December 23, 2009 by Pastor Dan.

A church member called me this morning from the Midwest, where she had gone for Christmas, to report that her nephew was killed yesterday on a highway in Texas. It has abruptly changed her holiday plans as she and her family now drive down to Texas for a funeral the day after Christmas.

Our parish has suffered five deaths in the extended family during this December, beginning with the loss of our pastor emeritus Harry Durkee on December 2, who had served from 1960–1991.

I am mindful that my mother lost her father in December also. Years later her mother succumbed to cancer on Christmas Night. The holiday season seems especially unfair as a time of joy to be taken away by the cruelty of death.  Even as I do my final preparations for Christmas Eve, I cannot shake the sadness of so much death and loss.

We modern people are wimps when it comes to dealing with the reality of death and grief. They are hard, but they are also bracketed by love and grace, and resolved only in a life of faith. I used to think it strange that St. Thomas and St. Stephen were memorialized on the church’s calendar during the days surrounding Christmas. But perhaps it is the wisdom of centuries of faithfulness that Christians offer up to God in prayer. We are certain that God’s gift to us cannot be undone by the meanness or the unfairness of sudden and untimely death.

What better time to remember those we have loved who have lived in faith, than in the very season when we also proclaim a holy birth among us – the coming of Jesus into our world of darkness and sorrow?

Jaroslav Vaja captured the essence of this in his Christmas hymntext, “Before the Marvel of This Night”. In his imaginative poem, the angels before God speak to one another as they prepare to “tear the sky apart with light” and come down to announce the birth of Christ and peace:

The love that we have always known,
our constant joy and endless light,
now to the  oveless world be shown,
now break upon its deathly night.
Into one song compress the love
that rules our universe above:
sing love, sing love, sing God is love.

—Pastor Dan Hooper

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December 21, 2009 by Pastor Dan.

This week I am trying to send out a few Christmas cards — I have essentially given up on that gracious communication with the bulk of our friends, because I get weighed down with everything else, more and more, as Christmas approaches. But I am writing now to several inmates in California prisons, to men who have written to our church from time to time. These men (all men, so far) have written because of one of our own community who is doing time now for a parole violation, and he has told other inmates that, yes, there is a church in Los Angeles which welcomes gay people. So, although the communication is a bit “stiff” in prison letters because every word going out and coming in is pre-read by prison staff, I can only assume that the guys writing to us are probably gay.

A couple of weeks ago, one of them wrote from Kern County. He isn’t ready to tell me what he did that got him convicted, or even how long he is in prison for. But he says this is his first time in prison, and it’s December and I realize he will spend Christmas in a cell.

“Since my imprisonment I have become ever stronger in Jesus Christ and God and church and hold my Christian beliefs even more dear to my heart than ever before.

“What I need: is someone — some church– and some church members to help me and take me under their wings and into their church and allow me to prove myself as a person, as a fellow church member and child of God.”

This young man’s plea is as clear as any I have ever heard. It seems risky for upstanding church-goers to be concerned about convicts who will have to prove themselves in order to be accepted again in society. But as to being a child of God, he has no need of proof. The church is the community of those who put their faith in Christ. Regardless of the division of people into categories—Jew or Greek, male and female, young or old, imprisoned or free, LGBT or straight, there are no subcategories for the children of God.

How can I be so sure of that? Because each of us is made a child not by something we do or accomplish, or avoid doing, or even repent, but by the gracious act of God alone. We are God’s children just because God says so. It’s about love, not “Brownie points,” sexual conformity, or the lack of a criminal record. It’s about a love so strong that nothing can tear us away from it.

In his Letter to the Romans, St. Paul agonizes about all of the things in life (he mentions “hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword” as examples) that may conspire to cause pain, failure, regret or worry, but then he says, “In all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

I am open-hearted enough to read his phrases very broadly, where he says “in all these things” and especially “things present nor things to come (like our modern world). Can we not see that, if Paul were writing today, he might have mentioned other examples: “poverty, racism, gangs, homophobia or sexual orientation, divorce, unemployment, drugs or alcohol, obesity, health problems or gun violence,” and still come to the same conclusion: “I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

To my friends in prison: may God keep watch with you at Christmas, knowing that not even bars and walls can separate us from the love which is given to us freely. Keep the faith you have in God’s gracious acceptance. And may the people of God keep faith with you!

—Pastor Dan Hooper

Posted in Homophobia, Gay Catechism, Violence, Doctrine, LGBT Christian, Public Affairs, Living by Grace, Faith, Recovery | Print | No Comments »

December 9, 2009 by Pastor Dan.

“Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.”   Joel 2:32; Acts 2:21; Romans 10:13
“Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,” will enter the Kingdom of heaven.” Matthew 7:21

These clear contradictions seem to stymie us nowadays, and Christians still argue whether God is lenient or hard-hearted, visiting the iniquities of the fathers upon the children to the tenth generation or very indulgent and forgetful of our offenses. Is heaven a place where only a handful will ever get in, or where the gates are never shut?

These apparent contradictions seem to say to us that the ancients and the early Christians were not all of the same mind on the charity and lovingkindness of God. It is not just we who cannot agree on the meaning of Scripture, for Scripture itself gives us different images which seem to contradict (speak against) one another.

Yet for me the overwhelming weight of the Biblical message, not just of spot passages and bumper-sticker length verses, is of God’s endless grace and acceptance. (Forgiveness is one metaphor for God’s grace and compassionate acceptance.)

Seriously, folks, can we actually say (and be theologically correct) that God loves everybody? As we know a certain unmentionable preacher-type from Topeka who argues against this vehemently. If God doesn’t love everybody, then why should we put up with or tolerate or condone anybody who doesn’t toe the line or walk the talk?

But we are the progressive (liberal) Christians, we think. We get it, even if those fundagelicals and Talibangelists don’t.

Alas, the full implication of the phrase “Everybody’s welcome” usually goes over our heads. It doesn’t merely mean that if everybody is welcome, then I am welcome—as reassuring and good as that seems. It doesn’t merely mean the invitation to receive God’s love is to me and to people like me. “Everybody” is an impossibly dangerous, radical word. If everybody is welcome, it means that even people I don’t particularly like or approve of are also welcome. It means that God’s unearned and unlimited grace does not have to be vetted by me personally before it is offered to everybody else in the world.

This takes some degree of self-examination to sink in thoroughly. It doesn’t penetrate our skulls as easily as the mantra “God loves me,” or “I am Jesus’ little sunbeam.”

—Pastor Dan Hooper

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December 1, 2009 by Pastor Dan.

Here we are again at another World AIDS Day (begun in 1987), and 25 million people have died of this disease. Progress in fighting it has been so remarkable that people don’t use the term “pandemic” any more, which is good.

But the burden and the horror of AIDS has shifted — from white homosexual males who transported HIV around like so much airline baggage, and shared freely if unwittingly — to the third world, to women, to children, and to minorities. The bad side of this generation-long struggle against AIDS is that access to health care is not fair, justice or equal. Those who can afford health care have gotten access to today’s wonderful medications which allow them to manage the immune deficiency and get on with their lives.

Those who cannot get access to such medications (including the millions in third world nations who can’t even get clean water) still suffer the same pain and the same potential future as those whose names are on the AIDS Memorial Quilt.

I am proud to be on the Board of Directors of a fairly new local non-profit entity here in Los Angeles, Hollywood Remembers. Two nights ago, in anticipation of World AIDS Day, Hollywood Remembers staged its third annual consciousness– and fund-raising event, premiering the new rock/blues musical “Red Ribbon,” conceived and written by Joe Lawrence and directed by Jerry Craig. It tells the courageous story of six people whose lives were so heavily impacted by HIV and AIDS in the early 1990s just as the red AIDS ribbon was becoming a national symbol of the fight.

At the end of the evening our Board present $2,500 to Women Alive L.A., a grass-roots organization helping mostly minority women in their struggle against HIV and AIDS. Executive Director Carrie Broadus was here to speak to the audience—preach, really, about the fight we will not give up until AIDS is conquered—and to receive the check. I am hopeful that when our annual accounting is done, we’ll be able to send Women Alive even more. Much of our work has been generously underwritten by corporate and other non-profit sponsors, including Thrivent Financial for Lutherans and Lutherans Concerned/Los Angeles, but many small donations at the door provided more than a thousand dollars and proof that people still care.

During the intermission, ushers collected scribe tickets on which people in the audience wrote the names of loved ones they have lost to AIDS. Every year I get teary just jotting down a few of the names of those friends I lost, but I was overwhelmed again this year to see that the enormous red ribbon on the banner (pictured above) being hoisted to the ceiling was not big enough to hold the names. Perhaps the heart of God is bigger than our banners, bigger even that the AIDS Memorial Quilt itself, which is the largest work of folk art in the world (nearly 1.3 million square feet).

If you’re in the Los Angeles area, the 576 square feet on exhibit at Hollywood Lutheran Church will be up through Sunday, December 6. Come and pay your respects, light a candle, and make a donation. It will be well used to help people with HIV/AIDS continue living and fighting.

—Pastor Dan Hooper

Posted in Hollywood, HIV and AIDS, Living by Grace, History, PRAYERS, Public Affairs, Uncategorized | Print | No Comments »