated since his wife left him...everyone. He even managed, in spite of some pretty daunting health problems, to date a man or two. And then, six months later, he died suddenly of a heart attack as he was getting dressed to meet my father for a visit to the family farm. He made it out of that damned closet, if just barely. But what if things had been different for him? What was there about his life, the culture, the church--possibly even my own lingering shame--that could have kept him in that closet for so long?

It's easier for some of us, in some places, in some circumstances. But there's still an awful lot of lies and condemnation out there. Like, for example, in the United Methodist Church Book of Discipline and other rule books of major denominations, with precious few exceptions.

Please, if you are celebrating Coming Out Week or Month and I am therefore not too late, raise a glass or have a dance or kiss that precious person you've found the courage to love, and remember my brother Tom, whose birthday ended about 90 minutes ago, and whose only gay brother forgot.

I love you and miss you, Tom. Peace to you, my out and proud brother, and may you rest in the arms of God who always knew that you were wonderfually and fearfully made, even if it took you a long, long time to figure it out for yourself.

Readers, do you have coming out stories to share?