Just as the Son, the living Word of God, does nothing on his own (John 5:19,30; 8:28), so too the Scripture, the written Word of God, can not and does not stand or work alone, but is interpreted and put into effect under the caring stewardship of the church by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit in its many members. The Word is meant to be productive as seed, and is thus inseparable from the mission of the church. The truth of the interpretation will be found in the fruit and harvest it bears. (Isaiah 55:10-11)

Tobias Haller’s “Thought for the Day,” June 18, 2008

And a comment from me: Why is it that so many of us cling to barren interpretations without ever stopping to evaluate them in the way Tobias suggests? What are we afraid of?

Kate Moos, the managing producer of my favorite public radio program, Speaking of Faith, posted the following at the show’s blog today:

It’s been quite a while since we’ve done a program examining the gay marriage issue. Our last treatment included the voices of 2 self-described evangelicals—Richard Mouw, the president of Fuller Seminary, and Virginia Mollencott, a  Professor Emeritus  at William Patterson University. We wanted to frame the conversation in the terms most often used in our culture to discuss it, so we chose two evangelicals. But we also wanted to go beyond the yelling and meanness of the debate, which may have reached a peak about the time we did the show. I think we succeeded.

But along with a good amount of positive feedback, and despite our deliberately conciliatory approach, we heard from people form all “sides” that we had hurt them, or offended them, or otherwise inflamed them.  I mention this not to say I think we did it wrong, but because to me it’s a measure of how much pain people are in on this topic.

With the California ruling recently, the door is open to that state beginning to marry gays and lesbians as early as next week, and we have asked ourselves what our next forway into the subject might be. It seems clear there has been a great deal of movement in the last couple of years. Witness, for example, a press release that crossed my desk this morning about GLBT families, led by Jay Bakker (son of Jim and Tammy Faye) attending services on Father’s Day at Saddleback Church (Rick Warren’s church) and then meeting with its leaders.  That perhaps would not have happened a few years ago.

What are your thoughts about how to cover this issue? Share your thoughts here if you have some.

The Father’s Day visit Kate mentions is the American Family Outing, a series of events being held this spring by Soulforce in order to establish dialogue between LGBT families and six of the country’s largest Evangelical churches and their leaders.  The previous five visits have been incredibly successful, and many have ended with pledges to continue the conversation and build on the relationships that were formed.

I’ve got an idea, Kate.  Perhaps Speaking of Faith could bring together members of the American Family Outing and leaders from the churches they visited at some point, say six months down the road, in a forum that encourages continuation of this dialogue?  That’s a program I’d really like to hear.  (Of course, I’m such a fan that you know I’ll be listening regardless!)

“We have seen Satan, and he is us!”

Writing at EthicsDaily.com yesterday, Dr. Miguel A. de la Torre (director of the Justice & Peace Institute and associate professor of social ethics at Iliff School of Theology) reaches that conclusion after a concise deconstruction of traditional responses to the Problem of Evil and the development of the concept of Satan:

The early shapers of sacred text found themselves in the position of having to protect God from accusations of being the source of evil. As it became less acceptable to have aspects of God represented in evil elements or events, independent evil figures had to be birthed. If Satan did not exist, then they had to create one so as to vindicate God.

One problem with their strategy is that the texts often place responsibility for human suffering squarely in God’s lap. De la Torre notes the story of Job, the case of Saul, and the words of Amos (”Shall there be evil in a city, and the LORD hath not done it?“) as evidence. This is why systematic theologians have to walk such a fine line when they describe Satan. Attribute too much power to him, and you weaken your monotheism; too little, and you risk making God responsible for acts otherwise considered evil.

But there are other, more practical problems with our traditional conception of Satan as well, as de la Torre points out. (Emphasis here is mine.)

Here then is the ethical concern: seeing Satan in the other. It cannot be denied that evil was, and continues to be, committed. But to reduce the other to a representative of evil justifies cruelties and atrocities to be committed by those engaged in the battle to save humans from Satan’s corruption. No evil ever dreamed up by Satan or his demons can outdo the atrocities committed by good, decent people attempting to purge such evil forces from this world.

Hence de la Torre’s conclusion: “We have seen Satan, and he is us.” We unwittingly do evil when we see other community members as evil’s source and deal with them accordingly.

Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender Christians regularly face this kind of treatment from their brothers and sisters in Christ. A mother and father force a gay child into a harmful reparative therapy program against his will. A family gives a lesbian aunt the “silent treatment” for years. A church ejects a long-time member who chooses to transition from one gender to another. This is what “love the sinner, hate the sin” has tended to look like.

Like the traditional theological conception of Satan, the doctrine of “love the sinner, hate the sin” forces adherents to walk a fine line. Stray too much toward love, and you risk enabling behavior you see as sinful. Stray too much toward hate, and you risk… Well, what, exactly? Most Christians, I think, instinctively sense that hate is dangerous, but would be hard pressed to say why. God hates, according to the texts at least, and Christians are instructed to hate (Romans 12:9 being the most general example). But the problem we recognize intuitively lies in hating the wrong things or hating for the wrong reason. Here the texts are often ambiguous, and that’s where the danger is.

This ambiguity means that Christians will err in their application of this doctrine, and so we’re forced to make some calculated decisions to minimize the error. Unfortunately, many seem inclined to err on the side of purity, and as a result, LGBT people are excommunicated from churches, ejected from families, and made to submit to exorcisms or rehabilitation programs. But the hypocrisy of erring on the side of purity is obvious–as both Testaments proclaim, “There is no one righteous, not even one.” When we reprimand some for alleged impurity without recognizing impurity in ourselves, we show our ethic to be arbitrary and self-serving. This hypocrisy is increasingly off-putting to those outside the church, and the LGBT people who are forced to endure it often leave the church and their faith behind, never to return. Above all, God’s feelings about hypocrisy are clear: “Woe to you.” Eight times, “Woe to you.”

So then why do we choose to err on the side of purity rather than on the side of inclusiveness and welcome? Perhaps, when God asks us that question one day, we can say, “The Devil made us do it.” It would go better for us, I think, if we remembered that Romans 12:9, the verse that instructs us to hate what is evil, prefaces that instruction with these words: “Let love be without hypocrisy.”

(Image courtesy gapingvoid).

Please read Jim Burroway’s post at Box Turtle Bulletin about LGBT Ecuadorians being committed against their will to “treatment centers” that can only be described as torture chambers. (Translations of the series of articles Jim cites can be found here.) Here’s an excerpt from a 22-year-old transgender woman who experienced their treatment:

“My father paid $1,000 [approx. $350 dollars] to have them lock me up in a clinic because he wanted me to change. Four men practically kidnapped me on the street. I wore my hair long and, since I had already taken hormones, my breasts had grown. They clipped my hair. Me and another three homosexuals. They would lock us up in rooms of less than a meter wide. So small that we had to stand on our feet, in the dark, with flies.”

The place where she was taken was God’s Paradise, a drug and alcohol rehab center, led by Jorge Flor who some residents call “My Pastor.”

“When I tried to escape,” says Chiqui, “they hit me until they broke my nose. They’d ask if I was a man or a woman, they’d take our pants down, they’d throw water between our legs and would put live cables to shock us with electricity.

How in the world can such atrocities be committed in the name of Jesus?

I’m reminded of a story from the life of St. Joan of Arc.  Before she revealed to her family that she had received messages from God calling her to lead the armies of France, her father had a recurring dream. In his dream he saw Joan leaving their home town of Domrémy in the company of soldiers, which he interpreted as a premonition that she would become a camp-follower and prostitute.  He swore to his wife and sons, Joan’s mother and brothers, that if such a thing seemed about to occur he would drown his daughter, and made his sons promise to do the same if he could not.

Such a thing flies in the face of our modern understanding of basic human rights–and yet such things take place every day in our world, and in Jesus’ name.  And they don’t just take place far away.  Spiritual abuse happens in the church next door and the synagogue down the street and the mosque across town any time families are taught or counseled to mistreat their LGBT loved ones in God’s name.

What would have become of France had Joan been murdered by her family as she was departing in men’s clothes to meet with the Dauphin?  What beautiful destiny does the church unwittingly destroy when it abuses its LGBT members and their families?

Virginia Ramey Mollenkott graced last month’s Transforming Faith–Divining Gender conference not only with her warm and wise presence, but with a wonderful keynote address. In it she laid out seven reasons that religious groups should embrace their transgender members. Here’s a summary, taken from my notes:

1. The scriptures are trans-friendly; people who value them should be as well. For example, note the Yahwist creation account, in which God’s original creative impulse is toward a hermaphroditic creation. Jesus speaks well of eunuchs and condemns the use of “Raca,” which scholarship has shown means “effeminate” or “sissy.” Once we shed our cultural proclivities, we can see an ethos in scripture that takes a favorable view of gender variance and diversity.
2. Transgender members help congregations transcend gender stereotypes. The binary gender construct does not merely differentiate between genders, but unjustly elevates one over the other. Transgender people provide congregations with a unique reminder that stereotypes are not objectively concrete and need not bind us.
3. Transgender members remind congregations to use diverse and inclusive language when speaking about God. In Mollenkott’s words, “If God is male, then male is god.” Transgender people are particularly sensitive to the injustices caused by gendering God inappropriately. Transgender people do congregations a great service when they insist upon more accurate language for God.
4. Transgender people have traditionally been recognized in many cultures as bridges between the seen and unseen worlds. Mollenkott made particular note of how Milton genders his angel characters in Paradise Lost. There is tremendous depth to this tradition.
5. Transgender people have often reflected deeply on the connections between faith, justice, gender, and sex. Our congregations’ hang-ups on these topics have distracted them from far more important matters. Transgender people can educate their congregations on our lives and issues; they are “particularly suited to teach congregations about the multiple connections between sex, gender, and justice.” As outsiders, we bring a perspective our congregations need. Jesus himself defied many gender norms, and yet in spite of his gender transgression, subordinationism holds sway in many congregations. (Mollenkott drew very interesting linkages between the lengths to which some churches and theologians go to justify subordinationism and the reappearance of Arianism.)
6. As occupiers of the “forgotten middle,” transgender people can help congregations get over their addiction to certainty. Our dualistic, “good vs. evil” worldview threatens to destroy humanity and the world. (I was reminded here of Karen Armstrong’s work on the Axial Age, a period of history marked by terrible violence out of which arose today’s great religious traditions with their focus on selflessness and compassion.) “Sympathy cannot be confined to our own group,” Mollenkott said. Transgender people know what it means to occupy a middle that defies artificial dualism. This makes us particularly well suited to teach others to love the Other across dualistic divides; we’ve learned to let our pain express itself as support for others. (She made note here of the Drag Mothers who mentor young trans people in Chris Beam’s Transparent.)
7. Transgender people demonstrate powerfully that just as all races share one blood, so do all genders. Mollenkott reminded us of the old “one drop” rule of race, by which anyone who had one drop of African American blood was considered African American and a legitimate target of bigotry. The same rule, she said, holds today for gender norms. One drop of femininity equals feminine or “sissy,” as opposed to the pure or normative male. If we lined up the entire human race from darkest skin to lightest skin, she asked, where would “black” end and “white” begin? Similarly, if we lined up from most masculine to most feminine, where would “masculine” begin and “feminine” end? And, more importantly, what would those distinctions even mean in that context?

Received this week from Soulforce (emphasis mine):

In 2007, the United Methodist Church’s Judicial Council ruled that a newly-transitioned transgender pastor, Rev. Drew Phoenix of St. John’s United Methodist Church in Baltimore, could continue to serve his church, as his congregation desires. However, because church law makes no reference to transgender people, the Judicial Council referred the broader question of whether transgender ministers are eligible for clergy appointments to the church’s main legislative body, the United Methodist General Conference, which will convene in Fort Worth, Texas, April 23-May 2.

The judicial council’s ruling has inspired both inclusive and discriminatory legislative proposals. A coalition of progressive organizations within the church have proposed expanding the church’s statement of civil rights to affirm support for “all persons, regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity.” The coalition has also proposed amending the church’s membership rules to state: “no person shall or will be excluded from baptized or professing membership in the United Methodist Church for reasons related to sexual orientation or gender identity.”

Unfortunately, anti-LGBT organizations have proposed legislation that is misinformed and discriminatory. One such proposal comes from the leader of an ex-gay ministry:

“Therefore, be it resolved, that in faithfulness to Scripture and Christian/Jewish tradition about God’s gift of male and female, and out of deep compassion for persons struggling with gender and sexual identity issues, we do not recognize transgenderism or transsexuality as part of God’s good intentions for humankind and we oppose sex reassignment therapy (hormonal or surgical) as a solution to these conditions.”

Another piece of legislation, introduced by an employee of the right-wing Institute for Religion and Democracy, would make simply “identifying as transgender” a “chargeable offense” for clergy.

The United Methodist Church is the 2nd largest Protestant denomination in the U.S. The impact of this General Conference will resound beyond the denomination and ultimately affect conversations about civil rights.

Soulforce is organizing an opportunity for delegates to the UMC General Conference to meet with transgender people and their allies this Friday.  More information is available here.  Christianity Today also has coverage.

Check out this surprisingly rigorous critique of the “New Masculinity” movement among evangelicals in this month’s Christianity Today.  What scares me most about this kind of theology is not that it calls men to be bold, but that it implies women cannot and should not be. 

No, wait.  What scares me most about it is the way it blames women for everything that’s wrong with the church.

No, that’s not it either.  What scares me most is how, by so blatantly defining Jesus according to marketing strategies (i.e. by what will bring men back to church) rather than allowing him to define himself, the “New Masculinity” movement actually contributes to the decline of the church rather than ameliorating it.

For those who would like to learn more about how the binary gender construct is screwing up the church (and basically everything else), I recommend Virginia Ramey Mollenkott’s Omnigender: A Trans-religious Approach. 

(Thanks to Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish blog.)

A friend asked me recently for my thoughts on Leeland’s song “Carried to the Table.”  (Click for lyrics, or listen by clicking on the video below.)

This is how I responded to her:

Over the last several years the communion liturgy has really increased in significance to me, to the point that today I cannot receive communion without weeping.  I’m worshiping now in a church where each individual leaves his or her seat and approaches the altar to receive (unlike my Baptist tradition, where the norm is to have it delivered to you in your seat), and where we celebrate communion at every worship service (the norm in my tradition being monthly or quarterly).  I’ve found there is something so powerful in walking toward that sacred place each Sunday as a whole person, hiding nothing, unafraid and unashamed, knowing that I will truly be received “just as I am.”  Thinking about it as I write makes me realize that I imagine God there, smiling at me, ushering me forward and into a supernatural intimacy with him that is beyond my words to describe.  The experience nourishes something important in me, such that I can’t imagine going back to a less regular observance of the sacrament.

My understanding of what separates me (or what once separated me) from God has also changed in profound ways.  Before I came to terms with my trans-ness, I imagined that I could draw significantly closer to him if I would just overcome my desire to be a woman.  Now, having realized that my femininity never was a barrier between us, I’ve also learned that there was never really any action I could have undertaken that would have drawn me closer to him in any significant way.  Only God is able to make up the distance between God and humanity, and he has made it up, “once for all,” in Christ. 

All this has made me feel closer to God than I ever thought possible.  In fact, it has completely altered my paradigm of proximity to the divine.  Finally I think I understand–and really believe–what Paul meant when he said, “Neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Rom 8:38-39).

I’ve been reading The Two Aunties blog for several weeks now.  Sarah and Kay are a married trans couple living in the southeast who have continued to be active in their small Episcopal church through transition and beyond.  This morning Sarah wrote about her experience in worship yesterday:

As the only transgender person of our small church, I was greatly saddened at this morning’s service. We are a small church in number, but as the service started only 4 people were in the seats; not counting the altar party and those who were sitting in the choir.

Many of us can relate to the kind of discouragement a person feels on a Sunday like that.  But imagine how much worse it would be if you thought it was all your fault.  Sarah continues:

I have developed a strong bond with my church and to most of the people who attend, and when attendance is down I am too quick to . . . think those who I expect to show up wanted to stay away because of me. My strong love for my church was one of the last road blocks, if you like, which held me back in revealing my being trans. The one reason that I waited so long, was my fear that by revealing my true self, that would cause people to react by point fingers at me if the church were to crumble where it stood. Being the person who causes a church’s demise was the last thing I wanted on my head.

Reading Sarah’s fears brought me back to my early years in ministry.  I was pastoring a small Baptist congregation overseas that had been teetering on the edge of collapse for some time before they called me, and I felt myself to be in many ways the last, best hope for renewal for this once thriving church.  I evaluated every decision I made, every sermon I preached, every pastoral action I undertook by the attendance at our worship services.  When lots of people showed up, I felt affirmed.  When only a few came, I doubted.  And on those dark days when my family and I were the only ones there, I despaired.

Then one day I realized that my own choices had much less to do with the size of our congregation than I had previously believed.  I can’t pinpoint what led me to that realization, but I’m sure it was connected to learning the following:

• People make their own choices about where and when to worship.
• I am not responsible for those choices.
• I am responsible for my own choices.
• My responsibility for my choices is to God, not to the congregation.
• To carry out my ministry with integrity, I must resist the temptation to take responsibility for the choices of others.

Sarah, you are not responsible for what has happened to your beloved church.  If some have left the church because of your presence there, they did so because they chose to.  You are not responsible for their choices; they are.  You are responsible only for your own choice to live with integrity among the people of God you have loved.  And you are not responsible to them; you are responsible to God.

There is a myth among Christians that living with integrity will always lead to prosperity.  Even a cursory reading of Scripture, I think, dispells that myth.  Frequently, individuals and congregations who stand firm for what is right do not prosper.  Sometimes they face strong resistance.  Sometimes that resistance even comes from within.  “This calls for patient endurance and faithfulness on the part of God’s people.”  “If you suffer for doing good and you endure it, this is commendable before God.  To this you were called, because Christ suffered for you, leaving you an example, that you should follow in his steps.”