Warm feeling: claim the love.

December 31, 2010 by Pastor Dan.

A long-ago friend recently wrote to me by e-mail, and now we’ve reconnected too on Facebook. He mentioned the church where I was an intern—the Vicar—for one year. He has returned several times, but says he didn’t find “the warm feeling I had there years ago.”

Of course, years ago he was a teenager, in a faithful family of the church, and all of life’s adult challenges and problems had probably not exploded yet for him. I re-read his message several times tonight, and the words that snagged me each time were “the warm feeling I had there years ago.”

What is that “warm feeling”? And where did it go?

I am mindful these days (writing in this very last hour of 2010) how much the world keeps changing. I reflect on a lifetime of remaining faithful to the Christian church — the Lutheran church — even in those decades that I knew I wouldn’t be loved if they knew the real me. But I remained faithful because I believed that God was faithful with me and that was all that mattered.

But “the warm feeling” is so much the creation of culture and emotion, which both change, be fickle, or disappear in a New York minute. Over the years I have seen so many of my own contemporaries disappear from the church, or at least from making a commitment, because they didn’t experience or maybe didn’t even want a “warm feeling.” But I am happy to say that I’m seeing this again in our time. It’s a vastly different warm feeling than our families and our childhood/youth culture provided. It is more honest, more grounded, less religious but more spiritual. It has nothing to do with social conventionality, and everything to do with personal integrity and the search for values over sensations.

For me, I think a new “warm feeling” started the day I realized that— if there is a God— God knows me all the way through, and in fact knows all the secrets I was trying to hide from myself and others. The realization caused me brief terror (like “OH NO!!”) until I saw this awareness of God’s knowledge in the same frame as God’s love: I am known by God who is omniscient, as I really am, and yet God loves me. That’s what is so shocking and revolutionary — that, being known fully and deeply, we are still loved.

There is an old phrase in the “red book” (Service Book and Hymnal) that I grew up with, I think, maybe in the Confession of Sins, that said of God: “from whom no secrets are hid.” In psychological terms, this represents true intimacy — when my guard is down, my pretense is gone, my vulnerability is at the maximum, and yet I genuinely sense that I am loved.

Well, maybe it sounds like a lot of theoretical crap.  This goes back decades now, but I think about the time all of this was working through my mind/heart, I was also having many new conversations with troubled young gay people — who never had any “warm feeling” but instead felt “that sick feeling” of rejection and fear of judgment. And my heart went out to them.

I remember sitting up very late many different nights with people who were terrified and wanted to run, if not from God, from any expression of the church. The fear of exposure was a wall too high to tear down merely on the promise that love awaits us all on the other side. But deeply and consistently I heard the secret equivalent of a “Voice” saying to me: “It’s true. Trust this. Follow this. God loves you as you are. It’s okay to come out of hiding.” And so I did. And ever since I’ve keep encouraging others to do likewise. Come out of hiding. Claim the love that Jesus promised.

—Pastor Dan Hooper

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Bury their own dead.

December 29, 2010 by Pastor Dan.

I read recently with near-horror that the Los Angeles Coroner’s office was about to put the unclaimed ashes of over 1,600 people in a mass grave. The horror comes from the fact that the remains of a homeless woman who basically lived in or around our church for nearly 20 years might be among those ashes.

I quickly called the Coroner’s office and was told that Rosemary’s case had been closed more than a year ago. for nearly two years I’d been trying to prod her homeless boyfriend to do something about her body. She did not want to be cremated, he said. But you can’t just bury a whole body, and nobody had the money to buy a casket, a burial plot and the services required to put the body in it. We had contact her next of kin, in the Midwest, shortly after her death from breast cancer nearly two years ago, and while they were saddened to learn she had died—homeless—in Los Angeles, they had about zero interest in paying for a proper burial.

So that matter languished, until I read the LA Times article about the mass burial. I knew that the County has, at any one time, thousands of unclaimed bodies and/or “cremains.” But somehow it seemed like the ultimate insult to an elderly woman who had lived a harsh, cold and hopeless life for many years to simply see her ashes, in a plastic sack, dropped in a big hole.

The County’s administrative office referred me back to the Morgue. More phone calls, more tracing of a closed case. But finally I was told that Rosemary’s cremains would not be buried that week—only the ashes of people cremated more than 3 years ago.

The next step—if prodding her boyfriend (or as he describes the relationship, common-law husband)—is successful, is to go to the Superior Court with an “Ex Parte Petition for

Court Order to Release the Remains of a Decedent” filled out, pay whatever court fees, probably pay for the cremation, and wait for a court date. Is it any wonder so many bodies go unclaimed?

Of course I am thinking of what our society says about the value of a human life. At least the government was planning to bury these ashes with dignity. Somewhere a computer at least has their names and dates of death on record. And is “society” responsible to show respect for individuals whose own families for whatever reason do not claim what is left? One of the most ancient aspects of civilization anywhere is the great respect and care which the living gave to the remains of the dead. Are we becoming far less civilized now?

Maybe the dignity and respect given to each and every human being is not inherently hard-wired into any society or community, but must be secured on a case-by-case basis. In Rosemary’s case, there is a dignified resting place for her cremains here in the church, in a compartment inside the “high” Altar, where three other containers also reside. Two were former church members, and the third one is a total mystery: no one here knows who she was or how the ashes got to this church.

But I reflect on the millions of people who died prematurely of HIV/AIDS. In America we have a wonderful national Memorial Quilt, but what about the human beings, created in God’s image, who died elsewhere in the world.

And what about the teens who have taken their lives because they were bullied, harassed and shamed repeatedly for being effeminate or gay? Their families, I think, have treated them with respect in the sad reality of their deaths, but what of a society that tolerates, even encourages disrespect to gay teens who are living?

The irony of Jesus’ words (Matthew 8:22) of course, is that the dead cannot bury their own dead. But if we are not alive to the reality of people’s lives being discounted, disrespected, or destroyed by the neglect or hatred of others, then we may as well be dead. Those who are truly living value the lives of others as much as their own.

—Pastor Dan

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Stop excusing cruelty.

December 26, 2010 by Pastor Dan.

Sometimes things just come to me – thoughts that won’t let me go until I have thought them through. This hit me hard on Christmas night.

Like a cup or bucket that cannot hold another drop with overflowing, or (more pertinent in Southern California) like a rain-saturated hillside that cannot take one more tenth of an inch of rainfall before it gives way to a mudslide, I have reached my lifetime saturation point on some things.

One of them is cruelty. Whether it be cruelty to animals or children, or women—or cruelty to POWs, children and animals in Iraq (it just goes on and on), or the atrocities of Darfur, or bullying of gay-appearing teenagers, or all the genocides of the 20^th century, some of which I have lived contemporaneously with and others were only lessons I learned as a student (the Jewish Holocaust had ended before I was born)— I am beyond wearying of cruelty.

These days I find myself not wanting to read a news headline if my cruelty meter begins to beep. Individual acts of psychopathic behavior or cruelty, or the utter madness of foreclosures upon the elderly and a marshal escorting someone from their own home because of missed payments, the bottom line is that our society still tolerates, if not legalizes, many forms of cruelty.

Like many other things, cruelty is concealed under different terms. Society accepts the unacceptable because it re-labels things to appear less odious, less inhuman, less cruel. When it comes to the tragic gay bullying of recent months that led to a wave of teen suicides, for example, how many of us heard “boys will be boys” as the standard excuse, a deflection of the evil. Braced as I was for the tragedy of it, I still got weepy watching a live production of The Laramie Project earlier this year in Pasadena, telling the chilling story of mixed reactions to the torture and murder of Matthew Shepard in1998. Cruelty is perpetrated by overpowering the weaker party. Masculinity is constantly measured and defined by the ancient contest to prove who has weakness, as if weakness then is justification for contest, for warfare, for cruelty.

When I was in college, our Drama Department produced “The Crucible” by Arthur Miller, a defining work that views the 17^th century Salem witch trials through a moral lense. Although there was no visible violence, what took place in those trials was also cruelty, disguised and re-packed as religious righteousness, and the slowly-grinding wheels of justice to conceal fear and superstition. But like masculinity in another context, justice and righteousness cloak the redefinition of cruelty so that it seems somehow necessary in the service of a higher good.

Nonsense!

One can always explain evil things that happen, but explanations cannot excuse them. For one human being to condemn another to death, or to torture another to death, is cruelty. Cruel is defined as willfully or knowingly causing pain or distress to another. Wikipedia’s article on psychopathy and antisocial personality disorder is long and complex, but disturbing. For example, “Psychopaths lack a sense of guilt or remorse for any harm they may have caused others, instead rationalizing the behavior, blaming someone else, or denying it outright.”

I would love to talk this over with a mental health professional in terms of religious convictions. Is there a corporate psychopathology that is easily cloaked with religious rectitude?

Today is St. Stephen’s Day on the Christian calendar. St. Stephen of the Acts of the Apostles (6:8–7:60), the first martyr in fact for the name of Jesus. Stephen was cruelly stoned to death by an angry mob that took offense at his religious views.

It is probably not wise to make any comparisons of that act with the actions of Muslims who defend their faith by taking umbrage whenever the Prophet is demeaned in a cartoon, etc. Christians have perpetrated perhaps as much or more cruelty than others to defend what they suppose is “the Christian faith.” Think the Crusades, the Inquisition. Think of burning gay people alive at the stake. Think of a flawed moral theology, pushed onto the faithful, which expects them to tolerate and accept unbearable burdens.

For example, “God never expects us to bear burdens which we cannot bear,” according to an old saying. You can find various wordings of this cliche on Answer Bag. Such a cliche is just as much heresy as anything else ever said. It is not God who lays unbearable burdens on us, but other Christians who load those burdens, completely lacking a “sense of guilt or remorse for any harm they may have caused others, instead rationalizing the behavior, blaming someone else, or denying it outright.” There you have theological psychopathology.

One thinks of that outrageous preacher from Topeka who preaches hatred at the front door of funerals. He thinks he is morally and theologically “right” as if that justifies cruelty and the complete absence of compassion. No wonder that “followers” of Jesus give him a bad name!

But Mr. Phelps is only the most publicly odious of the under-scum of our society which tolerates and excuses cruelty. It is time that decent people stop condoning hatred and cruelty no matter how it is labeled.

—Pastor Dan Hooper

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Looking for a different Christmas.

December 25, 2010 by Pastor Dan.

The message of the Christmas Gospel is that God is reconciled to this world—with all our imperfections. God does not abandon us, but comes to us.  To me that means that God loves us as we are, but God does not leave us as we are.  And every Christmas, we are invited again to respond to the loving call of God to be different than we have been, and even different than we thought we could be, because God works with us and that changes everything.

Of course, Christmas is a time we like to enjoy and just want to be filled with the mystery and beauty and promise of this night.  But Christmas makes us aware—awake—and giving attention to things other than ourselves.  We must look beyond things as they are to see the power of Christmas to make the world different.

The biggest difference I see is the difference between sentiment and faith. Sentiment looks back at all the other happy Christmases in the past, and fondly loves all those traditions that never change from year to year.  But faith is looking forward in the hope that next Christmas things will be different, not the same:

• that the hungry will not be hungry;
• that there will be far fewer people who are homeless on this night;
• that our soldiers will not be in Iraq, or Afghanistan, or anywhere else but home;
• that teenagers will not take their own lives in despair because of bullying and violence;
• that families will not be a place of strife and rejection, but of unconditional love;
• that prisoners will not languish without hope or purpose for their lives in a broken criminal justice system.

Can Christmas really change all that, and make the world a better place?  Not really.  But Christ can change everything, if first he changes you and me, and we change how we view God’s world and how we treasure this holy night. 

— Pastor Dan Hooper

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This remarkable life.

December 24, 2010 by Pastor Dan.

Think with me just a moment about the life of Jesus, not just his birth:

His was not a planned pregnancy, and his parents weren’t married. At birth, he was homeless; they became refugees shortly thereafter. In order to escape political violence and almost certain death, his family became illegal immigrants in a foreign land.

As a teenager, he was raised in a single-parent household.

He was misunderstood by his own siblings, and rejected by his neighbors and community. He faced the usual temptations, and resisted them. The crowds he attracted were fickle, eating his bread and even waving branches to salute him, but making no commitments; and within a week they called for his death.

He was betrayed by one of his own, denied by another, and ultimately deserted by the rest of the disciples he had hand-picked to follow him. He was arrested on trumped-up charges, didn’t receive a fair trial, had to defend himself, was convicted by corrupt officials, beaten by officers, and executed for crimes he did not commit, between two criminals. They even took his clothing away to shame and humiliate him.

He died in poverty; he had no assets, and left no estate.

Yet Jesus lived a life which has affected more people than any other human life, and his presence in this world permanently changed the course of human history. A billion people today claim to be Christians.

We should not be surprised by this remarkable life. But what should surprise us is that Christians today—the people who claim to be followers of Jesus— do not follow him very closely. The resemblance of our lives to his is faint, at best. Even with this remarkable life as clue and role model, Christians are suspicious of unmarried couples, of children born out of wedlock, of homeless people, of refugees and illegal immigrants, of single-parent households, of the poor and hungry and those in prison. We condone violence in society; we still let our police beat and shoot people. We do little to stop corruption in high places. We don’t want taxes adequate to pay for our criminal justice system, but we re-instituted capital punishment.

In short, Christians still uphold the entire system of privilege and power, and have too little concern for the people who struggle the hardest to survive in our society. Jesus was one of those who struggle, not one of the privileged. Why don’t we see this? Why don’t we conform our lives to his?

—Pastor Dan

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The mile high club reaches new altitude.

December 20, 2010 by Pastor Dan.

You gotta love it. You know that same-sex marriage is being normalized (no matter what the Family Research Center says) when it gets commercialized. SAS offered the world’s first in-flight gay marriage ceremonies earlier this month as part of its “Love is in the Air” advertising campaign.

Here’s the international twist: On SAS flight SK903 from Stockholm to New York, a lesbian couple and a gay couple exchanged vows (legal in Sweden and wherever Swedish marriages are legally recognized): a German gay couple and a Polish lesbian couple. Germany and Poland do not allow same-sex marriage, but there isn’t a heckuva lot they could do to stop these, short of an anti-gay hijacking of the flight.

The story and the photos are all gushy and cute on 365Gay.com.

And since the (Lutheran) Church of Sweden said OK to gay marriage more than a year ago, the flight must have truly been blessed.

— Pastor Dan Hooper

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We asked, and we got what we asked for.

December 18, 2010 by Dan Hooper.

This was never my fight, but it is emblematic of the struggle for all to be treated equally. According to the Human Rights Campaign this morning, the repeal of the “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” law has passed the U.S. Senate. It had passed the House already.

Breaking news: “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” repeal has just cleared its last congressional hurdle.

This discriminatory law will be relegated to the dustbin of history. This stain on our nation will be lifted forever. . . .

Today, America lived up to its highest ideals of freedom and equality. Today, our federal government recognized that ALL men and women have the right to openly serve the country they believe in. That it doesn’t matter who you are, or who you love – you are not a second-class citizen.

Think of the kids out there tonight, watching this on the news – kids who are bullied for being different, who live in fear daily that their parents will hate them if they find out the truth… Think of the relief, the empowerment, the sense of possibility they’ll feel, knowing that the U.S. military has said: if you’re lesbian or gay, you are worthy. We want you to join us, side by side, as equals.

Well HRC is a bit triumphalistic here. and it of course ties the “breaking news” to the same fund-raising appeal you find in every e-mail. But the true still sinks in. After the procedural, majority-only vote later this weekend, President Obama will sign the repeal bill into law.

This is sadly overdue for a nation which believes in due process and equal protection. Yes, there are shrill voices in the Marines, etc., that don’t want “open” homosexuals in their ranks. According to a chum who used to be a military chaplain, it is not true a quarter of the U.S. Marines are really gay. It’s much closer to half, he told me. Is our nation any safer, or is morale any higher, when people are secretive? We have been over this ground many times, of the dangers and inherent climate of catastrophe that develops when people are deeply closeted and then don’t develop the self-respect or good judgment to avoid “slipping.” Men and women who are out to themselves and others, and have learned to feel self-esteem, are better judges of how to behave that the closeted and fearful who have never developed the friendships or done the emotional and mental homework of working through their sexuality.

I don’t know where to track this quote originally, but a couple of months ago it was none other than Lady Gaga who commented that cohesion and morale in the military would improve not by kicking out the gay and lesbian people but by kicking out the homophobes! She’s pretty much on target there.

If you are a letter-writer or e-mail writer, send your representatives in congress a big thank-you for their courageous votes (if they voted courageously). If your senator or congressman voted against repeal, please act accordingly.

— Dan Hooper

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Jesus is coming. Look busy.

December 13, 2010 by Pastor Dan.

Notwithstanding that Christmas is a mere 11 days away, here comes the next cosmic prediction about Jesus’ next coming.

I’m so glad to have it finally settled. We have 171 days left – a little left than half a year to get ready. And all those crazy jokes about Jesus coming back again – to Rome or to Salt Lake. It looks like they are waiting for him first in Nashville, TN. Who knew?

The local paper is keeping its cool about it. You can read their even-handed reporting at: www.tennessean.com/article/20101201/NEWS06/12010350/Nashville-billboards-claim-Jesus-will-return-May-21-2011.

No matter how well intentioned, of course, this is not the first nor the last time someone predicted the arrival of Jesus. But billboards brings it to a whole new low.

—Pastor Dan Hooper

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Pastor Jay Wiesner received to ELCA roster.

December 10, 2010 by Dan Hooper.

LC/NA Celebrates the ELCA Reception to the Clergy Roster of Pastor Jay Wiesner, an Openly Gay Philadelphia Pastor

Lutherans Concerned/North America (LC/NA) celebrates the upcoming reception of Pastor Jay Wiesner onto the clergy roster by the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) on Sunday, December 12.

He will be received as clergy during a Service of Reception presided over by Bishop Claire Burkat, ELCA Southeastern Pennsylvania Synod, held during the 10:30 a.m. Sunday service at the University Lutheran Church of the Incarnation (www.uniluphila.org), Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Pastor Anita Hill, a pastor at St. Paul Reformation Lutheran Church in St. Paul, Minnesota, and also recently similarly received onto the clergy roster, will preach.

Pastor Jay Wiesner had been ordained “extraordinarily” in 2004. “Extraordinary” in this context means the ordination was outside of the usual practices of the ELCA. As a result, the ELCA did not recognize his ordination at the time it occurred. At this Service of Reception, the ELCA recognizes that ordination and the ministries Pastor Wiesner has done over time.

Pastor Wiesner completed his seminary training in 2002, but, because he was in disagreement with the then policy that imposed celibacy in a life lived without a partner, he was denied ordination by the ELCA. In 2004, Bethany Lutheran Church in Minneapolis, Minnesota, called him as Pastor of Outreach Ministry and ordained him, an act of ecclesiastic disobedience at the time. In September 2008, he was called by University Lutheran Church of the Incarnation as pastor, also an act of ecclesiastic disobedience.

His reception onto the roster of clergy is one of the results of the decisions of the 2009 ELCA Churchwide Assembly to eliminate the policy that had since 1989 precluded service as ministers by those in a lifelong, committed same-gender relationship. Though not in such a relationship, Pastor Wiesner had disagreed with the previous policy precluding even the possibility of it.

Emily Eastwood, Executive Director, Lutherans Concerned/North America, said “The prophetic witness of Bethany Lutheran, Minneapolis and University Lutheran, Philadelphia is coming true. We give thanks for Jay and the congregations who courageously called him in the face of policies precluding his service. We applaud the Southeast Pennsylvania Synod and its bishop for their visible support for the full inclusion of people of all sexual orientations and gender identities. While our struggle is not ended, this day leaves an indelible exclamation point in history. This day justice has prevailed, not just for one, but symbolically for all LGBT people.”

Pastor Jay Wiesner said, “This day has been a long time coming and something I have been praying for before I was even ordained in 2004. Both Bethany Lutheran Church and University Lutheran Church of the Incarnation have risked their standing in the greater Church to be a prophetic witness and for that I am truly blessed and grateful.”

Jay is originally from New Ulm, a small town of German descent in southwestern Minnesota. He graduated from Concordia College in Moorhead, Minnesota with a BA in religion. After college, he attended Wartburg Theological Seminary in Dubuque, Iowa. During his senior year, he publicly came out to the faculty and students at Wartburg and left to take some time off. He finished his Master of Divinity degree in 2002 and immediately began work at Bethany Lutheran Church in Minneapolis, Minnesota, as Pastoral Minister of Outreach. He was called and ordained by Bethany on July 25, 2004. He served that congregation from 2002-2008.

Since September 2008, Pastor Wiesner has served as pastor of University Lutheran Church of the Incarnation, an ELCA congregation in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. (www.uniluphila.org)

Pastor Wiesner is also pastoral director of The Naming Project. The Naming Project is a faith-based youth group serving youth of all sexual and gender identities. The primary focus is to provide a place for youth who are gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, queer or questioning to learn, grow, and share their experiences. In this way The Naming Project is a space in which youth can comfortably discuss faith and who they understand themselves to be–whether that be gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender…or straight.

Phil Soucy
Communications staff
communications@lcna.org

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