The more they stay the same.
I am in regular conversation with my daughter who is a first year law student at the University of Michigan.
As she reports to me about the discussions they are having in class about desegregation and affirmative action decisions as handed down by the Supreme Court, I keep hearing echoes.
In our nation's attempts to redress the wrongs done by routinely treating a portion of our populace as not only "different than" but more specifically "less than" in terms of granting and enforcing a standard of uniform civil rights, people put forward all sorts of arguments against making any such shifts in our national policy.
We were told the nation had been founded upon a different understanding of civil rights. An understanding that took into account an economic need for some persons to be owned in ways that allowed their labor to benefit others. We were warned that the very social fabric of our democracy required us to stand fast, to not make room in our thinking, much less in our laws, for any changes that were described as being based upon trends or faddish social science findings.
Now we are hearing the same sort of arguments advanced by theologians and other church officials speaking in oppositional response to the ELCA social statement draft on human sexuality.
Folks against change are stating that by allowing our rules and regulations to reflect a new or different understanding of sexuality we are somehow actually changing who we are. We are once again being warned that the fabric of our denomination requires us to stand fast, to not make room in our thinking, much less in our rules, for any changes that are described as "culturally driven" or based upon faddish social science findings.
Change can be frightening. I get that. I am often a foot dragger when it comes to change in my personal sphere.
But can anybody honestly tell me, once they have made room in their thinking for the slightest possibility that sexuality is a gift from God and not a human choice, that they are willing to allow a church purportedly based upon the radical grace of God's forgiveness to have in its rules and policies openly discriminatory language with regards to gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender persons?
I would argue that the shifts the sexuality task force statement urges on the church, along with the steps towards implementing policy revisions do not at all change "who we are" but rather move us as a denomination towards actually beginning to integrate with our policies and paperwork a reflection of "who we are" that is more accurate than the documents or rules of the ELCA as they currently stand.
For all our sakes let us put an end to this nonsense of pretending it is acceptable to have openly discriminatory double standards in place posing as church policy. Let us never for a moment waver in our unconditional acceptance, support and love of all our brothers and sisters in Christ no matter if they are attracted to men or women. Let us concern ourselves only with the quality, equity of power, and loving characteristics of humans relating. Let us leave behind any dogmatic insistence that an acceptable life long committed human relationship may only properly reflect one traditional practice to the exclusion of all others.
Who or more centrally, what should we wish to say it is we worship otherwise? Tradition over human reality? Historically venerated translated words over human experience? What other advances or shifts in human understanding will we next submit to our "this is not who we used to be" test then? Will we as ELCA Lutherans be asked to forgo immunizations for our children? Birth control pills? Divorce?
If we are to consider scripture to be any sort of accurate reflection of a peoples' living breathing ongoing relationship with their creator, then we simply can not remain stuck in our past no matter how comforting some may find the prospect. We can not continue to ignore the created nature of our brothers and sisters in any way that disallows them from being fully human as a requirement we will set into place to serve God or to serve God's people in the ELCA. Nor can we hope to be a relevant voice in any ongoing moral conversations if we insist upon a church that pretends with its policies that we still labor under the delusions of centuries past.
White skinned people weathered the initial discomfort brought about by welcoming our brown and black skinned brothers and sisters into polling places, into taking proper places in the halls of power. Would any sincerely wish to undo that progress? Male clergy weathered the initial discomfort brought about by welcoming female clergy into seminaries, into congregations, into pulpits, into taking proper places in the halls of power. Would any sincerely wish to undo that progress? Can any who embraced, (however reluctantly) the changes of the past, honestly insist now that those changes, along with their discomfort, did not also bring with them a myriad of gifts and growth for all involved?
This will be no different. Those of us who experience and identify with what has been unquestioningly accepted as a traditional or normative form of sexuality may now potentially experience some initial discomfort as we welcome our glbt brothers and sisters into their proper places in the ELCA. The discomfort will pass, we will all grow stronger for having faced it together, and the progress made by allowing for a fuller expression of the gifts of every ELCA member will become increasingly clear.
Stop wasting time advancing time worn arguments against change, against progress. Nobody is asking the ELCA to put into place documents or policies that change "who we are". The task force itself, those who submitted comments, theologians, parachurch organizations, and now the ELCA Church Council itself have all agreed that while what we have before us is not perfect, it does at the very least more accurately describe "who we are". The changes themselves have already taken place in the ELCA. It is time to acknowledge those changes, to embrace them and to move out of our own self imposed closet.
We of the ELCA are God's children. That means we already are gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, questioning, queer, intersex and ally. We now have a chance to integrate that acceptance of our reality into our practice and our paperwork so we can abandon the chaos of this self-imposed identity crisis and get back to work.
The time is now. The choice is ours.
