May 19, 2008 by Pastor Dan.

It seems that at a time when people are avoiding or rejecting traditional creeds (Latin credo = “I believe”) that they are also embracing personals statements of belief. National Public Radio is still running its “This I believe” series, sponsored by a big corporation. Some are real statements of faith, or values, or at least persuasions about specific public policy issues. A few months ago, a little “fluff” piece in Parade magazine (the throw-away in your Sunday paper) featured Brad Pitt telling you what he believes in. Turns out he believes in his family. Sweet.

So it seems that people who don’t believe in God or in any beyond-ourselves spiritual force do believe in other finite beings, or things, or issues. Is this the great spirituality of our age. Is this all we have to rely on? Ourselves?

Yet the ancient creeds do not satisfy. This being the Christian “Trinity Sunday” or the Feast of the Holy Trinity (yesterday), I thought it deserves comment. But even here, the doctrine of the Trinity (One God in three “persons”: the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit) has never been universally accepted by all Christians. It isn’t that they rejected the New Testament’s voice on this. They just don’t like the formula, the theology, which developed in the next three or four hundred years.

The ancient creeds are all about God. We don’t see ourselves in them, so we don’t relate to them as being statements that tell us about ourselves in relationship to God. In Leonard Bernstein’s “Mass”, the “Credo” consists of a strophe on the Latin mass credo, but the soloist sings in a rock-and-roll style, “I believe in God, but does God believe in me?”

In a previous study of the Nicene Creed, which is the ultimate test of Christian orthodoxy (for example, Mitt Romney does not really qualify as Christian because Mormons do not subscribe to the Nicene Creed), I was startled to realize that even though it describes Jesus as coming from God, being born of the Virgin Mary, being crucified, dead, buried and raised again, it does not bother to explain why Jesus came, why he died, or what he accomplished. The reason these things were not included in the 5^th century statement of belief, I surmise, is that they were not being disputed the way Jesus’ origins, divinity and equality with “the Father” were being disputed.

At any rate, creeds continue to bore even many Christian church-goers, let alone the larger world. What to do? Well, I have written my own, form time to time — my own “This I believe” statement. Here, in part, is what I had to say for this Trinity Sunday:

Early believers simply said, “Jesus is Lord.” They said that because they were deeply moved by his presence, his healing, his word, his grace, his compassion, and his love. And they said to themselves, we have met the God above in Jesus, and he changed our lives!

But then, they took Jesus away and killed him, and his friends scattered with fear, and almost lost all hope, until they began to remember, Jesus promised that he would never desert them, but give them his Spirit to be with them forever. And this living Spirit, moving Spirit, guiding Spirit is with us to this day. The Spirit is not prompting us to get our doctrines all squared away, or to split hairs over market share in the God-business, or to argue with our brothers and sisters about how God could be three different persons at once. The Spirit is calling us to do something far more simple: to share the same compassion and love and grace and healing which his disciples first experienced in Jesus Christ.

In short, I don’t reject the Nicene Creed. Greater minds than mine wrote it, and defended it as the best explanation of God’s own inner mystery. But I don’t believe in the Nicene Creed, I believe in Jesus Christ. I believe that God created me and cares for me like a Father. I believe that the Spirit dwells within me, to encourage me to do Christ’s work for others. Here is my creed: I believe in a living God, not a statement of ideas. I believe God calls me to live as if my life matters, and to use my life to show others that God’s love matters. I believe that– from the inside out–God’s Spirit works on me, and works with me to help bring God’s saving grace to my small corner of the world.

That is my faith, my belief system. Is it yours? If we could all just say “Jesus is Lord, so let us follow his lead,” wouldn’t that be holy enough to unite all Christians and to make new disciples and to save the world?

—Pastor Dan Hooper, Los Angeles

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May 18, 2008 by Pastor Dan.

What I know about Viking history would not fill up a 3×5 card. But thanks to Google and Wikipedia, I am able to locate the mass conversion of the Vikings to Christianity to the 9^th and 10^th centuries.

The first big event for this was a peace treaty in 878 after King Alfred defeated Guthrum’s Great Viking Army at Edington, and made conversion to Christianity one of the requirements in the peace treaty. King Alfred served directly as Guthrum’s sponsor for baptism.

St. Olaf, Viking navigator, who had much to do with bringing Christianity to Scandinavia

Then, in the Reformation, Sweden became Lutheran virtually by the declaration of the Riksdag, the parliament, in 1527. There were minor skirmishes, and overtones of nationalism and rebellions, but basically the nation of Sweden went the way of Lutheranism in one sweeping change. Two years later, a royal decree in Denmark accomplished the same thing.

A Viking cross, 10th century 

Faith is a strange thing when it insists on its own way. I like to think that true Christians would never force anybody to accept the Christian faith. We know that Christ wins us over, one heart at a time, not entire countries at a time. That seems more like the forced conversions in the other direction, where entire populations were coerced by the armies of Mohammed to accept Islam or accept death.

And yet we have this passage appointed for Holy Trinity where Jesus gives the Great Commission: Go to all nations, teach them to obey, and baptize them. So for those who take the Bible literally, what part of all nations don’t we get? Pick out a nation, any nation, march in there, or bomb your way in—in the modern technology of war—and force them through sheer intimidation to accept your teachings and become Christian.

What Alfred did to Guthrum, or Gustavus Vasa did for Lutheranism, is not entirely different from what George W. might like to see happen in Iraq.

We live in a nation where nobody has this power, even though the “mass media” at times seems to be converting the masses to a neo-pagan materialism. Instead of baptizing the masses, we give them credit cards with high credit limits and march them into shopping malls advertized on TV.

There is however something called a “tipping point” where something that was previously accepted by a culture or society suddenly changes. [Cf. Malcolm Gladwell’s best-seller, “The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference.” Good becomes evil, or evil becomes good at the tipping point when the social mass suddenly changes its mind. The late Yale scholar John Boswell described this point in medieval Europe when in less than 100 years society went from being rather open and accepting about gay people to turning on them, rejecting them legally and religiously, and instituting the death penalty.

Tipping points are moments when the momentum for change becomes unstoppable. We may have just passed the tipping point for climate change, for example, and so watch out! But I bring this all up because we may at last be at the tipping-back point, about 900 years later, when social attitudes about gay people are suddenly flipping back the other direction. In a relative short period of time, less than 25 years, a culture that shamed homosexuals into silence and threatened them with blackmail, has come to the point where everybody seems to have friends who are homosexual, even now the Chief Justice of the California Supreme Court. On the legal side, it was only 17 years from the 1986 Bowers v. Hardwick that sent a gay man to prison for sodomy in Georgia, to the favorable 2003 decision in Lawrence v. Texas that decriminalized consensual sex between persons of the same gender. In 2004 Massachusetts legalized gay marriage because the court demanded the redress of injustice. and in 2008, now the California Supreme Court has swept aside Proposition 22 as unjust, and included in their decision any law which discriminates on the basis of sexual orientation. We are now a “protected class” for any California law.

I am glad for it, of course, because I want to be married—or more accurately, to have my lifetime partnership with Carl recognized with respect by society and its legal system. We will indeed “get married” in California as soon after June 16 as we can grab a marriage license.

The symbolic “tipping point” may be 60%. Only eight years ago, over 60% of California voters said yes to the Knight Initiative, Prop 22, to close marriage to gay or lesbian couples. And (according to Steve Chapman in the Chicago Tribune today) last year, a CBS News/New York Times Poll found that 60 percent of Americans favor allowing gay or lesbian couples to enter a civil union or marriage.

But I keep thinking about that Great Commission to baptized and teach entire nations and expect them to obey. If Jesus bluntly commanded us to love our neighbor and our enemies, even homosexual ones, even homophobic ones, would we do because it has been commanded?

Or do we and everybody else really have to be won over, one heart at a time?

I would rather have it that the overwhelming majority of Californians concurred with the Court and said, “Of course! We know that everyone is entitled to the fundamental right to marry the person of his or her own choice. We didn’t need a court of law to demand that.” I would rather have every American, every world citizen, come to the conclusion independently that the homosexual is my neighbor, not my enemy.

But this will only happen if enough people believe that they are commissioned to go and teach, and win over, one heart at a time, to the justice and charity and compassion and impartiality before God which the Gospel proclaims. How do you playa role? How do you teach? By coming out, telling your story, and keeping the faith that is really is good news more than authority by which Jesus’ message spreads.

—Pastor Dan Hooper, Los Angeles

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May 17, 2008 by Pastor Dan.

This past week’s major event in California has me completely preoccupied, even though a church convention kept me too busy to give it sufficient thought until now. On Thursday, May 15, the California Supreme Court shook up America again by finding that gay and lesbian people were being denied equal justice by not being allowed to contract civil marriage. The decision can be read here.) The Court declared sections of the California Civil Code unconstitutional, and ordered state officials to redress the wrongs done to us by preparing County Clerks offices to issue marriage licenses to gay and lesbian couples.

Unless there is some arcane and unthinkable legal maneuver yet to come, the Court’s decision will take effect in 30 days. “Gay marriage” will be legal beginning on or around June 15, 2008. Equality California has some very helpful Q&A’s already on its web site.

I am especially preoccupied because churches and pastors everywhere in this state must now give gay and lesbian marriages much more serious thought. This new just freedom, which is heartily endorsed by Mayors Gavin Newsom in San Francisco and Antonio Villaraigosa in Los Angeles, has the potential to further divide voters and balkanize the Christian church. Although no pastor or church can be required to solemnize anyone’s wedding, you can be sure that the religious right will continue to scream that their faith and their freedom of religion is being damaged by homosexuals and “activist” courts.

(Frankly, if they were deeply troubled on behalf of the “sanctity of marriage” why haven’t they been screaming about the millions of heterosexuals who sleep together without marrying, or the tens of thousands of “sacred” marriages which are destroyed by violence, spouse abuse, alcoholism, or the cheap show-biz weddings of dizzy celebrities which last a few days, to name a few issues?)

When Massachusetts similarly legalized gay marriage (four years ago today, in Goodridge v. Massachusetts Department of Public Health), Californians didn’t have a dog in that fight. And it looked as if California’s Proposition 22, which passed in 2000 by a 61% margin, would bar California from allowing gay marriage. And even before Thursday’s release of the highest Court’s decision, a well-funded effort was underway to gather signatures to put a constitutional amendment on the California ballot to block same-sex marriage. It remains to be seen if they have submitted enough valid signatures, if the validity can be tabulated in time to make the November 2008 ballot, and if the required majority of voters would actually vote to deprive us of our civil rights.

(In this morning’s Los Angeles Times article about Massachusetts’ experience, Karen Kahn notes that there is not a lot of opposition left in Massachusetts and that almost all of it is religiously-based.)

Although I very much do “have a dog in this fight” I had not invested much of my heart in it for the past several years, ever since the Lockyer v. San Francisco decision nullified our San Francisco marriage license. In February 2004’s “weekend of love” Carl and I went with our best friends to San Francisco, braved the rain overnight under borrowed tarps and umbrellas, paid $75.00 for a license, and exchanged vows, dressed in matching sweatshirts and soaking-wet Levis, and wound up on Dan Rather’s CBS Evening News.

After Lockyer, the license we got in that historic moment is now legally worthless. We still have it among our photos and memorabilia, and it bears the souvenir signature of the Hon. Mayor Gavin Newsom.

But I resisted getting emotionally more involved because I didn’t want to lose again. And after all, my partner and I are protected, and obligated, by California’s extensive “Domestic Partnership” law. We must file our state income tax return jointly, for example, and we couldn’t break our “partnership” without going to a family law court. Domestic Partnership is serious, not play, because it creates rights and requires responsibilities for the couples who enter into it.

This new legality is complex, and many legal questions are yet to be answered in the weeks ahead. What ought not to be left unanswered, however, is the faith question: my faith is that God creates and blesses human relationships of all shapes and sizes, that the Scriptures give us many examples of vanilla and exotic relationships, that the Bible cannot be used truthfully to defend “one man one woman,” and that the Religious Right is not the arbiter of civil rights in a nation which expects and requires separation of church and state. Those whose beliefs are different from mine have no inherent right to deprive me of my legal rights. And if they don’t believe in gay marriage, they can simply not participate, either as a bride, groom or officiant.

My emotional investment is growing again, because I know I will be officiating at more marriages, and because a legal marriage may yet be in my future. In addition, I am drafting plans for “A Wedding Day: The Seminar” for pastors and church leaders, to be scheduled later this year in Los Angeles.

Next month’s Christopher Street West festival will likely be bubbling with marital bliss. I’ll be there again this year, at our Big Fat Gay Church Wedding booth. Last year we met and photographed 350 couples in wedding gowns and tuxedos!

In the meantime, everyone of us needs to get ready for a real dog fight to protect this new constitutional right form the Religious Reich. One avenue is to volunteer and donate to Equality for All.

—Pastor Dan Hooper, Los Angeles

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May 4, 2008 by Pastor Dan.

The apostles gathered around Jesus, and told him all that they had done and taught. • He said to them, “Come away to a deserted place all by yourselves and rest a while.” For many were coming and going, and they had no leisure even to eat. • And they went away in the boat to a deserted place by themselves. —Mark 6:30–32

This was the title of a recent book review in the L.A. Times Book Section, on a completely different subject. But I instantly realized it described the very scope and dimensions of what prayer and contemplation are about. “Hide and seek.”

Truly, it is not child’s play. Constantly, the world closes in with its relentless noise, demands and interruptions. Twenty-first century life makes demands on us that few can actually meet without always feeling we are about to stress out or collapse with an anxiety attack, if not a full-blown nervous breakdown. If only we could hide ourselves for a while from the confrontations we must usually engage with our work, our neighbors, our homes and families, bills and stresses, then the dialogue with God might have a chance. Hide and seek.

But remember, it is not so much that we seek God, but that God seeks us. When we are quiet, we can at last hear God’s voice in our lives. When we get away from other distractions, God can receive our full attention. God’s spirit gets through to our conscience, our hearts, our wills, and gently corrects us.

It also goes without saying that the more frequently we can do this the more effective it is. For then our subconscious minds begin to look forward to the time of quietness, apart-ness and attention to God’s voice.

—Pastor Dan Hooper, Los Angeles

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