Repentance of an Anti-Gay Bigot (a quote from Mark Osler)

"Are gays and lesbians sinners? It doesn't seem that way to me (other than the way in which we are all sinners), but at some level I really don't care. If it is a sin, it is not my sin. The sin that I need to discern, root out and identify is my own. One of those sins has been bigotry and senseless cruelty. I atone for and seek forgiveness for that now and here." — Mark Osler (read more here)

The King's Kitchen, Where You Feast to Feed Somebody

Today I had lunch at The King's Kitchen, a new restaurant in Charlotte. It's not only delicious, it's for a good cause--proceeds go to serving the poor of the city. Check out the info below from their website:

__________

The King's Kitchen is an outreach of Restoration Word Ministries managed by Jim Noble Restaurants that donates 100% of profits from sales to feed the poor in Charlotte, the region, and the world. Additionally, The King's Kitchen partners with area ministries to provide employment opportunities to Charlotteans in search of a new beginning.

And while every penny of profit at The King’s Kitchen has a higher calling, each bite of the food served to patrons, features Jim's signature "New Local Southern Cuisine." Specialties include premium local and organic produce paired with fine meats like Aunt Beaut's Pan Fried Chicken.

Twelve years before opening the doors of The King's Kitchen, Chef Jim and his wife Karen were awakened to a calling from God. Rather than open another restaurant to simply feed the body, the Noble's were called to start a ministry that would nourish the soul.

In 1998, Jim and Karen started Restoration Word Ministries (RWM) and their weekly radio broadcast ministry, The Voice of Healing Faith. An ordained minister, Jim uses this outreach as a way to share the teachings of Christ as well as remain open to the ways God calls him to serve. Over time, Jim recognized the relationship of his two passions – serving food and serving God – and was led to the ministry of feeding the poor.

The Not-Being-a-Jerk-About-It Part

Bunny Baptisms and Homosexuality

Worship class on Friday was hilarious. We were talking about baptism, so a good chunk of our time was devoted to practicing the Methodist baptismal rite on Amy May Wabbit, a stuffed bunny our professor brought in. It was funny but also practical--my dad commented that no one ever showed him how to do a baptism, and I hadn't realized how much the idea intimidated me until I found myself steadfastly refusing to volunteer to act out Amy May's baptism.

There was one part of the class discussion that bothered me. One of my classmates asked a question (which in and of itself was not bad) about whether the United Methodist Church had any official stance on baptizing, say, a gay couple's adopted child. Fair enough, since the UMC doesn't allow the ordination of homosexuals; but there's nothing barring membership. "Baptize the dang kid" was my response.

What bothered me was how long and in what direction this conversation went. Another classmate wanted to talk about how to be sensitive to congregation members who might be offended at seeing a gay couple at the front of the church, and how to avoid putting a gay couple in a potentially harmful situation. My thoughts are, if the couple doesn't want to be outed, they won't stand up in front of the church together (which, especially if it becomes a deterrent to having your child baptized, is a damn shame). And I understand the desire not to give the homophobes in the congregation (because every church has them, their voices need to be heard, and there are varying degrees of homophobia) a reason to come out and say hurtful things. But my response is still "Baptize the dang kid."

The next thing I knew, we were talking about how baptismal vows, especially in the case of infant baptism, put the responsibility on the parents and should be taken very seriously. When having a child baptized, the parents promise to raise their child in the faith, to be an example, etc. Someone brought up the point that if the parents are clearly not living in a way that is congruous with those vows, that's problematic. I absolutely agree with that statement, and we talked some about how to do education and preparation for baptism within a church. My problem was the assumption that a gay couple isn't living in a way that aligns with the baptismal vows.

I've said before that I don't know how to tease out the theological arguments for and against homosexuality, and I honestly don't care at this point. All I know is that there are people I love and respect who are gay, and I can't fathom excluding them from the church in any way. And if we're talking about setting an example, there are plenty of gay couples I know who are far better paradigms of love and commitment than many heterosexual couples. The institution of marriage has been cheapened in this country, but not by same-sex unions. And if baptism isn't being taken seriously in the church, we all bear the responsibility for that, especially pastors who have before them the challenging but crucial task of educating their parishioners.

A Rant

I'm going to stop arguing online about Islam and the proposed mosque in New York. I'm tired of and saddened by the fact that I feel like I'm on a completely different planet from people who disagree with me, especially brothers and sisters in Christ.

But first, I have to express my outrage at the fact that the site of the new Islamic center in Murfreesboro, TN has been torched.

[Just to warn you: this is going to be a rant. Don't bother picking apart my rhetoric. I'm angry.]

No. This is outrageous. Whether your argument against the building of mosques in this country stems from an "American" or a "Christian" argument, THIS IS WRONG. I know most people opposed to building the mosque in NY would never condone such action, but especially to folks who support stuff like burning the Quran--do you not see the slippery slope here?

This video is obviously a humor bit, but what I find terrifying is that people can hear what this woman (the leader of the anti-mosque movement in Murfreesboro) is saying and not realize that IT IS INSANE. I've been trying really hard to be gracious and to try to see things from the other side, and let me just say that I know that there are reasonable arguments against the mosque in NY, and I know there are concerns about violence in the Quran (to which I respond, ever read the story about Elisha having she-bears tear children apart for calling him "baldhead" or the psalm about dashing children's heads against the rocks?), but THIS IS RIDICULOUS.

Please. Please, set aside the numbers and statistics that come from God-knows-where. Go talk to a Muslim. When I took an Islamic civilization course in undergrad, my spiritual life was inspired to new life by hearing from several teachers of Sufism (Islamic mysticism). We have something to learn from Islam. And if we choose only to learn from jihadists, we are no better than they are.

I can't even laugh at this video right now.

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The Need for Nuance

Last fall semester, I had an irritating experience in a class discussion. Our preceptor had asked us a question pertaining to the day's readings, and she wanted a "yes" or a "no." As it turned out, the answer (per my view, confirmed by my dad and other smarter people) was "yes, but." I tried to argue my point against my preceptor's response of "no," but she wouldn't budge.

What annoyed me about that interaction is part of what troubles me about the state of opinion and politics in this country today: an utter lack of nuance. We want the answer to every question to be simple, direct and efficacious, which is a misguided expectation that alienates us from the reality that the world is complicated. We not only lack the ability to see in shades of grey, we don't even really think it matters to be able to do that. The thing is, being a Christian absolutely depends on paradox and nuance. I'll get to that point in a minute.

The result is that we as a people are quick to jump to conclusions, to extrapolate from delicate situations and statements, and to take things to extremes in discourse. In doing so, both sides lose sight of any common ground they might once have shared. Opponents' languages become completely estranged--once each side holes up in their extreme position, the original issue has been distorted and each side is talking about something totally different. No wonder we don't understand each other.

It's not our fault. I read somewhere that America as a nation has suffered something similar to post-traumatic stress disorder in the world after 9/11. This past March, my dad wrote an article for The Charlotte Observer entitled, "Has rancor become unbeatable foe?" In it, he noted this very phenomenon:

"After we endured the numbing body blow of 9-11, we then suffered the horrifying implosion of the economy: everybody's a little bit crazy. Everybody's scared. Nobody really knows which way to turn; we lunge, we shout, we grab onto the last vestige of what we used to cling to - so naturally we're difficult to be with, and so is the other guy."

We're all a little crazy, a little scared and a lot defensive. Most recently, I've been saddened by the "conversations" surrounding the proposed Islamic community center to be built right at two blocks from Ground Zero. I already posted a blog about this controversy, but there are two aspects of the issue that I think have to do with this need for nuance.

First, I'm troubled by the inability of many Americans to differentiate between the majority of the Muslim world and al-Qaeda. Part of the problem here is that there is a wealth of ignorance about the religion of Islam. Ron Ramsey likened it to a "cult," which is ridiculous seeing that 23% of the global population identifies as Muslim. Also, the Dove World Outreach Center's sponsorship of "International Burn a Koran Day" shows an appalling obliviousness to the contents of the Quran; I've commented that there are enough parallel passages between the Bible and the Quran to equate burning a Quran with burning parts of the Bible.

The fact that almost one in five Americans believe that President Obama is Muslim is also troubling, not only because it's wrong and implies racism but also because I'm sure that to those people, being Muslim is a bad thing. Obama is not Muslim, but so what if he were? Again, it's this inability (or unwillingness?) to distinguish between mainstream Islam and al-Qaeda. Just today, a black man in a skull cap (with, might I add, an easily visible Under Armor logo on the front) was accosted by protesters at Ground Zero, who assumed he was Muslim. See this video of the confrontation.

I'm also bothered by controversy that's been stirred up over the imam of the proposed mosque, Feisal Abdul Rauf. I heard a clip on NPR recently that related an outcry over comments he made shortly after 9/11. Rauf said, "I wouldn't say that the United States deserved what happened, but the United States policies were an accessory to the crime that happened." People are outraged at the implication that the blood of the 9/11 victims is not only on the hands of the terrorists but also to some extent on the hands of U.S. policy makers. Of course, the way people frame it is by saying that the imam believes we deserved the 9/11 attacks.

But I'm with Rauf on this one. Concerning opposition to U.S. policy in the Muslim world, Rauf said, "It is a reaction against the policies of the US government, politically, where we espouse principles of democracy and human rights and where we ally ourselves with oppressive regimes in many of these countries." We do that. Some of the decisions we make in international relations are wrong. Some of our foreign policy lacks necessary nuance, like our unquestioning support of Israel. Why are we so surprised when people hate us?

I hate the fact that songs like "America the Beautiful" are in the United Methodist Hymnal. (That's another discussion.) But there's a verse of that song that doesn't get sung--or listened to even if it is sung--often:

America! America!
God mend thine ev'ry flaw,
Confirm thy soul in self-control,
Thy liberty in law.

Why is it so impossible to think that we might be wrong? Why can't we look at the tragedy of 9/11 and say that although we didn't deserve it--no country or people deserves something like that--we have made decisions that contributed to the terrorists' motives? Why are we constantly running around trying to fix everyone else's problems but are unable or unwilling to admit to our own?

Let me pull this back around full circle. (Warning: my brain synthesizes information like crazy, so I may have connected some dots that don't align in everyone's mind, at least not right away. Bear with me.) We need to be able to understand and utilize nuance. We need to be able to acknowledge prophetic speech about shortcomings without perceiving it as an attack. We need to be willing to learn and to listen, not to lump people into a group because of their faith or race or country of origin. We need to be able to hold ideas in tension and not succumb to the temptation to cast everything in stark terms.

If we explore the Christian faith thoughtfully, we find that all of these things are demanded of us by the Bible and by church tradition. The prophets, God's messengers, rarely had complimentary things to say. Jesus is fully God and fully man. We must be in the world but not of the world. To believe and live out such things, we must be humble and discerning. We need to let go of our pride. We need to live in the unresolved tensions. We need nuance.

Cliques As Community?

On August 31, I'll attend my first American Christianity class to kick off my second year of seminary. I'm excited to go back to school. Last year was rough for me in a lot of ways, but my field ed experience this summer helped me to get reoriented and re-energized. I have a fresh sense of my vocation and how being at Duke Divinity School is an important part of realizing my calling.

There is one part of my life as a student these days that leaves me with a lingering sense of intimidation. My roommate and I commented the other day that neither of us put as much effort as maybe we should have into making new friends in the Div School. A lot of that was because, having been Duke undergrads, we had friends from college who remained a priority, many of them still in our geographic vicinity. Whatever the reason, both of us want to try harder to be a part of the social life at DDS this year.

The thing is, the Div School is incredibly clique-ish. Especially being someone who has always floated among various friend groups, at first glance, that reality is scary.

Of course, I know that the reason tight, easily identifiable friend groups develop at DDS is because almost everyone in the school is longing for, or has been indoctrinated with the idea of, genuine community. My dad's best friends to this day are men with whom he was in seminary. No one gets the struggles of a pastor more than another pastor. Whether we are pursuing ordained ministry, nonprofit work or a Ph.D., most of us are headed for a lifetime of work that will be fulfilling at times and difficult always. It is vital for each of us that we can begin to build lasting friendships and accountability/support groups now while we're in school, because the ministry can sometimes be an incredibly lonely, isolating vocation, ironically.

I'm not going to whine about cliques in the Div School. This isn't Mean Girls. I do think it's a pattern of which we as seminarians all need to be aware. Fortunately, I have already witnessed a broadness of care and concern within my own class that has manifested itself socially and academically. This past spring, a classmate of mine started a Google Group called DukeDivShare, where countless students uploaded exhaustive study guides, class notes, summaries of readings and more. There are tests I would have failed without the help of my generous classmates. I felt so lucky to be at DDS and not in law or medical school, having heard stories of students hiding or hoarding books to keep other students from affecting their grades. And when spring semester was rough for me, a surprising number of students I didn't know that well would check on me and encourage me.

So, yeah. Let's examine our friend groups. I know I've gravitated toward my friends from Duke undergrad for the most part. I want to branch out more this year. Let's be friends. :)

Mary Magdalene Was Not a Prostitute

Mary Magdalene gets a bad rap. We like to depict her as the prostitute who did ridiculous things like washing Jesus' feet with her hair.

The problem is that there are several Marys in the New Testament, and they're not all the same. We have Mary the mother of Jesus, Mary the mother of James, Mary the mother of Joses, Mary the wife of Clopas, Mary the sister of Martha (that's the one who did the anointing), "the other Mary," and Mary Magdalene. Of course, some of these are the same person, but my point is that not every Mary mentioned in the Bible is necessarily either Jesus' mom or Mary Magdalene.

Mary Magdalene is explicitly referred to in Matthew, Mark and John as being one of the women who went to Jesus' tomb (see Matthew 28:1-4, Mark 16:1-8 and John 20:1-16). In these same three gospels, she was also present at Jesus' death, and in Matthew and Mark, at Jesus' burial;

The only really strange mention of Mary Magdalene is in reference to her having been cured of demon possession. This is found in the longer ending of Mark and Luke 8:2.

So where did this idea that she's a prostitute come from? Get this. It's because in Luke 7, an unnamed woman washes Jesus' feet, and he declares, "her many sins have been forgiven." Now, I won't bother going into too much detail on how we can't even be positive this is Mary Magdalene (at best we can peg her as Mary of Bethany, Martha's sister), but the even bigger issue is the assumption the church made.

All we know from the text is that the woman is sinful. What her sins are, we do not know. But to the ancient church (and, um, the modern church), the automatic conclusion is that a sinful woman is a sexually promiscuous woman. Ergo, sinful chick who may or may not even be named Mary = Mary Magdalene is a prostitute.

This is troubling to me. It is even more so because of the way we talk about prostitutes and women's sexuality in general. I decided to write this blog when I recently saw a skit/talk where Mary Magdalene was described as a prostitute and said to have washed Jesus' feet with her hair. When one speaker asked jokingly if that meant she ran a salon, the other replied, "Well, not that kind of salon."

Sure, it's funny. I was amused for a moment, and all the teenagers present laughed. I love irreverent humor and can handle bawdy jokes as long as they're mildly clever. But we couldn't have known every listener's sexual history. How did we know there wasn't someone among us who had at some point sold their body or been sexually exploited? Because, guess what, even unwanted sexual contact brands a woman as somehow damaged. That's a problem, especially when 1 in 4 women will be sexually assaulted sometime in their life.

So can we please stop saying Mary Magdalene was a prostitute? Can we please start to combat the incredibly negative view of female sexuality that prevails in the church? It would be fine if she were a prostitute and Jesus forgave her, but the assumption that the worst thing a woman could do would be something sexual is a problem.

Note that Mary Magdalene was the first person to whom the resurrected Christ appeared. Heck, Mary Magdalene basically delivered the first sermon. Check out John 20:17-18--she's the first person to proclaim the resurrection. Take that, anti-women-in-the-pulpit people.

Intimacy Fail: How Technology Destroys Our Social IQ and Cripples the Greatest Commandment

Last night, I watched the movie Surrogates, starring Bruce Willis. Here's a bit of a plot summary from IMDB: "People are living their lives remotely from the safety of their own homes via robotic surrogates--sexy, physically perfect mechanical representations of themselves. It's an ideal world where crime, pain, fear and consequences don't exist." Discrimination disappears: everyone is good-looking, and race doesn't have meaning in a world where someone's skin tone may not necessarily reflect their cultural background. Infectious diseases are all but wiped out: robots cannot transmit bacteria and viruses. Injury and death are completely avoidable: surrogates can be thrown from bridges, shot in the head and beaten, with no consequence to the operator except the need to repair or replace their robot.

The flip side of this utopia is the reality that people don't actually interact with each other anymore. Bruce Willis' character lives in a world where his wife mourns the death of their son (during the pre-surrogate age) by locking herself in her room and living entirely through her surrogate. This married couple only interacts through youthful, physically perfected versions of themselves, and they hide their pain from each other by barricading their true selves in lonely isolation.

Of course, we don't need futuristic robot avatars to separate ourselves from each other. We're doing it already. It makes me think of the opening lines of the movie Crash: "It's the sense of touch. In any real city, you walk, you know? You brush past people, people bump into you. In L.A., nobody touches you. We're always behind this metal and glass. I think we miss that touch so much, that we crash into each other, just so we can feel something." Impersonality is the law of the land, whether imposed consciously for self-protection or unconsciously out of habit.

I recently read an article from the humor and video site Cracked.com entitled "7 Reasons the 21st Century Is Making You Miserable." (WARNING: Cracked is not known for being politically correct or polite. If you have issues with strong language a crude humor, don't read this. I'll summarize it for you anyway.) Here are those 7 reasons:

#1: We don't have enough annoying strangers in our lives.
#2: We don't have enough annoying friends, either.
#3: Texting is a [crappy] way to communicate.
#4: Online company only makes us lonelier.
#5: We don't get criticized enough.
#6: We're victims of the Outrage Machine.
#7: We feel worthless, because we actually are worth less.

I'm not going to go into detail on all of these, but here are some basic points made in this article. Today's technology allows us to be selective about how and with whom we interact; therefore, we can more easily avoid dealing with obnoxious people. However, this actually makes us less able to cope with the annoying people with whom we inevitably must communicate from time to time. This article also points out that e-mail and texting allow us to avoid deeper levels of honesty and leave tons of room for miscommunication; it cites studies that found only 7% of communication has to do with the actual words we use--the other 93% is nonverbal. This means that when you talk to someone purely using words on a screen, you're only getting a tiny fraction of what they're really saying.

The other thing does is that it allows us to throw things out online that we wouldn't say to someone's face. Online bullying is a real issue for kids and teens today that I, for one, simply didn't have to deal with much at all. When I was a kid, people just talked about you behind your back; now, they'll ridicule and threaten each other online. The lack of immediate consequences (or, sometimes, any consequences at all) can bring out the worst in people.

Christians are not exempt from this. Jonathan Acuff, author of www.StuffChristiansLike.net (his book Stuff Christians Like is now available for purchase), recently wrote for CNN's Belief Blog. His post, "Why Christians are Jerks Online," gives two reasons for the preponderance of hateful Christian blogs, bitter Twittering from churchgoers, and Christian hate mail. First, what Acuff calls "The Business Traveler Approach"--going on the "What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas" rule, Christians are often able to separate their offline and online selves, believing that despite their commitment to the commandment to love one another, what they say on the internet "doesn't count." The second reason, one that really hit home with me, Acuff terms "Room Cleaning Christianity."

"Think of it like college. When you’ve got a final paper due Monday, you will be amazed at how energetic your desire is to clean your room. You will scrub tile with a slow toothbrush if it means avoiding the bigger, more difficult work of writing your paper. The same thing happens with Christianity. Loving your neighbor might be simple, but it’s not easy. [...] So instead of dealing with that, we get online and police people. We find small things to focus on that will distract us. I think God wants us to discuss the little stuff, but we make it an idol when we practice room cleaning Christianity at the exclusion of love. And we tend to become jerks."

As a member of the Facebook group "Nothing Gets My Room Cleaner Than a Paper Due Tomorrow," I can identify with this metaphor. And Acuff's explanation connects directly to a conversation I had recently about how to be committed to your tradition without being an arrogant jerk. Sometimes we lose any trace of humility in our attempt to elevate adiaphora (non-essentials) to the state of dogma (essentials) when really we're just putting off dealing with real issues and real people.

As if this post weren't already too long, thinking about all this made me recall a book I started reading and really need to finish: Marva J. Dawn's Reaching Out Without Dumbing Down: A Theology of Worship for This Urgent Time. Dawn points out that the overload thrown at us by the internet has gotten us used to learning random trivia that has no impact on our actual lives (remember Cracked.com? Totally my guilty source for exactly that kind of thing). Dawn writes, "television [and the internet, etc.] has habituated its watchers [and users] to a low information-action ratio, that people are accustomed to 'learning' good ideas (even from sermons) and then doing nothing about them." She also emphasizes the point that our technology-addicted culture decreases our ability to form intimate human relationships: "We talk about the weather and the latest ball scores, but we don't understand each other as if we belonged to each other, and we don't really want to know the answer to 'How are you?'" Ouch.

I need to go ahead and admit something that you're probably already thinking: writing this entire blog has been totally self-indicting. I am the queen of Facebook, email and texting. Even making phone calls to close friends makes me nervous. I have definitely made attempts to counteract this tendency to keep a computer between myself and others--when I ran a summer camp last year, I got tired of all the volunteers communicating simply via email and called a meeting for the sole purpose of acknowledging and pursuing the incarnational nature that our faith is supposed to have. We didn't talk about anything we couldn't have done over email, but it was so much more fruitful to sit around a table with coffee and donuts and just talk and pray together.

And now I've compiled all this information and educated myself and maybe some of you. My question to myself and to my readers now is...what am I--what are we--going to do about this? First off, I'm going to get off the computer and go to lunch with a parishioner and our administrative assistant. And I'm going to pray about the possibility of going on a technology fast sometime in the near future. Some fellow Duke Divinity School students did this for a class last year, and it was interesting--it felt like they dropped off the face of the planet for a week, and yet until I was 16 or 17 I barely ever used the internet, and I didn't have my own cell phone until I was about 18. It's amazing how quickly I've become addicted to my gadgets. Recently my boyfriend thanked me for not bringing my laptop over to his apartment when I came to hang out because it removed the temptation for me to disappear into my computer and ignore him. I immediately felt ashamed that he would have to thank me for such a thing.

Are we willing and able to acknowledge that despite the amazing things technology can do (because obviously I'm not anti-technology--it's an incredible tool), it also presents a danger in limiting our personal relationships? Are we willing to have contact with others where we are not fully in control of how much time and energy we invest in that interaction? Do we really want to know the answer to "How are you?", even if the answer might make us uncomfortable or, heaven forbid, take up our time?

The Time Traveler's Wife

I just watched The Time Traveler's Wife. I didn't really know anything about it, I just picked it out on a whim from the most awesome invention ever Redbox earlier today. I really liked it! Besides being entertaining and a tear-jerker, it got me thinking. See, in this movie, Eric Bana's character, Henry, has a genetic disorder that causes him to time travel randomly. He has no control of where he ends up or how long it takes for him to travel back. Sometimes this is beneficial, like when he returns from the future with winning lottery numbers, but more often than not it's frustrating, particularly for his wife. Things get far more serious when he travels far enough into the future to learn that he dies when his daughter is 5 years old.

Obviously, this is quite a burden for his wife, played by Rachel McAdams, and also for his daughter, whose future self returns on her 5th birthday to let her know that this is the year her father will die. Being a divinity school geek, this made me think about God. I personally would not want to know when I am going to die--much less would I want to know when a loved one will die. Of course I know that we're all mortal, but there would be something very different about knowing the details of the end of our lives before we got there. And then I realized--just as God knew us in our mothers' wombs, he knows when we will die. "In your book were written all the days that were formed for me, when none of them as yet existed" (Psalm 139:16). Sure, God gets to hang out with us in heaven, but God has compassion for us and is moved by our suffering. It's as if in the movie Henry had been told when his daughter would die and had to wait for it to happen; except this is God, whose love is infinitely greater than even the most devoted parent's, and it happens for God billions and billions of times over.

OK, so some of this line of thought is a little inane, but still. I'm writing it down because it made me think about just how much God loves each of us, how much he hates for us to suffer. The love and pain written across Rachel McAdams' face, even if they weren't just the stylings of an actress, are only a pale shadow of God's love for us. And Rachel McAdams still made me cry! How much more should I be moved by the realization of the depth of God's true, pure, unconditional love?

__________


And also, the girls who play Eric Bana and Rachel McAdams' daughter Alba, Hailey and Tatum McCann, are precious:

What Would You Do?

Make sure you watch the whole thing. The beginning might make you cynical, but Jesus shows up in the end, in the form of a sometimes-homeless woman.

"Where is your brother?" -- Genesis 4:9

"I have called you by name; you are mine." -- Isaiah 43:1

Beth Nielsen Chapman: Back to Love

My dad heard Beth Nielsen Chapman perform at a conference, spoke to her afterwards and brought me back a signed copy of her new album, Back to Love. I procrastinated on listening to the whole thing, but when I did it was twice back-to-back, just for starters.

I've been describing Beth's sound to people as something like "Joni Mitchell meets the Indigo Girls meets Alison Krauss." Her style is a wonderful blend of folk, country, a little bluegrass and lots of soul. She has a truly unique voice that has a rich sound I haven't heard much before.

And her songs are beautiful! I'm talking musically and lyrically. As the album title would suggest, every song on here has something to do with love, be it love of another person or love of God. The simple, prayerful "How We Love" asserts, "All that matters in the end is how we love;" the subtly groovy "I Can See Me Loving You" (my favorite track at the moment) includes the terribly romantic line, "All I know is from the moment I laid eyes on you, you're as far as I can see." Every line is sung with genuine passion and playfulness--there are at least two laughs embedded in the vocals of this album, which just makes me smile. :) See?

A Quote on Worship

"Worship is love preparing to move."
Author unknown (from the Ekklesia Church @ Raleigh website)

"You shall love the alien as yourself"

This morning, I saw this posted as a friend's Facebook status:

"JUST SO I UNDERSTAND THIS...YOU PASS THE NORTH KOREAN BORDER ILLEGALLY YOU GET 12 YRS HARD LABOR, YOU PASS THE AFGHAN BORDER ILLEGALLY YOU GET SHOT. YOU PASS THE AMERICAN BORDER ILLEGALLY YOU GET A JOB, DRIVER'S LICENSE, ALLOWANCE FOR A PLACE TO LIVE, HEALTH CARE, EDUCATION, BILLIONS OF DOLLARS SPENT SO YOU CAN READ A DOCUMENT. WE CARRY PASSPORTS IN OTHER COUNTRIES OR FACE JAIL TIME. REPOST IF YOU AGREE"

My only direct response to this is...so our standards of comparison are North Korea and Afghanistan now? And getting shot in Afghanistan happens a lot more often for a lot more reasons than crossing the border illegally...

My indirect response comes from the fact that when I saw this, I had just read the daily office from the BCP with my housemates. The Old Testament lesson for today is this:

"When an alien resides with you in your land, you shall not oppress the alien. The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God."
-- Leviticus 19:33-34

I was so grateful for this. I don't really know how to respond to all the nastiness I see getting slung around online over Arizona and immigration and whatnot, and it turns out I don't have to say a thing. I can just point to these verses. Because, interestingly enough, most of the people I know who are rabidly anti-immigration are...Christians. I'm not demonizing those people--I have many friends and relatives who fall into that category. I'm just saying.

I wasn't going to blog about the issue at all, but this news item pushed me over the edge.

Why I wouldn’t want to attend an "open and affirming" church

A few opening words. First, the title of this blog was intentionally worded to elicit an emotional reaction, and I'm betting it did its job for most of you. Before you read further, take a moment to register what your initial thoughts and feelings were upon reading the title. Tuck that away in the back of your mind, and keep reading.

Second, this blog is one I think I meant to write years ago. I did write something that was a pitiful attempt at this, but it was clumsily conceived and written, and it hurt some people. For that I am sorry. This entry is an attempt at an apology and a rewrite. Hopefully this time, what I meant to say will come through more clearly.

With the disclaimers out of the way, I should warn you that if you do not share the basic assumptions I am working with, reading this blog is pointless. So let's get that straight from the get-go, OK? Here are the givens on which my thoughts depend:

• Homosexuals are members of the body of Christ
• Heterosexuals who support LGBT rights are members of the body of Christ
• Heterosexuals who do not support LGBT rights are members of the body of Christ

If you disagree with any of those statements, or think that any one of them is more important than the others, you should proceed with caution, or at least keeping in mind that we might not see eye-to-eye on our basic assumptions. Also, I've had to simplify my categories for the sake of brevity—I am fully aware that there are heterosexuals who do not think homosexuality is a sin but who do not support gay marriage, and that there are plenty of other in-betweens. Forgive me the lack of nuance, and if you don't seem to fit into one of the three groups above, I'd be more than happy to talk with you more individually if you so desire. My thoughts on this subject are continually developing, and I have much to learn.

I also want to say upfront: homosexuality is not an "issue." It has to do with people. And we aren't just talking about behaviors—we're talking about identities. Heterosexuals on both sides of the "issue" (there I go already) sometimes forget that.

So let’s get down to business, shall we? Back to the title of my blog. I would not want to attend an "open and affirming" church. To begin to articulate my thoughts on this, I'll share a bit about one church with which I am fairly familiar. It's a large, mainline Protestant church, historically white and upper-middle-class but recently becoming wonderfully diverse in many ways. There are a number of members who are gay, but the church has not declared itself "open and affirming."

Recently, a few people (who I believe were relatively new to the congregation) began to lobby the pastor to make this move. The pastor dissuaded them. Why? Because if that church were to be branded "open and affirming" or "gay friendly," the one or two members staunchly opposed to homosexuality would come out in full force, and deeply hurtful things would be said. Right now, the church is doing fine at welcoming gays, whether every single member knows it or not. To declare the congregation "open and affirming" would divide the church more than it would unite it.

A similar thing happened with my campus ministry group a few years before I got to college. The LGBT center was asking various organizations to make themselves known as "safe places" by putting stickers from the center on their office doors. Despite the fact that my campus minister and many of the group's members are vocal allies, they decided against it because they did not want to make people who disagreed feel unwelcome. Think about it—if you proclaim yourself "open and affirming," how much meaningful conversation will you have in-house on the topic that isn't one-sided?

See, it's not that I’m opposed to a church being open and affirming in deed. It's just that I wonder what is lost when a church takes the road of declaring itself as such. There are people in my life whom I would miss very much from my congregation if that happened. Some voices would be emboldened, but others would be lost completely.

I once went to a worship service that was so LGBT-friendly that I felt out of place—the songs were all about love in many forms, the vestments were rainbow-colored, even the communion bread had been made with an array of food dyes. I'll admit it—I was uncomfortable. I wasn't even sure I should be there.

The thing is, even though I was personally uneasy in that worship service, it was a truly beautiful event. All around me were people who had been hurt or disenfranchised by society and even by the church, and suddenly they were empowered, they were loved, they knew that at least in that time and that place, they were members of the body of Christ. My own discomfort paled in comparison to the joy and hope I saw in that room. And I couldn't help but think: the way I feel now—some of these people feel that way all the time.

Here's the part where I need help. What the heck are we supposed to do about this? The problem that I recognize in my own argument about avoiding the "open and affirming" stamp is that it can easily be misconstrued to mean, "don't ask, don't tell." But how can we be members of the same body if we don't understand each other? How can we bear one another's burdens if we don’t know what those burdens are?

There's another point I want to make that's going to be tricky to articulate, but I think it's important, so allow me to try. I've heard several gay friends and acquaintances of mine tell me that part of their struggle is that they don't want their lives to be defined by one issue (because even if we acknowledge what I said earlier—that it's not an "issue," it's about people—the world makes it an issue for us). Neither should an issue define our faith. Part of why I was so uncomfortable in the worship service I described earlier is that I feel very strongly that worship is not about us; it's about God. Worship shouldn't be about celebrating gayness—neither should it be about celebrating American-ness (which is why I don't like singing patriotic hymns in church), wealth (which is why the "prosperity gospel" is no gospel at all), racial identity (oh good grief that's a whole other can of worms, not now, please), or any other human quality.

By the way...let me briefly unpack my 3 givens from the beginning of the post. Too often we forget that saying someone is a member of the body of Christ does not mean that you agree with everything they say or do. At the 2008 General Conference of the United Methodist Church, a group tried and failed to change the wording of the paragraph in the social principles about homosexuality. Contrary to what you might have gathered from the intense anger of the opposition, the change would not have condoned homosexuality. What it would have said was that we must acknowledge that many intelligent, faithful people have examined the Bible, church tradition and the issue itself, and they have come down on both sides. The question here in my blog is not the whether homosexuality is right or wrong. I rarely debate that subject anymore, because honestly, I have yet to be thoroughly convinced by anybody one way or the other. I've heard people use the exact same Bible passages to argue opposite points, and at least for me the question has worn out its welcome. I don't want to know whether the church can come up with the perfect answer to every question. I want to know what the church is going to do in the face of uncertainty and disagreement.

A friend of mine (who is gay) once told me that although it's fine for people to disagree theologically with homosexuality, it is never OK to hate. The crucial point here, which far too many people miss, is that disagreement and hatred are not correlative to each other. We can be a part of the body of Christ without being on exactly the same page on everything, if only we can remember that our focus is on God and that the only way we can be healed is by working together towards understanding, not by issuing ultimatums.

So. Can you be gay and be a Christian? Yes. Can you support gays in their sexual identity and lifestyle choices and be a Christian? Yes. Can you hold the belief that homosexuality is a sin and be a Christian? Yes.

In closing, let me ask you to recall that first emotional reaction to the title of my blog. Did you assume I was anti-gay? Did that offend or affirm you? Did your assumptions prior to reading this blog color my status in your mind as a member of the body of Christ—or not? We all need help being Christians. None of us have it right. "All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God." All means all.

My husband's/wife's deepest needs

I have never cared about gender issues. When I was younger, I would hear people talk about women being disadvantaged in the academy and the workplace, and I would wonder why they couldn't just get over it--be really good at what you do and your gender won't matter. I still believe that to some extent, and I try really hard only to call foul when it's a real issue, but I'm finding that more and more I'm becoming a (*insert heavy sigh here*) feminist. I really hate that word, because it has bad connotations for me, but through life experience (some of it, unfortunately, bad) and just growing up, I'm starting to see more and more the ways in which the world and (sometimes especially) the church screws up gender roles and expectations. It's going to be fun for me when I really come into my prime after being underestimated and type-cast since high school.

Anyway, here's where some of this is coming from: I recently helped with music at a church marriage retreat. To preface, I'm not going to say which church because I don't want to seem like I'm dissing them, which is not at all my purpose. Also, I want to stress that I think a marriage retreat is a GREAT idea. The church needs to do a better job in general of talking about relationships, marriage, love, sex, all of that stuff. Too often I feel like the emphasis is placed on saving yourself for marriage, but then nobody tells you what you're supposed to do once you get there. I'm all for lots and lots of premarital counseling (Protestants, we suck at this. Let's please learn from the Catholics) and lots and lots of postmarital (er, during-marital?) counseling and whatnot. The divorce rate in this country is appalling, and the church is failing couples constantly by not giving them the resources to make and follow through on commitments.

OK, so this marriage retreat. I was behind the scenes for part of it, so I didn't get to hear it all, but some of it sounded really great. I heard lots of talk of communication and honesty, of moving out of an economy of shame into a life of grace, of forgiveness and joy and lots of great stuff. I'm sure a lot of couples were blessed--I know I was, one of a handful of single folks in the room.

I'm writing all this because I want to stress that my hang-up was over something minor. On each seat was a slip of paper with writing on both sides. Side one:

My Wife's Deepest Needs:
1. My wife needs a Godly man and my unconditional love.
2. My wife needs my affection, security, comfort, approval, tenderness, touch, cards and gifts.
3. My wife needs conversation with me.
4. My wife needs my honesty and openness.
5. My wife needs financial security.
6. My wife needs my commitment to the family--be faithful to my wife, share parenting responsibilities, take initiative in home repairs and be the spiritual leader in my home.

Side two:

My Husband's Deepest Needs:
1. My husband needs a Godly wife and my unconditional love.
2. My husband needs sexual fulfillment.
3. My husband needs recreational companionship.
4. My husband needs an attractive wife.
5. My husband needs domestic support.
6. My husband needs my admiration.

OK. Word to Godliness, unconditional love, etc. However, I have a few questions/comments:

-- #2 on side one sure makes women sound needy.
-- The claim that women need financial security is just funny to a woman whose boyfriend refers to her as his "sugar momma."
-- If anyone does house repairs in my family, it's my...sister.
-- Do wives not need sexual fulfillment?
-- Do wives not need attractive husbands? Is #4 on side two suggesting that it's the duty of a woman to stay beautiful for her husband? What about his beer belly?
-- I just hate the word "domestic," even if I've found in the past few years that I do enjoy cooking and cleaning. *sigh*

So...yeah. Just some thoughts. I could get all indignant over some of this stuff, but it's not worth it. Mostly I just found the card funny (yes, I kept it).

Thoughts?

Jesus, Take the Wheel?

Last Thursday evening, I was driving home with four of my housemates in the car when a man in a pickup truck blew through a stop sign and slammed into me. My car wound up in someone's front yard with the hood completely smashed and one rear taillight destroyed. Despite extensive damage, no one in my car was hurt except for a few bruises, and though an unbuckled 9-year-old in the truck lost a few teeth, it could have been much worse.

Once we had all calmed down and called the police, we were able to laugh a little. As we had started our drive home that night, in the midst of confusion about which way to turn at the first intersection, one of my friends had exclaimed, "Jesus, take the wheel!" We had all half-jokingly repeated the exhortation just minutes before the wreck.

The police came, and a few of our friends with whom we had just had dinner rushed over to check on us and to help take us and the contents of my trunk back to the house. As we surveyed the damage, someone remarked, "God must have really big plans for you guys, because he saved you all tonight."

At those words, I felt like a stone had dropped into my stomach. It's not that I don't believe it. One friend who came to help said he'd never seen a wreck with damage like that—severe damage to the front and the back of the car—where the area containing the passengers had been left intact. If I had been driving a tiny bit faster, my friend in the seat next to me would be seriously injured or maybe even dead. Someone was watching out for us that night.

But I have always struggled to balance gratitude for God's power to heal and protect with the knowledge that not everyone is healed and not every car crash ends the way ours did. In trying to wrap my mind around my friend’s assertion that I am important enough to God's plan for him to save me and my friends, I can't help but ask—what about people I know who have died in similar situations? What about Molly, the college student who worked with my youth group when I was in middle school and was killed in a head-on collision? Did God not have important enough plans for her?

I don’t know that I ever want a definitive answer to these questions. I sometimes feel like in this world we are too dissatisfied with mystery. If we are to serve the God who makes himself known in bread and wine, the God who allows some people to linger a little while on Earth but welcomes those who go home before we are ready to let them go, we have to be able to accept difficult mysteries.

I wonder if the only response we have to miracles and to tragedy alike is love. Whether rejoicing at someone being plucked out of the fire (John Wesley, anyone?) or mourning with someone for whom healing did not take the form they most wanted, we are told, "Let all that you do be done in love" (1 Corinthians 16:14). Maybe understanding is not the most important thing.

Logical Fallacies and Faith

I get into trouble in debates sometimes. I'm perfectly capable of using rational, deductive methods to make my point, but I seem determined to abandon all reason at a certain point in every argument. Sometimes, however, I think faith calls for that. I would never pit faith and reason against each other; they can always work in tandem, and at times when they seem divergent, they seem to me to be occupy such different planes that it's like comparing apples and oranges—or maybe apples and elephants. In any case, I went back and looked up some of those formulaic logical fallacies I learned to avoid in high school philosophy class and found that two of them—appeal to emotion and appeal to tradition—could get me into a lot of trouble with a philosopher but are valuable, maybe even necessary, within Christianity.

The one that gets me most often is the appeal to emotion. I'll follow a logical argument and hold my own for a while, but at a certain point, it all breaks down and I make a flot-out appeal to the other person's heart. I know I can't stop bringing up this issue lately, but the place where thisgets me the most is in the homosexuality debate. I can be convinced by logic of the soundness of church tradition (which will come up later, obviously) and the sanctity of marriage, but in the end I always want to ask—what about Christ's mandate to love your neighbor? What do I do when a dear friend senses a call to ordination and is unable to pursue it—and I don't know whether to support him/her? Although in a strictly logical argument, my comment would be out of line and fallacious, I firmly believe that these questions are vital within Christianity. The way our logic causes us to treat other member of the body of Christ matters a great deal, and so I will not relinquish my insistence on the appeal to emotion even—and especially—when the logic is so sound.

I found it amusing that the appeal to tradition was listed in the fallacies I looked up; I had forgotten about that one. I was recently told by a friend that to resort to tradition (again on the issue of homosexuality) was ultimately a cop-out. I think this is incorrect, and I think this is what the fallacy of appeal to tradition assumes. However, 2,000 years of tradition cannot simply be ignored; we may indeed need to wrestle with it, and sometimes changes should be made—take the ordination of women, for example—but to discount it entirely is foolish and completely against the nature and continuity of the Christian faith over time. In the case of homosexuality, the appeal to emotion and the appeal to tradition both come up a lot and are often at odds one with the other. Both are valuable and need to be considered as more than logical fallacies.

Just to add on to the two fallacies I've discussed, another good one is the Ad Hominem fallacy. This is when an attack is made on the person making an argument, and that attack presumes to make the argument itself invalid. I see this a lot in Christianity. People are often turned off of the church because its members say one thing and do another. Philosophically speaking, hypocritical or inconsistent actions do not discount the credibility of the argument, but in the church, it matters that the words and the actions match up. Certainly no one is going to be able to have a perfect record in any given area; we all struggle with our sexuality in one way or another, so taking the moral high ground should never be the goal or the method of the debate on homosexuality. On one hand, we cannot claim that because Bob is a sinner, Bob cannot tell me not to sin; on the other hand, Bob should be aware of his sin and honest about it, because it does matter.

Just some thoughts about logic and faith I wanted to throw out there...

Thank you, Captain Obvious

I recently had a blog post on Theolog, Christian Century's blog, that was a shorter version of my post on 10/25. One thing I learned through the comments I received (and they came from a variety of people and opinions) is that a lot of people think that it is obvious that (in this example) homosexuality is wrong, or, conversely, that it is obvious that homosexuality is fine. What happens is that you get arguments over full inclusion, ordination and marriage rights among people whose basic assumptions about the rightness or wrongness of homosexuality itself are sharply at odds.

On many issues, though not on the question of homosexuality, I am often one of those people who presumes that certain tenets of the faith are self-evident. A lot of this comes about because I have grown up in the church and am—in some cases, but not all—more familiar with the scriptural and/or theological arguments surrounding an issue than your average person. Once I got to college, I started learning that this tendency towards the obvious is not always helpful. Suddenly I was around intelligent Christians who thought that certain things about faith were perfectly obvious—things about which I thought in polar opposite terms, which I, too, thought were obvious.

One of my friends supports the death penalty from a Christian perspective and claims that its use preserves the right to life. Just hearing this makes my head spin because it seems like such a blatant internal contradiction. However, my friend thinks his reasoning is perfectly sound, and when I counter his point, it's not as if it's the first time he's thought about it from a different perspective—he's heard similar views before, he's thought about it before. I will maintain that his argument is inconsistent, but if I am not careful about how I approach the argument, I shut off all further debate, which seems to me to be ultimately unhelpful.

What this calls for, I think, is a certain level of intellectual generosity—something, I admit, I'm not very good at practicing. Especially on the issue of homosexuality, plenty of people have thought long and hard about it and crafted scripturally based arguments that end up being utterly divergent in many cases. One does not have to relinquish one's own position in order to seek to understand another point of view, and one does not have to agree with the other person, but as Christians I believe it is important that even—and especially—when we hold to seeming extremes of interpretation, we cannot do so without allowing space for the other side to articulate its points, even if we think their ideas ludicrous.

The heart of the Gospel is not that we need to prove ourselves right in opposition to all those who are wrong. I am by no means calling for a wishy-washy universality or relativity of belief (heaven forbid); I am not saying that some things are not ultimately right, because some things are. The Trinity, Christ's death and resurrection, Christ's divinity and humanity—these things, and other dogma outlined in the Nicene Creed, are non-negotiable. However, where it concerns the adiaphora of the Christian faith, we must be able to understand, if not necessarily embrace, other points of view—or risk the fragmentation of Christ's body, the Church.

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?