Blind Spots

I conceive of God, in fact, as a means of liberation

And not a means to control others.

-James A. Baldwin,  In Search of a Majority

There is a simple fact of life that one must confront if you are of the sort that must write and speak to other people.  Those other people are going to, from time to time, disagree with you.  What you do with those disagreements is up to you, and ultimately it belies your level of maturity and ability to accept challenges to your own ego.  Dealing with disagreement well means being able to see and concede truth in opinions that may differ from your own.  It does not mean caving in or abandoning your convictions, but it does mean examining them.

All people have blind spots and biases that go un-examined.  Your job, as a thinking person, is to examine and confront as many of those as you can, but you will never be rid of them all. I repeat, you will never be rid of them all, and neither will I.  Which makes dialogue about deeply held differences a challenge to say the least.  We're often only willing to be challenged on our most superficial levels, and some of us can't even take that very well.  It is a growing edge for most of us to have our poorly thought out bloviations dispelled by honest critique.  It can be extremely hard to have something you feel deeply about shot full of holes.

I am watching from a distance as my United Methodist brothers and sisters wrestle with the issues of human sexuality that have been wrecking havoc within many of the mainline denominations over the past 40 years. Episcopalians (Anglicans), Lutherans (ELCA), Presbyterians (PC(USA)), Churches of Christ and various other denominations have already moved towards more inclusive stances towards LGBTQ people, and we still have work to do honestly, however, none of these conversations and decisions have been without pain.  Of particular difficulty are the global communions like the Anglicans and the United Methodist Church, because they include the increasingly powerful and insistent voices of the Church in the non-western world, which are much more conservative, reflecting the culture of their origin.

It becomes difficult to speak about this rift without sounding condescending and pejorative, even to call them the "developing world" or the "third world," indicates a prejudice that assumes we are some how more "developed," than they are, and therefore our acceptance of LGBTQ people is somehow more enlightened than their position that holds to some variation of Biblical interpretation that labels anything but heterosexual, cis-gender, and "traditional" sexual and gender positions to be "abominations."  In many African nations, homosexuals are persecuted in the extreme.  This is simply a fact, and a tragedy for our shared humanity.  It is also a fact that while the Western Church is on the down slope, the African churches are growing in vitality.  Some make the correlation between the perceived adherence to "traditional" values and this growth and vitality.  Likewise, the rise of secularism and the general apathy and lack of real fire in the "first world" churches is seen as the cause of our decline.  I think both of those assumptions require leaps which are beyond what is rationally justified, although I confess, I may have entertained such illusions at some point.  But I believe that they are just that, illusions, the reality of the church in the world is rather more complicated. Perhaps the incarnation is a little more amazing than I allowed it to be.  Perhaps the Body of Christ, really does look and act differently in different cultural settings. Maybe that has always been true and these sorts of arguments are simply the latest version of the hand saying to the feet, "we have no need of you." All I can really tell you is that this debate is painful, and I am just hoping the pain is eventually constructive.

Every denomination in the Church that has moved towards being fully inclusive has faced schism and endured pain.  The PC (USA) congregation I serve has lost members over our denominational positions allowing for ordination of LGBTQ people, and for opening the door to those who would like to become married to a person of the same gender.  I see many parallels between what happened in the PC(USA) recently and what is going on right now in the UMC.  There appears to be a schism lurking, except with the shoes on the other feet. In the Presbyterian Church (USA) the progressive voices won by attrition, as the more conservative voices, sensing ultimate defeat with a truly Calvinist sense of inevitability, voluntarily seceded from the communion. In the UMC it is the conservative wing, bolstered by the international parts of their communion, that is "winning," and it is the progressives who are talking about the need to separate.

This is something to grieve, because it moves us away from unity rather than towards it.  Unity, I believe, is the direction that the Holy Spirit is dragging us, however reluctantly we may go.  In our quest for unity though we have a responsibility to always consider who it is we might be leaving out and excluding.  Look for the broken and the wounded, and you will find Christ with them.  That is the path that has led me to where I stand now, which has not always been my place.

I once stood on the side of purity, but I was a hypocrite and my Lord told me to put down my stone. It was and is the Scripture that has convicted me that we have not been as graceful as we should be towards LGBTQ people. And some people have and will call me a heretic, or apostate, or maybe just stupid for that conviction. I do not enjoy that. So be it. I'm a grown up, and I occupy a position of privilege on many levels. I am not really in danger of being crushed, but I am sorry that we have to keep going through this.  I am sorry to all the people to whom the church (any part of it) says: "you are not the way God intended you to be." I am sorry to all the people who feel some deep seeded antipathy and sense of moral indignation at my need to say that. I grieve the loss of those who feel they can no longer participate as part of a larger body because they do not agree on this issue.  Make no mistake, we are all wounded by these divorces, no matter who is "right," or who has the majority, the truth is that nobody wins.