Regime Change: Religion and Politics in the Ministry of Jesus (Luke 19:28-44; Palm Sunday C; March 24, 2013)

Regime Change: Religion and Politics in the Ministry of Jesus

Luke 19:28-44
Palm Sunday C
March 24, 2013

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, IA

Something very strange is going on in the gospel reading, the story of Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem that is the story behind Palm Sunday.  I know this story.  I’ve read or heard this story in its various versions at least fifty times.  I’ve led and followed in Palm Sunday processionals.  I know this story.  So do you.  It still seems strange to me.

It seems strange because all the signs seem to say that Jesus’ purpose in going into Jerusalem was to stage a coup d’état.  Jesus goes to Jerusalem to topple the powers that be and overthrow the government.  The Jesus of this story is militant, political.

Here are the things that point me in that direction.  First, there is the matter of arranging for the use of a donkey, the colt.  The way the story unfolds makes it clear that Jesus has arranged for this.  There is some sort of conspiracy that doesn’t involve the usual inner circle of Jesus’ disciples.  The donkey itself points us toward Zechariah and its description of the Messiah: 

Rejoice greatly, O daughter Zion!
Shout aloud, O daughter Jerusalem!
Lo, your king comes to you;
triumphant and victorious is he,
humble and riding on a donkey,
on a colt, the foal of a donkey.

The crowd picked up on all this and gave Jesus a hero’s welcome.  They spread their cloaks and tree branches on the ground for his donkey to walk on.  They shouted “Hosanna,” a word from Psalm 118, a processional psalm that celebrates the unexpected victory of God and the crowd that makes its way to the Temple with branches.

Jesus has surrounded himself with political images drawn from the Jewish memory of independence and the rule of David the king.  This flies in the face of the political reality that Jerusalem is living under the boot heel of its Roman conquerors with the help of their local Jewish collaborators, mostly of noble and priestly families.  Some of the Pharisees, who otherwise might well have sympathized with the crowd’s longing for liberation, try to get Jesus to put a lid on the celebration, but Jesus will not do that.  The Jesus of this story is militant, and thoroughly political. 

Is this Jesus crazy, foolish, reckless, or all three?  After all, it’s not as if staging a coup is rocket science.  If you’re going to overthrow the government there are several things that need to be done.  The government is always better equipped and better organized.  Therefore the element of surprise is absolutely essential—the coup must be so rapid that it’s over before the government realizes it’s begun.  The government leaders have to be captured and its armed forces and police either rendered helpless or brought over to your side.  These things must be done at the same time.

One very important rule for a successful coup is that you must wait until you have things under at least some control before you have your inaugural parade.  And this Jesus failed to do.  But Jesus, by styling himself a king and by entering into Jerusalem in triumph, had declared independence from the power arrangements in Jerusalem and in Roman Palestine in general.  He had spit in the faces of the powers that be.  If he didn’t intend a coup, then he should count on an immediate and violent response.  If he was not prepared to counter that response, then what was he doing?

You see, no one understood violence better than the Romans.  They knew how to use it ruthlessly and effectively.  More than that, they were cunning enough to know how to avoid using violence.  They brought the local elites over to their side with lavish rewards for cooperation.  The elites in their turn spun wide webs of patronage so that the common people who depended on them were reluctant to openly oppose them. 

But within this velvet glove there was the legendary iron fist of Roman military might.  In a matter of days after any unrest, the Romans could put a legion of boots on the ground anywhere in the empire, in a month three legions, in three months another three.  A violent rebellion against Rome was doomed from the start.  Using violence against the Romans was useless, worse than useless.  The only way to beat the Romans at their game was to be more cunning and more violent and more ruthless than they were.

Even if that were possible for Jesus and his followers, it wouldn’t have changed anything.  Overthrowing the government doesn’t change anything except for putting a different group of thugs in charge.  If you’re not one of the thugs, before and after look the same.

If you want to change things, I mean really change things, you need more than a coup.  What you need is a revolution.  To get a revolution you need to get at the roots of the way things are.  You need to call into question the deepest assumptions about power and how it works.  You need to get past the lies that regimes tell themselves and their citizens in order to keep doing business as usual.  

You need to show what the regime really is, stripped bare of its pretenses.  You need to show that its version of justice is not just at all, just brutality dressed up to look civilized.  You need to show that there is nothing natural or divinely-ordered or inevitable at all about the regime, that like other human power arrangements, its power is the result of ambition and ruthlessness and luck.

One of the best ways to do all of that is parody, to hold up the regime to ridicule.  Yes, it looks as though Jesus is staging a coup d’état, but unless Jesus was a whole more naïve than I think he was, this entry into Jerusalem is starting to look more like parody in the form of very daring and very dangerous street theater.  

The Roman conquerors come into Jerusalem on the backs of war horses, the commander with polished armor and brilliant crimson capes.  At their backs are legions of 4,500 men each, carrying their javelins.  When Jesus entered with his “triumph” he was dressed in peasant garb, riding on a donkey.  A few dozen men, women and children—a few hundred at most—carried their branches along the way and they shouted a welcome to the “king.”  With his little parade, Jesus has made mockery of the trappings of Roman power.  

Jesus has the powers that be off-balance and confused.  They knew how to deal with a rebel commander at the head of a band of would-be liberators.  Street theatrics were something else.  If anything, though, the street theater is a greater threat to their rule.  Soon enough they will recover.  Then they will kill him, callously and brutally.  When they do that, though, the Empire will be revealed as a collection of thugs in fancy clothes and pretty uniforms.  The Empire’s justice will be revealed to be no more than state-sanctioned violence to protect its power.  With the moral shabbiness of the Empire on display, a revolution would be launched, or at very least, it would become possible.

I wish I could say that the story ended well.  We in the Jesus movement don’t always get it right.  Too often we in the church have ranged ourselves with the Empire rather than against it.  Too often we have preferred the comfort of palaces and nice clothes to the place that Jesus has appointed for us with the outcast and the poor.  More often than that we have turned his message and mission into something harmless and bland.  We have imagined that there can be any salvation that it is not as political and economic and social a salvation as it is a spiritual and moral one.

Some of us have stumbled our way into faithfulness, almost by accident.  Oscar Arnulfo Romero, archbishop of San Salvador, was one of them.  Monseñor Romero, as Salvadorans call him today, was an ordinary Catholic priest of upper class roots.  He was hard-working and socially and politically conservative.  When he was elevated to the episcopacy, everyone assumed that he would be just another in a long series of archbishops who looked after the interests of the upper classes and reminded the poor of their place in the scheme of things and so helped the regime keep order.

But that isn’t what happened.  Other priests were working among the poor and naming their poverty as an injustice of the economic and political system in El Salvador rather than something the poor deserved.  The government for its part was responding by harassing and even assassinating these prophetic priests.  

Monseñor Romero, supposedly a safely conservative bishop, was transformed and radicalized by his own work with the poor of San Salvador and the Salvadoran countryside and by the government’s brutality, brutality that, I am ashamed to admit, was paid for by us in the form of military aid. 

Monseñor Romero encouraged the poor and called on the government to care for the people instead of making war on them.  He stripped away the government’s legitimacy.  He preached a God who loved the poor and stood with them.  And in his practice of ministry, he demonstrated what that love and that solidarity looked like in practice.  He was therefore a threat to the regime.

Two weeks before Romero’s assassination he told a reporter from Guatemala, “If they kill me, I shall arise in the Salvadoran people.”  He was shot to death while celebrating Mass thirty-three years ago today.  He had preached that morning on the saying from John’s gospel, “Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.”  

Monseñor Romero knew that there is no salvation that is not political and economic and social as well as moral and spiritual.  He took the pattern of Jesus’ life as his own.  He was not afraid to stand up to oppose the hatred and violence of the Empire with God’s love.  I can tell you that Monseñor Romero is alive today, risen indeed in the Salvadoran people, just as he said he would be.  

So we’re going to take a little walk after Sunday School this morning.  We’ll have some tacos and take a little walk and wave some palm branches and sing some songs and pray some prayers.  It’s only a gesture, but it’s a gesture in the direction of standing with God’s love against the violence and hatred of the Empire.  Maybe our own Palm Sunday triumph in celebration of Monseñor Romero’s triumph will give us just a little of his spirit and his love.  I hope so.

Jesus went to Jerusalem to start a revolution.  He succeeded.  It isn’t over yet.

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The Myth of Redemptive Violence (Micah 4:1-4; Lent 5C; March 17, 2013)

The Myth of Redemptive Violence

Micah 4:1-4
Lent 5C
March 17, 2013

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, IA

Christians have always had a troubled relationship with violence.  On the one hand we know the words of Jesus, “All who use the sword will die by the sword” and “[You] must not oppose those who want to hurt you.  If people slap you on your right cheek, you must turn the left cheek to them as well.”[1]

On the other hand we imagine that Jesus’ commands and expectations are more than a little, well, unrealistic.  I say imagine because there are not many of us who fully embody Jesus’ way.  Even those of us who refuse to use violence to protect ourselves can still be accused of hiding behind others—the men and women of the armed forces and law enforcement—who are willing to use violence on our behalf.  So what do we do with Jesus’ words, we who are pledged to live as his followers?

I find myself simultaneously on both sides of the question.  I know wars are fought for less than compelling reasons that have more to do with the political ambitions of our political leaders than our actual needs for self-defense.  I know that even when there are or seem to be compelling reasons strategic and tactical blunders on the part of our military leaders will mean needless injury and death.  There is no such thing as a war in which ambition and stupidity have not played a part.

On the other hand, I served in the Army during the Cold War as part of the front-line defenses of Western Europe.  I was a chaplain assistant and that meant that, unlike the chaplains themselves some of whom were conscientious objectors and none of whom were permitted to carry firearms, I had to be willing both to bear arms and to use them to defend the chaplain I was assigned to.  While I am grateful that my willingness was never tested, I am not ashamed of my service.  I was glad when the Department of Defense finally recognized, long after my enlistment was finished, that the Cold War, too, was a real campaign.  It was not the same as a hot war, but it was real nonetheless.  I am glad that my effort—such as it was—is recognized

So let nothing that I say be heard as disrespecting the men and women who have gone into dangerous places in uniform.  They have suffered great losses.  Some of them have been killed.  Too many have suffered awful damage to their bodies, injuries that would have been fatal in any earlier war but are now survivable.  But even those who have returned and look like they are in one piece carry injuries to their hearts and souls that most will get past but none will get over.  Some of the soul sick will not get past their injuries and will take their own lives.  Others will medicate themselves with alcohol or drugs or the adrenaline of high risk behavior until they can no longer handle their daily lives.  All who put on uniforms have risked these things and suffered whatever lot has fallen to them because we asked them to.  We owe them more than we can repay and I honor them. 

It is not a lack of respect that leads me to raise this subject among us.  Violence and especially the institutionalized violence of war are issues that are too important for us not to consider them carefully.  When, if ever, is violence acceptable?  When, if ever, is war acceptable?  Can a war ever be good?  Under what circumstances?

These are questions of ethics, of right and wrong, and of good and evil.  They are important matters, but our power to take them up is limited because our minds and hearts are in thrall. 

We look out and see a world that is shot through with violence, war and the threat of war.  This seems almost normal to us.  Only by straining can we imagine a different world.  Only with the greatest effort can we see the dim outlines of a world in which war and violence have no place.  The measure of our slavery to a violent worldview is that peace seems abnormal.

There is only one thing that has that kind of power over what we see and what we think and what we can imagine and that thing is myth.  A myth is a story.  We usually think that a myth is a false story, but that’s not necessarily the case, although most myths are false.  A myth is a particular kind of story.  A myth is a story we tell ourselves to explain ourselves to ourselves.  A myth is a story we tell ourselves to explain ourselves to ourselves.  No matter who the characters of a myth are, the subject matter is us.  No matter who might be in the audience when a myth is told, it is told for our benefit.  No matter who has asked the question, myth is intended to speak to our own fears and doubts.  A myth is a story we tell ourselves to explain ourselves to ourselves.

All stories have a certain power.  While we are inside them we are in another world, a world that may be like our own or strikingly different.  While we are inside a story our thoughts, our feelings, and our intentions are subtly shaped to more easily fit with the world of the story.  Stories have a certain power to shape us.  Myths, since they are about us to start with, have even more power to shape us.  Does this sound like magic?  It should, since the word “spell” is simply the Anglo-Saxon word for “story.”  

Walter Wink has identified and named the myth that keeps our hearts and minds in thrall to violence.  It is, he offers, the Myth of Redemptive Violence.  In its simplest form the Myth of Redemptive Violence is the plot that underlies Saturday morning cartoons:

“…an indestructible hero is doggedly opposed to an irreformable and equally indestructible villain. Nothing can kill the hero, though for the first three quarters of the comic strip or TV show he (rarely she) suffers grievously and appears hopelessly doomed, until miraculously, the hero breaks free, vanquishes the villain, and restores order until the next episode. Nothing finally destroys the villain or prevents his or her reappearance, whether the villain is soundly trounced, jailed, drowned, or shot into outer space.”[2]

The Myth of Redemptive Violence provides the basic plot of many creation stories, all action movies, every Western movie I have ever seen, much of our foreign policy and even some forms of our religion. 

In the Babylonian creation myth we have one of the earliest known forms of the Myth of Redemptive Violence.  The first divine couple, Apsu and Tiamat, give birth to the gods.  The young gods make so much noise that their parents plan to kill them so they can get some sleep.  (It’s not hard to see where that idea may have come from!)  The young gods discover the plan and kill Apsu. Tiamat, the dragon mother of chaos, vows revenge. 

The youngest of the gods, Marduk, offers to kill Tiamat if he can rule over the other gods.  Marduk catches Tiamat and kills her.  From the front of her corpse he creates the earth and from her back he creates the heavens.  Out of the blood of one of the gods who fought on Tiamat’s side, Marduk creates human beings to be the servants of the gods.

At its base the Myth of Redemptive Violence offers a simple understanding of the world and of our place in it: Creation itself is an act of violence.  Our life comes from the violent slaughter of one god by another.  We exist to serve this same violent god.  Order is established over chaos by violence.  Whenever and wherever there is chaos the myth tells us that violence will restore order.

We no longer believe in Apsu and Tiamat.  We no longer worship Marduk, at least not by that name.  But the myth survives and it is everywhere.  It is impossible to overestimate the power of this simple plot line.  Wink calls it, “…the simplest, laziest, most exciting, uncomplicated, irrational, and primitive depiction of evil the world has even known.”[3] 

But the Myth of Redemptive Violence is not the only story in town.  There is another.  In the creation myths of the descendants of Abraham we hear the story of a God who creates, not by violent combat with his grandmother, but by speaking the world into being with all its forms of life, us included, a God who fashions us, not out of the blood of a rival god, but out of the good earth, the same earth that is the root of all life, a God who enters into covenant with us not to be served but that we might serve each other.

This God has a vision of life for us and how our world might be and will be:

God will judge between the nations

and settle disputes of mighty nations

which are far away. 

They will beat their swords into iron plows

and their spears into pruning tools. 

Nation will not take up sword against nation;

they will no longer learn how to make war. 

All will sit underneath their own grapevines,

under their own fig trees. 

There will be no one to terrify them;

for the mouth of the Lord of heavenly forces has spoken.[4]

If we spend the kind of time and energy and love on this story that we have spent on the Myth of Redemptive Violence, the grip of that myth will loosen.  Turning our backs on it we will be able, in the words of our baptismal promises, to “renounce the spiritual forces of wickedness, reject the evil powers of this world… [and] accept the freedom and power God gives [us] to resist evil, injustice, and oppression in whatever forms they present themselves.”[5]

If we allow God’s dream for us and for all who share this planet to soak through our skin, to sink into our bones, to become the plotline for the stories we tell, then I am convinced that we will begin to see that Jesus’ words, “All who use the sword will die by the sword,” are a curse under which we no longer need to live.  We will begin to see that war and violence only make any kind of sense in a world fashioned by the Myth of Redemptive Violence, a myth that we no longer have to accept or live within.  And then we shall be free.

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 444 Castro Street, Suite 900, Mountain View, California, 94041, USA.

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[1] Mt 5:39, CEB.

[2] Walter Wink, “Facing the Myth of Redemptive Violence,” Facing the Myth of Redemptive Violence, May 21, 2012. http://www.ekklesia.co.uk/content/cpt/article_060823wink.shtml.  Accessed March 15, 2013.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Micah 4:3-4.

[5] The United Methodist Hymnal (Nashville, TN: The United Methodist Publishing House, 1989) 34.

How Straight Is the Road That Leads to Life? (Acts 10:1-35, 44-48; Lent 4C; March 10, 2013)

How Straight Is the Road That Leads to Life?

Acts 10:1-35, 44-48
Lent 4C
March 10, 2013

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, IA

Long ago in a faraway kingdom, well, to be more precise, twenty-nine years ago in Des Moines those of us who were going to be ordained at the 1984 Annual Conference met with Bishop Wayne Clymer to get acquainted.  He congratulated us on our journey to that point and gave us a chance to ask him questions.  The 1984 General Conference was about to begin and someone asked him what he thought would be the most important issues.  He replied, “Well, we’ll fight about sex.  That’s what General Conference is for: We get together every four years and fight about sex.” He went on to list a few other topics he thought would be raised.  I don’t remember them.

The United Methodist Church has been fighting about sex ever since it was formed in 1968.  In 1968 the very first words to express the new denomination’s rejection of homosexuality were inserted into the “Social Principles” of the Book of Discipline, declaring “the practice of homosexuality is incompatible with Christian teaching.”  We’ve been fighting about it ever since.

We’ve written our condemnations into various parts of the Book of Discipline, our governing document.  We’ve made sure that “self-avowed, practicing homosexuals” are excluded from ordained ministry.  We’ve made sure that denominational funds will not be used to “promote homosexuality.”  The various provisions have been tested in our church courts, sometimes with rather bizarre results. 

In the meantime those who are convinced that the wideness of God’s love includes gays and lesbians and who are convinced that their relationships, like straight marriages, can be signs and means of God’s grace for them and their communities, have sought in various ways to remove or soften the denomination’s bans.  Most of the time the conversation has been difficult but respectful.

At last year’s General Conference in Florida, things took a turn.  Perhaps under the influence of the “anger-tainment” industry, the conversation has become uncivil.  Advocates for greater inclusion of gays and lesbians in the life of the church were heckled on the floor of the General Conference and verbally abused in committee meetings.  They couldn’t even pass a resolution that acknowledged that they disagreed about the issue.

On both sides of the issue, delegates came away wondering whether the “united” in United Methodist Church hadn’t become a bit of wishful thinking.  As I watched from a safe distance of fourteen hundred miles or so, the General Conference looked like a couple whose relationship has gotten so bad that no matter what either of them said it only made matters worse, a couple who badly needed a third-party to help them through this.  But there is no third-party for them and so they go on wounding each other. 

My own views have had a long evolution.  I started out with a whole fistful of misunderstandings and prejudices.  As a young Christian I took a legalistic stand that completely rejected gays and lesbians.  I thought that stand rested comfortably on a biblical foundation.

Experience, a great deal of study of the biblical texts, and a changing understanding of the nature of the authority of the Bible have led me step by step to another place.  My journey is not unlike Peter’s journey in our text for this morning, although for him and me the issues are different.  And yet not so different, either.

The story begins in Caesarea, a pagan city with a large Jewish population.  As in most cities of this sort the Jewish community had its pagan admirers who hung around its edges, attracted by the strong ethical content of the Jewish religion.  One such was named Cornelius, a centurion (probably retired) who had settled in Caesarea.  He is described in rather glowing terms as devout, generous and protective of the Jewish community.

He was praying and had a vision in which an angel told him that his prayers had been answered and that he was to send for Simon Peter who was staying at the home of Simon Tanner in Joppa.  So Cornelius sent some of his people who drew near to Joppa on the next day.

The detail that Peter’s host is a tanner should alert us.  The carcass of an animal was unclean in Jewish practice.  As a tanner he was engaged in daily contact with the untreated skins of animals that rendered him unclean.  Being unclean was not a catastrophe because it was something that could be fixed.  There were ritual actions that restored an unclean person to cleanness so that they could be around other people, but these were a hassle.  And the presence of a tannery rendered Simon Tanner’s home an ambiguous place, possibly clean, possibly unclean.  Simon Peter is a guest there in that ambiguous place where the boundaries between the clean and the unclean are a little fuzzy.  We are alerted that the story that follows will have something to do with cleanness and uncleanness.

Well, Peter is praying as Cornelius’ messengers are getting closer.  He’s up on rooftop at noon and he’s hungry.  He has a vision in which a sheet is lowered from heaven.  It contains all manner of animals that unclean, animals that may not be eaten.He hears a voice that tells him to kill and eat whatever he wants.  He protests that these animals are unclean and he has never eaten an unclean animal.  The voice replies, “Never consider unclean what God has made pure.”  And then the sheet was taken up into heaven.

Just to make sure that Peter really gets it, this whole thing happens three times.  Then Peter is told that there are people looking for him and that he is to go with them without asking any questions.

And sure enough, there were three men newly arrived from Caesarea asking for Peter.  They explain their mission to him and he invites them into the house to stay overnight.  These are gentiles, mind you, non-Jews, whom Peter invites into this Jewish household.  So here’s some more stuff about cleanness and uncleanness, some more fuzzing of the boundaries.

The next day Peter went with the men and took some Jewish followers of Jesus, so now we have a mixed caravan of gentiles and Jews.  Fuzzy.

When Peter and his traveling companions arrive in Caesarea at the house of Cornelius they are met by Cornelius.  This meeting took place outside, not in Cornelius’ house.  Cornelius knew the rules.  He was a gentile.  Peter was a Jew.  Jews were not allowed to come inside the house of gentile.  Cornelius did not expect Peter to come inside his house and met him outside.

Cornelius knelt in front of Peter to honor him, but Peter made Cornelius get up and told him, “Like you, I’m just a human.”  Then Peter went with Cornelius into Cornelius’ house.  This was unthinkable, or it would have been unthinkable if the story hadn’t been preparing us to think it.  Peter said to the crowd, “You all realize that it is forbidden for a Jew to associate or visit with outsiders.  However, God has shown me that I should never call a person unclean or impure.”   

Peter continued to speak to the gathered crowd.  While he was speaking the Holy Spirit fell on the crowd in the same way that it had on the disciples gathered at Pentecost to show that these people, too, had God’s approval.  On the strength of this proof Peter gave orders for them to be baptized. 

This is a new thing in the life of Jesus’ followers: a baptized gentile.  Peter can get in a lot of trouble for doing this.  It’s against the Book of Discipline.  He will indeed have to give an account of his actions to the Board of Ordained Ministry in Jerusalem. 

This story is usually called the Conversion of Cornelius, but some years ago I noticed that Cornelius is never really converted.  He begins the story as one who loves God.  He ends the story as one who loves God.  That’s not really a conversion.

It’s Peter who is converted in this story.  His religious identity has been—at least in part—wrapped up in having firm boundaries between the clean and the unclean.  Eat the right foods, don’t eat the wrong foods.  Associate with Jews, not gentiles.  But all of that has been blown away in this story.  Peter the observant Jew travels with gentiles, accepts an invitation into a gentile home, and orders the baptism of non-Jews into what had been up to that point a Jewish sect.

After a few days Peter went home and tried to explain all this to his Jewish friends.  He was still a Jew.  Cornelius was still a gentile.  I don’t suspect that Peter started eating bacon cheeseburgers, any more than Cornelius started keeping a kosher kitchen.  These things simply faded into insignificance against the larger reality that Peter and Cornelius were now both baptized followers of Jesus. 

We cannot underestimate the fatefulness of this conversion.  Peter chose for himself, of course, but he also deflected the Jesus movement in an entirely new direction.  The Jesus movement had been a Jewish movement.  But now there were baptized gentiles in the movement.  It wasn’t that gentiles were invited to join this Jewish movement as long as they acted like Jews.  This was no longer a Jewish movement, but a movement of both Jews and gentiles.  The character of the Jesus movement was changed forever.  The church—their church, our church—would never be the same again.

We take that for granted.  Even more than African Americans who sit in any seat on the bus that’s open, we don’t have a second thought about the fact that we are here and none of us had to become Jews first.  God accepted us just as we were and as we are.

The issues have been different for Peter and me, but we’ve walked much the same path.  It wasn’t quite as dramatic for me, but in a number of insights I too have become convinced that I should “Never consider unclean what God has made pure.”  Over the years I have come to believe that the exclusive, committed and permanent relationships of gays and lesbians are means of grace for them and for our community no less than my exclusive, committed and permanent relationship with Carol.  I believe that the church should extend the outward signs of God’s blessing as an acknowledgement that the inner reality of God’s blessing is not withheld simply because a couple is gay or lesbian.  These are my convictions, arrived at by a long journey, nearly as long as the journey that Peter made from Joppa to Caesarea.

I am old enough and experienced enough that I no longer fall for what I call the Preacher’s Fallacy.  The Preacher’s Fallacy is to expect that I can reproduce in you in fifteen minutes the journey it has taken me thirty years to complete.  In our heads we preachers imagine we are that good, but reality is quite different. 

You have your own journey as I have mine.  None of us is finished.  None of us has yet become all that God longs and dreams for us to be.  But we are all of us begun.  We are fellow-travelers in this caravan we call First United Methodist Church.  No matter what our experiences have been, we support each other by hearing and honoring each others’ stories.  I ask that all of us try with all that is in us to stay open to each other and to the stories that we bear.  With God’s grace I know that we can.

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 444 Castro Street, Suite 900, Mountain View, California, 94041, USA.