Today is my mother’s birthday. Maybe that’s why I woke up feeling a little blue; she died nearly eleven years ago. She was a remarkable woman, but I suppose most of us think that about our moms. Though I miss her physical presence in my life, to say that she is a part of who I am is not a platitude. The interactions, the relationships we have with others change us. This is particularly true of those with whom we have the strongest attachments.

Robert Mesle describes the experience of being changed by a relationship, 

She and I have shaped each other. Decisions that she makes about who she will be and how she will act call forth responses in me. I experience  her, and then [decide]. . . how I will act. Her love and anger and joy and frustration express themselves in ways that I experience, experiences that are literally part of who I am. (Mesle, Process Theology: A Basic Introduction, 56.)

Mesle wasn’t writing about an important relationship with someone who had died, however the same is true of those who we have lost through death. I still carry within me the interactions I had with my mother. My unconditional love of my children, my insatiable curiosity, my commitment to God, and my passion for young children and their families all have their roots in the mother-son relationship. My fondness for pistachio ice cream, my silly songs, and, yes, even my spaciness also can be traced back to the one who died eleven years ago. We carry those who came before us within us. 

Though I never met my paternal grandfather, an alcoholic who abandoned my mother, I carry him within me, too. Though I cannot identify specific personality characteristics within him that are within me, I know that his relationship with my mother changed her. His personality as well as his alcoholism are a part of me, transferred to me through my mother. Who she was included her Scottish immigrant father; who I am includes her. 

We are interconnected; we are one humanity. We are not only bound together through those we personally meet but through those generations that came before us.

***

American culture, especially Anglo-American culture, downplays our connectedness with our forebears. (Perhaps this is the result of our relatively short time on this continent.) We think we are disconnected from our ancestors. We are not. To pretend otherwise is to lose sight of who we are and who we can become.

We think of time as a linear experience that begins with the present. We surgically remove the past from our personal and communal psyches. That is unless that past reflects well on us. Americans like to take pride in our entrance into World War II as liberators. We conveniently forget that our isolationism contributed to Hitler’s rise to power. I like to take pride in my grandmother standing up for an unwed mother in her church while ignoring her bigotry toward a neighbor. 

Our sense that time begins with us, prevents us from reconciling with others. It prevents us from healing historic rifts with other peoples and wrongs committed by us. We are responsible for the actions of our forebears. 

As humans, we all sin and we all do good. My people are responsible for much good. We are also responsible for heinous acts. We are responsible for the Crusades, the slave trade, theft and colonization of other peoples’ lands, and an atomic bomb dropped on innocent people in Japan. Though I am not personally responsible for any of these actions, they are a part of me. 

We must change our sense of time. We must accept the sin we share with our forebears or we will never be able to reconcile with our kindred human beings. For those of us who claim to follow Jesus, reconciliation with all of God’s people should be a part of our DNA. Reconciliation is more than striving to be loving people in the present, though that is critical. Reconciliation requires that we love all peoples enough that we’re willing to confess the sins of our past.

“We don’t want to be known as a ‘one issue church.’”

Put less diplomatically, as some people have done, the reservation is expressed this way:

“We don’t want to be known as the ‘gay church.’”

I want to address this matter because it can prove to be an obstacle for churches in entertaining the radical notion of becoming Open and Affirming. (Also, I have something of a personal interest in broadly addressing this matter, since some of my critics have voiced their concern that I am also in danger of being known as a “one-issue guy,” beating only this particular theological drum—to the exclusion of other important theological questions.)^[3]

This is worth talking about. The charge that focusing on LGBTQ inclusion carries with it the danger of consigning oneself or one’s congregation to a box reserved for single issue (and thus ) matters marked, “identity politics” (e.g., race, gender, ethnicity, etc.), misses a very important point.

Open and Affirming is not simply code for “gay friendly.” In writing up a resolution about our denomination declaring itself Open and Affirming, I was cautioned by more than a few people that O&A is seen by many to be a euphemism for militant gay friendliness.

“Urging churches to be O&A is a sure way to turn people off, because there’s a long history behind that designation that many people hear as a call to become a ‘gay church.’”

Ok. I get that, if by “Open and Affirming” what people mean is just another sneaky way to squeeze into the life of the church the “agenda driven politics” of the LGBTQ community (perhaps a straw man argument all its own?).

But the thing is: Nobody I know is making that argument.

Open and Affirming, though it carries a specific and important association with the LGBTQ community is so much more than making churches “gay friendly”; it is a call to the church to fundamentally reorient its understanding of hospitality and justice. The full inclusion of LGBTQ people only scratches the surface of the church’s radical vocation to love those who’ve been kicked to the margins.

When a church becomes Open and Affirming, it soon finds that welcoming LGBTQ folks is just the beginning. Pretty soon, if you’re anything like serious about your faith, you begin to ask,“Who else has been left out that the church should be welcoming in? About who else has society generally said, ‘You need not worry about those folks. We’ve got much more pressing concerns. Their stuff (even if we think they have a right to it, which oftentimes we do not) can wait?’”

Immigrants (legal and otherwise)? People of races different from mine? The poor? AIDS patients? Those who can’t get health insurance? The disabled? Drug addicts? Ex-cons? Prostitutes and tax-collectors? Lepers? You know, the disposable people?

Open and Affirming, after you live with it a while, instead of narrowing your focus to one beleaguered group, broadens your vision. It is a way of beginning to take seriously what otherwise gets so casually tossed about by popular Christianity: What would Jesus do?

Indeed, what would Jesus do? Which question is another way of asking, “Who would Jesus love? Who would Jesus welcome? Who would Jesus see cast off from the rest of ‘normal’ life, drop what he’s doing with the highly accomplished and well situated, and go hang out?”

Open and Affirming congregations, I want to suggest, are much less “single issue” churches than those congregations that spend the bulk of their time in extended instances of applied ecclesiological navel-gazing.

To the extent that a church spends the bulk of its time hand-wringing about its impending demise, for instance, it’s a single issue church.

Congregations that obsess about attracting young families are much closer to being single issue churches than O&A congregations.

You might just be a single issue church … if you spend more time talking about not having enough money than about what kinds of interesting things you’re going to do with the money you’ve got.

You get the idea.

The point is that becoming O&A doesn’t limit the horizon of discipleship; in fact, it stretches it in revolutionary ways, offering a point of access to the radical hospitality and the institution-challenging justice practiced by Jesus himself.

Perhaps discipleship, when all is said and done, is a single issue: Does the faith you practice assist you or prevent you from following Jesus to the wrong side of town?

1. I’ve written quite a bit about why churches should declare themselves Open and Affirming. These pieces have often started with reconstructed and condensed versions of conversations I’ve had with real people. However, that literary conceit upsets some—understandably, I think, because as the author, I always get to appear in control. I have an unfair advantage in such an exchange, since it’s perhaps a bit too tempting to paint people who have a different set of convictions on the issue as less than thoughtful. Let me set the record straight: I believe that many of the people who disagree with me on the issue of the full acceptance of LGBTQ people in general, and on the issue of becoming Open and Affirming in particular, are just as thoughtful and committed to their faith as I am. I just think they’re wrong. (I don’t suppose that’s going to win hearts and minds either.)  ↩
2. This post, like other posts I’ve done on this issue is specifically written for those people who agree with me that full inclusion of LGBTQ folks in the life of the church is appropriate, but who have yet to press the conversation in their congregations. If, however, you happen to be someone who is not convinced that LGBTQ folks should be welcomed into the life of the church, you probably ought to stop now, and go find another article to read, because the rest of this post is only going to irritate you. I don’€™t mean go away for ever, just for the rest of this post.  ↩
3. Let me attend to that specific charge but briefly: I do, in fact, write and comment on a wide range of issues that extend beyond the acceptance and embrace of LGBTQ people. If you’re really that interested, you can go back through the archives of my writings here or here and check.  ↩

I guess I should offer a caveat right from the start. I know I’m privileged. 
I know that my white, southern, maleness may make the following invalid to many.
Still, I’m in The Body known as the Church, too.
So, here’s some musing on disillusionment, loving the unloving,
and what it means to remain invested in the institutional life of Christianity. 

It was 1992 when I was enrolled at what was then a clandestine Baptist seminary in Richmond, Virginia. Baptist Theological Seminary at Richmond was just getting started. My step-grandfather was involved in the initial planning. The faculty was comprised primarily of folk who had lost tenure at places like Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. They were too liberal…whatever that meant in the 1980′s. The Fudamentalist Takeover had been successful and these intellectual leaders had been ousted from their seminary positions. BTSR was a place to regroup. It was a place to keep working. It was a place to start over. The students who first attended were also looking for a place to escape the insanity of Baptist life of the 1980′s. Of course this would prove impossible. We brought the fights and fears into the classroom with us. We looked around and could only see small churches with entrenched and hurtful attitudes about women, human sexuality, and a myriad of other social issues. Enter E. Glenn Hinson…

Glenn was the professor for Christian Spirituality and taught an amazing class on the History of Christian Spirituality. He was also my advisor and encouraged me to become involved at Richmond Hill.

Glenn decided to host a book study group. We were to read Life Together by Dietrich Bonhoeffer. We struggled with the language, both Bonhoeffer’s dense thinking and prose, and the gendered language. We were all about the issue of gender in language about God and Christianity. But we worked through it and found ourselves struggling with the passages about disillusionment.

Just as surely as God desires to lead us to a knowledge of genuine Christian fellowship, so surely must we be overwhelmed by a great disillusionment with others, with Christians in general, and, if we are fortunate, with ourselves.

By sheer grace, God will not permit us to live even for a brief period in a dream world…The sooner this shock of disillusionment comes to an individual and to a community, the better for both. A community which cannot bear and cannot survive such a crisis, which insists upon keeping its illusion when it should be shattered, permanently loses in that moment the promise of Christian community. Sooner or later it will collapse. Every human wish dream that is injected into the Christian community is a hindrance to genuine community and must be banished if genuine community is to survive. He who loves his dream of a community more that the Christian community itself becomes a destroyer of the latter, even though his personal intentions may be ever so honest and earnest and sacrificial.

Glenn shared his struggles, his losses. He spoke of how he lost tenure in the most abrupt and cruel of ways. Then he demonstrated again and again how through history the Church has been a place of brokeness…just like the rest of the world. He spoke of humility, the humility it takes to repent and forgive…and to recognize that we are not immune to one another’s cruelty. We all shared our frustrations and fears. We each had our utopian vision for the Church. Again and again Glenn knocked them down. He did us a great kindness by doing so. Bonhoeffer wrote, “God hates visionary dreaming; it makes the dreamer proud and pretentious.”

The Church is not a purity cult. We try to turn our institutions into purity cultus of behavior or belief all the time. We’re really good at it. We’ve fought wars over our theologies wrapped in nationalism. We’ve crusaded from west to east all in the name of the purity of the Church. “Ex filio” was a war cry a thousand years ago.

Rachel Held Evans is right. Evangelicalism may very well be losing a generation and by extension, we all are. But then some of us have been losing parts of generations for a long time. Some of the Boomers walked never to return. More of Gen X did the same. Now the enormous generation of Millennials is having its say. Many are voting with their feet. They are tired of the culture wars. They are tired of the purity fights. Many people from various generations are. They are all voting with their feet. The same thing is happening in Catholicism though some arechoosing to stay. If it weren’t for the influx of Catholic immigrants to the US, we’d see the same statistical free fall in Catholicism that the mainline is experiencing.

Maybe those who leave the Church actually understand Bonhoeffer. I don’t know. Maybe they are looking for what I like to call the “impurity cult” of Christianity. I don’t know. All I know is disillusionment, in the end, is good for us. We need to learn that the Church is no different from any other community. We hurt one another. We even kill one another. It can be as terrible as any other place. And it actually becomes more so when we fall for the lie that we’re better than anyone or anywhere else…that we are somehow morally pure.

I understand that I’m in a privileged position in many ways. My life and my rights are not threatened in any way. I understand that. I’m not suggesting that people not leave the institutional life of the Body of Christ. If you are being abused, get out. And if you need to stand in solidarity with the abused by leaving with them, then do so. What I do ask you to consider is this: it is one thing to love the “unloveable” or the lepers of this world. It is another thing all together to love the “unloving,” the Pharisees of this world. God loves them both and the unloving will always be part of our life together. We are the unlovable and the unloving and we’re all in this thing together.

Glenn echoed Bonhoeffer who echoed Christ: life in the Body, in the community of Christ, is not a safe place, a pure place with shiny happy people holding hands. It’s not “up with people.” It’s a place with real people who will intentionally or not find ways to hurt one another. We will always need repentance and forgiveness in our life together. No matter how fluid (or post-modern) the institution, we will need these practices because we will always find some way to oppress one another.

In the end, disillusionment is good for us. We need to rid ourselves of the illusion that there is such a thing as a perfect Church. It doesn’t exist. Our imperfections come with us, our impurities come with us when we enter into the life of the Church. So we repent. We forgive. And, sometimes we leave.

(From Isa 61 - 5.13.12)

People who imagine history flatters them (as it does, indeed, since they wrote it) are impaled on their history like a butterfly on a pin and become incapable of seeing or changing themselves, or the world. 

 This is the place in which it seems to me, most white Americans find themselves.  Impaled.  They are dimly, or vividly, aware that the history they have fed themselves is mainly a lie, but they do not know how to release themselves from it, and they suffer enormously from the resulting personal incoherence.  This incoherence is heard nowhere more plainly than in those stammering, terrified dialogues white Americans sometimes entertain with that black conscience, the black man in America.

The nature of this stammering can be reduced to a plea: Do not blame me. I was not there. I did not do it. My history has nothing to do with Europe or the slave trade. Anyway, it was your chiefs who sold you to me. I was not present on the middle passage.[1]

In the so-called colorblind America of the 21^st century in which we live, there is a conversation that we need to have.  And when I say “we,” I am imploring you to remove the race-less spectacles we’ve been told to wear, so that we can acknowledge the extraordinary colors of the human family, and see where a great many of us have been divided and conquered along those lines.  When I say “we,” I’m talking about American white folks.  Specifically, I’m talking about my people.  And as an upper-middle class, straight, American, white male between the ages of 18-35, I know how our collective posterior can tighten at the mention of a talk about race.  I understand the uncomfortable position to be put in where there seems to be no good answer to any question put to the white man about race in America today.  Can’t we just move past this?  Wasn’t the Civil Rights Movement victorious?  Can’t you see that we have a black man in the White House?  I understand the hot flush that runs up the back of our necks for something we can’t quite name, and the incredulous frustration over the guilt that is sure to be heaped upon us.  I can’t imagine anyone who enjoys being force-fed shame over original sins committed years before his birth.  And I certainly understand the response of good white people of every political stripe to advocate the move to colorblindness, so that the race-less virtues of merit and accomplishment, of strong families and solid faith, may overcome the social challenges of the regrettable behavior of distant ancestors.  So let me assure you that while this conversation is sure to be difficult, it is one that we must have in order to move forward along the great arc of human history bending towards God’s justice.  And while we must all accept our responsibility to do the heavy lifting of kin-dom building, I promise you that shame and guilt are not burdens we are designed to carry.

As people of faith, we have ways to engage the truth of God, of who we are and of what we are designed to do.  And while we may all agree that Biblical texts are an entry point to that engagement with the divine, careful study of how those texts have interacted and responded to the world since its original composition is crucial in order to sift the Word of God out from a desert of lies and misinformation.

As we examine the Genesis creation story handed down to us through the descendants of Abraham, let us consider the Babylonian creation myth, Enûma Eliš.  This narrative tells of gods who war with one another, who resort to violence, and who create the world out of the corpse of the defeated.  The gods who have been conquered become servants of the victorious, until it is decided that humans are to be created in order to assume the burden of labor for the gods.  This story served the dynastic kings, who were legitimized by the supreme deity, in order to preserve and maintain the Babylonian power structure.  You see, it was necessary to assure people who were forced to labor for the building of the empire that they had been created for slavery.  If the status quo must be protected, then it becomes critical to tell a narrative that asserts the righteousness of the status quo.

The Abrahamic faith narrative, however, reveals that God has a way of subverting unjust power structures the status quo.

The ancients who first heard and recorded the creation story we find in Genesis 1:1-2:4a, people who were aware the Babylonian myth, would have detected the bold and subversive claim that humans were not created for slave labor, but rather to rule over the created world and all the abundant life within it.  The Genesis story claims that human beings were not conceived at the end of a series of bickering, failures, annoyances and war among the god, but rather created intentionally good.  We see in Genesis the boundless delight of God, pleased with God’s creation of male and female, made in the very image of God.

So God created humankind in [God’s] image, in the image of God [God] created them; male and female [God] created them.  God blessed them, and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth” (Gen 1:27-28, NRSV).

And the climax of our creation story is not that the point of life is for toil under the oppression of the state, but for Sabbath rest.

Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all their multitude.  And on the seventh day God finished the work that [God] had done, and [God] rested on the seventh day from all the work that [God] had done.  So God blessed the seventh day and hallowed it, because on it God rested from all the work that [God] had done in creation (Gen 2:1-3, NSRV).

You see, we have a remarkable story of who we are and what we are designed to do in this grand mystery of incarnation, in this beautiful and abundant world.  But the power of this story is uniquely revealed when we consider the dominant narrative that it challenges.  The power structure says that humans were created as an afterthought for the leisure of the gods.  Genesis says that we are created in the image of the Divine.  The power structure says that humanity was created for endless toil.  Our God says that we created for empowerment and the benevolent rule of an abundant world.  The power structure says that life is a burden of work from the cradle to the grave.  God declares a holy day of Sabbath rest.  God compels us to have faith that creation is so abundant that six days of work will fill seven days of life.

So what does this have to do with the conversation that we must have about race today?

When I say that the world is abundant, that God wills us to have prosperity and leisure, upper-middle class white people like myself hardly skip a beat.  We look at our broad, green lawns and clean suburban streets and think to ourselves, “of course.  I have been blessed by God.  The abundance of God is evident in my life.”  When we excel in our private or parochial schools, graduate college, secure comfortable, air-conditioned jobs, and vacation in resorts overflowing with amusement and pleasure, we earnestly think to ourselves that the American dream has come true.  We logically associate our dedication and resourcefulness to material success and earnestly believe that anyone who perseveres with such industriousness can have the leisure and consumptive lifestyle that we enjoy.  We figure that it must be something about the determined American character of sacrifice and hard work, combined with the favor of God’s blessings on exceptional people that make the United States of America the greatest nation on earth.

But the fact of the matter is that we have been sold a lie.

We’ve been duped.

And like the Babylonian creation myth that was circulated among ancient people in order to protect an oppressive power structure as well as the elites who were privileged by it, we too have been told a story about our origin and identity that simultaneously privileges a few with power, and oppresses a great many without.  And just as the Genesis creation story subverts a narrative of social control, we too must confront the lies that have blinded us with a liberating faith that speaks truth to power and seeks to dismantle unjust social structures for the kin-dom of God.

The reality is that hard work and ingenuity are admirable values that are worth preserving.  But the truth of the matter is that the world we live in provides access and advantage to some people, so that hard work has the suitable environment to manifest itself in material prosperity, while preventing a great many people from having enough to even survive.  Extensive data reveal that inadequate schools, ethnic and racial disparities in health care, vastly disproportionate rates of employment and incarceration among our sisters and brothers of color are undeniable.  And the myth of individualism, that in order for someone to make it in our world is to pull herself up by her own bootstraps, is not only false, but dangerous.  This is the contemporary Babylonian myth sold to us by a selective telling of our American history.  It is the fiction of an egalitarian nation that earned its wealth with every drop of honest sweat.  But the creation myth of this nation leaves out the millions of Native Americans whose land was stolen and whose people were forcibly displaced.  The story fails to acknowledge that the great wealth of this nation was built on centuries of slave labor, justified by an emerging capitalist ethic and doctrine of white supremacy.  The selective history defames the bravery of impoverished folks who were conscripted to fight and die in wars abroad.  It overlooks the tremendous irony of black and brown men and women who fought overseas for rights they did not enjoy at home.

Now some may say, “sure, we are not a perfect nation.  There have been many sins committed in the past.  But we are beyond that now.  Slavery is over.  Jim Crow has been outlawed.  Haven’t we evolved?  Can’t we move forward?”  The answer is no.  So long as white folks like me benefit from an unresolved and impartial telling of history, and so long as folks of color continue to suffer disproportionately from that same past, then truly we are held captive still.  For it is not the sins of malicious people from which some of us have benefited and others have been abused.  It is the inherently unjust system by which this nation was born and operates still that enslaves us all.  And yes, we are all in bondage.  Some of us are bound by the system as the privileged, and many others are held captive under the weight of its machinery, oppressed generation after generation.  Those of us who are the privileged prisoners are duped into giving our consent to an abusive system that crushes our sisters and brothers under God.  We are taught that our possessions and good fortunes are blessings.  But the truth is that they are the bribes of the empire, paid for with the lives of the oppressed.

And here’s the thing.  This is not about guilt.  None of us built this unjust society by ourselves; it was not even built in our lifetime.  We should not feel guilty.  We should feel angry that we have been coerced into being accomplices to crimes we would never knowingly commit.  We should come to grips with the truth that our economy has been built on two lies:  that scarcity requires us to compete for limited goods, and that the aim of life is unconscious and unbounded consumption.

And here’s another thing.  We need not fall into despair.  Trust me, it’s tempting to leap into the abyss of hopelessness when we open our eyes to the extent of abuse against the most vulnerable and innocent, to the depths of injustice against all of God’s people.  We must look again to the revelation of God in the scriptures, in the person of Jesus Christ, and in the movement of the Holy Spirit among us.  But we must have this conversation of the injustice of race in this nation in order to hear what the voice of God has to say in defiance and revolution against such sin and evil.  Because as long as we do not hear the suppressed voices of the marginalized, we cannot hear the voice of God.  So long as we hear only the seductive coddling of the empire, we are deaf to hear anything else.

The Genesis creation story told an ancient people that the myth of the Babylonian Empire had sold them a lie for the sake of social control.  Today, the same truth that we are created fundamentally good in the image of God in order to rule justly in the world subverts the contemporary lie that maintains an oppressive status quo.  It is difficult to see such systemic sin in the world from the perspective of privilege, when we have been told our own selective historical myth, but that is precisely why we must not shy aware from having the difficult conversation of race in our society.  We need to see that truly we are all held captive, so that we realize that no one can be scapegoated for injustice, neither the oppressed nor the privileged.  This is a system that must be recognized and defeated, because as Christians, we believe in something greater for which we strive as the Body of Christ.  We are not guilty of the past we did not commit.  But we are responsible.  We are obligated to respond to what has happened, because we follow Jesus Christ who responded to the sins of the world with indomitable love.  First we are going to need a shift in perspective in order to dissolve our blindness, and we’re going to need the faith in a God big enough, powerful enough and compassionate enough to replace the empires of humanity with the kin-dom of God.  And to find that God, we are going to need to listen to the lived experiences of people of color who do not share our historical illusions, and to follow closely the narrative of love and liberation we find in our sacred texts.  It is the true story of where we came from.  It is the story of who we truly are and what we were created to be.  And through our faithful lives, it will be the story of how a God who is madly in love with us flows into the world to overturn dehumanizing powers to set us free.

It’s time to reclaim our identity.

However, more often than not conflict can bring out the worst in us, because we don’t know how to deal with it in a healthy way.  We don’t know how to confront conflict, when we have a disagreement with someone, or if someone has rubbed us the wrong way.  Bad behavior happens in every social gathering.  Churches are no exception.  Someone rubs us the wrong way.  We tell another friend about it.  Gossip gets woven into the fabric of the group.  The hurtful words come back around to the person they were about and the damage is done.  Rather than dealing with conflict head on, we go round about ways of dealing with it to the point we often create more conflict over other issues than the original issue that was at conflict.

Case in point: in one church a big brouhaha occurred over an extra cake making its entrance at a church lunch.  The person in charge of the lunch said quite sternly that they already had a cake and didn’t need another one. The person who brought the cake was hurt by those words and told several others they would leave the church.  Yes. Over a cake.

The issue was not the cake.  The issue went far beyond and before my time at the church, but it came to a head over the cake and the bad behavior was going around and talking to others rather than addressing the person they felt offended by.

Since moving to the South, I have found another layer of defense: “The devil must be in her.”  “The devil is in control of that church.”  Satan gets a lot of blame for personal conflict and poor leadership.  I’m not going to debate the existence of Satan here, but I do think we blame others, or we blame Satan, rather than looking at ourselves.

When we have been wronged or hurt by someone in the church, what is the best way to deal with it?  All too often, we talk to others rather than talking to the one who has wronged us, who may not even realize their actions were perceived as hurtful (as in the situation with the cake).  While there are times when actions can be purposefully hurtful, many times it is our own reaction, based on experiences of the past that causes us to overreact and make mountains out of molehills.

Maybe it’s a regional thing to blame Satan (I never heard that when I served churches in the Northeast) but whether we blame Satan or the other person, the only thing we truly can control is our own reaction.  How do we respond when we’ve been hurt?  Where do we go?  Who do we talk to?

As a minister, it has been a slow lesson for me to learn over the years that yes, there are toxic people in churches.  Yes, there are times people do things on purpose to hurt others, even ministers.  But most of the time, it is our reactions that can make conflict a place of growth and learning or a place of division.  We can only control how we react and manage our own emotional response.  We can’t change others.  We can’t change the fact that there are control freaks and “Lone Rangers” and all sorts of different personalities in our congregations, but we can change how we react to them, and by our model, we can perhaps show others how to learn from conflict.

Then in the end, instead of one person in control and another person hurt, perhaps we’ll learn that the miracle is there are two cakes to enjoy.  Or at the very least, maybe one will learn how their actions cause negative reactions in others, whether it be the controller of the lunch or the cake baker.   And whether or not one believes Satan was involved, let us all at least remember we have control over our own actions and reaction, and that is the one thing we can fix, we can change.  We can learn from conflict and grow from it, rather than being paralyzed and watching it spin out of control.  And by our lesson, we can model for others a different way to live with each other in true Christian community.

Yesterday I watched a few news organizations cover the story of president Obama coming out in favor of Gay Marriage. One story I was watching shared a quote from President Obama’s book:

He says in his 2006 book The Audacity of Hope that “It is my obligation, not only as an elected official in a pluralistic society but also as a Christian, to remain open to the possibility that my unwillingness to support gay marriage is misguided…and that in years hence I may be seen as someone who was on the wrong side of history.”

In m own career as a pastor I have seen the denomination I serve (the CCDOC) and the church I serve decide to ‘prayerfully discern’ their stance on this and other issues that have the potential to divide. While I support prayerful discernment wholeheartedly I wonder at what point ‘prayerful discernment’ becomes a cop-out for doing the right thing in a difficult situation.

When is prayer no longer enough?

A colleague and friend of mine has recently been interviewing for church positions and was asked what I think may be the best church interview question I have ever heard: ‘Using the image of Jesus in the temple, what would you be willing to turn over the table in the temple for?’

Jesus certainly was a model for ‘prayerful discernment’ but He was also a model of action in difficult circumstances. Jesus certainly took time to pray as a first reaction to difficult circumstances, but prayer was not his only tool. He taught, spoke up, had compassion, lived alongside, and expanded the kingdom in His every action and word.

I hope that more often than not I speak up even when its hard. I hope that while I prayerfully discern I also remember that Jesus was ‘action.’ From that prayerful center comes a burning desire to follow the heart of Christ into battle for the least of these among us, for the right/ethical thing, for the compassionate thing and for what brings healing to our broken world.

My answer to that question:

Treating people with respect, not using power to manipulate and control, having high ethical standards in working with people’s money, time, secrets, and passions, standing with those who have no voice, caring for the ones among us who need a voice, and making sure that message is passed onto the next generation are the things I would be willing to turn over the tables for. I hope in doing so I will be on the right side of history when I look back.

Love Always Wins.

I’ve got a friend who, not too long ago, experienced some difficult times with his family. Addiction. Co-dependency. A nightmare of family recriminations. For a couple of months, it seemed, he was on the phone every day with his family rehearsing some new sordid development.

He and I went out to breakfast one day, and I asked him how he was doing. He said that this family crisis seemed to consume him, and that he didn’t have any energy for anything else. Always some new wrinkle, some new situation requiring that he devote more time and energy.

“It’s like living in a soap opera. And the weird thing is, I feel almost like I’m addicted to it.”

I said, “What do mean?”

“At first it seemed interesting being involved in something important. I liked the phone calls and the meetings, thinking I was helping to make the situation better. Hours every day. But then I realized that I needed the adrenaline rush I got when some new twist appeared, and we were all on the phone about it. Now, it just feels like we talk endlessly and nothing really gets fixed. And I’m beginning to wonder if I’m hooked on the drama.”

“So why don’t you quit doing it?” I wondered.

“It’s not that easy. I want to quit, but we really are talking about some important things. On the other hand, whatever we’re doing isn’t really changing anything; it’s just making me constantly stressed out and preventing me from doing other things I need to do. I don’t know.”

Have you ever been around somebody who’s gotten hooked on drama? Everything in their lives revolves around “the thing.” They endlessly run conversations and scenarios in their head, like the Joint Chiefs of Staff war gaming the invasion at Normandy. There’s intrigue and subplots, betrayals and instances of sacrifice, great acts of courage and petty retributions.

I’ve been a part of congregations like that. Congregations get hooked on drama. Phone line marathons. Postmortems on the board meeting in the parking lot. Strategy sessions seated around conference tables, furiously poring over copies of the by-laws, now complete with marginalia and a cross-referencing apparatus.

The whole negative feedback loop of drama can start innocently enough. A personnel issue here, a budget problem there—and pretty soon you’re talking about Roberts Rules of Order over your cornflakes.

But the irony is that doing anything creative (or even constructive) is almost impossible once the drama takes hold. Reactivity reigns. You spend more time rehearsing what you “should have said” at the meeting than imagining what kind of action could allow you to realize a faithful vision of the future.

“So, how do we stop it?”

It would be easy for me to be glib, coming off like I have all the answers about how to disrupt the drama enough to get purchase on a healthier way of being. The truth of the matter is I don’t have any magic elixir I can dispense.

But let me get back to that in a minute.

If You Were Successful Would You Know It?

I was driving the other day, and this phrase popped into my head: If your congregation were ever successful, would you recognize it?

That’s a lot to unpack, right? Most of which has to do with how you define “success.” That’s problematic, as I’ve argued before, since congregations tend to have standards of success that are largely impossible to achieve, having to do with a variety of complex factors mostly out of any congregation’s control. Because of the culture we live in, we have a pretty good idea of what “successful” congregations are supposed to look like. They’re the one’s getting all the attention, the one’s reporters turn to to get a comment on breaking news, the one’s highlighted in denominational P.R. materials.

I’m increasingly convinced, however, that success has more than just one face—past which we all too quickly walk. There are successful congregations—congregations that are living faithfully their calling to embody the reign of God—which, because they don’t look that great according to the ways we’ve been taught to keep score, are always in jeopardy of despair—always in danger of succumbing to the temptation of drama.

These churches limp along on budgets that rarely seem to cover all the costs. They don’t have huge numbers of transfers. They can no longer support a graded Sunday School program. By all popular ecclesiastical accounting measures, they’re failures.

And it would be one thing if they failed courageously, but for the most part their failures are pedestrian, unexceptional, ho-hum.

Decline. Attrition. Death. Not with a bang but a whimper.

But what if there were some congregations, congregations that had no business calling themselves successful, that were actually doing something huge, enormous, earth-shattering? Because of the ways we’ve trained ourselves to think about success, would these churches even know they were setting the world on fire—and if not the world, then at least the worlds they occupy?

“So, where are you going with this?”

Let me try to weave two separate strands together.

The Tsunamis of Drama that Keep Us Preoccupied with Our Inadequacies

Congregations, like the enablers addicts require to feed their addictions, often get caught up in the self-destructive cycle of drama. They move from one catastrophe to another, always convinced that they’re in a life and death struggle. Three hour board meetings, frantic phone calls, endless email threads exegeting each passive-aggressive line of text.

The handwringing is exquisite in its enjoyment of self-inflicted pain, like the ever darting tongue rolling over a canker sore. Drama gives satisfaction, just to the extent that it allows its participants to feel the same apprehension and foreboding felt by people who really are facing cataclysms. Life seems so much more significant when infused with the adrenaline of anxiety.

But here’s the problem I see: Congregations addicted to drama are virtually incapable of doing the kind of reflection necessary to recognize when they’re doing something right. The lizard brain takes over, reactivity sets in, and every external stimulus gets read as a threat requiring all the energy and resources of the body.

What if you were doing something outrageously important, but because it didn’t fit whatever model of success sold to you by a cynical culture you continued to cling to the familiar fears you associated with your inadequacies?

What if caring for that group of aging CWF women was the very thing God put you on the earth to do?

What if as God is busy drawing up the blueprint, your congregation’s role in helping usher in the God’s reign is handing out backpacks and haircuts to the children of migrant field workers?

What if what you have to offer for the cause is a van and a couple of folks willing to go to the wrong side of town to pick up a few kids who’ll never swell anybody’s bottom line?

What if God is busy saving the world with the very resources you discount because you’re so addicted to the drama, so afraid your resources can’t possibly be enough that you don’t even realize it?

In The War of Art, a book about writing and the pursuit of creative passion, Steven Pressfield gets at the crux of the issue:

It may help to think of it this way. If you were meant to cure cancer or write a symphony or crack cold fusion and you don’t do it, you not only hurt yourself. You hurt your children. You hurt me. You hurt the planet.

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You shame the angels who watch over you and you spite the Almighty, who created you and only you with your unique gifts, for the sole purpose of nudging the human race one millimeter farther along its path back to God.

Don’t let the drama suck your soul and steal your passion for the very thing God is depending on you to do.

A Sermon by Doug Sloan, Elder
Terre Haute Central Christian Church
Sunday, May 6, 2012

I want to begin by thanking Dianne Mansfield and Phil Ewoldsen for their participation in a very important and successful meeting that took place yesterday, Saturday, May 5, 2012 at Central Christian Church in Indianapolis. This congregation [Terre Haute Central Christian Church], through its board and elders, is one of four congregations [now five] sponsoring a resolution to change the ordination policy of the Indiana Region. Elders and representatives of those four congregations met with the pastor and an elder of the Oaktown congregation, which has deep reservations and sincere concerns about the resolution. The meeting was serious – most of the time, we are talking about a gathering of Disciples – and spiritual. I came away from the meeting feeling hopeful. New ground was broken and a path was cleared for similar conversations elsewhere in the region that involve congregations with the same reservations and concerns as Oaktown.

Also, I want to thank my wife, Carol, for “encouraging” me to stop and think and – in this case – step back ten yards and punt. I can’t help wondering how much better off the history of the church and how much easier Christian theology would be if Paul had been married. Imagine the difference there would be in all of Christianity if Paul had been married to a woman who had looked at him with equal amounts of disdain and concern and said, “Paul, honey – KISS.*”

Being family is not always easy.

My father was quiet and laid back. My mother was gregarious and active. My younger brother, Dennis, was a jock. I was not. In high school, I was in choir, plays, and on the speech team. Dennis ran cross country and played trombone in the band – with band, especially marching band, being more for social enjoyment than satisfying any musical ambition.

Dennis also liked to ride his 12-speed bicycle. Dennis and his riding buddies thought nothing about jumping on their bikes and pedaling from New Castle to Muncie and back between lunch and supper. Muncie is approximately 25 miles north of New Castle – a round trip of a good 50 miles. You have to understand, they would return from these little jaunts with no signs of having exerted themselves.

One day, a trip was planned to our Uncle’s house on the southwest edge of Muncie – and I decided to join them. How hard could it be? The trip to my Uncle’s house was a great ride – we took county roads and stayed off the state highways. We had a nice visit with our Aunt Marjorie and Uncle Kenneth and our cousin Joy Ann and her boyfriend, Phil – and the girl who lived next door to Phil.

Well, the time came to return home. We jumped on our bikes and started pedaling home. A few miles south of Muncie, it happened – my lack of experience with long-distance bicycle rides caught up with me and hammered me with the great-granddaddy of all leg cramps. Every muscle in both legs, above and below the knees, tightened into an unbreakable searing knot. Whatever fantasies I ever had about being “the man of steel” – this wasn’t it. The ride came to a screeching stop in front of someone’s house – to this day, I don’t know who those poor people were. Dennis knocked on the door to ask to use the phone to call our parents. Meanwhile, I had hobbled to the porch to get out of the sun where I promptly collapsed in excruciating pain which I expressed without restraint at the top of my lungs. Eventually, my father arrived and took me and my bicycle home. I never took another bicycle trip with my brother – and my brother has never harassed me about it or held it against me.

Being family is not always easy.

I hear that it has been this way for a long time.

When King David died, the crown went to his son, Solomon.
When Solomon died, the crown went to his son, Rehoboam.

Rabbi Joseph Telushkin is the author of an encyclopedic book titled, “Jewish Literacy: The Most Important Things to Know About the Jewish Religion, Its People, and Its History.”

Rabbi Telushkin has this to say about King David’s grandson:
“Rehoboam has three bad traits; he is greedy arrogant, and a fool.” (p. 84)

From I Kings 12, here is a summary of what happened after the death of King Solomon. King Solomon had imposed high taxes and forced labor to build the temple. After the death of Solomon, the people approached Rehoboam and asked, “Your father made our yoke heavy. Now, therefore lighten the hard service of your father and his heavy yoke that he placed on us, and we will serve you.” Rehoboam told them he would have an answer for them in three days. His father’s advisors, who are older, suggest kindness and moderation and thus gain the eternal allegiance of the people. The younger advisors, who had grown up with Rehoboam, suggest a ruthless denial of the request. Rehoboam listens to his younger advisors. When the people return in three days, Rehoboam informs them that he will be even tougher than his father. And the people said, “We’re outta here.” [Hoosier translation of the original Hebrew] Ten of the twelve tribes form their own kingdom and Rehoboam is left with the tribes of Judah and Benjamin. The ten tribes name their kingdom, “Israel.”

208 years later, Israel is destroyed by Assyria.
136 years after the destruction of Israel, most of Judah is exiled to Babylon.

Here is the rest of the story. When the Assyrians destroyed Israel, some of the people escaped to Judah, formed their own province in the north of Judah and called it Samaria.

Take a breath and change gears – we are jumping to the United States in the 1860s. Think about the animosity between the North and South just before the Civil War. Now, think about that animosity between the North and South and no Civil War. Instead of Civil War, there is only the constant animosity. That is the relationship between Judah and Samaria in the first century during the ministry of Jesus. Back to the United States; what kind of stories do people in the north like to tell about southerners? What kind of stories do people in the south like to tell about those damn yankees? It was the same way between Judah and Samaria. Remember the animosity and the stereotyped jokes that had to have existed the next time you hear the story of the Good Samaritan or the story of the Samaritan woman at the well.

NRSV John 4:7-21
A Samaritan woman came to draw water,
…..and Jesus said to her,
……….Give me a drink.
(His disciples had gone to the city to buy food.)

The Samaritan woman said to him,
……….How is it that you, a Jew,
……………ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?
(Jews do not share things in common with Samaritans.)

Jesus answered her,
……….If you knew the gift of God, and
……………who it is that is saying to you,
………………..‘Give me a drink,’
……………you would have asked him,
……………and he would have given you living water.

The woman said to him,
……….Sir, you have no bucket, and the well is deep.
……….Where do you get that living water?
……….Are you greater than our ancestor Jacob,
……………who gave us the well,
……………and with his sons and his flocks drank from it?

Jesus said to her,
……….Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again,
……………but those who drink of the water that I will give them
……………will never be thirsty.
……….The water that I will give
……………will become in them a spring of water
……………gushing up to eternal life.

The woman said to him,
……….Sir, give me this water,
……………so that I may never be thirsty or
……………have to keep coming here to draw water.

Jesus said to her,
……….Go, call your husband, and come back.

The woman answered him,
……….I have no husband.

Jesus said to her,
……….You are right in saying,
………………..‘I have no husband’;
……………for you have had five husbands,
……………and the one you have now is not your husband.
……….What you have said is true!

The woman said to him,
……….Sir, I see that you are a prophet.
……….Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain,
……………but you say that the place where people must worship
……………is in Jerusalem.

Jesus said to her,
……….Woman, believe me,
……………the hour is coming when you will worship the Father
……………neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem.
[END OF SCRIPTURE]

Two interesting observations about this story.

The first observation is this: Jesus would go the synagogue of whatever village he was visiting. The custom of the day was to invite such a visitor to participate in the worship service. This gave Jesus the opportunity to share his message. Yet, only a couple of stories exist about his synagogue visits. All of the other stories about his ministry – about the teachings and interactions of Jesus – take place outside the synagogue.

The second observation is a question and a challenge: With whom did Jesus interact? Go home and explore the four Gospels; start with Mark, then Matthew and Luke, and finally John. With whom did Jesus interact? Here is a hint: anyone. The early church heard this message and followed it.

NRSV Acts of the Apostles 8:26-40
Then an angel of the Lord said to Philip,
……….Get up and go toward the south
……………to the road that goes down from Jerusalem to Gaza.
(This is a wilderness road.)
So he got up and went.

Now there was an Ethiopian eunuch,
…..a court official of the Candace,
…..queen of the Ethiopians,
…..in charge of her entire treasury.

He had come to Jerusalem to worship
…..and was returning home;
…..seated in his chariot,
…..he was reading the prophet Isaiah.

Then the Spirit said to Philip,
……….Go over to this chariot and join it.
So Philip ran up to it and heard him reading the prophet Isaiah.
He asked,
……….Do you understand what you are reading?
He replied,
……….How can I, unless someone guides me?
And he invited Philip to get in and sit beside him.

Now the passage of the scripture that he was reading was this:

Like a sheep he was led to the slaughter,
and like a lamb silent before its shearer,
so he does not open his mouth.
In his humiliation justice was denied him.
Who can describe his generation?
For his life is taken away from the earth.

The eunuch asked Philip,
……….About whom, may I ask you,
……….does the prophet say this,
……….about himself or about someone else?

Then Philip began to speak, and
…..starting with this scripture,
…..he proclaimed to him the good news about Jesus.

As they were going along the road,
…..they came to some water;
…..and the eunuch said,
……….Look, here is water!
……….What is to prevent me from being baptized?

He commanded the chariot to stop,
…..and both of them, Philip and the eunuch,
…..went down into the water, and Philip baptized him.

When they came up out of the water,
…..the Spirit of the Lord snatched Philip away;
…..the eunuch saw him no more,
…..and went on his way rejoicing.

But Philip found himself at Azotus,
…..and as he was passing through the region,
…..he proclaimed the good news to all the towns
…..until he came to Caesarea.
[END OF SCRIPTURE]

The eunuch, because of his incompleteness, would not have been allowed to participate in certain acts of worship at the temple in Jerusalem and there were parts of the temple where he would not have been allowed to enter.

Both of these stories were clear messages of inclusiveness to and by the early church. Additionally, a very clear attribute of the ministry and message of Jesus and the conduct of the early church was that ministry and message occur out there, not in the synagogue. While ministry and message are public, they are not to be overtly offensive, not in-your-face abuse, and they do not demand change as a requirement to hear the message or to receive ministry. Change can occur and it happens through the resurrection and transformation that is experienced when the ministry and message of Jesus is embraced and internalized.

We speak of being children of God, of being in the family of God. We speak of how this includes everyone, that it is a global perspective. We gladly talk about having an open table where all are invited. Really?

We are open and affirming – we welcome anyone regardless of sexual orientation. What about the homophobic? They, too, are children of God.

We happily talk about welcoming all regardless of race, color, or ethnicity. What about the racist, the Neo-Nazi, the KKK? They, too, are children of God.

We would welcome attorneys, judges, police officers, prison guards – anyone involved with law enforcement. What about the car thief, the burglar, the robber, the home invader, the child molester, the rapist, the murderer? They, too, are children of God.

Would we welcome the invisible people? The illegal immigrant, the homeless, the people who have chronic mental illness and are receiving little or no mental health service? They, too, are children of God.

Being family is not easy. There are 4 terrible prices to be paid if we truly accept and embrace this radical ridiculous notion that there are over 7 billion of God’s children on this planet.

1) If we accept each other as real brothers and sisters, then we are going to have to overlook a lot – and that includes stupid disastrous bicycle rides. For example, just in this room, it means affirming that in our worship service, there are no mistakes. [I have lost count of how many times this act of grace in worship has saved my butt.] When applied globally, the price to be paid is: There is no “them”, only us.

2) If we accept that we have 7 billion brothers and sisters, then we lose “there.” The Republic of Congo is not there, it is here. Syria and Iran and Pakistan are not there, they are here. Mexico and Venezuela are not there, they are here. They are as much here as we are in this room.

3) If we accept that we have 7 billion sisters and brothers, then we lose “later.” If Dennis phones from his home in Churubusco saying that he has an emergency that requires me to be there, I’m outta here. I know – We know – that the same is true between many of us in this room. It should be true for all of us who are here – all 7 billion of us. How do we respond “now” [?] – because “later” doesn’t exist.

4) The most terrible price to be paid is that in the presence of evil, we cannot be silent and still. In the presence of evil, we are called to shout, “This is wrong!” and we called to move against it. Evil exists. Evil is when a person is murdered, abandoned, or excluded from their rightful place in life because of prejudice or ignorance. Evil is when people are treated as “them” “there” and we decide that their need for justice or compassion can be dealt with “later.”

Consequently, if we accept that we have 7 billion siblings – and if we accept that “we” are “here” “now” – then we are going to settle our differences in vastly different ways. We are going to settle our differences as family. We are not going to settle our differences as winner-take-all antagonists and not as an act of conquest. We are going to change the way we intervene in conflicts and feuds – and we are going to intervene. We are going to change the way we intervene in harmful practices such as genocide and slavery and exclusion based on prejudice and ignorance – and we are going to intervene. We are going to change the way we intervene in the oppressive practice of living in empire instead of community – and we are going to intervene.

Being family is not easy.

My apologies to those who have already heard this story. I am telling it again because it is the only one I have to end this message.

At one point during his short troubled life, my son, Chad, was arrested and incarcerated in the Greene County jail. Having neither the emotional nor financial resources to pay his bail, I rationalized it as an example of “tough love.”

At 4 o’clock in the morning there was a knock on the front door. There stood my brother, Dennis, with Chad. Chad had phoned Dennis, who at the time lived in Muncie. Dennis had made the 3-hour drive in the middle of the night, from Muncie to Bloomfield, and bailed Chad out of jail and brought Chad home, and then Dennis made the 3-hour drive back to Muncie.

My question to Dennis was something along the line of “What were you thinking?”
My brother’s response to me was “What else was I to do? He’s family.”

Being family is not easy. The Good News is that there is no other way than – all of us here and now – be the family of God living in the Kingdom of God – and respond to each other one-to-one with generosity and hospitality and healthy service – and as a community provide justice and compassion – and that we be and live and share the Kingdom of God by embracing and exuding the unrestrained love and unconditional grace of God.

Amen.
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* In this case, KISS = Keep It Short and Simple

This is something that, you know, we’ve talked about over the years and she, you know, she feels the same way, she feels the same way that I do. And that is that, in the end the values that I care most deeply about and she cares most deeply about is how we treat other people and, I, you know, we are both practicing Christians and obviously this position may be considered to put us at odds with the views of others.

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But, you know, when we think about our faith, the thing at root that we think about is, not only Christ sacrificing himself on our behalf, but it’s also the Golden Rule, you know, treat others the way you would want to be treated. And I think that’s what we try to impart to our kids and that’s what motivates me as president and I figure the most consistent I can be in being true to those precepts, the better I’ll be as a as a dad and a husband and hopefully the better I’ll be as president.

~Pres. Barack Obama

That President Obama’s announcement of his support of marriage equality for LGBTQI people was met with consternation by many in popular Christianity shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone. That his “brand” of Christianity fails to be persuasive to a portion of the Christian world should surprise no one either. It is common to dismiss anyone who supports hospitality to those created LGBTQI by God as deluded (at best) and evil (at worst).

What I continue to find troubling, though, is the extent to which people who oppose marriage equality maintain that any support of it by those who call themselves Christian is some kind of hermeneutical dodge. The working assumption seems to be that if you fail to employ some form of traditionally conservative interpretive schema, you can’t reasonably expect to call yourself Christian. Because everybody knows that “liberals” don’t actually believe anything important about God or the Bible or following Jesus; they’re just trying to baptize their godless agenda and impose it upon the unsuspecting majority of real Christians.1 What many people apparently find too difficult to fathom, however, is that some people—among whom I take President Obama to be one—hold these “liberal” positions not in spite of but because of their commitment to following Jesus.

On a “liberal” reading of scripture, “loving one’s neighbor” isn’t a frothy placeholder for moral action nobody cares much more about than to feel it deeply in the heart; it is the very thing of which moral action is an embodiment. Put more simply, to progressive Christians “love” isn’t so much something you “feel” about God or another person, but a way of life that seeks to demonstrate its own authenticity by seeking justice and peace for those kicked to the margins by the powerful—which is to say, by seeking to love those whom God loves, but for whom love in this world is often illusory.

The greater (and more damning) criticism of “liberal” Christians is not that they don’t believe the Bible, but that they don’t live up to their claims about “justice” and “peace.” This is a real danger in progressive Christianity. Talking about justice and peace, without actually going to the trouble to see it realized rightfully leads to charges of hypocrisy—that is, failing to walk the walk.

In President Obama’s case, however, the criticism has for some time been reversed: His words about justice and peace for LGBTQI people weren’t matched by his deeds (e.g., refusing to uphold DOMA, doing away with Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, etc.). His failure, according to his critics, was in not being willing to “talk the talk.” In other words, people from both ends of the spectrum were inveighing against him for failing to say in words what he was already doing in practice—a perhaps rarer, but no less damning criticism.

Since I don’t hear the you’ve-also-got-to-talk-the-talk line of argument very often, it got me to thinking about denominational officials, who privately will offer reassurances that they are in support of affirming the full inclusion of LGBTQI folk in the life of the church, but who publicly find it difficult to articulate that support. I understand why taking a stand publicly in support of a controversial issue presents all manner of political land mines, and it makes a certain amount of sense when politicians hesitate to do it. Even religious officials must weigh the political costs of taking, what we religious types call, a “prophetic stance.” But whereas in the case of our political leaders (to our shame, I would argue) we tend to expect political calculations to trump the integrity of personal convictions, one would hope that we haven’t yet reached that level of cynicism about our religious leaders.

Is it to be the case once again that the church can’t quite get its theology straight until the culture shows it the way? Because, let’s not fool ourselves, inclusion is the way things are inexorably headed.

The upshot of it all? If David Kinnaman is right, as Rachel Held Evans deftly points out, what our continued silence risks is the better part of a whole generation coming to the conclusion that they can find better ways to spend their time because they believe the church and its leadership to be “anti-homosexual”. And while I realize that speaking openly about support for our LGBTQI brothers and sisters carries its own risks, I think—like President Obama, it would appear—that silence is a risk no longer worth taking the.

I had an idea for an article today but it wasn’t coming together.

Then Maurice Sendak died, and I knew I needed to write about him, and Where the Wild Things Are.

Where the Wild Things Are is, as everyone knows, a beloved children’s classic.  I never bothered to see the movie because I knew it would create an unintentional background and write in a new story where one never was.  The same happened with the full-length motion picture The Grinch Who Stole Christmas.  Sometimes, we really should leave the classics alone, for we lose the beauty and innocence of the original tale.

Every one of us has a wild streak, a time when we don’t play by the rules and we do things because we want to.  We make mischief of one kind and another until we find ourselves alone, because we’ve pushed others away by our actions.  We enter The Wild, becoming a Wild Thing.  We join the Wild Rumpus.  We are driven by desire to satisfy ourselves.

But at some point, we realize that living by our desires doesn’t fulfill us.  We realize that the people who love us the most are the ones we may have pushed away—and we attempt to fill that emptiness but we remain hollow.  Like Max, we may hear the call of The Wild even say that we are loved, but we know the real love is the love that calls us into responsibility, into caring for others, and that real love is always waiting for us.

No matter where we wander and roam into The Wild of the world, we know that we can always turn back.  Supper will still be waiting for us, and it will still be hot.

Rest in Peace, Maurice Sendak, for teaching me about faith before I could read, and more importantly, about love like a mother has for her Wild Child.  May you make your way home from the Wild, and may you find your supper still waiting for you, hot.