I am deeply in great pain, as are many of the LGBTQ members of the ELCA. You can get a full account of what transpired at the Assembly - including the courageous silent protest of 100 LGBTQ members of the ELCA in defiance of the Assembly rules - at www.Goodsoil.org, the umbrella site for all the Lutherans working for change.
My own response, posted to Goodsoil, is below as well.
-----------
The Day After: A Vision and Expectation.
Or, First the Pain, Then the Healing, Then the Broader Struggle.
(Or, Forget That "Journey Together Faithfully" Bullshit Once and For All)
Though I do not post often on this site, I follow every conversation closely, and have often drawn comfort knowing that it - and the community it represents - is out there. During the Assembly yesterday, when my family was working on other, important things and I was alone in watching the destruction via the web, I drew strength to endure by knowing that Goodsoil was one place (however virtual) where I could stand with sisters and brothers united not by statements of faith but by our struggle for justice. I share these thoughts this evening, then, as a contribution to repay some of the solidarity and comfort I have drawn from this good soil (though as a good Lutheran I know we can never repay such debts!). I offer these thoughts having been trained by Heidi Neumark and Barbara Lundblad, whose own powers of resistance through proclamation make mine here mostly just an echo. On this first Sunday after the disaster, may these words be part of the many gathered on Goodsoil for your own worship, whether in church or (like me) in protest away from church.
WHERE WILL WE GO FROM HERE? This morning, that is the refrain chanting itself through my head, more resonantly than just about any LBW classic. Where, dear friends, will we go from here? A large part of my heart, mind, and soul is still stunned and numb, But a small part of me urges me to move somehwere, anywhere, to avoid further injury and violence. And that small part of me even now can discern a narrow, craggy, path over great distance ahead. It is a path whose journeying promises more pain and some healing. It is the path of journeying, finally, to and through and in the broader struggle of justice which will and MUST BE our destiny as LGBTQ people of God. It is THIS path, in and through and towards the broader struggle of justice, by which we will find our own destiny as GLBTQ people of God. And it is this path by which we will find the Paradise that has been and continues to grow in the good soil with which we have been entrusted to us by Our God.
WHERE WILL WE GO FROM HERE? First, to the pain. We will go, dear friends, to the circles of fire in the place of deep pain, where Rachel wails and refuses to be comforted, where Mordecai sits in sackloth and ashes, where the Psalmists lament the destruction of their homes, where Job has the courage to question God's seeming indifference, where everything that Mary had treasured in her heart pierces that heart right through, where Paul (admittedly in something of a gender-bending moment!) hears all of creation groaning in the pains of childbirth. We will go to the fires in the place of pain, and stay as long as we need, not one moment less.
Around these fires in this place of pain, we will call our experiences - in the past week, in the past few years, in the past decades - exactly what they are: spiritual abuse, Biblical assault, domestic violence in the House of God, theological torture, and, ultimately, attempted ecclesiastical murder. Around these fires, we will NOT accommodate ourselves to a cutting-losses paradigm: not one good thing came out of the decisions of August 12, 2005 - aside from the protest. Not one good thing came, because the soil was toxic to begin with: the proposals did not evince a good-faith effort by this church to address its hostility and violence towards LGBTQ people - they represented the attempt by a fearful majority to appease but continue to oppress an urgent minority. The proposals were, prima facie, bad for LGBTQ people in the first place, for which Goodsoil did not endores them. We entered the Assembly under proposals which were not, ultimately, meant to liberate us.
Around these scorching fires, we will refuse to be comforted by the closeness of a 13-vote-margin, or the implausibility of securing a 2/3-supermajority victory, or the defeat of even more oppressive amendments on the floor. We will not be comforted that blessings are exceptionally allowed - because the Assembly explicitly affirmed a statement that such blessings are unsupported either by Scripture or tradition. And we will not be comforted by telling ourselves that at least V&E wasn't affirmed, because the Assembly specifically rejected several attempts to revise or reject V&E's authority, while at the same time establishing its status essentially in parity with the ELCA Constitution and Bylaws. Now, after August 12, a document which was neither written at the behest of a Churchwide Assembly nor put into effect by it (it was approved by the ELCA Church Council) has now been established as changeable ONLY by a 2/3 supermajority of a Churchwide Assembly. A document whose original authority comes from about two dozen people (ie, the margin of approval in the Council) now definitively requires the concerted action of over 600 to change or dislodge. Let us admit that it could ONLY have gotten worse if the Hesse substitution - requiring "consistent enforcement" throughout the ELCA - had passed. These fires are fanned by every copy of V&E distributed in every new candidacy packet, and every page of the LBW (and Renewing Worship) marriage rites that specify "man and woman," "husband and wife."
Yet these fires are also cleansing - not because we ourselves our dirty or polluted, but the muck of injustice has been flung upon us by others. Around these fires, to be sure, we will refuse to be comforted by any outside consolations, and such comfort as we find will come only from the grieving we share with one another. Around these fires in the place of deep pain, we will name and claim the pain for what it is, and so doing, begin to reclaim its hold on our hearts. We journey first to these fires because only there, paradoxically enough, is it hot enough to make a crucible of brutal honesty and desperate need. And in that crucible, we will be able, at last, to reshape our pain, to reform it into the motivation we need for further work in nonviolent struggle - to turn it, ultimately, away from the torrents of destruction which are its cause towards the flowing streams of justice which can be its end.
We will, dear friends, come to these fire around this place of deep pain, and stay as long as we each need, and weep as loudly as each of our hearts' call. And each of us, as we need, will leave this place when the time is right. But each of us will take a little of flame of our communal fire when we leave for the journey.
WHERE WILL WE GO FROM HERE? From the place of deep pain, we must go to the plains and vistas of healing, which Richard so well sketches out. Some of us will return to healing congregations that already do love GLBTQ people and take a prophetic stance in our full inclusion. Some of us will search and find healing in new congregations that extend the "hospitality" of equal and unseparate places at and around God's table. Not a few of us, I suspect, will journey a little farther, to plains of healing that are tended by people in other denominations. Some of us will return to families that love and affirm us; and some of us will begin to make new family, having been rejected by our families and rebuffed by the Family of God.
We will journey and find the plains of healing in all the relationships and communities of people who share our pain at injustice, whether the same means of injustice as ours or one of the many the world offers. We will find the plains of healing wherever there are the villages that raise children through many kinds of family structures and many parenting configurations (of gender role no less than division of labor). We, dear friends, will not fail to find the plains of healing among ALL our LBGTQA brothers and sisters in every denomination - historically white no less than historically black or ethnic minority - to open the doors to Our God's House for all who seek grace to enter.
On these plains of healing, we will see just how far we have to go - yes; but we will also see how many are gathered there with us for that long journey. We will see friends in congregations and denominations and whole faith-traditions working to end poverty, to end racism, to end the disproportionate violence against women and children under the prevailing norms of sexism, and even to end the vast disparities that define and sustain the gulf between so-called Global North and Global South.
Indeed, on these plains of healing - and only here - we will truly and clearly see our sisters and brothers in the Global South whose own starvation and disease and death are near-directly the result of a global(ized) economic scheme that requires asbolute, generational poverty for almost all in exchange for perfidious wealth on the part of almost none, with moderate middle-class comfort for barely some. There, on the plains of healing, we will see the lie told about the Global South at the Assembly for what it is - a convenient means to create "solidarity" that helps us all in the US (at least those most "concerned" about "preserving our communion with churches in the Global South") sleep morally snug and tight at night. On the plains of healing, we will even be able to repent before and beg the forgiveness of our Global South sisters and brothers, for countenancing four centuries of Western imperialism and four decades of post-colonial dependency, pillaging, and indifference.
And from the plains of healing, we will travel to those vistas of reconciliation and resistance which, like the mount from which Moses surveyed his people's Promised Land, reveal to us the ultimate realm of justice and freedom for which God created, intends, and sustains us on our journey. On these vistas, we will glimpse like Elijah upon the fire of the presence of Our God, a fire that turns out to be no brighter than the fire each of us carries within - the fire of struggling to end our own and others' pain under injustice and opppresion - a fire that burns in our hearts but does not consume them.
At these vistas, we will discover the partnership that is possible, AND NECESSARY, if we are ever to get to the land we are promised. We will discover the critical links we must maintain across the manifold, diverse movements for justice in our churches, in our nation, and in our world. We will see how our own struggle for LGBTQ equality in the churches is FUNDAMENTALLY, INHERENTLY, ESSENTIALLY BOUND to struggles for equality and freedom throughout the world. On these vistas, Our God will show us how the liberation of LGBTQ peoples, of women, of children, of men trapped in structures of sexism, of non-European-descendant peoples, of indigenous peoples, of low-wage and no-wage workers, of differently abled people, of impoverished people, of immigrant peoples (documented and undocumented), yes, even of the teeming Earth itself - how all the liberation of all these, that is, of ALL OF US, are fundamentally, inherently, essentially joined together.
And when we have seen all that Our God has to show us of the new partnerships and collaboration that are possible, AND NECESSARY, for our journey, then and only then will the path become clear to find our way to the Paradise of justice for which and towards which we were formed by a God of bold imagination and powerful creativity.
WHERE WILL WE GO FROM HERE, dear friends? We will journey together in RECONCILIATION and RESISTANCE. NO LONGER WILL WE JOURNEY TOGETHER FAITHFULLY, for "faithfully" has been shoved down our throats and chained around our necks as code for "silent," "second-class," "compliant," or "tolerated." The difference between these two ways of journeying is what makes the witness actions of the Goodsoilers on the Assembly floor entirely good, right, and salutary. Their refusal to respect or live under structures of injustice any longer - even when those structures are the minute boundaries of "visitor"/"voting member" (that is, "oppressing"/"excluded") - IS the point of JOURNEYING TOGETHER IN RECONCILING RESISTANCE, NOT JOURNEYING TOGETHER "FAITHFULLY."
From now on, we who have burned the fires of pain at injustice and traversed the plains of healing to find all our new partners, can only journey together in reconciling resistance if we are to find our way to the Paradise of justice where Our God awaits us.
We, dear friends, will journey together in reconciling resistance, and in this journey some of us will return to each of the 65 synods and 10,000 congregations of the ELCA and there increase the good soil by building an advocate-in-every-congregation kind of grassroots organization that is an absolute requirement for change to happen in the span of the next four years - when the human sexuality social statement provides another window for changing LGBTQ-discriminatory policies.
For many of us, I hope and pray, journeying together in reconciling resistance will bring us into full communion and organizational collaboration with the various communities of other progressive Christians in many denominations, all of whom are struggling for the same kind of more just, more embracing Christianity that we are. Despite the different situations of our denominations and our different histories, it has oft been said, correctly, that we have more in common theologically, scripturally, and faith-practically with LGBTQ-affirming Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Methodists, Baptists, Catholics, Black Churches, the MCC, the UCC, and other traditions than with LGBTQ-discriminating Lutherans in the ELCA or the LCMS. Now it is time to live into that reality, and unleash all the creative potential that awaits in those broader networks.
Finally, dear friends, for all of us, journeying together in reconciling resistance - in the face of this week's devastating defeat - will help us see how desperately the moment has come in this nation for progressive Christian people and communities to join with one another and with non-religious movements and organizations in the broader work of justice in which our own liberation is deeply embedded and implicated.
EVEN IF our non-hetero-conforming relationships were fully, equally married in the ELCA and people in them were fully, equally rostered as ELCA leaders - we will have lost the struggle if our church is not profoundly engaged in working to end poverty, homelessness, racism, environmental degradation, sexism, educational disparity, income discrimination, and hypernationalism throughout these United States. It is why our denomination's name ends with "in America," because HERE is the context within which we must do the justice that, as Micah reminds us, is the requirement of Our God.
EVEN IF marriage and ordination in the ELCA were fully opened to not only lesbian and gay but bisexual and transgender and queer and all sexual and gender identities, it wouldn't matter one damn if the Christianity in which we are married and ordained has only one dominant witness in the public life of the United States: that of supporting third-class (and lower) treatment of all manner of "minorities" in this country.
And so, dear friends, we see at last how we will journey from good soil that feels soiled right now to that blessed land where we will all share God's blessings with one another. We will only get there if, from this past week's shattering votes, we see the real moment in which we stand and journey: a moment of choice for all Christians and all Christian communities - about whether fundamentalistic, legalistic reliance on scripture, tradition, and reason will predominate and marginalize the lived, diverse experiences of the many members of Christ's precious, non-straight body. This choice is THE fulcrum-point from the first two thousand years of Christian struggle into the next one thousand. It's a choice upon which lives of whole communities - including those that are affected by Christians' entrenched power and privilege throughout the world - now hang. It is, finally, a choice we Lutherans know well, with our heritage of the paradoxical paradigm of "law AND gospel." And because we have this beautiful heritage of living in and into paradox, we Lutherans - whether we stay in the ELCA or not - know we have something marvelous to offer to all our brothers and sisters - whether Christian or religious or neither - in our journey together of reconciling resistance.
We cannot know when we will reach the Paradise of Justice that is our journey's end - but we know where we will stop along the way, and whom we will find to journey with along the way, and on what terms alone we will journey together. At times like this, that knowledge just might be enough to help us "keep on keeping on." It might be just enough to help us fearlessly face that question gnawing in our stomachs and lumping in our throats and tearing in our eyes: WHERE WILL WE GO FROM HERE?
To Our God, dear friends, to the loving embrace of a God who created us for justice, who sustains us in resistance, who redeems us - all of us - for wholeness and equality and freedom.
Amen.
No comments:
Post a Comment