You Are Invited

Austin in June is a warm but lovely place. Come, join us as we celebrate!

Listening

In light of recent evidence that a certain ubiquitous hard plastic is potentially harmful to us, I am sharing an Earth Day poem from the Panhala group, a traditional song from Senegal. ( I mostly took a break from the internet yesterday, trying to spend as much time as I could out of doors without totally undermining my battle against seasonal allergies.)

A comedian recently remarked about how Britain had handed the baton of imperialistic world dominance off to eager Americans decades ago, and demonstrated how China is now in the starting block, equally eagerly awaiting the passing of that baton. He conjectured Americans may be just a few years away from living in mud huts, shaking goat ke-babs at the sky.

After reading about the potential harm we have caused ourselves, and worse, our children and grandchildren, by our hasty embrace of all things convenient, I am wondering if maybe we wouldn't be better off that way. Healthier living in the mud, close to the earth, and eating whatever we could raise ourselves? It is a lot of hard work, but think of all the money we'll save on gasoline and gym memberships...

Here's to listening, here's to learning, here's to living slowly, locally, greenly...

Listen to things more often than beings.
Hear the voice of the fire, hear the voice of the water,
Listen in the wind to the sighing of the bush:
This is the ancestors breathing.
Those who are dead are never gone;
The dead are not down in the earth:
They are in the trembling of the trees,
In the groaning of the woods,
In the water that runs, in the water that sleeps,
They are in the hut, they are in the crowd.
Those who are dead are not ever gone;
They are in the woman's breast, they are in the wailing of a child,
They are in the burning log and in the moaning rock.
They are in the weeping grasses, in the forest and the home.
Listen to things more often than beings.
Hear the voice of fire, hear the voice of water.
Listen in the wind to the sighing of the bush.
This is the ancestors breathing.


(traditional song from Senegal)

The Last Word?

Perhaps you have been following the ongoing debate about a young army officer, slain in the line of duty, recognized as a hero, and now buried in Arlington National Cemetary.

Major Alan Rogers was an intelligence officer who trained Iraqi soldiers and died protecting the lives of two other soldiers as an IED exploded while they were out on patrol.

Alan Rogers had been adopted at the age of 5. His adoptive parents predeceased him, and according to an early NPR report on his death, Maj. Rogers "had no wife or family to take away the flag that draped his coffin, so soldiers folded the flag and gave it to his cousin.".

The presumably comprehensive Washington Post obituary illustrates Roger's life sharing quotes from Roger's college roommate, still his active friend, along with statements made by his cousin, former professors, fellow military officers and others. The obituary notes his theological degree from the U of Florida, his ordination through his church in Florida, and his master's degree in political management at Georgetown University.

However it is not what the Post's obituary says about Rogers so much as what it fails to say, that has drawn attention and criticism.

You see, Major Alan G. Rogers, posthumously decorated war hero, was one of thousands of gay men serving in the US Military, closeted under the provisions of "Don't Ask Don't Tell". Alan Rogers was also an active participant in AVER, American Veterns for Equal Rights, a group working to change US Military policy towards glbt servicemen and women.

There are voices on either side of this debate discussing if Rogers ought to have been shoved back into the closet after his death by the reporting of the national news media. This charge of a "coverup" flared somewhat when a Wikipedia page created by friends of the dead man was reportedly edited to omit references to his sexuality and it was later accused that the IP of the editor was sourced to the Pentagon.

Some state under similar circumstances a straight man's sexuality would not be reported on in his obituary. Others maintain that Rogers' activism was well known and the omission of the information that he was a gay man serves to reinforce prejudicial governmental policies that he openly worked to overthrow.

No matter which side of the fence you fall on about whether or not Roger's sexual orientation was an important fact to be acknowledged when memorializing his life, I think we can all agree on two things. First, Alan Rogers was a hero.

Secondly, what we say and what we fail to say can have significant consequences.

I was reminded of this forcefully while reading two separate reports on the recent death of a celebrated Lutheran Bishop, Dean, Scholar and Teacher, Krister Stendahl. The official ELCA news release on Stendahl does mention that Stendahl "spoke and wrote in support of full equality for people who are gay or lesbian in both the church and society.". The ELCA is not trying to cover up this part of Stendahl's work in order to give a partial picture of who this man was, so what is my complaint?

According to the Lutherans Concerned/North America tribute to Stendahl, "He was a stalwart advocate for full inclusion of LGBT people in the life of the church he so loved.

Indeed, it was he who first used "extra ordinem" and "extraordinary" to describe the ordinations of Ruth Frost, Phyllis Zilhart, and Jeff Johnson in 1990. Stendahl, then the Myra and Robert Kraft and Jacob Hiatt Distinguished Professor of Christian Studies at Brandeis University, wrote celebrating St. Francis Lutheran and First United Lutheran congregations for the courage to call openly gay and lesbian pastors."

In the midst of our ongoing disagreements in the ELCA over the blessing of same gender couples which stands as the single largest roadblock to the ordination of openly lgbt clergy, Stendahl's prophetic support of ordination is no small matter. The ELCA's generic statement that Stendahl supported "full equality for people who are gay or lesbian in both the church and society" simply does not do justice to Stendahl's position.

This error of omission is exacerbated further on in the ELCA report, where there is specific mention by current ELCA Bishop Mark Hansen that "Stendahl advocated for the ordination of women in U.S. Lutheran churches as well as in Sweden". What Bishop Hansen fails to mention appears early in other national memorials, such as in this New York Times News Service piece by Douglas Martin which notes in the lead paragraph describing his life, "As a religious leader with the World Council of Churches and other bodies, Stendhal, a Lutheran, fought for the ordination of women and gay men and lesbians and against the use of sexist language in Scriptures, saying Jesus' maleness was no more significant than the color of his eyes.". (italics mine)

What a difference a sentence or two can make.

Nearly every Sunday in worship, we ELCA Lutherans state some form of the following... "Most merciful God, we confess that we are in bondage to sin and cannot free ourselves. We have sinned against you in thought, word, and deed, by what we have done and by what we have left undone."

As I would say is evident today, some could amend that slightly to say..."we have sinned against you in word, by what we have said and by what we have left unsaid..".

Even in confession however, the pastors, the church as institution, does not get the last word. Although they are empowered to offer us absolution and a declaration of "the entire forgiveness of all your sins, in the name of the Father, and of the +Son, and of the Holy Spirit", it is the congregation, the people of God, who proclaim when all else is said and done, "Amen". Let it be so.

Krister Stendahl, rest now in God. As for those of us yet alive? We have a lot of work left to do. In honor of the life and witness of Krister Stendahl, let's get to it. Amen!

Boycotting Bishops

As a Lutheran, I subscribe to the ELCA's email news releases.  I scan the headlines and read some of the stories, while I typically delete others without a second glance.

Today I idly began to read a story that quickly grabbed my attention. The headline read: "Lutherans Prepare for First Anniversary of Virginia Tech Shooting".

Let me provide a little background. I grew up in Austin, Texas and was in junior high (we still called it that) when on August 1, 1966 ex-Marine sniper Charles Whitman casually climbed the stairs of the Tower at the University of Texas with a footlocker full of weapons and ammunition and opened fire on the students, faculty, and townspeople below. I knew personally, as did pretty much everybody in Austin, two of the young people killed, and my father's office at UT featured a large a window that faced the grassy mall where Whitman's rifle did the most damage.

That tragedy here in Austin was "the worst campus shooting in US history" until the Virginia Tech incident. Justifiably or not, I have always felt a special empathy for the students, faculty, townspeople and families of all those affected on the campus in Blacksburg, Virginia.

As I was reading, I was struck that many of the students dreaded most the return of the media attention. They found the media portrayal of their grief intrusive, failing to accurately portray what they were experiencing. I suppose, like many others who find themselves unexpectedly in a spotlight, they found it disturbing to be talked about, rather than talked to. Reading on, I was not surprised to read the central role the Lutheran Student Ministry had played in helping to bring about healing for many.

The campus pastor for Luther Memorial, an ELCA congregation across the street from the campus, the Rev. Joanna Stallings, states, "The most important thing we did as a community was worship," ... Students gather weekly on Tuesday evenings for a meal and worship at the student center. Another of the campus pastors, Rev. William H. King, explained their approach. King said, "When push came to shove, it was the worship that provided those words of comfort...the needful, healing things that people were yearning for. There were no answers that were going to explain this."

In the national spotlight, King was asked to "offer words from the Christian tradition to comfort the a diverse community at the Virginia Tech Convocation" the news item goes on to say. King says "I took a lot of heat for not mentioning Jesus in that convocation", a nationally broadcast event. The article says "King felt it was important to provide pastoral care for the entire university community at that event, rather than make a confessional statement."
(italics mine).

That evening King and three other pastors led a joint worship service for the student LSM and two ELCA congregations in the area. "That was the place where we brought the Word into reality.." King recounted.

King relates how in the months afterward he revisited the theology of the cross, studying how God is revealed and yet also hidden in times of suffering. He shared, "Now I'm beginning to get a sense of what it's all about. In the midst of this, God is faithful, but there are also lots of loose ends that flop around." King would never say "God did this" to VA Tech, but says through this experience of pain and suffering, the community has been opened to other people's pain around the world.

And here is the clincher for me personally, anyway. In the ELCA news release King compared the task to preaching at a funeral: "The gospel matters in that moment or it doesn't matter at all. There's a bracing clarity in that moment."

And was it solely because of my own adolescent exposure to tragedy that these words spoke so vibrantly to me today? That may be part of the answer, but I believe the deeper reasons come out of a very disturbing series of email conversations I have been holding with my own Synod's Bishop.

I had heard, during the Conference of Bishops gathering on the West Coast, that a group of Bishops had declined to join the full conference in the regularly scheduled worship service to be held at St. Mark's Lutheran Church to be followed by a shared meal. The reason shared with me by my Bishop was that with the pastor on staff under discipline from the Synod, if the conference attended, that presence would make "a statement". After objections were raised, the schedule was revised and an opportunity was made for Bishops to attend worship at St. Mark's or at another location.

In other words, certain ones out of our Conference of Bishops, a group reflective of leadership across our denomination, chose to boycott a worship service in order to make a statement about the acceptability of hearing the Word, praying, singing, and simply being in community with a congregation who has a called pastor currently under discipline. This group included my own Bishop, who chairs the Synodical-Churchwide Relations Committee.

In our last Churchwide Assembly in Chicago in August of 2007, the 1100 gathered faithful voting members passed a resolution allowing room for "refrain/restraint" by Bishops when it came to disciplining openly gay clergy. For the past several years, the entire ELCA has been engaged in a study and discernment process around questions of human sexuality, entitled "Journey Together Faithfully". In the context of these decisions, reached by the prayerful, thoughtful, spirit led, denominationally sanctioned and agreed upon process participated in faithfully by hundreds of ELCA members, both clergy and lay from all across the United States, several of our Bishops chose to set themselves apart, intentionally, from an invitation to worship.

The Conference of Bishops has made a statement, all right. By refusing to worship, by choosing not to sing, pray, hear and celebrate the Word of God in community with a congregation of the ELCA, they have indicated their unwillingness to "journey together". When the chair of the Synodical-Churchwide Committee of our Conference of Bishops speaks out against worshipping with any congregation that makes it perfectly clear that it is the opinion of some of our highest clergy that some congregations are going to be accepted, while other congregations will be discriminated against.

Were my Bishop and the others who boycotted following a written rule? Is there currently an ELCA policy asking Bishops not to worship with congregations where a pastor is under discipline? No. The worship at St. Mark's was organized by the national staff of the ELCA as part of the original agenda of the Conference of Bishops meeting.  The Bishop for the entire ELCA was in worship there, along with the majority of those Bishops attending the Conference meeting.

When it comes to being "church", the campus pastors in Virginia Tech discovered that worship was where healing happens for a people in pain. When it came to ministering to a diverse group, the Rev. King stated that in some contexts it is more important to "provide pastoral care for the entire community rather than make a confessional statement". In a differing worship setting King discovered that sharing the Word in the midst of pain and suffering is when the gospel matters most.
Could not the Conference of Bishops, in unity, have led this denomination by making a pastoral display, ministering to their entire community? Their own Bishop spoke at St. Mark's during the worship service. Could they have acknowledged, in the midst of the pain and various forms of denial and "death" our ELCA's discriminatory policies mete out, that the Gospel, the Word matters ESPECIALLY when we all gather in worship, together? Could they not have reached out in graceful leadership, to demonstrate what was most important over all? That being our common ground as sinners, equally beloved and forgiven by God?

If our Bishops will not worship together in an RIC congregational setting, including my own Bishop who has been called to serve a Synod where we have affirmed, not once, but twice by increasing margins, an RIC statement of welcome, then I do not see how any member of the ELCA, lay or clergy, can justifiably claim superior allegiance to the policies of the ELCA, much less the demands of scripture. The Bishops may not have defied the letter of ELCA written policy by their refusal to worship at St. Mark's. But they have certainly openly violated the spirit of our denomination's ongoing attempts to reconcile disagreements over church policy and traditional interpretation of Scripture.

Shame on you, boycotting Bishops! You have taken an invitation to communal worship and twisted that into a political statement. That is not living together at all, much less "Living Together Faithfully".

I Once Was 3/5 Blind...Now Can I See?

Imagine for a moment that you have gone out to the curb one afternoon to get your mail, and you notice one of your neighbors has posted a sign in their yard stating "Cable TV will destroy society!".

You ask your neighbor (who is standing by her sign) what she means by that and she explains to you "Cables are an affront to the god Thoth. They radiate theta waves which make people sterile.". You ask for more of an explanation and your neighbor changes the subject.

You decide your neighbor is making decisions based upon information that flies in the face of accepted facts and science, that she is delusional and possibly schizophrenic, responding to forces, threats and agents that are products of her own imagination.

You perhaps resolve to keep a much closer watch on your pets and/or kids when they are leaving the house or yard for any reason.

Now imagine another of your neighbors puts up a sign in their yard stating "Gay marriage will destroy society". You ask for an explanation and he provides "Homosexuality is an abomination to God. Gay marriage undermines marriage which is foundational to our society." You press for details and he changes the subject.

Is your neighbor delusional or merely conservative? (you might want to hold off answering that....)

Jon Haidt, in a video presentation to The New Yorker Magazine's Conference on Stories of the Near Future entitled "Morality:2012", and again in an article with Jesse Graham for the journal, Social Justice Research, entitled "When Morality Opposes Justice" is making the case that liberals tend to base their moral decisions on two foundational psychological constructs versus a more conservative approach which places equal weight upon five foundational constructs.

In other words, when I (as a liberal type gal) make up my mind as to a moral course of action, I will do so based upon two questions: 1) Who is harmed by or cared for by my actions and 2) is this fair?

On the other hand, my neighbor with the anti-gay marriage sign in his yard (which I am grateful to report is a fiction from Haidt's article as far as I know), the conservative, would base his decision making with equal consideration given to five questions over my two. My conservative neighbor (a term which would realistically include nearly everybody living in the State of Texas outside the large cities and my little Blue County) would be asking my two questions along with three others to include "does this protect the group I belong to?", "does this sustain our purity/identity standards?" and "is this properly respectful of existing authority?".

While all five questions sound reasonable to the majority of my neighbors, to the vast majority of the world even, when I typically try to consider "purity" "group identity" and "authority/respect" issues I start to cue up my 1960s-70s soundtrack and over that music and the noise of dropping bombs I mostly hear something that sounds like the Charlie Brown trombone slides that were the adult voices in the Schulz cartoons... "wanh, wanh, WAAAAH!".

Haidt (and others) propose this is a basic difference in understanding that has liberal and conservatives talking past each other rather than to each other when it comes to many very divisive topics roiling society and our churches these days. If we are ever to hope to understand each other in any way that might bring us closer together, he maintains, we will simply have to accept, at least as liberal thinkers, that satisfying two out of five criteria, or potentially only even considering two out of five criteria, is simply never going to pass muster with much less gain the support of the very people we will need to effect real policy change.

But don't take my 2/5 word for this. Please watch the video and/or read the article on your own. Whether or not you are more or less convinced that the conservatives around us are merely delusional after all is up to you.

If folks (like me) who are all for allowing blessings for same sex couples and ordination for otherwise qualified openly lgbt clergy were able to see this situation from the viewpoint of more conservative eyes, then perhaps we would be able to talk TO each other about this in ways that will find us seeing our commonalities with the same clarity as we currently see our differences? Perhaps we would be able to formulate statements, memorials and propose resolutions that will represent clear attempts to satisfy the five concerns our many neighbors hold when regarding what it would mean to change ELCA policies.

What are the odds? About two, or three, out of five, as it turns out.As the story of Jesus healing the blind man in the Gospel as attributed to John points out, it is not only the light of Christ that will determine where we see our paths to be, but our response to that illumination that will make the difference in our own lives.

If I am only wanting to be "correct" in my own eyes, if I am only interested in how I think and who else agrees with me? I will do so at the expense of being in communion with very,very many of my other brothers and sisters in Christ. Am I willing to ignore the needs and experiences and viewpoint of the people who do not "see" morality the same way I do? If I do so, how am I very, if any different, than the folks I disagree with?

I am grateful for this "new way to see" how my fellow ELCA Lutherans are making their determinations of what is moral. Whether or not I agree with them, I am better able to understand them now, and perhaps also to speak to them in a way that they can hear.

Speaking to each other, hearing each other, seeing each other with new eyes. What a miracle of healing that could be! I maintain an ability to understand why conservatives are seeing the same situations the liberals are, only drawing vastly differing conclusions from that sight, would be an amazing grace, indeed.