Monthly Archives: February 2014

Religious freedom, religious discrimination, anti-LGBT bigotry

Posted on by
1

Like so many others, I’ve struggled to understand the recent debates over religious freedom and discrimination. There are the corporations like Hobby Lobby that are perfectly willing to pay for contraceptive coverage for their employees until the ACA came about. There are Catholic institutions like the Little Sisters of Mercy who assert that even filling out a form offends notions of religious freedom (tell that to all of my relatives who filed for Conscientious Objector status over the decades). There was the Federal Court smackdown of Notre Dame this week.

Then there are the efforts to give cover to businesses that want to refuse to sell or provide services to LGBT clients. On the one hand, I don’t know why anyone would want to have their wedding photographed or buy a wedding cake from a vendor that didn’t want to honor their relationship. On the other hand, I worry about the analogies with Jim Crow and with the idea that the state can permit bigotry and hate. That Governor Brewer has vetoed the bill in Arizona, and that legislators in other states like Ohio have withdrawn their bills begs the question.

There have been some interesting perspectives from Evangelicals and political conservatives that have criticized or rejected these efforts to enshrine bigotry into law. But the question that’s perhaps most interesting is how these vendors deal with other issues. Willamette Weekly asked some difficult, embarrassing, and silly questions of two vendors who refuse to provide services to LGBT couples. It turns out they are happy to provide cakes for divorce parties, baby showers for unwed couples, and the like.

The incredible pushback over these laws–from the business community, from the NFL, even from politicians who initially voted in favor of the bills, shows that something fundamental has changed very quickly. Even in Arizona, polls show that slight majorities are now in favor of gay marriage.

The courts are moving even faster. In the midst of this enormous sea change, it’s quite likely that many social conservatives are simply losing their bearings. The old answers and responses no longer resonate as they did even a few years ago. That’s true for politicians but it’s also true for people in business, in local communities, even in churches. The ground has shifted and it’s hard for them to get their bearing in this changing landscape. That they might seek legislative help to help them negotiate is hardly surprising. But it’s clear that the politicians are as disoriented as the ordinary population. A vote that they thought was safe and a nobrainer even two or three weeks ago suddenly is revealed to be absurd. That explains why Arizona state senators suddenly ask the governor to undo something they could have prevented with their no votes.

It’s easy for opponents of such laws to ridicule these efforts. But I think it’s important that we understand where they are coming from and help those who are feeling such disorientation to make sense of the world in which they now find themselves. For those of us who are Christian, it’s our responsibility to help our brothers and sisters who are struggling in this new context to figure out how to express their faith consistently and openly and to engage this rapidly changing culture in ways that witness to the love of God in Jesus Christ.

I think much of the same could be said of the conflict over contraception.

Resist not Evil: A sermon for the Seventh Sunday after Epiphany, Year A

Posted on by
1

I cannot hear or read the words of Jesus in today’s gospel without thinking of my past. Most of you know that I grew up in the Mennonite tradition. It’s not something I talk a great deal about because for most people the word Mennonite conjures up images of plain clothes and horse and buggies. The Mennonite community in which I was raised had abandoned those markers of identity and separation decades before I was born, although one could detect certain vestiges of traditional dress among some of the elderly of my home congregation. These outward symbols of difference may have faded away but for most, the teachings of the Anabaptist-Mennonite tradition were, when I was a child, still closely followed. At the heart of those teachings were Jesus’ words here, “Resist not evil.” Continue reading →

Sad ironies in Episco-land

Posted on by
Reply

So today I came across two very similar stories from diametrically opposed sides of the Anglican/Episcopal scene in the US. Bishop Robert Wright had to defend himself because he recommended a book by Rick Warren for Lenten reading. “What could have you been thinking?” was the response he received from progressive Episcopalians.

Word came from Nashotah House, one of the seminaries of the Episcopal Church, that Presiding Bishop Katherine Jefforts Schori will be visiting this spring. In response Bishop Jack Iker of one of the breakaway dioceses has resigned from the board and the conservative blogosphere is apopleptic.

Now, I’ll make my confessions. Yes, I’ve read one of Warren’s books–A purpose-driven church–and i didn’t find it particularly interesting. And in my nearly five years in Wisconsin, I’ve never stepped foot on Nashotah House property. The invitation to the Presiding Bishop does not make my visit to “the House” more likely, but it does change my perception of the institution considerably.

We are a deeply divided church and a deeply divided culture but the work of God in Jesus Christ is first and foremost the work of reconciliation. Both Bishop Wright and Bishop Salmon, the Dean and President of Nashotah House, are doing that hard work of reconciliation and I for one pray for them, their efforts, and for our ongoing need to reconcile across the theological, cultural, and political divides that separate us.

Bishop Wright’s letter is available here: http://episcopaldigitalnetwork.com/ens/2014/02/21/what-were-you-thinking-a-letter-from-the-bishop-of-atlanta/

Bishop Salmon’s video explanation of how the invitation to the Presiding Bishop is here:

http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=EcUanH0OQYg&feature=youtu.be

God Loves Uganda

Posted on by
Reply

It looks increasingly likely that the “Kill the Gays” bill in Uganda will soon become law. I had the chance to see God Loves Uganda today, a documentary that tells part of the story of the background of the bill, including the involvement of American Evangelicals in advocating for its passage.

Unfortunately, the film is deeply flawed. As I watched, I increasingly felt as if the film maker was attempting to create a mirror image in the US of the events in Uganda. In other words, he was manipulating the story, the imagery, and the emotions of white progressive (LGBT) Americans in his effort to demonize Ugandan politicians, religious leaders, and American evangelicals. Throughout the film, ordinary Ugandan people are silent and passive, objectified and prevented agency, acted upon by American missionaries and activists. It was if Uganda had become a proxy battlefield for the American culture wars, just as in previous decades, African countries had been proxies in the Cold War.

It’s a story with real victims and real consequences which becomes clear with story of LGBT activist David Kato, his brutal death, and the travesty of his funeral show.

But there’s a larger story that would provide important context–the history of Colonialism in East Africa and especially Uganda; the history of Anglicanism in Uganda which began with the martyrdom of Ugandan Anglican converts by the local king when they refused to sacrifice to the traditional gods and refused to accede to his sexual demands. It’s also a church whose Archbishop was executed by Idi Amin. There are dynamics of nationalism, anti-Americanism, and anticolonialism that play important roles in the story as well.

I know all too well how African Anglicans have been deployed and manipulated by American  Episcopalians over the years as pawns in our internal struggles for legitimacy and the upper hand. It’s been done by both sides and this film often takes that manipulation to another level.

Jason Bruner provides important background on the complexities within Ugandan Christianity, society, and politics that have played crucial roles in the anti-gay legislation and attitudes. On the Anglican Church of Uganda, for example, he points out that in addition to the importance of conflict within the Anglican Communion and the perception that African Anglicans have become the stalwart upholders of Anglican Orthodoxy, Ugandan Anglicans are also motivated by increasing competition with other Christian groups, especially Pentecostalism.

His essay is a must-read to understand the controversy and the Ugandan context better.

Martin Luther, 1483-1546

Posted on by
Reply

Today is the commemoration of Martin Luther in the Episcopal Church’s calendar. He died on this day in 1546.

My sermon on Sunday elicited two lengthy written comments, both of them addressing what I take to be Christian misinterpretations of the Sermon on the Mount (1–that it is meant only for a spiritual elite, and 2–that it is intended to show us the folly of attempting to live according to good works and thus forces us to ask for God’s grace). I made an offhand (and unscripted comment) critical of Luther on the latter point which elicited both of the replies.

So I want to briefly lay out my gratitude and indebtedness to Luther and take issue with some of his central theological concerns.

I am an Episcopal priest because of Martin Luther. As a young man, I struggled to hear the good news of Jesus Christ in the Anabaptist-Mennonite tradition in which I was raised. Reading Luther’s early works helped me to come to a new understanding of faith. Instead of assent to a series of propositions, or a commitment to follow Jesus Christ in a certain way, for Luther, faith is not something we need to do. It is a gift from God, God’s work in us, justifying us before God. Our only task is to trust in God’s promise that God will save us.

Luther opened me to the power of God and the power of God’s grace. Over the years, I’ve come to know and experience God’s grace in my life and in the lives of others. I’ve come to trust in God’s promises and to trust that God can work a new thing in me.

If my personal religious experience and theology were profoundly shaped by Luther, there are also important divergences. I find his focus on God’s grace and on human sinfulness ultimately somewhat narrow and only partially adequate for making sense of God, the world, and humanity. He is too critical of the created world, too quick to see evil in it and to see evil in human effort and accomplishment. He was also too critical of the scholastic tradition and not able to see his own dependence on it.

Reading extensively in Augustine of Hippo deepened my experience and knowledge of the grace of God. Augustine also helped me to think of the relationship between God and humans more three-dimensionally, attributing goodness and beauty to creation in ways that Luther could not.

Why am I an Episcopal priest because of Luther? He provided me with the theological and spiritual tools to begin to recconstruct my Christian faith out of my broken experience as a child and young adult. He gave me the tools to build a bridge from my past Christian life to the present. There were many other tools and building blocks, including many that I brought with me from the church of my upbringing, but Luther helped me see and experience the way forward, to imagine the possibility of a way to cross the river that blocked my path. The path on the other side of the river ultimately led toward the Episcopal Church but without Luther, I couldn’t have begun the journey.

It’s All About Relationships! A Sermon for the Sixth Sunday after Epiphany

Posted on by
Reply

The Sermon on the Mount, that section of Matthew that stretches from chapter 5 through chapter 7 includes some of the most familiar teachings of Jesus as well as some of the most difficult and challenging. It begins with the Beatitudes-“blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven; blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted; blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth; blessed are those who hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they will be filled.” It’s also the location for the Lord’s Prayer, which we recite at every Eucharistic celebration. Continue reading →

Justified Anger: Town Hall on Racism in Madison

Posted on by
Reply

I attended Alex Gee’s town hall meeting on racism this afternoon. It was very interesting. A standing room only crowd, traffic jams on Badger Road, politicians of all stripes including Senator Ron Johnson came together to listen to Alex speak about what’s happened in his life since his article in December. We learned about the coalition that has emerged in the African-American community and hopes for real change to some of the wide disparities in achievement, economic status, and incarceration.

In the comment period that followed, we heard from people eager to participate, some ideas on what to do, and the need to engage other people of color in this conversation. We also heard about some of the challenges faced by the African-American community–the problems faced by people who are trying to reincorporate into society after prison; problems of under- and unemployment among African-American women, and the absence at this conversation of people from the under-class. We also heard about efforts over the past decades–reports of inequities and racism in Madison going back to the sixties and people who had tried to initiate change in previous generations.

It was heartening to see so many people come together across the great divides in our city. We are separated by class, economic status, and education, and more often than not, we are also deeply divided by our faiths, including divisions within Christianity.

For more information and to get involved in Alex’s emerging efforts, visit the website: http://madisonjustifiedanger.wordpress.com/JustifiedAnger

An Untidy Church: Archbishop of Canterbury on Division and Disagreement

Aside

The chief legislative body of the Church of England is currently in session. It’s been an eventful week with the fast-tracking of legislation for women bishops approved by a wide margin.

They are also debating the Pilling Report on human sexuality which called for “facilitated conversations” to help Christians with different perspectives on human sexuality to understand the positions of others. The report also advocates “that clergy, with the agreement of their Church Council, should be able to offer appropriate services to mark a faithful same sex relationship.”

This week, the Episcopal Church celebrated the twenty-fifth anniversary of the consecration of Barbara Harris, a stark reminder that although we are partnered with the Church of England through the Anglican Communion, we very different in many ways.

There are also similarities, of course. The conversations we’ve been having about LGBT inclusion at Grace are not all that different from those proposed by the Pilling Report. And like the Church of England, there are still deep divisions within our denomination. Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby addressed General Synod yesterday, urging the Church of England, the worldwide Anglican Communion, congregations, and individual Christians to find ways to live faithfully with disagreement. His words are passionate, powerful, and challenging:

So, for example, if we are to live out a commitment to the flourishing of every tradition of the church there is going to have to be a massive cultural change that accepts that people with whom I differ deeply are also deeply loved by Christ and therefore must be deeply loved by me and love means seeking their flourishing.  We cannot make any sense of Philippians chapter 2 and the hymn to the Servant unless we adopt that approach.  The gift that Christ gives us, of loving us to the end, to the ultimate degree is meaningless unless that love is both given and received, and then passed on. …
Yet what lies on that journey? Well, it is certainly an untidy church.  It has incoherence, inconsistency between dioceses and between different places.  It’s not a church that says we do this and we don’t do that.  It’s a church that says we do this and we do that and actually quite a lot of us don’t like that but we are still going to do it because of love.  It’s a church that speaks to the world and says that consistency and coherence is not the ultimate virtue, that is found in holy  grace. …

Let’s bring this down to some basics.  We have agreed that we will ordain women as Bishops.  At the same time we have agreed that while doing that we want all parts of the church to flourish.  If we are to challenge fear we have to find a cultural change in the life of the church, in the way our groups and parties work, sufficient to build love and trust.  That will mean different ways of working at every level of the church in practice in the way our meetings are structured, presented and lived out and in every form of appointment. It will, dare I say, mean a lot of careful training and development in our working methods, because the challenge for all institutions today, and us above all, is not merely the making of policy but how we then make things happen.

We have received a report with disagreement in it on sexuality, through the group led by Sir Joseph Pilling.  There is great fear among some, here and round the world,  that that will lead to the betrayal of our traditions, to the denial of the authority of scripture, to apostasy, not to use too strong a word. And there is also a great fear that our decisions will lead us to the rejection of LGBT people, to irrelevance in a changing society, to behaviour that many see akin to racism. Both those fears are alive and well in this room today.

We have to find a way forward that is one of holiness and obedience to the call of God and enables us to fulfil our purposes.  This cannot be done through fear. How we go forward matters deeply, as does where we arrive. …

Read (or watch) it here:

Christianity and Racism in Madison

Posted on by
Reply

Thanks to the Capital Times and to several courageous African-American leaders, there’s an important conversation about racism taking place in Madison this year. Sparked by some shocking statistics–that Wisconsin has the highest incarceration rate for African-American males in the US. At 13%, it’s double the national average. In Madison, the recent Race to Equity report revealed the enormous disparities in Dane County and Madison:

  • the unemployment rate for African-Americans is five times higher than that of whites
  • 54% of African-American residents of Dane County live beneath the poverty line; the rate for whites is 7.8%
  • around  75% of African-American children live in poverty; the percentage of whites: 5.5%

In December, Alex Gee published an impassioned plea: Justified Anger. In an article that included stories about his own experiences with racial profiling (including in his church’s parking lot), he concluded with a ringing challenge to Madison:

I challenge the entire community to become concerned and involved. I challenge African-American pastors to make their voices and concerns known and hold community forums with politicians to demand action.
I challenge white clergy to address racial disparity and discrimination from their pulpits, challenge parishioners to think and act differently and help sound the alarm of the injustice and inequity in our community. I need those pastors to explain how these systems are perpetuated by the silence of “nice” people.

Gee has invited the community to a town hall meeting to discuss racism and inequality in Madison.

Maria Dixon (Patheos) takes a wider perspective. Looking at the tradition of Black History Month, she challenges American Christians to have the serious conversations about race that are necessary:

Despite our efforts and initiatives to eradicate the conditions faced by undocumented immigrants; the educational challenges faced by the poor; or the inequities of justice and wealth– until we engage in the hard conversation regarding the framework that set all of these conditions in motion—the grand American concept of race–we will be still floundering like beached ideological whales 25 years from now.

To engage in hard conversations requires trust and presence, neither one of which we have in the American Church. Our way of dealing with race is to erase difference by folding it in and objectifying it. Rather than dealing plainly about fears, our biases (past and present), and admitting that race sometimes does play a role in our approach to ministry, we render it totally invisible. Sadly, it is the tendency to make race invisible that is most damning for any chance at honest reconciliation. For erasure is the greatest form of dehumanization in a symbolic culture—for it communicates the belief the object being erased is not viable for productive service nor is it worthy to remembered much less esteemed.

In the past few weeks, I’ve had conversations with clergy colleagues, both with Episcopalians and in wider ecumenical contexts about how we might respond. Of course, neither of those conversations included African-American participants. I’ll be attending the town hall meeting to listen, to learn, and to find ways to build relationships.

Knowing nothing but Jesus Christ and Him Crucified: A Sermon for the Fifth Sunday after the Epiphany

Posted on by
Reply

I’ve been thinking a lot about Paul these past few weeks. Our second reading throughout the Season of Epiphany comes from I Corinthians, a letter I have found fascinating since my first undergraduate course in Paul more than thirty-five years ago. I was also engaged with Paul because of the recent screening and conversation at UW of the Film “The Polite Bribe.” I’m not sure why, but in January, I also began reading N.T. Wright’s new 2-volume work on Paul, Paul and the Faithfulness of God. Let me confess right now, this is the first scholarly work of Wright’s that I’ve read. I’ve avoided him because of his reputation for being on the conservative side of Pauline scholarship, and because as Bishop of Durham, he contributed to the difficult relationship between the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Communion. Still, I had read some early reviews and thought it might be worth taking a look at. I’m glad I did. Continue reading →