Perspective is everything.

May 31, 2011 by Pastor Dan.

I am always browsing the internet for graphics and photos to use in illustrating articles, web sites and this blog. But this one I took myself last week. I haven’t seen this particular vehicle before or since, but its owner certainly has a different perspective on things than I.

And I can’t help wondering what level of frustration, anger or rage against the cosmos would drive a person to further deface his/her/probably his own vehicle as an editorial on one’s own life. Everything is a pretty inclusive word, after all, and no one person’s perspective is quite so vast. Okay, I know, it’s rhetorical. But we’re looking at a mental case, folks, and this driver needs help.

A second equally plausible explanation: the painter of the message is not the owner of the car.  That opens up another entire set of assumptions and conclusions.

How are things for you? Is this your car?  Is this your life? Feel free to comment.

—Pastor Dan Hooper

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Is there a trend going?

May 23, 2011 by Pastor Dan.

Just weeks after the Presbyterian Church in the U. S. A. finally opened its doors to lesbian and gay clergy, today’s breaking news is that the Church of Scotland is doing the same.

The British Guardian reports the story, which also touches on the issue of same-sex marriage.

The Church of Scotland is the largest Protestant body in Scotland (although not large, only some 450,000 members). Since the Reformation four centuries ago, the Church of Scotland has been a part of the Reformed movement which is essentially Presbyterian in polity.

“The church’s general assembly, its law-making body, voted on Monday to lift that moratorium, officially allowing gay ministers to take on parishes for the first time since its formation 450 years ago.”

The story, however, dies not indicate whether the Church of Scotland voters were in any way influenced by the ratification of changes in policy in the PCUSA earlier this month.What is fascinating in the Guardian story are the competing predictions of potential disaster (before the vote was taken by the church’s general Assembly): the number of ministers and congregants who would leave the church if homosexual clergy are permitted, and the number of ministers and congregants who would leave the church if homosexual clergy are not permitted. It seems human nature cannot resist the making of polarizing threats.For the record, there were hundreds of clergy and thousands of believers in my own Evangelical Lutheran Church in America who never promised to leave or threatened anything for the decades it took to shift the thinking of the entire churchbody. Although we have certainly not won over every heart and mind, the scale tipped in favor of openness and tolerance in August 2009, and all efforts to rescind this new liberal policy have thus far failed miserably.

Although the Guardian story is too brief and vague, it notes that “In addition, the church has set up a commission to investigate the theological issues raised by the acceptance of gay clergy.” In contrast, the ELCA studied the issues almost to death, including the adoption of a comprehensive statement on Human Sexuality, before it recommended action two years ago.

We shall stay on the look-out for more information coming directly from the Church of Scotland.

—Pastor Dan Hooper

Posted in Doctrine, Lesbian/Gay Marriage, International, Ecumenical Issues, LGBT Christian, Ministry, Coming Out, History, ELCA | Print | No Comments »

An extraordinary moment of history.

May 22, 2011 by Pastor Dan.

I wish I could easily summarize the feelings I had participating in the ordination of my friend Guy Erwin to the ministry of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America on Wednesday, May 11.

With four bishops present and two choirs singing, Erwin was ordained in a moving ceremony attending by more than 500 people in Samuelson Chapel at California Lutheran University.

Erwin, who is a brilliant scholar and affable and effective teacher, holds the Belgum chair of Confessional Lutheran Theology at CLU in Thousand Oaks, California. He also serves as the ELCA’s representative on the Faith and Order Commission of the World Council of Churches. Although he is more than qualified to serve on the ELCA’s clergy roster, until the ELCA changed its anti-gay policies in August 2009, Erwin was never eligible to be called to an ordained position. He is gay and permanently partnered.

This ordination is historic for several reasons, in my view. First of all, he is the successor (although the title and scope of the position have changed over the years) at Cal Lu to Rev. Dr. Paul Wennes Egertson, who died unexpectedly last January, and before him to the Rev. Dr. Gerhard Belgum. I am old enough to remember Gerhard Belgum, and although these things were not spoken out loud in the 1970s, I remember hearing enough covert information to believe that Dr. Belgum was more than a little homophobic. Be that as it may, when Paul Egertson took up responsibilities in Thousand Oaks at what was then called the Center for Theological Studies, he became the bridge. Paul’s amazing first-born son Greg came out to the family and triggered the complete re-education of this central family in Southern California Lutheranism. (Paul’s father was also an esteemed Lutheran pastor; Paul served as Bishop of the Synod in Los Angeles and Paul’s cousin Howard Wennes served as Bishop in the Grand Canyon Synod of the ELCA.)

You can see a six-minute tribute to Dr. Egertson on Youtube which was produced as part of the first annual Clarence E. Anderson Peace and Justice Award.  Dr. Erwin narrates the video.

Once he clearly understood the personal, pastoral and theological issues at the center of the controversy about LGBT Lutherans, Paul Egertson “changed sides” with passion and determination and became a champion for opening the doors of the Lutheran Church to LGBT people and pastors.

Now the transition is complete, as Rev. Dr. Erwin inherits the mantle, not only as a key theologian at our local university, but as an eminently qualified teacher of the larger church. the second reason, in my view, that Erwin’s ordination is important is that a young but important academic institution of the whole church has participated fully and enthusiastically in his ordination, even though it is possible that the university’s “donor base” may include conservative or even homophobic people who will withdraw from active support of the university because a gay pastor holds an endowed chair in the University. To me this means that the regents are also claiming and participating in the shifting of the Christian paradigm from being anti-homosexual to welcoming and utilizing all people who have God-given gifts to serve.

I am delighted to have such an extraordinary man as Pastor Guy Erwin in the church I love and in such an influential setting as he has been given in the university.

By the way, in addition to the fifty or so pastors participating in the laying-on of hands for Pastor Erwin were ELCA Bishop Dean Nelson and Bishop Murray Finck, Episcopal Suffragan Bishop Mary Glasspool and Retired ELCA Bishop Howard Wennes. It was a splendid and remarkable moment in our faith community’s life.

—Pastor Dan Hooper

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Another close call coming, another earthquake?

May 10, 2011 by Pastor Dan.

More Light Presbyterians and Lutherans Concerned began their advocacy, education and support work about the same time, in 1974. Over the years we have had a great deal of dialogue about LGBT issues between the two bodies. I first met the late Dr. John Boswell at a Presbyterian event in West Hollywood not long after the publication of his blockbuster Christianity, Social Tolerance and Homosexuality in 1981. Chris Glaser, a Presbyterian pioneer in the gay/Christian movement, has worked tirelessly and written numerous books although he could never be ordained as a Presbyterian elder or minister.

All that may be about to change, if the Twin Cities Presbytery votes tonight to ratify a measure, Amendment 10-A, removing the ban on non-celibate lesbian/gay clergy in the Presbyterian Church U.S.A. In Presbyterian polity, a vote such as this in the General Assembly must be ratified by a majority of local presbyteries (smaller than Lutheran synods). According to Minnesota Public Radio, the Twin Cities Presbytery vote to rescind the policy would be the 87^th ratifying vote. Sixty-two presbyteries have voted against the change. Not all presbyteries have weighed in yet.

Because of the advocacy—lobbying—work of More Light Presbyterians and many others, the Presbyterian General Assembly (national convention) has three times voted to rescind the 1996 policy which expressly banned partnered lesbian/gay people from ordained service.

But we live in an era of domino-effect tipping points. The United Church of Christ, the Episcopal Church and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America have all dismantled their gate-keeping rules that kept lesbian and gay clergy out. The ELCA, which is larger than the other three church bodies, changed its policies most recently, in 2009.

Even more interesting, the PCUSA is one of the “full communion” partners with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. And so are the United Church of Christ and the Episcopal Church. (And the Moravian Church.) Together this group of Protestant bodies represents close to 10 million members, and begin to present a common witness of sexual inclusivity.

But there are “wrinkles” in this witness. Another “full communion” partner of the ELCA, the United Methodist Church, has not budged on sexuality issues and is not likely to any time soon, largely because it is a global church body, and because it is a very rural church in the United States. So the changing attitudes of large urban centers in the United States will not be enough, culturally, to shift the anti-gay attitudes of the Methodists.

Another significant wrinkle, of course, is that every time a church body moves forward on a social issue, it leaves some people behind who refuse to move on. The Presbyterians in American, for example, split over the issue of slavery more than 150 years ago, and have never completely reunited all of their congregations into the PCUSA. The Episcopal Church lost a lot of people over the ordination of women to the priesthood, and is still engaged in a battle with its global partners of the Anglican Communion over the consecration of openly-gay and partnered Bishop V. Gene Robinson. The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America has lost somewhere around 100-200 of its 10,000 congregations because of its courageous tipping vote in favor of partnered same-sex clergy in 2009, and lost a considerable amount of revenue flowing to the national church from other congregations who are withholding their cash in spite.

The PCUSA faces a similar on-going breach with congregations and individuals who won’t move on about sexuality issues. A disgruntled group, Presbyterians for Renewal, already has its own executive director and will hold its own convention later this year in Minneapolis, even though its director concedes that Amendment 10-A is likely to be ratified.

But according to MPR, Presbyterian polity will make it harder for individual congregations to just “pull out” and form a break-away churchbody. The local presbytery holds all church properties in its area in trust, so a local congregation would have to buy their own church buildings (and I guess convince the presbytery to sell!), or else just be disgruntled out in the street.

These years of struggle to change the church are really the raw data of a massive realignment of Christian groups as they confront the extraordinary social change happening in our times in the world. I can’t help thinking of the shifting of the globe’s huge tectonic plates, as entire continents or ocean floors continue to either slide past or move over or under each other. All that movement is bound to cause quite a few earthquakes. So it is with communities of faith.

—Pastor Dan Hooper

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Is this story for real?

May 9, 2011 by Pastor Dan.

I often am reminded, in the Peanuts comic strip, of Lucy pulling the football away at the last second when Charlie Brown goes for the kickoff. I guess it’s been a defining symbol of our times, that if something sounds too good to be true,… it probably is.

In this case, the intersection of two of the high profile LGBT topics of our times: same-sex marriage and the repeal of “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell.”

I am not familiar with CNS News, so I’ll keep scouting to see if other news outlets run this story. But tonight CNSnews.com is running this headline: “Navy Authorizes Chaplains to Perform Same-Sex ‘Marriages’ in Naval Chapels.”

My suspicion started with the headline that puts “Marriages” in quotation marks. This is typically the sign that the publishers means “so-called” instead of authentic. A little Wiki-search reveals that CNS News now means Cybercast News Service, but it was launched in 1998 as Conservative News Service, funded entirely by “private donations.” According to Wikipedia, CNS’ editor for 7 years was Scott Hogenson, who simultaneously worked for the Republican National Committee for a time.

This is not a gay marriage story lifted from the pages of The Onion. According to a 2-page April 13 memo from Rear Admiral M. L. Tidd (bio here) linked CNS, this is a genuine article.

Citing “additional legal review” by Navy attorneys, the admiral said the Navy “has concluded that, generally speaking, base facility use is sexual orientation neutral.”"If the base is located in a state where same-sex marriage is legal, then the base facilities may be used to celebrate the marriage,” the admiral’s directive states.Tidd has been Chief of Navy Chaplains since last August, according to his official bio. But it surprised me I had not seen this story on mainstream news wires. I went digging and, well, it has, sort of. Yahoo News is running the Reuters version of the story, also with today’s date. And MSNBC is running it tonight. The only real question, then, is where was Tidd’s memo since April 13?The Family Research Council is lamenting this and crying foul, because it believes that DOMA still prohibits same-sex marriages on federal property. That, I am sure, will be open to interpretation. (see pro-DOMA or anti-DOMA sources.) The Obama administration announced more than two months ago its finding that DOMA is unconstitutional and that it will no longer defend DOMA in court. If this is the conclusion President Obama came too, and he is (ahem) Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces, wouldn’t that settle this issue? But according to the MSNBC story, “Representative Todd Akin, chairman of a U.S. House subcomittee that oversees Navy and Marine Corps programs, said the new Navy guidance violates a federal law that defines marriage as a union between one man and one woman. The Missouri Republican and 62 other members of Congress have sent a letter to the Secretary of the Navy calling for the service to obey the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act.”Nothing I could find says that any Navy Chaplain has actually performed a same-sex wedding since April 13. So as of this minute, the news still falls in the category of “probably too good to be true.” At least it gives our partisan political system something else to chew on. I wouldn’t send out your invitations just yet.

—Pastor Dan Hooper

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Day of arising.

May 7, 2011 by Pastor Dan.

The Easter hymn comes to mind tonight:  “When we are walking, doubtful and dreading, blinded by sadness, slowness of heart; yet Christ walks with us, ever awaiting our invitation: Stay, do not part.”  It is based on tomorrow’s Gospel text from Luke 24, the “Road to Emmaus” story.

On Thursday, our friend Jeffrey was finally released from state prison—one month late due to the passive-aggressive incompetence of our state department of “corrections.”

Jeffrey is a gay man who was part of our church community, even though actually homeless when he was nabbed for a technical violation of his parole—failing to report his whereabouts to the parole officer.

Our “criminal justice” system is broken.  In California it eats up about as much as our entire educational system, some $10.5 billion a year.  The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation admits that more than 95% of that monstrous sum goes to simply keeping inmates locked up.  Prisons are running at over 200% design capacity.  Actual “correction” or “rehabilitation” scarcely happen at all.  Job training is spotty and inadequate.  Those inmates who never finished high school may only be permitted to take one class per week toward their G.E.D., while prison guards have the money sewed up and take home huge sums of overtime pay.  Medical care is equally spotty, and we know inmates who have had to manipulate the system just to get a nurse to see them.  There really is no such thing as counseling available to inmates, and it is extremely onerous to get the permission needed to visit inmates as pastors or volunteer chaplains.

Gay men are still targets in prison, and get raped—often by guards, not other inmates.  (See Just Detention International.)  We know of inmates who got HIV while doing time.  One straight inmate has gotten himself permanently into Ad Seg, or Administrative Segregation, so that other inmates don’t hit on him or try to beat him up because he is not real masculine-appearing.  How do we know he’s straight?  He serving time for raping his girl friend (even though she was living with him at the time, but that’s another symptom of a broken justice system).

I wouldn’t have thought so, but transgender M2F (male to female) inmates have it easier, and often find a straight protector in a fellow inmate who likes having someone feminine around for friendship and privileges.  We’ve had some difficulty with one transgender parolee, who looked for the same sweet deal “on the outside,” expecting someone would protect and support her.

It is hard to get an accurate picture of the system unless you get to know the people who have been swept into its grasp.  Voters see periodic reports that California has the highest recidivism rate in America, but according to the UC-Irvine Center for Evidence-Based Corrections in September 2005, “Two-thirds of California’s offenders return to prison within three years, but more than 50% of those offenders are sent back for parole violations alone, a rate considerably higher than in other large states.”

Such parole violations may sound serious, but how they are defined is itself often at the whim of the system which is abused not only by the guards union but political opportunists.  They have created a climate of “lock ‘em up and throw the key away” at the same time we don’t have enough money for education or the decent humanitarian care of our most vulnerable citizens.  As if the Three Strikes Law weren’t ineffective enough, in 2010—thanks to governor Arnold Schwarzenegger—Chelsea’s Law added to the insanity of Jessica’s Law, making it almost impossible to live in an urban county in this state if you are a sex offender.  (This is on top of Megan’s Law.)  The two options for such parolees are idiotic: either you declare yourself homeless, in which case the public is no safer if it doesn’t know where you are from night to night; or move to a rural county where there are no jobs or future, increasing the likelihood that parolees will eventually turn to criminal activity just to eat and stay alive.

Yet the CDCR and parole system requires parolees to return to the county in which they were originally apprehended.  We were working with another gay parolee a few months ago who did not want to return to the central valley county where he had been mixed up with local gangs that got him into trouble in the first place.  He had the official promise he could return instead to Los Angeles, where there was a support network waiting to help him start a brand-new life. But the minute he actually got our on parole, the parole officer changed everything, had him nabbed for a parole violation for not returning to his home county, and forced him back into the very criminal environment he was trying to avoid. As a result, he has disappeared.

Yet Christ walks with us, even as we try to carry out the mandate of Matthew 25:36. Tomorrow Jeffrey comes home to our congregation, to meet the people who have kept faith with him for three years of imprisonment.  Thanks to the vision of church members, we’ve been able to visit him twice in prison, write frequently, send him supplies and accept collect calls from prison several times a month.  Tomorrow is a homecoming, even though he still faces homelessness, unemployment, and three more years of close surveillance under parole. Yet Christ walks with us!

—Pastor Dan Hooper

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The devil doesn’t frighten me.

May 4, 2011 by Pastor Dan.

Be careful what you pray for. We have an interesting legacy of hands-on Bible Study in our parish, complete with all the urgent shouts of differences of opinion. It took us 9 months, for example, to slog through the Gospel of John verse by verse.

And when it ended we took a survey of what people wanted to study next. Guess. People want to study Satan, and tonight was the opening volley of our local war of good against evil.

Of course, we pray constantly for all people, dozens of them by name on Sundays, Wednesday and Thursdays, including those who are suffering from addictions, mental health problems, unemployment, homelessness, you name it.

And tonight three guys walked in who are not part of our “usual crowd,” two of whom I knew from prior episodes and one I’d never seen before. One is a known drug addict who thinks he is serving Jesus by preaching to the wackos on Skid Row but has himself never mastered his addiction to crystal meth. Another is certifiably mentally ill who cannot stop talking and making grimacing faces as if he is digging deep into intellectual turf. And the third turned out to be a raving fundamentalist who wanted to make sure we are a Christian Church before he would sit down, and later admitted he is homeless. This on top of several other “regulars” who tend to dominate, act out or digress into tabloid news, pop psychology or Dan Brown-esque conspiracy theories.

All true Christians, of course, show up for things late, and that meant that our special friends tonight were the first ones there. I was praying next not for the homeless, the addicted or the mentally ill, but for a very fast-acting dose of patience. Jesus, you promise you will never test us with more than we can handle (that is the Bible, isn’t it, however obliquely?), and I don’t think I can handle three at once with special needs.

But we launched the study of Satan with some general observations that people tend to believe stuff about Satan, the devil, evil and human nature that are not grounded in the Bible but mostly shaped by pop culture. In truth, pop culture has always yanked the chains of Christian theology and has been doing it for thousands of years.

We started with a verse-by-verse reading of Genesis 3. As improbable as it is, I had to argue for a mythic reading of this story–a story of talking snakes and the low-hanging fruit of good and evil. People want to believe the story is literally true—fact—because they think that somehow they are honoring the Bible and showing their loyalty as believers. Then the grimacing man asked in all seriousness if scholars have ever researched what kind of tree it was and what kind of fruit Adam and Eve were eating.

Hello? Lord, please show me some mercy. Help me show them that a parable is a story with Truth of far greater significance than the kind of fruit or the talking snake. A parable is not untrue just because it has no historic facts in it. If we obsess about the facts we will likely not be paying attention to the Truth even if it bit us in the heel!

What we will agonize about in coming weeks of course, is whether there is such a creature as Satan, the Devil, as an individual being who is God’s nemesis and truth’s antithesis, who is able to take over the brains and fates of all human beings at will. The idea that the Devil is God’s evil counterpart, with nearly all the same omniscience and omnipotence to inflict suffering, is largely non-scriptural. Such an idea entered into the western pop psychology thousands of years ago as their contemporary answer to the problem of evil in the world and the human aversion to responsibility for ourselves, our lives and relationships, and our world.

It may be a tough sell that Satan is the personification of evil run amok in the world–the aggregate of thousands of frailties, selfish choices, avoidance of spiritual struggle, and indifference to the suffering of others. Evil takes on a life of its own, I keep saying. If, as the homeless man said tonight, we leave an open door, evil will enter. That is not paranoia, but an understanding that evil seeks opportunity like seeds seek a crevice in the earth and water seeks its own level. Think Osama bin Laden, who is his madness and contempt opened every door he could and squandered much of his own $300 million fortune causing untold human suffering.

Where do the mythic and screwball images of the devil in our culture come from?— think of the evil child horror movie genre. Think “The Exorcist” (which grossed over $400 million, the most “successful” horror film ever), or “Rosemary’s Baby” or “The Omen.”

The screwball stuff does not come from the Bible. In my opinion, the Bible does not have an elaborate “doctrine” of Satan, assigning him great supernatural power over humanity for two reasons: (1) it believes that Almighty God is the source of all created things, all good, all power, all blessing, all purpose and all destiny; and (2) it believes that humanity is responsible for our own errors, failures and rebellion against God.

Two quotes to end this reflection, the first from Leo Tolstoy: “All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.”

And this from the late M. Scott Peck (The Road Less Traveled, People of the Lie): “The whole course of human history may depend on a change of heart in one solitary and even humble individual–for it is in the solitary mind and soul of the individual that the battle between good and evil is waged and ultimately won or lost.”

— Pastor Dan Hooper

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