Thursday, October 25, 2007

Love = Love

I have a t-shirt that says, "Gay? Fine by me." I have another t-shirt with stick figures in 3 pairs—one a man and a woman, another two men, the third two women—with the caption "Love = Love." I was raised to love people no matter what they look like or what they think or do, and for that I am grateful. But I don't wear those shirts often, because, for the first time in my life, I seem to be on the fence on an issue.

As seminary and possibly ordination waver on my horizon, I am finding that I have to think much more seriously about issues that I previously took quite lightly. As I have observed the strife in the Anglican Communion over the issue of ordaining a gay bishop and, more importantly—and at the heart of the argument—scriptural authority, I have begun to see how much is at stake. More recently, the question of ordaining gays has been brought very close to home as a young woman I know who wants to be ordained in the Methodist Church has come out as a lesbian.

To see people that I know and love being denied the fullness of their pursuit of what they perceive as God's call on their lives is troubling at the very least. I cannot ignore my church's stance on the issue, much less the scriptural basis in which it is grounded. The fact of the matter is that the Methodist Church, of which I am a part, does not ordain gays. Especially if I pursue ordination myself, there will be times when I will have to adhere to the tradition of my denomination, which may mean denying support to friends who want to be ordained. It breaks my heart to think about having to do so.

The church I attend in Durham, NC is a diverse congregation, and that includes diversity in sexual orientation and gender identification. I know that there are some people in that church who believe that homosexuality is a mortal sin, but they still share hymnals with our gay members and hug them during the passing of the peace—they may not agree with their life choices, but they love them unconditionally.

It seems to me that this is the church's best response to the question of homosexuality. A person's sexual orientation—not to mention race, age, gender, etc.—should never prevent them from being included in the worshiping body of Christ. I have seen myself what it can look like for a church to, as the old adage goes, love the sinner and hate the sin. If it were not possible to do so, how could any of us ever relate to one another? We know all too well that "all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God" (Romans 3:23).

But several questions still linger. Why is homosexuality portrayed as so grievous a sin by the church when adulterers and the like, even among the clergy, are not always dealt with consistently? Is the issue of ordaining gays eventually going to follow the trajectory that the question of ordaining women did (at least among most Protestant churches), or is this a different kind of question? Are we really accepting gays into the body of Christ if we love them unconditionally but do not allow them to be ordained?

Tuesday, October 23, 2007

Showing His Need (quote)

"He prays more by showing his need to the merciful shepherd than by any beseeching." — From Saint Anselm's Prayer to St. Peter

Friday, October 19, 2007

Images of Forgiveness

Washington National Cathedral, D.C.

Tuesday, October 16, 2007

No One Is Beyond Redemption

This article was first published in Religio: An Undergraduate Journal of Christian Thought at Duke, in April 2007.

The United Methodist Church, of which I am a part, has stood against the death penalty for over 50 years. Many other denominations take a similar stance. American Christians especially must grapple with this issue because the U.S. is one of few developed countries that has retained the death penalty over the years. As the modern world has advanced, the overwhelming trend among industrialized nations has been to abolish the death penalty. Capital punishment is not practiced anywhere in Western Europe; in fact, this is a prerequisite to membership in the European Union. The company that America keeps in its use of capital punishment is less than flattering: other nations with high rates of execution include Iran, Iraq, Sudan, China, and Pakistan, countries whose human rights records are not among their best qualities.

The demographics of those against whom capital punishment is used in America evince a disturbing trend. A huge percentage of convictions are handed down to defendants who could not afford an attorney, and a majority of death row inmates are people of color. In 80% of capital cases, the victim is white, but only half of homicide cases nationwide involve white victims. Amnesty International's website summarizes this in a damning statement: "From initial charging decisions to plea bargaining to jury sentencing, African-Americans are treated more harshly when they are defendants, and their lives are accorded less value when they are victims" (www.amnestyusa.org). The fact that the people who are executed for crimes in this country are those who are already marginalized by society evinces the ease with which one can dehumanize criminals and distance oneself from the humanity of the accused.

Much time and energy has been spent on finding more humane ways of carrying out executions. Regardless of the extent to which certain methods of execution may or may not be "humane," the death penalty is an incontrovertibly violent act. Violence entails doing bodily harm to another person, and I can think of no bodily harm more permanent than death. One does not need the example of Eduard Delacroix's grisly death in the movie The Green Mile, or the real life example of Angel Nieves Diaz, whose 2006 execution in Florida took over half an hour, to recognize the face of violence in the death penalty. The danger that emerges here is one that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. recognized well when he pointed out that "returning violence for violence multiplies violence" (Nobel Speech 1964). Peter Storey, a Methodist bishop in South Africa who helped lead the nation's protest against apartheid, made a similar observation: "If you justify violence for any reason, no matter how good and noble, you legitimize it for every reason, no matter how wrong and unworthy" (With God in the Crucible, Abingdon 2002). Both King and Storey had seen what violence had done to tear their countries to shreds and had heard the good news that with Christ lies the way of peace and reconciliation, a path not taken when recourse to violence, including the death penalty, is taken.

To support capital punishment is to say that some people are beyond redemption. This was not what Jesus declared when he stretched his arms out on the cross in an eternal gesture of welcome and forgiveness. This was not what Paul was telling the early Christians when he said, "while we still were sinners Christ died for us" (Romans 5:8). Jesus was a victim of the death penalty, and he was flanked on each side by criminals being put to death. To the thief who cried, "Jesus, remember me," he responded, "Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in Paradise" (Luke 23:42-43). Who is this Savior who hangs next to sinners and tells them the gates of heaven are open wide to them, even as they endure state-mandated execution for crimes they willfully committed? This is the Savior we address thus: "Lord Jesus Christ, you stretched out your arms of love on the hard wood of the cross that everyone might come within the reach of your saving embrace" (Book of Common Prayer). Christ's death and resurrection declares loudly that no one is beyond redemption, and the death penalty flies flagrantly in the face of this unconditional, forgiving love.

Capital punishment seeks to establish a system of justice, but it is enslaved to the concept of retributive justice. The famed Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa explains the difference between retributive and restorative justice eloquently in his book No Future Without Forgiveness as exemplified in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission held in post-apartheid South Africa. Archbishop Tutu writes that retributive justice, "whose chief goal is to be punitive...has little consideration for the real victims and almost none for the perpetrator. We contend that there is another kind of justice, restorative justice...the central concern is the healing of breaches, the redressing of imbalances, the restoration of broken relationships, a seeking to rehabilitate both the victim and the perpetrator" (No Future Without Forgiveness, Doubleday 1999). Tutu says that this approach looks at a crime as something personal, "something that has happened to persons and whose consequence is a rupture in relationships." In the legal workings of capital punishment cases, the perpetrator is the accused and the wronged party is the state. In actuality, it is all of us, including the perpetrator, who experience the crime as a tear in the fabric of humanity. The American justice system does not acknowledge this and provides the victims' families—not to mention the perpetrator's loved ones—little space for healing. Our legal system sees only the transgression of laws, not the rending of human hearts.

Christ came not so that everyone might get what they deserve in an "eye for an eye" system of justice. Christ came "that they may all be one" (John 17:21). Christ died and rose again that broken relationships might be healed and that all might be reconciled with God and with one another. To resort to the death penalty is to make permanent the damage done to human relationships in a violent act, first in the initial crime and again in the perpetrator's trial and execution. To say that the death penalty is the only option is to abandon hope that we, the body of Christ, broken and bruised, may one day be made whole. We as Christians need to believe that we are promised more than the suffering we now experience and to recognize that in our ability to forgive and to live in peace with one another lies God's greatest dream for us, his most beautiful creation.

Thursday, October 11, 2007

Angels and Light

Clay was an all-around nice guy. A young, single doctor who was a member of our church when we lived in Davidson, Clay was a part of my family's life from early on in his involvement with the congregation. I remember being eight years old and joining a group of adults on a trip that my father led to Israel; Clay went, too. A group of mostly men would stay up late in the hotel playing spades on into the night, and I would watch and learn the game. Clay was an intense card player and would seem to be nearly at blows with our equally intense music director, but outside of a game of spades he was charming, friendly, and unfailingly kind to me.

I remember, too, when I was a little older and Clay had taken my dad and my younger brother out on Lake Norman in his boat. They returned late in the day with quite a story: Clay had somehow managed to ground his speedboat on a sand bar. Apparently he bore it with admirable nonchalance, until my brother, who must have been four or five years old, began asking why Clay had wrecked the boat...and wouldn't stop asking, over and over again. "Clay, why did you wreck the boat? Clay, how long are we gonna be stuck here?"

Then one day, Clay surprised us all. He called my dad and told him he had to come over to his house so he could show him something. Confused, my dad complied, and Clay led him into the spare bedroom. There, of all things, was a baby! Apparently Clay had decided that no one was ever going to want to marry him (why, we could never figure), but he really wanted a child, so he had gone and adopted Lauren without telling anyone. My dad was skeptical at first, but he quickly saw that Clay was going to really come alive in his new role as a father. As my dad describes it, it was as if you had been exploring a museum full of beautiful works of art and then had turned a corner to discover the treasure room, whose contents surpassed all expectations of beauty and value. That was how Clay's character blossomed as he parented Lauren.

Naturally, Clay wanted to have Lauren baptized in our church, and my dad was thrilled to perform the sacrament. Present in the service, as on every Sunday, was Mary. Mary was a wonderful, sweet woman, but a little strange. She had a mystical flair that seemed a bit out of place in our down-to-earth Methodist congregation. After church on the day that Lauren was baptized, Mary sought out my dad and told him she had had a vision. My dad was skeptical, but he had little choice but to hear her out.

I can only imagine the look of polite but feigned interest on his face as he heard her describe how, when Lauren was brought before the baptismal font, she saw the roof of the church lift off. A great light streamed into the sanctuary, she said, and shone on the child, and angels descended and gathered around to watch this baby girl being brought into the life of the church. My dad probably muttered a nervous "Wow" and disentangled himself from the conversation as quickly as possible. He didn't think twice about Mary's vision.

Five years later, almost to the day, my dad received a phone call. By then, Clay had moved with Lauren to Texas to take a job at a hospital out there. He and my dad had stayed in touch, but this was not a routine phone call. My dad listened in shock as Clay told him that he had an inoperable brain tumor and had six months to live. Clay was a doctor. He knew exactly what his chances were, knew just why surgery was not an option, knew the kind of swift, inexorable death that awaited him.

The news was difficult for my whole family. Clay was a young man, talented and likable, and should have had decades of life ahead of him. It seemed senseless that the malady he worked to relieve others of would now take his life. And then, too, there was Lauren. She was five years old now, a beautiful child with thick blonde hair and a crooked smile. Clay had already arranged for a new home for her after he passed. All that remained was to say his goodbyes and wait for the tumor to claim him.

The day after my dad heard the news, he received an unexpected piece of mail. It was from Mary. We had since moved to Charlotte and had not seen Mary in a while. Curious, my dad opened it to find a card with a strange illustration on the front. As he read Mary's enclosed note, he understood and was flabbergasted. Out of nowhere, five years after this vision that she hadn't shared with anyone but my dad, Mary had suddenly thought about Lauren's baptism again. Inspired, she had an artist do a visual rendering of the vision and had notecards made with the image. She had sent one to my dad just so he could see the picture and remember this strange little event from half a decade before.

Some people thought it meant Clay was going to be healed. Others shook it off as a weird coincidence. Some wondered if even then, at Lauren's baptism, there had been some shadow in Clay that had somehow been detected in Mary's vision. Many were sure that the child was under a form of protection that would hold her even after Clay passed. Even my dad, leery of visions and mystical experience, had to say that to call it a coincidence was ridiculous. Five years had gone by since Mary had had the vision. She must have recalled that day and had the painting done around the same time Clay was diagnosed. She mailed my dad the card before he got the call from Clay; no one in North Carolina knew before then that he was sick.

I'll admit—I'm not sure what this story means. But I do think that maybe it means that there is someone watching out for us. That doesn't mean that brain tumors will miraculously disappear; sometimes they do, but Clay's did not. What I think it means is that when God breaks into our hearts, we may find that we are closer to our neighbor than we first thought, perhaps closer than is comfortable.

Here's the artist's rendering of Mary's vision:

Thursday, October 25, 2007

Love = Love

I have a t-shirt that says, "Gay? Fine by me." I have another t-shirt with stick figures in 3 pairs—one a man and a woman, another two men, the third two women—with the caption "Love = Love." I was raised to love people no matter what they look like or what they think or do, and for that I am grateful. But I don't wear those shirts often, because, for the first time in my life, I seem to be on the fence on an issue.

As seminary and possibly ordination waver on my horizon, I am finding that I have to think much more seriously about issues that I previously took quite lightly. As I have observed the strife in the Anglican Communion over the issue of ordaining a gay bishop and, more importantly—and at the heart of the argument—scriptural authority, I have begun to see how much is at stake. More recently, the question of ordaining gays has been brought very close to home as a young woman I know who wants to be ordained in the Methodist Church has come out as a lesbian.

To see people that I know and love being denied the fullness of their pursuit of what they perceive as God's call on their lives is troubling at the very least. I cannot ignore my church's stance on the issue, much less the scriptural basis in which it is grounded. The fact of the matter is that the Methodist Church, of which I am a part, does not ordain gays. Especially if I pursue ordination myself, there will be times when I will have to adhere to the tradition of my denomination, which may mean denying support to friends who want to be ordained. It breaks my heart to think about having to do so.

The church I attend in Durham, NC is a diverse congregation, and that includes diversity in sexual orientation and gender identification. I know that there are some people in that church who believe that homosexuality is a mortal sin, but they still share hymnals with our gay members and hug them during the passing of the peace—they may not agree with their life choices, but they love them unconditionally.

It seems to me that this is the church's best response to the question of homosexuality. A person's sexual orientation—not to mention race, age, gender, etc.—should never prevent them from being included in the worshiping body of Christ. I have seen myself what it can look like for a church to, as the old adage goes, love the sinner and hate the sin. If it were not possible to do so, how could any of us ever relate to one another? We know all too well that "all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God" (Romans 3:23).

But several questions still linger. Why is homosexuality portrayed as so grievous a sin by the church when adulterers and the like, even among the clergy, are not always dealt with consistently? Is the issue of ordaining gays eventually going to follow the trajectory that the question of ordaining women did (at least among most Protestant churches), or is this a different kind of question? Are we really accepting gays into the body of Christ if we love them unconditionally but do not allow them to be ordained?

Tuesday, October 23, 2007

Showing His Need (quote)

"He prays more by showing his need to the merciful shepherd than by any beseeching." — From Saint Anselm's Prayer to St. Peter

Friday, October 19, 2007

Images of Forgiveness

Washington National Cathedral, D.C.

Tuesday, October 16, 2007

No One Is Beyond Redemption

This article was first published in Religio: An Undergraduate Journal of Christian Thought at Duke, in April 2007.

The United Methodist Church, of which I am a part, has stood against the death penalty for over 50 years. Many other denominations take a similar stance. American Christians especially must grapple with this issue because the U.S. is one of few developed countries that has retained the death penalty over the years. As the modern world has advanced, the overwhelming trend among industrialized nations has been to abolish the death penalty. Capital punishment is not practiced anywhere in Western Europe; in fact, this is a prerequisite to membership in the European Union. The company that America keeps in its use of capital punishment is less than flattering: other nations with high rates of execution include Iran, Iraq, Sudan, China, and Pakistan, countries whose human rights records are not among their best qualities.

The demographics of those against whom capital punishment is used in America evince a disturbing trend. A huge percentage of convictions are handed down to defendants who could not afford an attorney, and a majority of death row inmates are people of color. In 80% of capital cases, the victim is white, but only half of homicide cases nationwide involve white victims. Amnesty International's website summarizes this in a damning statement: "From initial charging decisions to plea bargaining to jury sentencing, African-Americans are treated more harshly when they are defendants, and their lives are accorded less value when they are victims" (www.amnestyusa.org). The fact that the people who are executed for crimes in this country are those who are already marginalized by society evinces the ease with which one can dehumanize criminals and distance oneself from the humanity of the accused.

Much time and energy has been spent on finding more humane ways of carrying out executions. Regardless of the extent to which certain methods of execution may or may not be "humane," the death penalty is an incontrovertibly violent act. Violence entails doing bodily harm to another person, and I can think of no bodily harm more permanent than death. One does not need the example of Eduard Delacroix's grisly death in the movie The Green Mile, or the real life example of Angel Nieves Diaz, whose 2006 execution in Florida took over half an hour, to recognize the face of violence in the death penalty. The danger that emerges here is one that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. recognized well when he pointed out that "returning violence for violence multiplies violence" (Nobel Speech 1964). Peter Storey, a Methodist bishop in South Africa who helped lead the nation's protest against apartheid, made a similar observation: "If you justify violence for any reason, no matter how good and noble, you legitimize it for every reason, no matter how wrong and unworthy" (With God in the Crucible, Abingdon 2002). Both King and Storey had seen what violence had done to tear their countries to shreds and had heard the good news that with Christ lies the way of peace and reconciliation, a path not taken when recourse to violence, including the death penalty, is taken.

To support capital punishment is to say that some people are beyond redemption. This was not what Jesus declared when he stretched his arms out on the cross in an eternal gesture of welcome and forgiveness. This was not what Paul was telling the early Christians when he said, "while we still were sinners Christ died for us" (Romans 5:8). Jesus was a victim of the death penalty, and he was flanked on each side by criminals being put to death. To the thief who cried, "Jesus, remember me," he responded, "Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in Paradise" (Luke 23:42-43). Who is this Savior who hangs next to sinners and tells them the gates of heaven are open wide to them, even as they endure state-mandated execution for crimes they willfully committed? This is the Savior we address thus: "Lord Jesus Christ, you stretched out your arms of love on the hard wood of the cross that everyone might come within the reach of your saving embrace" (Book of Common Prayer). Christ's death and resurrection declares loudly that no one is beyond redemption, and the death penalty flies flagrantly in the face of this unconditional, forgiving love.

Capital punishment seeks to establish a system of justice, but it is enslaved to the concept of retributive justice. The famed Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa explains the difference between retributive and restorative justice eloquently in his book No Future Without Forgiveness as exemplified in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission held in post-apartheid South Africa. Archbishop Tutu writes that retributive justice, "whose chief goal is to be punitive...has little consideration for the real victims and almost none for the perpetrator. We contend that there is another kind of justice, restorative justice...the central concern is the healing of breaches, the redressing of imbalances, the restoration of broken relationships, a seeking to rehabilitate both the victim and the perpetrator" (No Future Without Forgiveness, Doubleday 1999). Tutu says that this approach looks at a crime as something personal, "something that has happened to persons and whose consequence is a rupture in relationships." In the legal workings of capital punishment cases, the perpetrator is the accused and the wronged party is the state. In actuality, it is all of us, including the perpetrator, who experience the crime as a tear in the fabric of humanity. The American justice system does not acknowledge this and provides the victims' families—not to mention the perpetrator's loved ones—little space for healing. Our legal system sees only the transgression of laws, not the rending of human hearts.

Christ came not so that everyone might get what they deserve in an "eye for an eye" system of justice. Christ came "that they may all be one" (John 17:21). Christ died and rose again that broken relationships might be healed and that all might be reconciled with God and with one another. To resort to the death penalty is to make permanent the damage done to human relationships in a violent act, first in the initial crime and again in the perpetrator's trial and execution. To say that the death penalty is the only option is to abandon hope that we, the body of Christ, broken and bruised, may one day be made whole. We as Christians need to believe that we are promised more than the suffering we now experience and to recognize that in our ability to forgive and to live in peace with one another lies God's greatest dream for us, his most beautiful creation.

Thursday, October 11, 2007

Angels and Light

Clay was an all-around nice guy. A young, single doctor who was a member of our church when we lived in Davidson, Clay was a part of my family's life from early on in his involvement with the congregation. I remember being eight years old and joining a group of adults on a trip that my father led to Israel; Clay went, too. A group of mostly men would stay up late in the hotel playing spades on into the night, and I would watch and learn the game. Clay was an intense card player and would seem to be nearly at blows with our equally intense music director, but outside of a game of spades he was charming, friendly, and unfailingly kind to me.

I remember, too, when I was a little older and Clay had taken my dad and my younger brother out on Lake Norman in his boat. They returned late in the day with quite a story: Clay had somehow managed to ground his speedboat on a sand bar. Apparently he bore it with admirable nonchalance, until my brother, who must have been four or five years old, began asking why Clay had wrecked the boat...and wouldn't stop asking, over and over again. "Clay, why did you wreck the boat? Clay, how long are we gonna be stuck here?"

Then one day, Clay surprised us all. He called my dad and told him he had to come over to his house so he could show him something. Confused, my dad complied, and Clay led him into the spare bedroom. There, of all things, was a baby! Apparently Clay had decided that no one was ever going to want to marry him (why, we could never figure), but he really wanted a child, so he had gone and adopted Lauren without telling anyone. My dad was skeptical at first, but he quickly saw that Clay was going to really come alive in his new role as a father. As my dad describes it, it was as if you had been exploring a museum full of beautiful works of art and then had turned a corner to discover the treasure room, whose contents surpassed all expectations of beauty and value. That was how Clay's character blossomed as he parented Lauren.

Naturally, Clay wanted to have Lauren baptized in our church, and my dad was thrilled to perform the sacrament. Present in the service, as on every Sunday, was Mary. Mary was a wonderful, sweet woman, but a little strange. She had a mystical flair that seemed a bit out of place in our down-to-earth Methodist congregation. After church on the day that Lauren was baptized, Mary sought out my dad and told him she had had a vision. My dad was skeptical, but he had little choice but to hear her out.

I can only imagine the look of polite but feigned interest on his face as he heard her describe how, when Lauren was brought before the baptismal font, she saw the roof of the church lift off. A great light streamed into the sanctuary, she said, and shone on the child, and angels descended and gathered around to watch this baby girl being brought into the life of the church. My dad probably muttered a nervous "Wow" and disentangled himself from the conversation as quickly as possible. He didn't think twice about Mary's vision.

Five years later, almost to the day, my dad received a phone call. By then, Clay had moved with Lauren to Texas to take a job at a hospital out there. He and my dad had stayed in touch, but this was not a routine phone call. My dad listened in shock as Clay told him that he had an inoperable brain tumor and had six months to live. Clay was a doctor. He knew exactly what his chances were, knew just why surgery was not an option, knew the kind of swift, inexorable death that awaited him.

The news was difficult for my whole family. Clay was a young man, talented and likable, and should have had decades of life ahead of him. It seemed senseless that the malady he worked to relieve others of would now take his life. And then, too, there was Lauren. She was five years old now, a beautiful child with thick blonde hair and a crooked smile. Clay had already arranged for a new home for her after he passed. All that remained was to say his goodbyes and wait for the tumor to claim him.

The day after my dad heard the news, he received an unexpected piece of mail. It was from Mary. We had since moved to Charlotte and had not seen Mary in a while. Curious, my dad opened it to find a card with a strange illustration on the front. As he read Mary's enclosed note, he understood and was flabbergasted. Out of nowhere, five years after this vision that she hadn't shared with anyone but my dad, Mary had suddenly thought about Lauren's baptism again. Inspired, she had an artist do a visual rendering of the vision and had notecards made with the image. She had sent one to my dad just so he could see the picture and remember this strange little event from half a decade before.

Some people thought it meant Clay was going to be healed. Others shook it off as a weird coincidence. Some wondered if even then, at Lauren's baptism, there had been some shadow in Clay that had somehow been detected in Mary's vision. Many were sure that the child was under a form of protection that would hold her even after Clay passed. Even my dad, leery of visions and mystical experience, had to say that to call it a coincidence was ridiculous. Five years had gone by since Mary had had the vision. She must have recalled that day and had the painting done around the same time Clay was diagnosed. She mailed my dad the card before he got the call from Clay; no one in North Carolina knew before then that he was sick.

I'll admit—I'm not sure what this story means. But I do think that maybe it means that there is someone watching out for us. That doesn't mean that brain tumors will miraculously disappear; sometimes they do, but Clay's did not. What I think it means is that when God breaks into our hearts, we may find that we are closer to our neighbor than we first thought, perhaps closer than is comfortable.

Here's the artist's rendering of Mary's vision:

 

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