December 31, 2007 by Pastor Dan.

Gracious Father, we pray for your holy catholic church. Fill it with all truth and peace. Where it is corrupt, purify it; where it is in error, direct it; where in anything it is amiss, reform it; where it is right, strengthen it; where it is in need, provide for it; where it is divided, reunite it, for the sake of Jesus Christ, your Son our Lord. —Evangelical Lutheran Worship, 2006

Let us pray for the holy Catholic Church of Christ throughout the world; for its unity in witness and service, for all Bishops and other Ministers and the people whom they serve, for all Christians in this community, … that God will confirm his church in faith, increase it in love, and preserve it in peace. — Authorized Services for the Book of Common Prayer (The Episcopal Church), 1973

O God our Father, we pray for thy Church, which is set today amid the perplexities of a changing order, and face to face with new tasks…. Bid her cease from seeking her own life, lest she lose it. —The Methodist Hymnal, 1964, 1966

“Neither pray I for these alone, but for them which shall also believe on me through their word; that they all may be one; as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be one in us: that the world may believe that thou hast sent me.” — Jesus’ High Priestly Payer, John 17:20–21, King James Version, 1611

New Year’s Eve seems as good a time as any to pray for the whole church of Christ on earth. We pray every week for the whole Church in our parish.

I’ve been reading the comments of Nicholas Lash, a Roman Catholic theologian and respected professor at Cambridge University in England, in the December 11 issue of The Christian Century, who was asked in an interview about the state of ecumenism today. He made a few comments but also remarked that generalities about ecumenism are not that helpful. “At least we’re not at war with one another anymore,” he said.

In some ways there is a condition of detente, but in others, there is a constant, willful eroding of one constituency by another. I have a great deal of respect for the people and clergy of groups I have worked with and known — mostly mainstream Christians. But I remain deeply suspicious of “non-denominational” outfits – whether the independent mega-churches or the “ministries” that sell youth materials, send musicians around, or want to come speak and ask for a free-will offering. What I’ve come to see is that “non-denominational” does not mean uber-open minded (as if they have gotten past the squabbling which divided Christians in the past). It means they have no accountability to anyone except their immediate machinery. For some clergy, it means no accountability to anybody except the one congregation they’ve put together by grand-standing or upstaging others.

Yet in some important ways there is an ecumenical open-mindedness which now characterizes many church bodies. I don’t include the patriarch of Rome (Lash’s term) who publicly stated in 2007 that the rest of us are not really the “church” as he understands the church. There are many small, conservative bodies also who won’t have anything to do with those of us whoa re liberally disposed.

There are issue-oriented movements which supercede the denominational divisions with some degree of success, such as the Institute for Welcoming Resources that unites the individual movements within denominations to work for the full inclusion of LGBT people in the Christian church. Lutherans Concerned modeled its Reconciling in Christ program on the Methodist program of the same name more than 25 years ago. Now every major and even marginal denomination has some kind of entity working independently of its own body and with some kind of loose cooperation with other programs: the Methodist’s Affirmation and Reconciling Ministries Network, the Episcopal Church’s Integrity and the Alliance of Lesbian and Gay Anglicans, More Light Presbyterians, Orthodox Axios, Brethren Mennonite Council for Lesbian and Gay Concerns, American Baptists Concerned for Sexual Minorities; the Gay, Lesbian and Affirming Disciples Alliance, the Moravian Sanctuary, Seventh-day Adventist Kinship International, Quaker Friends for Lesbian and Gay Concerns. This is not an exhaustive list; there are more at www.godmademegay.com.

Perhaps I am naive to go on believing that these groups, although narrowly focusing on the single issue of including sexual minorities in the Body of Christ, are modeling the ecumenical and universal Spirit by patiently workin today on today’s issues, rather than hunkering down around issues from two, three, five or ten centuries ago.

Yet we painfully acknowledge that what divides the church is most often not doctrine but human nature. At best, we are all anxious to be the church but each of us lunges and pulls in opposing directions with enthusiasm energy that tears at our unity. Our cultural and political differences constantly interfere with our best intentions to reform the church to be more welcoming, compassionate, wise and generous. At worst, each of us is self-important and the pawn of pious power lust, anxious to protect our own fiefdoms and crown ourselves as God’s vicars on earth.

True prayer for the church universal must begin with a prayer of humility and repentance, and the expectation that none of us has the will nor the wisdom to unite the whole Church. The French Jesuit and visionary philosopher Fr. Pierre Tielhard de Chardin once ventured that the closer all of us come to Christ the closer we would be to one another. Those who pray a real ecumenical prayer must acknowledge “Thy will be done,” and then get out of the way.

—Pastor Dan Hooper, Los Angeles

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December 28, 2007 by Pastor Dan.

Conventional wisdom has long repeated that suicides are higher around the holidays. Apparently, we’ve always believed, some people become hopelessly depressed at a time of year when everybody else is enjoying festivities and making merry. Imagine how you feel when you are left out of something which everybody else is part of. It is easy to get depressed.

Well, actually I first read this in the LA Times December 22, but confirmed it at Snopes.com’s urban legends department: the suicide spike is not true. The Centre for Suicide Prevention in Canada says the same thing, and notes that suicides actually drop right around the holidays. The reason?

• The gathering of friends and relatives surround and protect vulnerable people;
• Christmas celebrations may evoke positive memories, hopefulness, and a renewed outlook for those in distress.
• Community resources: there is an increased awareness of community resources and safety-nets available during the holidays, including food banks, shelters and outreach programs.

Those factors of course reconfirm for me the vital importance of caring people continuing to care for others – to extend the good will of Christmas to the population which may not be regular “churchy people.” If the selflessness of the holiday gift-giving has any real benefit, it can remind us that our generosity makes a difference. (The tough part is that our generosity has to be generosity of spirit, not generosity of stuff. When we give our own hearts to people, we ease the depression, stress and pain which others may be experiencing.)

There is no mistaking that the Christmas holiday season adds more stress to people’s lives. Then on top of that, employers often wait to the end of the year to lay off or downsize. Losing your job in December can be a serious bummer. The worst holiday stress, I think, is financial. We all tend to over-extend our financial resources: run the credit cards up, spend all the cash, buy things which promise us “no payments ‘til February 2009!” etc.

Today we remember the “Holy Innocents, Martyrs”, the infant boys of Bethlehem who were slaughtered by King Herod in his attempt to exterminate the baby Jesus (Matthew 2:13–23). A woman called my office the week before Christmas and said that she didn’t have a Christmas tree for her children. She was wondering if I could help her out. I think I may have seemed a little “short” with her. I said something like, “We are a church, not a Christmas tree lot.” In truth (I told her) we have food for the hungry, and I could help her out with groceries, but we do not have the resources to make everybody’s Christmas merry and bright–especially financially.

Over the years I have been asked to pay someone’s natural gas or electric bill, pay their rent, etc. What I really wanted to say is, “We are a church, not an ATM machine.” Yes, some of these are definite scams, because they will tell me complicated stories that can only be solved with cash. In one case, I offered to come to the manager’s office and give the manager some rent money, but the needy person on the phone simply hung up on me when I didn’t offer to drive to the motel in which he was living, 25 miles away, to give him cash.

If cynicism is a form of spiritual suicide, maybe the rate does go up in December!

Christmas can remind us not only to be generous, as individuals, but also to lower our expectations. As it turned out, the Delancy Street Christmas tree lot in our neighborhood was giving away Christmas trees by December 23. I had suggested to this mother over the phone that she check with the tree lots; I wonder if she did. The expectation she needed to lower is that, if she does not have the resources, someone should give them to her so she can have everything she desires just like everybody else. With patience, however, she could do what our grandparents’ generation did: put up a Christmas tree on Christmas Eve. One year when we didn’t have a lot of money, we got a tree out of the dumpster on Christmas Eve. It was very pretty when it was decorated.

I have lowered my expectations, too, that people will be as generous as I wish they would be. And even I have my limits. My church is asked for far more financial assistance than we could ever provide. Too often I have given help out of my own wallet, which makes me less and less generous over time. If the churches were full (as we think we remember of earlier generations—is that another urban myth that needs debunking?), and the needy were less needy, perhaps there would be more resources to distribute. But now I realize if the churches are just faithful, it will be enough, if that faithfulness is really a generosity of spirit, not of stuff. Where Christmas consumerism traps us is in supposing that we should concentrate on money, spending, and providing a material Christmas for the needy. My heart goes out to those whose expectations are tied to that. Hopefully, as all resources become more scarce, our society can re-think what consumerism has done to us, and has robbed from our spirits.

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December 25, 2007 by Pastor Dan.

Yesterday it was our privilege, for the fourth year, to carry gifts from our church to the Jeff Griffith Youth Center – gift cards for all 24 young people in the residential program. These kids are tying to get their lives, and life skills, together having come out of abusive homes, or having been thrown out of their homes because of the sexual orientation. The residential counselor, Mr. Joey Aguilar, was quite kind and happy to have something else to put under the tree this morning for these young people. (And they literally do provide a Christmas morning gift-giving experience for all of them!)

As Mr. Aguilar explained some of the circumstances these kids come through before finding the Center’s residential program, I listened attentively to what seems like matter-of-fact circumstances of growing up lesbian or gay –or transgender (about 25 % of those currently in the program). But inside, I was thinking these kids must have been living a horror story: sleeping under bridges or on the street; being abused by street life after having run away from an abusive home life.

What has happened to “home life”? And after all the conservative trumpeting of “family values” for several decades (which not incidentally has made people like Dr. James Dobson and his family values industry quite wealthy), America’s family values are just getting worse.

It further surprised and troubled me when Aguilar told us not only that kids are still being kicked out by the parents, when they come out as gay or are found out, but that not all these kids in the program are refugees from some hyper-conservative “red state” environment. Kids in Los Angeles are still rejected by their own mothers and fathers simply for telling the truth about their sexual orientation. Have I been naive to assume that people here, if not everywhere, have been sufficiently exposed to the truth about sexual orientation so that they would be much more understanding and accepting if their own child turns out to be lesbian or gay.

Or transsexual. Several years ago I saw an amazing documentary titled “Just Call Me Kade” (synopsis; review) about a “typical” suburban family from Tucson, Arizona whose darling little girl, from the age of 3 or 4, was certain that she is a boy not a girl. By the time she reached puberty and began menstruating, she was depressed and almost suicidal. This film compassionately told the story of a very understanding nuclear family that did not reject their child, but helped him transition (with hormonal treatments, etc.) to self-identify as an adolescent boy.

It being Christmas, I cannot but think too of the “Holy Family” — an entire family that was persecuted and had to become refugees in order to protect the Child. Obviously, the murderous King Herod did not care about family values.

Thinking back, I guess I had a perfect childhood in a loving home where I was not abused or neglected, but loved and encouraged. At the time, it didn’t seem perfect, of course, and I was probably as rebellious as an emerging gay boy could have been in the 1950s and 60s. I developed my life skills like everybody in those days. Sitting around the kitchen table, in long talks about everything, I learned about compromise and getting along, love, effort, money, jobs, and dreams for the future — all the ordinary stuff (to me) that seem so elusive to these young people at the Jeff Griffith Youth Center.

If American homes had any real “family values” then parents would value their kids enough to et their lives, and their family life, together to provide for and protect and nurture the kids. They would buck up and find out how to react and to treat and care for a teenager is questioning, or who comes as gay or lesbian or transgender. It is so sad that the big shot public figures who tout family values (Dobson claims that Focus on the Family is “Nurturing and defending families worldwide”!) have done absolutely nothing to equip American parents to lovingly deal with their kids coming out. While Dobson enriches himself, it is ordinary people like the Parents and Friends (PFLAG) who have done the heavy lifting for decades. They have taught countless families what family values really are.  By supporting the Center’s youth program, our church is really supporting family values that were missing at home for these kids.

This is also a plug for the excellent documentary film out this fall, “For the Bible Tells Me So” which tells the story of five families trying to cope with a gay or lesbian child. The film had a limited engagement in West Los Angeles in November, but will be shown at St. Matthew’s Church of Burbank/Glendale on Sunday January 27, 6:00 p.m. There is more information here.

— Pastor Dan Hooper, Los Angeles

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December 22, 2007 by Pastor Dan.

I received an e-mail yesterday about the death of a retired pastor, 89 years old. The news brought up mixed feelings in me.

As a pastor of the church I should feel some sadness for this man, who lived a long life and remained faithful to our church. I don’t know all the facts of where he served in his long career, but I only know of the one brief time—a few months—when he served as the interim pastor of a congregation I was attending.

This was in the 1980s while I served in a specialized ministry of the church.  I wasn’t officially “out” although my immediate superiors knew that I was gay and had been living in a relationship of more than 6 or 7 years. But officially I was still quite closeted.

But this particular pastor, in his 60s at the time “put two and two together” and realized that I was living with another man.  Now, perhaps in the span of his career he counseled and prayed and struggled with people who faced very significant life issues.  Perhaps he was quite supportive and loving with them.  But he never spoke to me about being gay, or how I could justify serving the church as an ordained pastor while living in a semi-secretive relationship with another man.  He never asked me about my faith, my pilgrimage in life, my sense of call, my understanding of the Bible, or any other significant life issue.

Yet I came to find out that, behind my back, he was spreading the news that I was homosexual.

Within two years I had been recommended by my bishop, and called from my specialized status back into the parish ministry in the area.  And within about a year in that position, I began to feel the suspicion of parishioners.  Before long I was asked to leave the congregation, but was never confronted over any significant failing on my part.  This story unfolded slowly, but within a few more years a woman who was in a position to know the facts confirmed for me confidentially that the reason I had been forced to resign was that people were told I was gay.  I knew that this particular pastor had been the one who launched the wave of rumors which pushed me out of the ordained ministry of the church.

Twenty some years ago, this was the fate of those who lacked the courage, the resources and freedom to just “come out.”  We were slowly, excruciatingly, hampered, limited, excluded, rejected in ways just as secretive as our lives were.  We were eliminated from the lives and callings and jobs and relationships we thought we were so skillfully preserving by keeping our own personal agony secret.  This happened everywhere in society, but especially in the church. It was as if no one needed to confront us or say anything, because we should just understand the reasons we were being rejected.  I think it must have felt similar to what African-Americans felt when they were passed over for a job or an advancement, or denied housing, or avoided in social settings—that they were just supposed to understand why they were disliked or discriminated against.  We were all supposed to internalize the shame which society implicitly demanded of us.

The upshot of my loss of career was the personal decision—with the help of a competent therapist—that I would never again go back into a closet.

But I have mixed feelings about the man who spread the rumors that deprived me of 16 years of my life work.

Was this like the patriarch Joseph in the book of Genesis: hated by his brothers, sold into slavery, and because of false accusations went to prison before being vindicated by God?  In this (overlooked) story, Joseph finally confronts his hateful brothers with love and forgiveness:

“His brothers were so dumbfounded at finding themselves face to face with Joseph that they could not answer.  Then Joseph said to his brothers, . . . ‘I am your brother Joseph whom you sold into Egypt.  Now do not be distressed, do not reproach yourselves for having sold me here, since God sent me before you to preserve your lives.’”—Genesis 45:4–5

This elderly pastor and I were brothers in the family of God, so I should be respectful of his passing.  The circumstances of life sent us along very different paths, and he would never have had reason to fully understand me.  When he personally brought great harm to me, I confess, it took years to expunge the bitterness out of my life.  We never saw each other again. He went into retirement.  I went into another line of employment for sixteen years.

And now at his death what am I to feel?  I came out; I have never regretted that step, and will defend the necessity of coming out publicly, especially within the church of Jesus Christ.

Society has changed—in ways for which this elderly pastor would, I am sure, have felt contempt.  Increasingly there is safety for more and more LGBT people to be who we are, and to live without the shame that earlier generations forced upon us. We still may have to duck some homophobic slurs and even violence.  But more and more we will not internalize the homophobia that previous generations accepted as inevitable.  Perhaps, like ancient Joseph, it took me years of life experience to be able to let my bitterness go and to forgive the one who intended harm, because now I know that God intended it for good.

—Pastor Dan Hooper, Los Angeles

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December 16, 2007 by Pastor Dan.

In church we had another reading this morning about John the Baptist (Matthew 11:2–11). Nine days to go until Christmas (!) but we had a passage when Jesus is a 30-something man about his cousin John in prison for condemning the adulterous and murderous “King” Herod.

By my lights, we should have been reading another passage. But the appointed reading prompted me to look at John the Baptist and his place in the prophetic tradition of Israel.

“Jesus began to speak to the crowds about John: ‘What did you go out into the wilderness to look at? A reed shaken by the wind?’”

John is described as a wild-eyed prophetic type who called a nation to repentance and baptized people in the Jordan River as a sign of their change of heart. According to the biblical evangelists, he described himself as “the voice of one crying in the wilderness.”

Church people read this stuff just so literally! We picture this wild-eyed John dressed in camel-hair clothing and eating insects out in the desert, the wilderness. We take it literally —and because we don’t particularly care about the desert or insects— we nod off.

But perhaps, like the prophet Hosea eight hundred years before, John used his life as a metaphor to make a point. Hosea literally married a prostitute as a metaphor to illustrate Israel’s unfaithfulness to God. John lived, and served, and cried out in a literal wilderness as a sign of the spiritual wilderness of his people.

Is there a sign, a metaphor, a “lesson” for us today, living as we do in a fat and lazy nation of both privilege and poverty—split by racism and prejudice, polarized (or should we say balkanized) into so-called liberal and conservative camps? Is 21^st century America a wilderness?

It is certainly easy to feel like I am not heard — that no voice standing up to the prevailing cultural values (wealth, appearances, greed, power, hubris, entertainment and pleasure) can be heard in our society. It is literally impossible now to “speak the truth to power.” Power does not hear anything but more power.

Is that cynical? Do you believe that you make all the decisions about your life? Or do you see that politics, culture and huge corporations tell us all what to do, what to spend, what to think, what to believe? There has never been a better educated era, with access to all the greatest minds of human history and the important movements of our times, yet our culture is more and more shallow by the minute. (Google “shallow society” and get 1,020,000 hits; Google “Paris Hilton” for 45,100,000 hits.) There has never been a more affluent generation, yet what we buy mentally and materially —as individuals or as a society—has never been more worthless.

As I said recently, there are no true leaders left, only “handlers” and “spin doctors.” Anything can be “sold” to the American people, including the unbelievably stupid myth that the world is “out to get us” so we need to have guns at home, bombs in every silo, and the U.S. military on every continent; we need to build thousands of miles of “Berlin wall” in order to keep out the people who are stealing minimum-wage jobs from native-born American couch potatoes who have given up looking for honest work.

In 1959 Stanley Kramer released “On the Beach” (starring Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner, Fred Astaire and Anthony Perkins), about a doomed planet after someone pushed the button that started World War III in 1964. The film takes place mostly in Australia after the entire Northern Hemisphere has been wiped out, and everyone left is waiting for the inevitable end: for nuclear radiation to gradually kill everyone else. In the last desolate scene I remember, a wind-whipped banner in a deserted public square reads “There is still time.”

Is there still time?  “On the Beach” made a huge impression on me as a pre-teen. (I remember how shocked and confused my brother and I were with our Dad because he refused to dig up our back yard and install a fallout shelter!)

Is there still time? Nearly 50 year have passed, and a literal nuclear war has not taken place. But from my perspective of the wilderness out there, we are seeing the aftermath of a neutron bomb which, in popular understanding, would kill all the people and leave the buildings behind. Is the one “crying in the wilderness” the only one who sees that a spiritual neutron bomb is killing/has killed most of the sentient beings on Planet Earth and left all “the stuff” intact?

Is there still time? John the Baptist “flourished” (as biographers would say) around the year 30 c.e. Within a mere 40 years, an uprising of nationalism triggered the brutal annihilation of Judea and the wholesale destruction of Jerusalem. There was no nation left to repent.

Is there still time? The Zealots (we get the word in our language from this political faction of ancient Jews) believed that the only way for the nation to survive was to fight the foreign invaders. But perhaps John the Baptist had it right, crying alone in the wilderness: unless the people repent, the nation would be destroyed from the inside out.

—Pastor Dan Hooper, Los Angeles

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December 14, 2007 by Pastor Dan.

“Why can’t we talk about religion or politics?”  This is the opening question which Jim Wallis poses to begin his important 2005 book God’s Politics:  Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn’t Get It.

It is an old aphorism that these two subjects are taboo “in polite society,” and that says something about politeness–that it’s main rule is to not do or say anything which might be “unpleasant.”  (My friend John in Atlanta says that Southerners used to refer to the Civil War as “that recent unpleasantness.”)

A quick test drive of Google will tell us that people do in fact talk about both religion and politics, constantly, and often in strident tones.  Those who hate religion are equally as vocal and earnest as the salespeople and brokers of religion.  And politics, oh my!  Those on the extremes of both Left and Right are no less vocal than those who are committed to cynicism about the public arena and refuse to identify with the Left or Right.

Well, really, politeness would also forbid us (at a dinner party for example) from talking about sex, or cancer, or for that matter, obesity.  Politeness knows that people have strongly-held opinions, or they do not want to face certain information, or opposing persuasions, in a situation in which they feel trapped such as around a friend’s dinner table.  Years ago an acquaintance was known for going ballistic at a dinner party over the Shroud of Turin, and it became a running gag to try to “set him off” every time he was at a party or other social setting.

My favorite translation of 1 Corinthians 13:7, in St. Paul’s well-known “Love Chapter” is the New English Bible:  “There is nothing love cannot face.”

My loved ones faced cancer with me.  I know a morbidly obese lady who will soon have the bypass surgery, and is facing it largely because she found love in our community and was able to take the first steps with the loving support of another lady who had the surgery to stop her obesity years ago.  In love, we have talked about her obesity and her fears and her dream for a much better life after the surgery.

Is it possible that, if we all practiced love, we could talk about both religion and politics and remain polite?   I realize this sounds like flimsy, pathetic liberalism to some — that, instead of “being right” we would have to be satisfied with “being loving.”  It is the slippery slope of that dreaded liberalism that love could so easily slide or collapse into condoning, accepting or even approving of things which should be considered absolutely wrong!

For example, Jesus himself must have already slid off into liberalism when he said to the woman caught in the act of adultery, “Neither do I condemn you,” John 8:11.

Ah, but what about where he says, “Enter by the narrow door,” Luke 13:24.  Who is it that is making the door narrow—God or human beings who don’t want to condone anything but their own behavior?  That is general advice, in its context in the story of Jesus.  Clearly, he spoke with great fervor about the particulars of moral narrowness, and scolded scribes and Pharisees for their self-righteousness.   How does anyone, or an entire society, know what ethical standards ought to guide us, if we can’t talk about it?

But round and round we go.  Polite society composed only of dedicated Christians will never agree until they surrender their hard-edged “rightness,” and agrre to be open to the influence and maybe persuasion from another source or another point of view.  That has certainly been the case with the huge controversy about human sexuality and homosexuality.  The other point of view, the other experience, which has most influenced the discussion of sexual ethics in our times, has been the “coming out” of individual men and women to their friends, families, employers and churches.

Wallis, who is the respected Editor of Sojourners and an avid, committed evangelical Christian, makes the persuasive argument that if Christians got their religion right, their politics would change.  Perhaps both left and right would find an ethical, responsible, moral, and polite, position somewhere near the center.

—Pastor Dan Hooper, Los Angeles

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December 10, 2007 by Pastor Dan.

I’ve been thinking over and over about the issue of torture, for obvious reason that the approval of what amounts to torture by the White House won’t go away. A few weeks back I had reason to consult ancient history on the figure of St. Martin of Tour (for whom Martin Luther was named at his baptism). Catholic On Line: Saints and Angels has this about St. Martin and his relationship to civil power and torture:

Martin of Tour (315-402)

. . . . However it was this compassion and mercy that led to what he considered his greatest mistake. Bishops from Spain including a bishop named Ithacius had gone to the emperor soliciting his help in destroying a new heresy taught by a man named Priscillian. Martin agreed completely that Priscillian was teaching heresy (among other things, he rejected marriage, and said that the world was created by the devil) and that he should be excommunicated. But he was horrified that Ithacius had appealed to a secular authority for help and even more upset that Ithacius was demanding the execution of Priscillian and his followers. Martin hurried to intervene with emperor Maximus, as did Ambrose of Milan. Martin stated his case that this was a church matter and that secular authority had no power to intervene and that excommunication of the heretics was punishment enough. He left believing he had won the argument and saved the heretics but after he left Ithacius began his manipulation again and Priscillian and the other prisoners were tortured and executed. This was the first time a death sentence had been given for heresy— a horrible precedent.

The word “torture” almost slips by, along with “death sentence.” What were they thinking in the late 4^th Century? Probably the Emperor Maximus wasn’t terribly concerned about either torture or capital punishment. If religious heresy could foment great public passion and thereby de-stabilize the society, the means would justify the ends: put down the dissenters, the rebels, the heretics, swiftly and decisively. Make an example of them. (Capital punishment as a deterrent.)

Am I safe to assume that “Who Would Jesus Torture?” was not a question the Roman Emperor pondered.

But what were they thinking—Bishop Ithacius and his ilk—who thought that going to a civil authority to trounce a religious opponent is anything close to what Jesus would approve? It may not be fair for a historian to ask a rhetorical question of a Bishop 1600 years later: “Are you nuts?” But it is fair for a blogger to ask: At what point did the growing power and influence of the Christian Church first fail to notice that it was no longer following Jesus of Nazareth and had gotten into bed with evil?

Is there a lesson in this for our own times? Well, duh!!

But it is not enough to decry the adulterous relationship of one particular political party with religious conservatives in America. The separation of church and state is a huge and important issue for our own times as much as ever. But the various parties in both religion and politics come and go with every generation. Even if unchecked fundamentalism is voted out of office in the next national election, we cannot dust off our hands and sit down in complacency. The bigger issue is always before us if we are followers of Jesus. Are we really following Jesus, or simply manipulating him to conform our cultural, political and capitalist affinities?

The film “Amazing Grace” has just recently passed like a pious wave through our cinema houses. It tells the story of 18^th Century William Wilberforce who fought hard to end the practice of slavery in the British Empire and certainly had a big hand in bringing slavery down in all of civilized society.

I am interested in the film, and the figure of Wilberforce (1759–1833)—a member of Parliament, a politician, who while in his 20s had a conversion experience and became an evangelical Christian. Was he the last politician (or the last evangelical Christian) to do something noble because it was the right thing to do rather than because it was politically expedient or advantageous?

Slavery is evil. Astonishingly, it still goes on in the 21^st century, mostly in the form of involuntary sexual servitude. But it is only an example, one folly among hundreds into which Christians have allowed themselves to wander from the path of Jesus.

—Pastor Dan Hooper, Los Angeles

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December 9, 2007 by Pastor Dan.

Presidential candidate Mitt Romney finally made his “religion speech” last week. http://www.getreligion.org/ notes that Romney basically wrote the speech. Certainly this is a big enough issue for a sizeable block of the American people he had better take responsibility for his words, and choose them carefully.

For many Christians – at least those in an official position where they represent the teachings and doctrines of their faith— the Latter Day Saints are not Christian. I know this causes these people great pain – and that they see it as a form of prejudice and bigotry.

(And who shouldn’t be against prejudice and bigotry? In the last 40 years we have seen Christians at many levels in society reject conversation and collegiality with the Metropolitan Community Church, for example because it is the denomination that unequivocally welcomes sexual minorities and is served primarily by lesbian and gay clergy. But is the M.C.C. not Christian?)  Is the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints not Christian?  Logically it is only fair to conclude that Mormons do not share many of the same essential beliefs about the person of Jesus that other Christians do.  Mitt Romney tried to massage this fact in his speech, here quoted from www.getreligion.org: 

“What do I believe about Jesus Christ? I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God and the Savior of mankind.  My church’s beliefs about Christ may not all be the same as those of other faiths. Each religion has its own unique doctrines and history.  These are not bases for criticism but rather a test of our tolerance.  Religious tolerance would be a shallow principle indeed if it were reserved only for faiths with which we agree.”

I note in this passage that Romney is deflecting the religious doctrine question and trying to make it a social tolerance issue. And perhaps in terms of serving in the high office of President it is. “He seized the opportunity to connect his candidacy to something larger and transcendent: the history of religious freedom in America,” said Peggy Noonan in the Wall Street Journal. “He made a virtue of necessity.” But he sidesteps the core question (sidestepping = “spin” = political necessity) which Christian voters are still curious and unnerved about:  Are Mormons to be considered Christian—either by other Christians (a very subjective measure), or by some objective standard? Is there such a thing as an objective test for using the term “Christian” anyway?

Unhappily, the Christian church has slugged that one out for 2,000 years. In the earliest centuries it excommunicated dissenters.  By the 4^th century, with new-found civil power, it had heretics put to death over theological disagreements– something which even St. Martin of Tour found to be odious.  A hundred years before Luther, the Catholic Church was still killing off dissenters such as John Hus, Michael Servetus and of course the Jews; Martin Luther survived only because his politically well-placed friends helped him hide (and later supported capital punishment for heresy!).  When the 16^th Reformers argued their case, they bent over backwards to show the Roman authorities that, by objective standards, they had not departed from the true Christian faith.  In the Lutheran confessional document, the Augsburg Confession, written in 1530 as a trial brief, for example, the core Christian dogmas are incorporated by reference:  the Apostles’ Creed, the Nicene Creed, and the Athanasian Creed, the doctrines embedded in the Old and New Testaments about God, Jesus Christ, the Holy Spirit and the Church.  If by no other measure, over 2,000 years these key elements (”symbols”) have come to define what “Christian” means.

Then why is there such fragmentation in the Christian Church, and isn’t the Mormon church just another expression, or denomination or tradition or fragmentation within the larger Christian Church?

By the way, it seems that another piece of “Christian” teaching which has deep tap roots in the Jewish/Christian Bible, is that once a doctrine is thoroughly defined, the Christian faith holds that anyone who holds different views (even slightly varied views) is wrong.  In talking about the great Councils of Christian history, where doctrines were hammered out, the late John Boswell, author of Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality, once remarked: “Before the vote is taken, there is a majority and a minority. After the vote is taken, the minority is dead wrong.”  (The Athanasian Creed makes the rejection of other points of view a matter of dogma, which many Christians including me find very unsettling and choose to selectively ignore!)

Objectively speaking, Romney’s faith tradition is not Christian, or it is at best quasi-Christian, because, as he says, “My church’s beliefs about Christ may not all be the same as those of other faiths.” [Emphasis added.]

Be honest, Mitt. They are not the same as the beliefs of the Christian churches.  The LDS Church does not sign on to the Apostles, Nicene (and here is a very fascinating link for theological discussion!) and Athanasian Creeds, for example.   LDS founder Joseph Smith built his following on the premise that a heavenly angel revealed to him the right stuff and that all the other Christian churches were wrong.  Smith and many other 19^th century splinter and reformist groups carved out their “market share” (as we would call it now) by dropping some core Christian beliefs and adding others which are rejected by Christian churches.

Although it took from the year 1530 to 1999, the Roman Catholic Church and the Lutheran Church worldwide are now in agreement about the essential issues of justification by faith which are at the heart of the Augsburg Confession.  The Lutherans and the Orthodox now see almost eye to eye on the doctrine of the Holy Trinity. 

Do not look for the Mormon Church to sign on any time soon to these Christian teachings. For what they teach about Jesus and salvation, etc., are expressly and decisively opposed to these core Christian teachings.

Technically, the argument over who is a Christian, or what objective tests can be use to decide that, are irrelevant in the race for the Presidency. Romney is hoping that American tolerance of differences will not be an impediment to his election as President. But if the pollsters are correct, for the Christian evangelical crowd (the religious “right” wing), Baptist Rev. Mike Huckabee looks a lot more acceptable than ex-Governor Romney.

In my personal perspective, neither one of them would get my vote but not because of their particular theological views, or the official teachings of their church traditions and doctrines (Christian or not). I don’t agree with their social values, and I would worry more than a little that they would use those faith-influenced social values to enforce a particular, prejudicial and unjust agenda on this nation. (CNN’s sound-byte: “Romney: ‘My convictions will indeed inform my presidency’”.) From what I have read about Romney, while he appeals to American tolerance, he is not likely to promote the view that all the laws of this land be broadened to guarantee equal tolerance for the views of others. He does not support the legalization of same-gender marriage, for example, as the tolerant, American, thing to do.

It is pretty clear that George W. Bush used his own religious faith as a big factor to get himself into the White House. It is clear that the votes of his co-religionists counted heavily (even if they don’t know how to count in the state of Florida) in the last two general elections. Now a man equally as socially-conservative as Bush wants the America people not to count his religion against him. Is it any wonder that fundagelicals are finding this hard to do?

—Pastor Dan Hooper

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December 6, 2007 by Pastor Dan.

The AIDS quilts are coming down today, after being displayed for over a week. Hundreds of people came and viewed them, read their messages, and thought about their significance. On these particular panels, some 24 people who died of AIDS are commemorated.

Our friend Paulette procured them from the Names Project Foundation in Atlanta to display over the period of World AIDS Day and our World AIDS Hollywood Vespers Concert.

The last visitors, last night, were teenagers from the Silverlake Children’s Theatre Group, who were on site for their regular rehearsals. They were very interested, and respectful of what they saw. None of them had been born when most of the individuals whose names appear on the quilts were dying of AIDS.

Alas, AIDS has become a “generational thing” in America. Too many young people have little to no experience of anyone having HIV or AIDS. It is natural for them to think it’s an old people’s disease, or a former disease, or one that will never affect them. Tragically, too many young gay people are having unprotected sex in the mistaken belief that AIDS is not their problem. Their gullibility to this falsehood is increased under the influence of crystal meth, which lowers inhibitions to sexual expression. Looking for “hookups” online is deceptively easy. And people still lie about their status. Yesterday a 365Gay.Com story reports allegations that a Roman Catholic priest and Navy chaplain has been having unprotected sex with other men without disclosing that he is HIV+.

AIDS is still killing people by the thousands, although we do not see it as much in America. America can (just barely) afford the miracle drugs that have kept tens of thousands of people alive during the last 15 years. We know individuals who have been living with AIDS for more than twenty years, so AIDS is no longer an automatic death sentence.

I remember our friend Andy, who came to Lutherans Concerned events in the 1980s. Young, cute, blond, buff, pleasant, Andy was a UCLA student. He was, however, not out to his parents. And he was not aware of how easily he could contract HIV. In those days there were no miracle drugs. Andy got sick, very sick, and was diagnosed with the virus. In a matter of days, his parents learned the awful truth: that he was gay, that he was infected, and that he was dying. Andy was dead before most of his friends even knew he had been sick.

But because his death occurred twenty years ago, today’s youth just have no connection with it nor with the hundreds of thousands of people who died in their youth.

After years and years of activism, from “Play Safely” ads in gay magazines to total abstinence programs which Republigelicals have been pushing so hard, too many people have little understanding of AIDS or why it must be stopped globally. “Stop AIDS: Keep the Promise.”

One would think that visualizing AIDS as an enemy to be defeated would inspire a new generation of activists. But I’m not seeing that yet. And I don’t think it’s because people are that complacent about the disease, but they seem to be complacent about life itself.

Americans are the worst of human beings when it comes to denial. We are certainly the epicenter of death-denial and death defiance.. Evel Knievel just died November 30, incidentally, after a 40 year career of doing imaginative, stupid things to get attention. A man in Omaha Wednesday killed eight other people in an Omaha shopping mall before killing himself. He apparently left several suicide notes, including one that said, “Now I will be famous.”

And we are in a state of pathological denial about the causes of death, and will eat, drink, race, have sex, and blow off every form of danger, commit murder and suicide, as if our lives do not matter.

Perhaps our lives do not. There is the thinnest of lines between carelessness and callousness about life. But life is what you make of it. Reverence for life is not inherited, it must be learned, adopted, believed. To honor those whom we have lost —such as we did Sunday with the lighting of candles and reading of the names of 250 people— is to love life itself as a gift of God, and to respect ourselves and our finite existence even more. What is “the meaning of life”? The meaning you give to it, beginning with self-respect.

Remember the dead. Thank God for life. Stop AIDS. Keep the promise.

—Pastor Dan Hooper, Los Angeles

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December 3, 2007 by Pastor Dan.

Have you been following the headlines that the much-touted California sex offender law passed last year may never be (fully) implemented?  Apparently the will of the people can be flouted simply by the expense of it all.

“Jessica’s Law” (after a 2005 Florida law) requires convicted sex offenders to wear a device for the rest of their lives so that a Global Positioning System (GPS) would monitor their whereabouts 24 hours a day.

I did not vote for this law, so this may seem like a cheap “I told you so.” But the law is completely flawed, and even more, the angry public mind-set behind it is also flawed.  (You can still read the impartial analysis from the 2006 Voter Guide here.)

To start with, if the law is implemented I can’t think of a better example of the “cruel and unusual punishment” forbidden by the constitution other than of course torture, which is apparently OK with the White House.

No other citizen in any country, especially since the collapse of the Soviet Union, has even tried to track the exact whereabouts of its citizenry, even a tiny percentage of them who have been convicted. The law should be challenged in court and struck down. Alas, if it isn’t implemented, it won’t be challenged, so the thing sits there on the law books, when it should be removed promptly.

At present the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation already uses GPS for a small class of convicted sex offenders who are considered at “high risk for reoffense”–they will likely do it again. But that number is about 1,000 individuals. Proposition 83 extends that to some 90,000 registered sex offenders, a number which grows at about 8,000 per year. While you’re at it, you might want to read the state’s helpful pamphlet, There’s No Such Thing as a “Typical” Sex Offender.

The “cruel and unusual” part is important as a very basic civil right of every human being in the United States. While sexual crimes may be disgusting, so is murder. Jessica Lunsford was raped and murdered in Florida. Why not require all convicted murderers to be tracked forever? Stealing the life savings of an elderly couple is also disgusting. Who then should be required to wear a tracking device? Bankers? Option-ARM loan brokers? Enron executives? Republicans? Why just sex offenders?

In the 1990s we were in Italy, and spent a couple of days in Venice. This grand queen on the Adriatic is distinguished for, among many other things, inventing the word “ghetto” and it was used for the Jews. Venice had the original Jewish ghetto, where a huge gate was rolled shut and locked every night to keep the Jews confined to their own little island, separated from the Christians by those canals. I thought it was hilarious, at the time, because if 14^th Century Christians thought that Jews were devious and crooked, why didn’t they lock them in during the day when they were about their business of writing loans, doing banking, running businesses and making profits, instead of at night?

Proposition 83 is a cynical attempt to create a “virtual ghetto” by means of technology. Another of its provisions is that a convicted sex offender cannot live near a school or park. What difference does it make where any criminal lives (sleeps at night)? What matters is where the criminal commits his crimes, and so while the GPS provision was supposed to cover that, the harassment over where one can live is unnecessary and cruelly punitive. Yet the CDCR mailed notices 90 days ago to 2,741 whom they say live too close to schools or parks and must move. These individuals had 45 days to comply. Have you ever tried to find a new place to live, and complete your move, in 45 days? That alone is reason to challenge this law in court!

But more basic is the provision–-and this is the “angry public mind-set” part— of a life-time sentence to wearing a tracking device even after the time has been served and the parole has ended and there is no further relationship with the criminal justice system. If a convicted person has served his time, paid his so-called debt to society, how can a just society tolerate a law that essentially says, “screw you; Big Brother will never forget your crime even if Blind Justice does.” In other words, there is no forgiveness, not even after remorse and repentance, not even after making satisfaction for one’s sins.

This being a Christian nation (at least in the eyes of the conservative Christians), apparently the Christians who passed this law do not believe in forgiveness and so have essentially flunked the test of Christian doctrine. “Do to others as you would have them do to you.”  “Forgive your brother seventy times seven.” “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.”

Okay, this is not a Christian nation, at least on selected issues—issues where public prejudice easily trumps core Christian beliefs. But don’t get me started on hypocrisy!

But why is this important to a blogger who is writing from am LGBT/Christian perspective?

It has only been four years since the Supreme Court Lawrence v. Texas decriminalized consensual sex between two members of the same gender. I am still not over the high court’s earlier decision in Bowers v. Hardwick (1986) in the gathering hysteria of the AIDS epidemic, that sent Michael Hardwick to prison.  (You’re too young to remember? View the pre-Lawrence “Sodomy Map” to see what you would have faced five years ago.)

Sodomy laws have been used for at least eight centuries to criminalize, torture and put to death two people who loved each other – all done of course under the big tent of the Christian faith. One of the clear conclusions of the late John Boswell’s research in Christianity, Social Tolerance and Homosexuality was that within the course of less than 100 years in the middle of the Dark Ages, homosexual expression went from being legal to becoming a capital offense all over Europe. Unchecked fear, social prejudice and hatred whipped up a fever that has lasted from the 12^th century down to our own times.

When I first came out as a gay man—scarcely six months after the Stonewall Riots in New York City—I could have been arrested and sent to prison for expressing physical passion even with someone who was agreeable. More likely, I could have been blackmailed, shamed, and my career destroyed with just an arrest record (not even a conviction).

Okay, I didn’t have a career yet in 1970, but within a few years I did, and when my partner and I met, in Tempe, Arizona, our relationship was still criminal under the laws of Arizona.

We’ve come a long way in terms of civil rights as lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender persons, and Lawrence v. Texas was a huge step forward for us. (You should thank the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force that you are not in prison today!) But Proposition 83 was a huge step backward promoted by mean-spirited quasi-Christians who have attempted to inflict a punishment wholly out of proportion to the crime.

Perhaps the worst part of this law pushing the envelope on sex offenders is that it makes it more likely that convicted persons will drop out and disappear, rather than register or keep the CDCR informed of their whereabouts. Would you feel safer knowing that the onerous nature of this law has actually made sex offenders go underground? From a practical point of view, Proposition 83 specified no penalty if a convicted sex offender refused to comply with wearing a monitoring device. And it did not name the agency or set aside the funds for an agency to actually administer this law. While the state government dutifully goes the steps of trying to implement it, wasting tax dollars in the process, the fact that the law was so poorly written and not funded simply reinforces my point that it was written to make a moral statement and help the angry general public feel smug and righteous, rather than actually protect children.

—Pastor Dan Hooper, Los Angeles

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