The “core” of the faith: not about sex.

February 25, 2010 by Pastor Dan.

Associated Press had a feature story yesterday on the dissenters who are leaving the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America because of its increasingly liberal agenda. The story, which is even-handed if not totally sympathetic, highlights the experiences of several Lutheran churches—some small and some large— and pastors who have taken action to abandon their membership in the ELCA.

This kind of thing is not new. From time to time for decades thee have been individual congregations who get exercised over one or another issue and cannot countenance having organizational relations with people who do not agree with them on whatever pressing issue of the day is causing a stir.

You can read the full story here: Lutherans seeing fallout over gay clergy issue.

Statistically, the division is insignificant. Only a couple hundred congregations out of the ELCA’s 10,000+ have taken any steps to leave because the ELCA is now on a path to officially welcome lesbian/gay clergy in same-sex intimate relationships. Here in Southern California, we’ve seen a couple of these couple hundred, and most of them have been small congregations, and one or two very large parishes that are full of themselves and must feel a certain economic and egotistic independence.

The thrust of the AP story is that not all these conservative congregations are moving in the same direction. They are splitting off into several different little splinter groups which have formed in the last decade or so as receptacles for them.

The one that has any significance is called Lutheran CORE, headed by one Rev. Mark Chavez. CORE hopes to form a new denomination by August called North American Lutheran Church. By my count off their web screen, they have 135 congregations in the U.S. and 4 in Canada, plus some overseas. Hardly a counter-Reformation.

CORE posts some theological statements, among which stuff on traditional views of marriage and family figures prominently. But they also had this article that intrigued me, “The Diminution of God as Father (And his Holy Pronouns)” written by the Bishop Emeritus of the ELCA Virginia Synod. (Ahh, Virginia again: think Falwell, think 3/5 of a human being…) Turns out that author Rev. Richard Bansemer is exercised about contemporary prayer language that tires to diminish he, him, and his in referring to God the Creator. His 1,900 word essay (about the length of a typical Sunday sermon for me: a 12-minute listen) has a couple dozen quotes from the Bible, and nothing from any other Christian scholar ancient or modern. So it’s a light weight argument that implies that the ELCA is going under because we have diminished the God-our-Father language.

Will these men ever get it? A good place to start is the scholarly work by Gail Ramshaw, God Beyond Gender [Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995] and her chapter, “Pronouns and the Christian God.”

Bansemer and his ilk in CORE, I guess, wouldn’t be interested in Ramshaw’s finding that the brilliant ancient Cappadocian Fathers of the 4^th century (St. Basil the Great, Bishop of Caesarea in Cappadocia, St. Gregory, Bishop of Nazianzus and St. Gregory, Bishop of Nyssa) wrote and taught that God is not male in the way that human beings are male and female. These guys were as orthodox as you could get, and triumphed at the Council of Constantinople in a.d. 381 over Arianism. Ramshaw notes Gregory of Nazianzus “ridiculing those who would draw from the gender designation in language a notion of actual sexuality within God.”

That God is consistently referred to in the Bible with masculine is above all an effort to distinguish the Hebrew and Christian faith(s) from the pagan goddess worship in the ancient world, a religious paradigm which was very obsessed with fertility and therefore with sexuality.

Why bring all this trivia up? Much of CORE’s theological statement seems obsessed not only with gender but with the same relentless masculine privilege that has plagued the Christian faith almost since the day they crucified our first feminist: Jesus Christ. CORE’s Advisory Council, for example, is made up of 17 men and 2 women.

Counter reformation: you can have the CORE.

But worse, CORE looks like an effort to keep beating a drum which is small and bent: the idea that there are deep and fundamental theological issues over which no compromise with the ELCA is possible, and those fundamental issues are all about gender and human sexuality. Somebody should tap the CORE people on the shoulder and point out to them that there is not much in the ancient creeds and confessions about gender and not a word about human sexuality. The faith of the church—the ancient church, the modern church, the ELCA, is our faith in God and in Jesus Christ, not our faith in marriage, family, gender, sexuality, homosexuality, gender role models or the proper way to bring up children in a home with one mom and one dad. In short, CORE has staked out its uniqueness in the same sand trap used by most other contemporary indignational movements that represent the right wing of the so-called Culture Wars.  As for me and my house, we will keep the faith.

—Pastor Dan Hooper

Posted in Doctrine, Sex, Bible & Interpretation, LGBT Christian, ELCA, Uncategorized | Print | No Comments »

The crazies are at it again.

February 19, 2010 by Pastor Dan.

Fred (”God Hates America“) Phelps continues to attract media attention, which is the only pay-off he could possible get out of flying his family/congregation around the country. … and I won’t say anything more disparaging, not that he doesn’t deserve it.  His “God hates” web sites are evidence enough of his twisted nature.

 

In fact, St. Paul warned us about Fred Phelps and talks to people today who listen to his anti-Christian, ungodly diatribes:

I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting the one who called you in the grace o fChrist and are turning to a different gospel— not that there is another gospel, but there are some who are confusing you and want to pervert the gospel of Christ.  But even if we or an angel from heaven should proclaim to you a gospel contrary to what we proclaimed to you, let that one be accursed!  As we have said before, so now I repeat, if anyone proclaims to you a gospel contrry to what you received, let that one be accursed! — Galatians 1:6-9 (NRSV)

This just in from Pastor Dan forwarding it from Rabbi Steve (I have added emphasis because this apparently happens tomorrow, February 20).  Please pray for our friends in faith, and if you are extra brave, say a prayer for Fred, who has completely blown off the gospel of Jesus.  ~  P.D.

A Message from Rabbi Steven Moskowitz…

Dear Temple Israel Family,

As you may already know, an anti-gay, anti-Semitic group, the Westboro Baptist Church from Topeka, Kansas, is scheduled to come to Long Beach to engage in a series of protests at various locations February 19-21.  Among those places to be picketed are Wilson High School, the Alpert Jewish Community Center, and Temple Israel.  Specifically, the group’s schedule states that it will picket Temple Israel on Saturday, February 20, 10:00-10:30 a.m.  Westboro is a small group, which typically has a small number of picketers displaying hateful and offensive signs, engaging in vocal demonstrations but refraining from any violent or unlawful activities.  Below is a link to a Press-Telegram article announcing the group’s intentions. 

The staff has been in touch with the Long Beach Police Department, the Jewish Federation, the Alpert Jewish Community Center, the ADL, and other agencies.  Following discussions that included Sharon Amster Brown, Education VP Judy Blumenthal and Torah Center Chair Katherine Bussi, we have decided to move the 7^th grade program scheduled for that morning to a parents’ home.  Sharon will shortly be sending an email to the 7^th grade families with the details for that morning’s schedule. 

After giving the matter much thought, I approached the South Coast Interfaith Council and proposed that we host at our synagogue that morning a unity prayer service as a way to refocus the story of the day away from Westboro’s message of hate to our community’s message about love, diversity, and unity.  I invited clergy and congregants from this interfaith community both to attend and to contribute to such a service with prayers/readings/songs which speak of the sacred power of love and unity.  I am delighted to say that the SCIC was very enthusiastic about this invitation.  Already I have received responses from neighboring congregations expressing their support for us and their interest in participating.  We are going to change the start time of our service that morning to 9:30 a.m.  It will conclude at 11:00 a.m.  Similarly, we will shift the start of our regular Torah study session to 8:15 a.m. 

Members of the Long Beach Police Department will be present at Temple Israel that morning.  Please do respect their recommended guidelines that there be no direct encounters with the picketers and no counter-demonstrations.  That would only help the group to feel that they had achieved their goals of provocation and attention.  I invite you to join us on February 20 at 9:30 a.m. as we give voice to the view that there are many paths to God, except the path of hate.  On that day we shall bear witness to the prophetic words inscribed on the outside of our synagogue: “My house shall be a house of prayer for all peoples.”

Rabbi Steven Moskowitz

Press-Telegram link: http://www.presstelegram.com/search/ci_14272240?IADID=Search-www.presstelegram.com-www.presstelegram.com

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Shifting paradigms: Christ has moved.

February 16, 2010 by Pastor Dan.

Our midweek book study is now reading Marcus J. Borg’s book The Heart of Christianity: Rediscovering a Life of Faith [New York: www.HarperCollins.com, 2003].

We’ve decided not to meet at church but at the local Starbucks two blocks away. (Vermont and Prospect in Hollywood; feel free to join us Tuesday March 2, and have the first 2 chapters read!)

It still takes a little getting used to talking about God with a bit of an audience, hunched around three tables ganged together. So far people are being respectful, but we’re not trying to be exhibitionists with faith, either. At least it’s almost late-night conversation over the contemporary struggle of faith in a secular world.

If people reject the “paradigm” of what Christianity used to peddle, Borg says they are still “hungry for meaning and values.” (p. xii)

But I see hungry people looking for the things that will not satisfy, simply because they are hungering and cannot distinguish between what is worthwhile and what is frivolous. This reminds me of a comment from a colleague years ago in Phoenix. “When people stop believing in God, they don’t believe in nothing. They will believe in anything,” said Dr. Shelby Lee, who at the time was Senior Pastor at First Congregational Church downtown.

Borg references and labels the “earlier paradigm” and the “emerging paradigm” —terms I am comfortable with. But I tripped over the word Christianity itself. Is the Christian faith different from Christianity?

To me Christianity is nearly synonymous with Churchianity. Christianity includes the Crusades, the Inquisition, St. Augustin and his weird ideas about sexuality, the “Holy Roman Empire,” the Pope and his medieval pronouncements, the Bible bangers and all that crap. It includes all the baggage, the culture and the ungodly assumptions that prop them up. Too bad Borg didn’t ditch the word “Christianity” itself. For more than 30 years I have used another term and I think it still describes all that I want to say with a label: “The Christian faith and life.”

I realize that sitting in a Starbucks to discuss a theological book is itself a shifting paradigm. Funny isn’t it that a commercial establishment can make room for God talk when a lot of people who want to talk about God can’t make room for a difference of opinion, let alone a change of venue. Christ has moved out of the church and into the community: get used to it.

Borg’s point should not be missed, however. There is a choice in the Christian world of the 21^st century. Sad though it be, there are two profoundly different ways to buy into the Christian faith and life. The one, the “earlier paradigm” corresponds to fundagelicalism, but the “emerging paradigm” doesn’t yet have a satisfactory label. It is not a cocksure, alienating belief that the Bible is literally true in every detail and without errors because it was dictated from God’s lips to the writers’ ears. Borg believes that both of these views (for convenience: conservative and liberal) are quite recent approaches to the Christian faith, and he aims to drill deeper to find the heart of the Christian faith.

I have often thought that if the rabid, aggressive, take-no-prisoners fundamentalist brand of Christian faith were the only one out there — if it were my only choice— then I could not be a Christian. Of course, even to make that observation could set me up for very nasty criticism by fundamentalists. Now they can simply link to this site and say, “he is a Bible doubter” or “he is not a Christian.”

But it is not that I doubt the Bible, but I look more deeply for what its meaning is for us than the fundamentalist is willing to look. I am looking for truth, not proof. I know that God speaks to us through the Scriptures, but I know just as fully that God speaks to us apart from the Scriptures. And I agree wholeheartedly with Martin Luther nearly 500 years ago who said, “The Bible is God’s word, but not every word is God’s word for me. God may have been speaking to someone else.”

That is the underlying energy in the “emerging paradigm.” Millions of people today cannot accept that every word in the Bible is speaking to them. So much of it is time– and culture–conditioned that it literally makes no sense to us any more. To say with honesty and integrity that every word of it is without error and literally true and applicable to every human being for all time would be to force not only the ancient message and its truths into a box, but to dumb down our own lives into slavish imitation of a world view that no longer exists. It would be mental suicide, not faith.

—Pastor Dan Hooper

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Enveloped on the mountaintop.

February 14, 2010 by Pastor Dan.

Today being the feast of the Transfiguration of Our Lord, it deserves some comment. I had to preach on it this morning.

It’s a difficult thing no matter whether you’re a cynic or deeply pious. As the story is told it’s too supernatural–ranks right up there with the Ascension on the list of things no one really believes as narrated.

Yet the narrative tries to convey something intensely mystical and meaningful. In the midst of his public ministry, Jesus seemed profoundly different to his disciples. Something happened that allowed/permitted/forced them to see him in a new and blinding light.

Typically we call that a “mountaintop experience,” and it must have been for Peter James and John, the “inner three” who get lot of attention in the Gospel stories but we are never fully told why. As told in Luke 9, the three of them were “weighed down with sleep” (and you will remember that in Matthew and Mark, the same three disciples are with Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane and, yup, there they fell asleep too).

Just like the other nine disciples, these guys were not perfect. They had feet of clay. They were as flawed as any human being alive right now—but: the witness of these disciples is that a veil was ripped away, and they saw Christ Jesus as God sees him. They were overshadowed and enveloped by a Cloud— a glory they could not understand and could hardly describe— but the Jesus who came out of the transfiguring Cloud with them was not One to be afraid of, or One to hide from, but One who was to lay down his life for them.

I cannot guarantee you a mountaintop experience. You will find your own mountain, and it probably won’t be a pretty picture in the piney woods with postcard views from the top. For some of us, it may be the mountain of our own failures, or sorrows, or mistakes, or addictions, pain or internalized homophobia. But if we climb the mountains we have heaped up in our lives, there, at the top of these heaps of human experience, we encounter the Cross. And it is not a trigger for terror. It is the revelation of the One True God of grace, forgiveness, compassion and lovingkindness. It may be Law which drives us up the mountain of despair, but it is pure Gospel to find the love of Jesus Christ awaiting us at the top.

— Pastor Dan Hooper

Posted in Homophobia, Gay Catechism, Doctrine, Bible & Interpretation, Living by Grace, LGBT Christian, Spirituality | Print | No Comments »

We’re here. We’re Christian. Get used to it.

November 23, 2009 by Pastor Dan.

The year 2009 has already been momentous enough in the world of faith, what with both the Episcopal Church and the Lutheran Church taking decisive left turns on sexuality issues. The Episcopal Church essentially ended its self-imposed moratorium of electing a lesbian/gay bishop, after the existence of out gay Bishop Gene Robinson set the world’s conservative Anglican into a firestorm of indignation.

Then a month later the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America did something almost unthinkable for a mid-America-dominated outfit of good decent folks: it lifted the 20 year old ban on the ordination of partnered lesbian and gay people into the Lutheran ministry. Since that momentous day in August, everybody seemed to threaten to stop talking to the Lutherans, including other Lutherans, Catholics, etc.

Every denomination of Christians knows full well that they already have lesbian and gay clergy in their ranks. But most of them have preferred the continuous hypocrisy of plausible deniability – that they are unaware or even sincerely believe that they do not have lesbian and gay clergy because, well, they don’t allow such a thing. (By the way, the word “plausible” has an interesting history of its own.)

At any rate, the outrage and indignation over the reality of sexual variation even among decent and God-fearing people, is at least the flashpoint for a lot of upheaval in the Christian world.

Upheaval is usually caused by a lot of light material being tossed around by stronger forces. (I imagine the example of, say, a card table full of champagne glasses is upset by a fast-moving house pet.) There is far less upheaval of any sort when something is built on bedrock, and I always thought that the Christian faith was built on bedrock. I was brought up to believe that. More on that later.

But upheaval there is, and many well-respected commentators have been suggesting now for years that what we see emerging is an enormous realignment in the world of religion. Breakaway groups from mainline Protestant denominations, for example, may simply team up and form new unions.

So as the CORE Lutherans announce they are moving ahead to form their own little churchbody, we can’t help wondering if they will eventually converge with the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod if that latter can trust their conservatism, or even the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod (which is really not evangelical and not Lutheran in my humble opinion).

As a side note, I will watch with enthusiasm mixed with amazement to see how many ELCA congregations actually do go with the CORE movement. My count today on their web site is that 87 congregations are moving in their direction. Keep in mind that somewhere between 300 and 400 ELCA congregations have signed on with the Lutherans Concerned Reconciling in Christ program to publicly welcome lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people. So at the moment this doesn’t look like a serious realignment of apocalyptic proportions.

But the this ecumenical thing popped into the news, the so-called Manhattan Declaration which came out three days ago, that attempts to put up a barricade to the enormous social change of recent decades, over the signatures of Orthodox, Catholic and Evangelical Christians.

(It seems more than a little odd this group would grab the title from the climate change people who in 2008 issued the Manhattan Declaration in Manhattan. This month’s 7-page religious moratorium was actually released in Washington D.C., not New York. I suppose now anybody could just write up his or her own version of truth and issue it under the title “The Holy Bible,” and it would be okay, huh?)

But this seems to fit the pattern of that “strange bedfellow” coalition of Mormons and Roman Catholics who donated huge sums to “defend” heterosexual marriage in California and again in Maine.

Bruce Garrett, of Truth Wins Out has written a cogent piece (”Statement Of Conscience: Just Give Us The Money”) on the Declaration and warns of its blatantly anti-gay political agenda.

Is there a real Christian realignment going on? Realignment is hard to detect for certainty when things change at glacial speed. And you know how the media loves to exaggerate, hence the word “upheaval” when 87 out of 10,000 congregations pick up their marbles and leave the ELCA’s game.

Personally, I doubt that there is a grand realignment that will abide for very long. The Mormon/Catholic alliance over Proposition 8 was a marriage of convenience. Both, as I have said, did their best to take the moral heat off of their own houses (a wild history of plural marriages, and a current pattern of sexually-abusive priests and pedophiles) by amping up their indignation over same-sex marriage.

Even in the current Declaration, there is so little holding Evangelical and Catholics together theologically that I doubt it means a massive or fundamental realignment. There are still plenty of evangelical Christians who think the Pope is Antichrist, for example. And Benedict XVI hasn’t done anything to dispel that age-old antipathy. It was more than amusing to see the Catholic News Agency identify some of the writers who put the Declaration together as including “renowned Evangelical leader Charles Colson.” Charles Colson, of Watergate notoriety? Charles Colson, who wrote “Born Again” in 1976 after serving time in prison for obstruction of justice? Well, I guess so, because he got into bed with ex-Lutheran convert to Roman Catholicism (the late) Richard John Neuhaus to publish “Evangelicals and Catholics Together: Toward a Common Mission” in 1995. (You can get your used copy from Amazon right now for 59¢.)

And I suspect the Orthodox are not about to cave into Roman Papal authority any time soon, especially in light of its astonishing resurgence in post-Soviet Russia. The ecumenism of recent years on that front has Orthodoxy being cordial but not really trusting the Papacy. And Benedict is not likely to suggest parity with the Patriarch. His recent”generous” offer to welcome disaffected Anglicans back into the Roman fold, for example, smacks of canon law machinations: an Anglican bishop can become a Roman priest, keeping his wife but forfeiting his episcopate. Gee thanks, Ben.

If the Christian faith and witness is built on real bedrock, it is not the bedrock of Christian history nor a unified view of the divisive social issues in any era. It could only be the bedrock of the Lordship of Jesus Christ and the historic creeds and confessions of what it means to be Christian. (So there go the Mormons, who hold to some very odd beliefs about God, Jesus, Adam, and human beings becoming Gods, and who turn up their noses at the ancient statements of faith.) Clearly, the bedrock of Christian faith, and the “core” of Lutheran theological teachings, are about what God does for humanity in Jesus Christ. Those core believes including nothing about who is Pope or whether one needs a pope, a bishop or a priest. the core believes including nothing about human sexuality, homosexuality, or marriage, for that matter.

You can appeal all you want to tradition, and loyalty to the real Holy Bible, but unity of faith is grounded on a great deal more than widely-held prejudices and a quickly assembled outrage and bluster promulgated to grab the attention of the media. And most important, a 7-page statement drawn up by indignant traditionalists does absolutely nothing to make reality go away. And a significant part of reality is that there are lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and questioning human beings out there, many of whom were raised in Christian homes and in spite of all the conservative bluster still acknowledge the Lordship of Jesus Christ. We’re here, we’re queer. We’re Christian. Get used to it. Do I have to say that into Latin?

— Pastor Dan Hooper

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Deeply flawed at the core.

November 21, 2009 by Pastor Dan.

My friend Steve writes/rants about the latest ecclesiastical saber-rattling:

Hey, it’s Thursday, so the Lutherans must be forming yet another break-away denomination. Did you see the LA Times today? A little piece from AP that the CORE group is moving ahead more rapidly than they had originally anticipated in the formation of a new denomination for those unhappy with the direction of the ELCA. [Good background article from Associated Press here]

Well, need I say it? What will their foundational docs look like: “We are the church that thinks homosexuality is a sin.” So much for the solid rock of faith. E gads.

AND what a phenomenal WASTE of resources…to put all that energy into leaving and forming something “new” (which is, in actuality, a rehash of something very OLD…can you say “Missouri?”) What good could be done with all those resources!

Oh, and so much for the “bound conscience.” These folks, apparently, were never bound to anything but their own dogmatism. As soon as they didn’t get their way, they decided to take their marbles and go home. OK, bye!

SO…maybe NOW the ELCA will be able to move into God’s future, unencumbered by these folks. There’s a vision you can hang your hat on!

End of rant (for now).

My thoughts (which I will one day express just a tad more completely): the church that is held together merely by habit and antipathy to someone else’s sex life is deeply flawed. May God bless them. They need it. – DH

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Berlin: let your light so shine.

November 10, 2009 by Pastor Dan.

“Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God. Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. “Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account.

“You are the light of the world. . . .No one after lighting a lamp puts it under the bushel basket, but on the lampstand, and it gives light to all in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others. . . .” —Matthew 5

This week’s news includes the 20^th anniversary of the Berlin Wall, and I keenly remember the events as the world rapidly changed in the late 80s— early 90s.

When my spouse and I went to Berlin 10 years ago on a concert trip with the Gay Men’s Chorus of Los Angeles, we walked through the Brandenburg Gate easier than you could a turn-stile in an amusement park. We saw the thin bronze strip laid into the asphalt streets signifying where the famous Wall had stood.

Last night you could have knocked me over with a feather when I heard an NPR story about what led up to the break-through and the collapse of the Berlin Wall. It began with peaceful street demonstrations not in Berlin, but in Leipzig on September 4, 1989. What NPR said was that a Lutheran pastor, Christian Fuhrer, the pastor of St. Nicholas Church, known as “Nikolai Kirche” at the crossroads of two main streets on the main square in Leipzig, began holding Monday night “peace prayer” services, and they began to draw people from all over the city.

Within a few weeks, each time the parishioners spilled out into the Leipzig Karl Marx Square, they took their prayers and candles with them and began to keep a public vigil for peace. Before many Mondays went by, it was thousands of people carrying candles from the church, in non-violent protests against the government.

The STASI, the state police, held back, unwilling to cause a massacre. One of them later said “we were prepared for anything” that the crowds might do. But we were not prepared for prayers and candles.

Nikolai Kirche   ~   Montagsdemonstration

Pastor Fuhrer’s peace prayers drew a crowd of 10,000, and within weeks, 70,000—this in a city of half a million. By October 16, the Monday night crowd had swelled to 120,000, and the following week, to more than 300,000.

The most interesting note I found in the story of the Monday night demonstrations was this quote, from a cabaret artist Bernd-Lutz Lange, who said, “There was no head of the revolution. The head was the Nikolaikirche and the body the centre of the city. There was only one leadership: Monday, 5 P.M., the Nikolaikirche.”

My point is very simple and direct:  Never, never, never underestimate the power of one person, or one church, to make a huge difference in the world.

Within the first month of the peaceable demonstrations in Leipzig, Western Germany television was reporting what was happening. Viewers in East Germany learned of the candlelight marches, and Pastor Fuhrer’s vigils began to happen in other Easter German cities.

The context in which the first Monday night prayers for peace started was a mood of either resignation or hopelessness. This one Lutheran Pastor could not have dreamed that he would launch a movement to bring down the German Democratic Republic. But he did what he could do, and the people of Leipzig knew from the witness of this one church that the Lutheran Church supported their yearning for change.

“You are the light of the world.” Jesus tells us to put our lights up and out there like a lamp on a stand. “In the same way, let your light shine before others.” That light may be a candle. But it almost always includes other forms of courage, determination, sacrifice, strength and risk. If we are not stuck in a mood of resignation or hopelessness or powerlessness, any one of us has the ability to change the world.

— Pastor Dan Hooper, Los Angeles

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Mr. Fundamentalist and the Theology of Scarcity.

September 30, 2009 by Dan Hooper.

How hard our righteous sense of judgment dies.

After another wild and intense Bible Study tonight, I drove home just now thinking to write about one of the guys who attends who is steeped in fundamentalist rhetoric. At times, he is so judgmental that it irritates many of the others. (He has been fed at a different theological trough, so to speak, for most of his life, and can quote Scripture—or at least approximate it—freely and frequently. But it seems that he has concentrated his search of the Scriptures on what is the most judgmental.

We get 12 to 15 people each week for food, prayer and study, and right now we’re working through Paul’s Letter to the Romans—a very intense and heavy book for after-dinner conversation. But hey, somebody else suggested it!

Several weeks ago, we got heated over whether —even with God’s divine forbearance and love— we can be certain that some people are going to burn in hell. Hey, I didn’t bring that up either, he did! The phrases “get to heaven” and “go to hell” seem to be a constant staple in his faith diet.

So over and over (and tonight was no exception) I keep bringing up illustrations of God’s awesome grace to fill in the heart and the soul of Paul’s more juridical arguments about justification. One of my favorites is the parable of the Prodigal Son (Luke 15), where the Father figure treats both sons generously—both the one who was long on obedience but short on tolerance, and the younger one who has foolhardy and then sorrowful when he came to his senses out of sheer desperation.

Another favorite is the parable of the laborers in the vineyard (Matthew 20), who work varying lengths of the day from as much as 12 hours down to merely 1 hour, but all receive the same wage from the landowner. When there is grumbling, the employer (the God figure) says to those grumblers who worked through the heat of the day, “Do you begrudge my generosity?”

These are both illustrations of God’s grace, but they also bring to light the fundamental human trait of resentment. Scholar are quick to tell us that both parables have a deeper level of interpretation as contrasting the Jews (long obedient and faithful) and the Gentiles (lawless johnny-come-lateleys).

So in the Bible Study, even as I try to affirm what people are saying and thinking, I am always seeking ways to re-channel fundamentalist judgmentalism that wants to be certain God is sending disobedient sinners to eternal damnation. After all, they say, its right here in black and white in the Bible.

As if the parables Jesus told are not also “in black and white”? What is it about our righteous sense of judgment that we will go to great lengths to track down and then lift up the judgmental stuff in the Bible, and then soft-pedal the forgiving, grace-filled forbearance of God? Do we have some profoundly human need, in comparing ourselves against others, to put them down (condemn to hell) in order to lift ourselves up?

Tonight, Mr. Fundamentalist quarreled a little against the parable of the laborers by insisting that in heaven different people would get bigger or smaller rewards based on their deeds in this life. The immediate outcry and groaning from others surprised even me! “Oh brother! No, you’ve got it wrong. That’s irrelevant! Where does it say that? For pity’s sake!”

Christian entitlement fits hand-in-glove with Christian judgmentalism. Both are stuck in the idea that God’s grace is scarce, limited, and that in order for “good” people to receive it, it must be withheld from “bad” people.

Both the parables I mentioned say otherwise. Before the thundering waterfall of God’s gracious and generous love I stand with open hands. I will not receive much if I make my hands into fists. I must have open hands. And I will not receive more by shoving my brother or sister aside. In fact, we are never justified in trying to keep one another away from this constant, bountiful supply of God’s grace. Paul says in Romans that we are justified entirely and only as a gift, received by faith. It is not a reward, but a gift. there is no deserving, no entitlement, no wages at the end of the day. And those who receive the most are probably the most aware of this flood of grace.

But those who think they have earned it, and that it is due them and not to others, have probably received the least. For when our hearts close against others, it is as if we were trying to capture the whole of the waterfall with our fists.

—Pastor Dan Hooper

Posted in Doctrine, Bible & Interpretation, Fundamentalism, Faith, Living by Grace | Print | No Comments »

The institutional and the theological high ground.

September 24, 2009 by Pastor Dan.

This summer has been a tipping point for the ELCA, the largest of the Lutheran churchbodies in the United States. Somehow, while many observers weren’t paying much attention, but the Holy Spirit was near, this largely Midwestern-based Protestant church slipped from the conservative column to the liberal. Its actions in Assembly a month ago in Minneapolis are still being weighed and measured for significance.

Yesterday, Presiding Bishop Mark S. Hanson (who is also the President of the Lutheran World Federation) issued a “pastoral letter” on the tipping point — what he thinks about how Lutherans should feel about the major change in the ELCA’s view of same-gender relationships and lesbian/gay clergy.

For review, there was no official prior policy against same-gender relationships. No Lutheran pastor has been defrocked or disciplined by the ELCA for officiating at a lesbian wedding. Not so for the Presbyterians and the Methodists, who have drawn their line in the sand way to the right of the Lutherans.

But there was an official policy against rostering (ordaining, commissioning or hiring) out lesbian and gay clergy who are in same-gender relationships.

And there was no policy to forbid gay or lesbian persons from being clergy if they promised to be celibate forever, although the defacto rule is that any congregation that blanched at the thought of a homosexual pastor with a same-sex spouse would have blanched at the thought of a celibate homosexual pastor, too.

You can read Hanson’s pastoral letter on my other web site where I store bigger documents. In it, he takes the institutional high ground, and at times is almost eloquent in reminding the denomination that we have a mission to accomplish and we are only hurting ourselves and our mission if we get into a schism over lesbian/gay clergy.

For the record, the schism will proceed as previously scheduled. Hanson’s letter is not likely to convince anybody to change their mind. But the schism will be small—perhaps 100–200 congregations may bolt, out of a total of nearly 10,000 congregations.

But it still hurts when people we thought understood the Gospel as well as Lutherans do decide to say “we’re out of here,” like where Paul says, “the eye cannot say to the hand, `I have no need of you.’” (1 Corinthians 12:14–27)

Hanson reminds the church that Lutherans have always deftly distinguished Law and Gospel, what he says Martin Luther called “the highest art among Christians.” To make this important distinction and apply each appropriately is in fact nothing less than interpreting the Scriptures rather than shooting them from a gun at a social issue.

My turn: Hanson speaks in generalities, but I would have been a bit more specific, in reminding the whole church that heterosexuality is neither Law nor Gospel. The Christian Church long ago gave up trying to make “be fruitful and multiply” into a commandment that must be obeyed by all believers in Jesus. Heterosexual love, or sexual expression, or even reproduction, cannot be commandments, as Jesus and Paul both made clear.

But neither is heterosexuality Gospel. No one will be saved or redeemed or put on God’s right side by heterosexuality. No one earns a heavenly mansion by virtue of heterosexual behavior. We are saved by grace (Romans 3:23–24; Ephesians 2:4), regardless of Paul’s curious take on women being saved by bearing children. He even says, in 1 Corinthians 7:16, that a woman or man might save the unbelieving spouse —salvation by marriage?  But his broadest theme, over and over, is that we are saved by grace alone.  Sex, sexual orientation, sexual expression, are not part of the equation at all.

I have continued to say this wherever possible: the ELCA’s ~ or the Episcopal Church’s ~ action to open its doors and its ministry fully to LGBT people is not a departure from traditional or correct Christian doctrine because human sexuality, in all of its perplexing diversity, is not part of Christian doctrine. Christian doctrine is about Jesus Christ and what he has done. It is not about us and what we have done, whether sublime or perverse. No one, whether Jew or Greek, circumcised or uncircumcised, heterosexual or homosexual, “has a leg up” before God.

Yes, I know the conservative rant to the contrary. But it is a hopeless stretch to insist that any one or another specific sexual behavior is a sin which disqualifies one from God’s love – and yes, you can find Bible verses to attempt to so insist – because there are other Bible verses that blow that thesis away!  Jesus said “Anyone who comes to me I will never drive away” (John 6:37); and “Very truly, I tell you, whoever believes has eternal life” (John 6:47).  There is just no extra credit for being heterosexual.  There are millions of people of faith out there who are not heterosexual. They have come to Jesus and they believe in his message of hope and grace. Regardless of what a congregation or an entire churchbody may say, Jesus will not drive them away, but because they have put their faith in God’s grace through Jesus Christ, they have eternal life.

Moreover, since no one is without sin (Romans 3:23), no one, including no heterosexual has the right to cast the first stone.

No one has the right to judge.

No one.

Just say No, when homophobic people start to rant that they are now being driven out of the church. No, they are walking away all by themselves.  They are doing, or preparing to do, what millions of LGBT Christians have not done, even when our churches would not welcome us if we were open. We remained faithful to Christ and to his church. Now we rejoice that the ELCA is being faithful to us. If others cannot accept that, perhaps they never did understand the Gospel after all.

— Pastor Dan Hooper

Posted in Sex, Lesbian/Gay Marriage, Gay Catechism, "The Closet", Doctrine, Bible & Interpretation, Ministry, Faith, LGBT Christian, ELCA | Print | 1 Comment »

Missouri Synod weighs in on gay clergy.

August 24, 2009 by Dan Hooper.

First, this tidbit from KXMB CBS, in Bismarck, ND (with video?): “Update on the latest in religion news:”

“MINNEAPOLIS (AP) The president of the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod has told members of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America that their votes on gay issues will have negative consequences.”The Reverend Gerald Kieschnick (KEESH’-nik) addressed the churchwide assembly of the ELCA a day after its delegates lifted a ban on partnered gays and lesbians serving as clergy.

“Kieschnick said that decision will hurt relations between the nation’s two largest Lutheran denominations and “cause additional stress and disharmony within the ELCA.” Conservative Evangelical Lutheran congregations won’t be forced to hire gay clergy, but opponents nevertheless warned that straying from Scripture could result in a loss of members and finances.

“Lutheran CORE, a conservative group within the ELCA that fought the gay clergy policy, will hold a convention in Indianapolis next month to review its next steps.”  Sound: CUT ..235 (08/23/09)

I’ve been waiting for this since early Saturday — news from the Minneapolis Assembly about what “greetings” the head of the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod would bring in light of the ELCA’s assembly actions in the days before.Next I quote from the blog letter from Phil Soucy, Communications Director for Lutherans Concerned/North America:

“‘Greetings’ were brought to the assembly by Reverend Dr. Gerald Kieschnick, President of the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod. … The Reverend Dr. did not smile, but began his message by quoting Paul in 2 Corinthians 15: ‘…we implore you, on behalf of Christ: be reconciled to God. For our sake, He made Him to be sin who knew no sin so that in Him we might become the righteousness of God. What a blessing it is to know that our sin is forgiven, removed from us as far as the east is from the west because of the atoning sacrifice of Christ on Calvary’s cross…’ . . .”He later quoted from the Kolb-Wengert translation of the Formula of Concord on doctrinal controversy and discord, to wit: ‘…for these controversies are not merely misunderstandings or semantic arguments where someone might think that one group had not sufficiently grasped what the other group was trying to say or that the tensions were based upon only a few specific words of relatively little consequence. Rather, these controversies deal with important and significant matters, and they are of such a nature that the positions of the erring party neither could nor should be tolerated in the church of God, much less be excused or defended. Therefore necessity demands explanation of these disputed articles on the basis of God’s word and reliable writings so that those with a proper Christian understanding could recognize which position regarding the points under dispute is in accord with God’s word and the Christian Augsburg confession and which is not. And so the Christians of good will, who are concerned about the truth, might protect and guard themselves from the errors and corruptions that have appeared among us…’

“His was a serious message of rebuke, delivered somberly and, as he said, ‘…in deep humility with a heavy heart and no desire whatsoever to offend. The decisions by this assembly to grant non-celibate homosexual ministers the privilege of serving as rostered leaders in the ELCA and the affirmation of same-gender unions as pleasing to God will undoubtedly cause additional stress and disharmony within the ELCA. It will also negatively affect the relationships between our two church bodies. The current division between our churches threatens to become a chasm…’”

I am not at all surprised by Dr. K’s grim and humorless chastisement of the ELCA for taking the courageous step of opening the gates to lesbian/gay/partnered clergy. Actually, I chuckled at the line that he said ‘…in deep humility with a heavy heart and no desire whatsoever to offend.” Well, Rev. Dr., you certainly offended a lot of us, then, without desiring to! Neat trick, doubtless grounded in backward thinking if not in passion or desire.This is the very heart of the deep divide which has opened in the last four decades between different groups of Lutherans. The Missouri Synod has become more and more 19^th century in its obsession about perfect agreement in all matters, even if it means continuing to cut all relationships with other Lutherans who differ. Perfect agreement in theology means nothing short of perfect thought control, and LC–MS seems to have achieved it. Kieschnick’s heavy-hearted remarks to the ELCA were not only a rebuke of us, but clearly a warning shot fired at his own churchbody. Don’t even think about raising any new discussions of human sexuality in the LC–MS. It is a settled matter which will not be revisited.

Kieschnick’s remarks, and the severe quotation from the Formula of Concord – which he obviously chose to lift out of its 16^th century context and attempt to apply it in the 21^st century – has all the marks of Missouri’s obsession about sin and evil, lockstep doctrinal conformity, and dire consequences for difference of opinion. Not only is he and his officialdom—to which the LC-MS churchbody has remained captive since J.A.O. Preus’ take-over of the LC-MS in the 1970s—unwilling to have any honest dialogue about where Christians disagree in matters of faith, he has chosen not to respect the deeply-held convictions of other fellow-Lutherans/fellow Christians who hold to those convictions by reason of their own conscience.

In other words, Kieschnick’s and LC–MS’s official interpretation of tough contemporary issues and matters of faith are the only ones which may have validity anywhere in Christendom. Any other point of view, according to his rough application of the quote from a document written in A.D. 1580, “should not be tolerated in the church of God.”

Has Kieschnick forgotten that the dispute back then which the Reformers could not tolerate were disputes with the Roman Catholic Church, not with fellow evangelicals? And has he not noticed that Pope Benedict XVI himself has basically said that all of us — all Lutherans and all Protestants and everybody else who are not under his personal authority are not even a “church” in the proper sense? In effect Kieschnick’s rebuke of the ELCA, a churchbody nearly twice the size of the LC–MS parallels Benedict’s rebuke of all other Christians. In Kieschnick’s case it is utter arrogance masquerading as doctrinal purity. In Benedict’s case it is utter arrogance masquerading as divine authority.

But Kieschnick’s quote is wrong for a more fundamental reason. Read this again, carefully: “Therefore necessity demands explanation of these disputed articles on the basis of God’s word and reliable writings so that those with a proper Christian understanding could recognize which position regarding the points under dispute is in accord with God’s word and the Christian Augsburg confession and which is not.”

Why I find this to be a deeply flawed application of a 440 year old document is that it refers to “these disputed articles”, meaning articles of faith. Do we need to remind Rev. Dr. Kieschnick that the Augsburg Confession (published in 1530) does not even contain an “article of faith” on human sexuality, let alone homosexuality? Should it not be pointed out to him that articles of faith are about God, Jesus Christ, the Holy Spirit, justification by grace through faith, etc., and not about anthropology, sociology, biology or psychology. Christians do not put our faith in these matters or in our current understandings of any of them, even if we are influenced by them because they change. And when matters of anthropology, sociology, biology or psychology change, our opinions and attitudes change with them.

Strictly speaking, our faith is never in ourselves (gay or straight, Catholic or Lutheran, woman or man, married or single, sinner or saint). But the LC-MS obsession, like other fundamentalist religious obsessions, is that they get to define with exactitude what is sinful and against the will of God and therefore cannot be tolerated in the church of God.

As. St. Paul says in 1 Corinthians 14:36, “Or did the word of God originate with you? Or are you the only ones it has reached?” Yes, it’s kind of funny that Paul said that as a rebuke of one congregation with whom he disagreed over allowing women to speak in church, a real issue of faith that also has divided the ELCA and the LC–MS since the 1970s. (Missouri Synod does not ordain women to the ministry, and tries to keep them out of all authoritative positions over men in the church from the local congregation on up.) Their reasoning is as fundamentalist as you can get: they can point to some verses in the Bible that they say with vehement certainty applies to the present times, and because of their own certainty they will not even grant the civility to talk with a sister or brother in Christ who differs in discernment of what applies or doesn’t apply. In doing so they completely bypass and ignore a lot of other Holy Writ that reminds us to listen to one another, to pray for one another, to bear one another’s burdens, and to draw near to Christ rather than searching the scriptures for a proof text. They ignore the divine permission which Christians are given to “bind and loose” even matters which are covered in the Scriptures.

Maybe we will, sadly, look back on 2009 as the year when Christianity definitely began to crack into two irreconcilable camps. Each of us believes that we are reconciled to God, but not by our own achievements, conformity, certainty or doctrinal purity, but purely and solely by grace. Think about that, Rev. Dr.

—Pastor Dan Hooper

Posted in Bible & Interpretation, Ecumenical Issues, Doctrine, Lesbian/Gay Marriage, Catholic matters, Environment, LGBT Christian, Public Affairs, History, Faith, LGBT Rights, Ministry | Print | No Comments »

The view from the middle of Sunset Boulevard.

August 23, 2009 by Dan Hooper.

Some wisecracker years ago said that “the church is the only army that shoots its own wounded.” As more atrocities from our armed services come to light from both Afghanistan and Iraq, that may not really be true, but you get the point. Christians are not successfully warring against the forces of darkness on behalf of Jesus if we are constantly beating up other Christians. It is no wonder that millions of people today want nothing to do anymore with any church, because they can’t distinguish between good church and bad church.

How can we let them know that we trust in God’s grace, and don’t believe that God is trying to trick us all into stumbling headlong into damnation?

Today I sat at our parish’s booth in the local street fair, Sunset Junction, which has been going on every August for 30 years to build bridges between ethnic groups and across the chasm between straight identities and gay people. The astonishing diversity and I guess even perversity is palpable when watching it point blank from the middle lane of Sunset Boulevard, closed to traffic for 36 hours.

This is the first year that our congregation has put up the effort to get a booth, think up a theme, and take banners, tables, chairs, literature, free giveaways (we ordered New Testaments from the American Bible Society) and ask volunteers to staff 2-hour shifts. The street fair is decidedly a party atmosphere—the music is deafening and a lot of beer is consumed to wash down either Mexican, Salvadoreno or Thai food—and yet it is surprising how many people actually did look at our banner and posters and take home flyers and a New Testament. We even had a real mail box for people to leave written prayer requests, which we will lift up in our parish life this week.

The reason I mention all this is because this afternoon a woman stepped up, and her first question was, “You’re not Missouri Synod, are you?” She had been raised in the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod, and went through a K–8 parochial school in the Chicago suburbs. Now she won’t go near an LC-MS church. “Too many rules,” she said flatly.

Ten minutes hadn’t past since another woman had stopped to stare at our banner, and weigh whether it was worth stopping to talk, before one of us noticed and called out a “Hello” to her. The banner, in addition to our congregation’s name, etc., bears this slogan:

“Where Religion Doesn’t Hurt.”

She told me a heart-breaking story of having been expelled—she used the word excommunicated —from her church eight years ago. She had been publicly humiliated in church for her sin, which I deduced must have been over a marital break-up. Years later, she is still deeply wounded but also still longing for a spiritual community where she will not be tested or questioned about her sins or failings, or pushed out the door.

Clearly, our church is a place where wounds are healed, but people don’t always recognize the different between a church that continues to wound and one that wants to be a place of healing.

It convinces me all the more that Christian ethics are first and foremost a matter of personal discipline and discernment. As a community, our first duty is to stand with someone who is struggling with difficult ethical decisions or choices, and stand with them even in a failure or a mistake, before the community even begins to talk about condoning or not condoning a behavior.

Martin Luther rebelled against Roman Catholic Canon Law. To this day, the Lutheran Church has no such “code” by which a member can be tried or excluded. We hope and expect that each person, guided by the light of the Holy Spirit, will measure him or herself against the Law until it is clear that each person is in need of God’s forgiveness and grace. Once I am thoughtful and clear about my own need for grace, it also becomes clear that I am in no position to judge another. When you have a whole collection of individual Christians who are clear that none of us can play the divine judge (”Let the one who has not sinned cast the first stone,” John 8:7), it ought to temper the temptation of a congregation or a churchbody to condemn anyone, to pass judgment, or to exclude even a single sinner from the community of grace.

What interested me, too, was that both of these women were heterosexual, and weren’t wounded over being lesbian or gay. Yet both of them had felt judged, even condemned, by harsh religiosity that has forgotten the place we all must have before the throne of grace.

Dear sisters, this is not right. This should never happen to you. Please give us a second chance to proclaim the good news, not wallow in the self-righteousness of those who imagine they are “holier than thou.”

—Pastor Dan Hooper

Posted in Bible & Interpretation, Doctrine, Hollywood, Faith, Living by Grace, Ministry | Print | No Comments »

“Sex! Schism! Sky is falling! Armageddon! Oh my!”

August 16, 2009 by Pastor Dan.

Above, presiding Bishop Mark Hanson, right, leading Assembly worship

I have postponed talking about the Churchwide Assembly of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America until the last possible moment, and for good reason. This mother of all Lutheran conventions opens tomorrow in Minneapolis, and with all the religious hype and theological terror of the Book of Revelation, if not the special effects of such apocalypse.

Because sex is on the agenda again, there are conservative voices who have been threatening to start the Armageddon war right there on the prairie. The “sky is falling” flag of Chicken Little is being carried most openly by the Word Alone Network of New Brighton, Minnesota. Their last conservative knee-jerk convention was held in another hotbed of activism, Golden Valley, Minnesota.

“God’s authority is being hijacked in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America,” wrote Betsy Carlson, the Editor of their Network News in the July-August edition.  I thought conservatives still believed that women are to remain silent in the church (1 Corinthians 14:33-35), but I guess they are just as good as casuistry as anybody.

Word Alone officially thinks that the ELCA is “moving toward schism,” much the same as observers of the Anglican /Episcopal Church USA impasse think so. But when a chunk falls off an iceberg into the sea, however, one cannot attribute the split-off to the iceberg. It is not the ELCA which is moving toward or causing a schism, but the little piece of it which has defined its mission around crying: “Sex! Schism! War! Sky is falling! Oh my!”

Seriously, nobody wants to see splits or disunity, but perhaps it would be best, even in God’s compassionate gaze, if the statistically minor group which cannot stand the thought of homosexuals in the larger fellowship would just take themselves and their particular slant on Christian faith elsewhere. God love ‘em, God bless ‘em. They are never going to be happy trying to keep unity, if they’ve spent the better part of the last 8 or 10 years planting the seeds of schism, building their mass mailing lists, raising funds and producing their DVDs filled with alarm.

It reminds me of those few but unhappy times when I was having something very ugly going on in my stomach. (If you are faint of heart, skip down a paragraph.) I felt absolutely terrible until my stomach involuntarily forced a vomit. It always amazed me that after that brief and icky moment how much better I felt almost immediately. (The Scriptures are not afraid of such graphic language, incidentally; the word occurs 12 times in the NRSV; cf, Ecclesiasticus 31:21.) I suspect the ELCA will feel considerably better when those within it who cannot stomach gay and lesbian Christians serving Christ in their midst simply eject themselves.

So what is at stake this year are two major things: first, a major teaching or Social Statement on Human Sexuality is up for a vote. So far the ELCA has adopted nine such teaching documents on these topics: abortion, church in society, the death penalty, economic life, education, the environment, health and healthcare, peace and race, ethnicity and culture. “Our Calling in Education” was adopted with a few amendments by the Churchwide Assembly two years ago, but I think I yawned right through the vote. Education is probably more important to society as a whole than individual sexual behavior, but it doesn’t stir the passions (no pun intended).

“Human Sexuality: Gift and Trust” is a responsibly prepared social teaching that of course has flaws everywhere. More truthfully than in the past, the entire process that led to its drafting has been transparent about the lack of consensus on controversial matters of sexuality. You can find the proposed statement here, even if it is a bit buried on the ELCA web site.

The 2007 ELCA Assembly heard a progress report on “Gift and Trust” and delegates demanded that the study commission not avoid talking about gay and lesbian people serving as pastors and lay professional leaders, but “directed the task force assigned to develop the social statement on human sexuality to ‘specifically address and make recommendations to the 2009 Churchwide Assembly on changes to any policies that preclude practicing homosexual persons from the rosters of this church.’” the commission also has brought in a Report and Recommendation on Ministry Policies, a four-footed beast that will take some careful husbandry to get into the barn. The recommendations include the lifting of the ban against partnered lesbian and gay people from serving as pastors or lay professionals, which would reverse the odious 1990 Vision & Expectations and Guidelines for Discipline which the ELCA’s church council had put into place quickly and furtively to block the ordination of three highly qualified but openly gay seminary graduates. The fourth and final of these recommendations, unfortunately, is a cumbersome 67-lines long and almost defies summary of its 7 “Resolveds.”

The first order of business that concerns us beginning tomorrow is whether or not the these liberalizing recommendations will require a 2/3 majority vote for adoption. That will be a decision about the Rules, which must be agreed upon along with the Agenda. What we have been told, however, is that to require a 2/3 majority for passage would itself require a 2/3 majority vote on such an Assembly rule, so it seems unlikely.

In my deepest safe places of the heart, I know I should be at prayer about these matters. If these recommendations pass this Assembly, the wheels would be put in motion to remove the ban that has kept me off the ELCA clergy roster since 1991. But closer to the surface, I just want it all to be over with quickly. I remain neither hopeful nor optimistic, but I do put my trust in the Holy Spirit.  Stay tuned.

—Pastor Dan Hooper, Los Angeles

Posted in Sex, Lesbian/Gay Marriage, Bible & Interpretation, LGBT Christian, ELCA, Ministry, Uncategorized | Print | No Comments »

Summer indulgence.

August 12, 2009 by Dan Hooper.

“For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven.”– Ecclesiastes 3:1.

And, this being mid-August, it is time in my part of the country to pick figs. We have an enormous old fig tree, and annually we have this tug-of-war, survival-of-the-fastest competition with the squirrels and the crows to see which of God’s creatures get to eat the figs. 

So—and this is especially for those of you who look at this blog from time to time and say, “this guy is a total wing nut!” —here is something quite off-topic:

Figs Baked in Liqueur  [adapted from www.inmamaskitchen.com]

• 15-20 ripe figs
•  ½ cup water 
• 1/3 cup Kirschwasser, Grand Marnier or whiskey
• 2-3 Tbsp. brown sugar
• ½ tsp. ground cinnamon
•  tsp. ground nutmeg

Wash figs and cut off stem end just enough to see the fig pulp inside the top. Arrange figs tightly in a baking dish sprayed with non-stick spray. Use more figs if you have can squeeze them in. Pour water and liqueur over figs. Dust with brown sugar.

Bake in a 350 oven for 30-40 minutes until flavors have mingled and alcohol has cooked out but figs have not disintegrated. Remove and dust the tops with cinnamon and nutmeg. To serve warm or cool spoon remaining syrup over figs in individual serving dishes.

Note: For those in recovery, you may of course omit the alcoholic ingredient, and experiment with any other flavoring desired.

—Dan Hooper, Los Angeles

Posted in Bible & Interpretation, Recovery | Print | No Comments »

The Biblical Issue in Three Parts: Part Three

August 6, 2009 by Pastor Dan.

This is the third and concluding part of the discussion of Acts 15, continuing from yesterday.

What do I mean by “internal evidence”? I mean these obscure references in the “short list” of four commandments which are themselves now quite obsolete. Christians gave up even minimal imitation of kosher laws long ago.

Internal to the Christian church we decided that avoiding what has been strangled (the manner in which animals were killed and prepared as food) or meat which has not been drained of its blood (Leviticus 17:15) was not a defining doctrine of the Christian faith. Thankfully, we are again more aware that as stewards of God’s creation we should be concerned for the humane treatment of animals, including animals which are raised for slaughter for human food. But nowhere do I see Christians damning one another over the inhumane or humane treatment of animals, or citing the Bible as the final word.

But external to the Christian church, another of these minimum prohibitions has also become quite irrelevant. To my knowledge, there are no meats being sold in the supermarkets today which have already been ritually sacrificed to pagan gods. I think that sort of went out with ancient paganism, and even today’s neo-pagans (oh my!) haven’t re-relevantized Acts 15:20, 29.

Now, how do we have conversation with those sisters and brothers who don’t approach Scripture, or approach Acts 15, the way we do? Often their method of biblical interpretation is far less sophisticated: if you can flip and point to it somewhere in the Bible, you can use it. In other words, if you can read it and quote it, you can slap it on somebody and insist “God said it. I believe it. That settles it.”

There is where I look back to some of the testimony in Acts 15 again. I’ve quoted Peter’s testimony previously in this blog. It is important, because he is speaking directly to other Christians who had opposing points of view. They were the so-called Judaizers, those who insisted that for a Gentile to become a Christian he must first become a Jew and take upon himself all the commandments of Judaism including the commandment that he be circumcised.

^{7 After there had been much debate, Peter stood up and said to them, “My brothers, you know that in the early days God made a choice among you, that I should be the one through whom the Gentiles would hear the message of the good news and become believers. 8 And God, who knows the human heart, testified to them by giving them the Holy Spirit, just as he did to us; 9 and in cleansing their hearts by faith he has made no distinction between them and us. 10 Now therefore why are you putting God to the test by placing on the neck of the disciples a yoke that neither our ancestors nor we have been able to bear? 11 On the contrary, we believe that we will be saved through the grace of the Lord Jesus, just as they will.”}Simon Peter, like Bishop Rogness in the St. Paul Area Synod of the ELCA, is acknowledging that he sees the work of the Holy Spirit in the deeds and wonders of the church. Peter saw the work of the Spirit in the faith and life of Gentile believers who had come to Christ. Bishop Rogness saw the work of the Spirit in congregations led by lesbian or gay pastors (and drawing into Christ’s body LGBT people of faith).Clearly, this steps beyond the relatively simple issues of what the Bible says and what it means. This steps into the area of trusting that God is alive and present today, that we Christians who are living today are entrusted not only with the content of faith—the doctrine which everybody from Peter Akinola to Fred Phelps to Gene Robinson all say they believe and want to preserve—but with the witness of faith lived in the presence of the living Spirit of God.Clearly, the Bible does not settle all questions of Christian faith. It contains all we need, however, to ask the relevant questions of Christian faith. And it provides guidance for answering them, not final answers.

It has been said a million times or so (I have lost count, actually) that the only way people change their minds about LGBT people is when they meet them and come to know them. This works first among families, when a gay son or a lesbian daughter shares his or her discernment of sexual orientation. Then tears are shed and words are said, some of which are regretted later. But finally people come around and realize that loves makes a family, not gender. The family regains the son or daughter it thought it would have to kick out the door. And what is lost is prejudice and homophobia.

This could also be said of the Christian family. The only way Christians will change their minds about LGBT people is when they meet them and come to know them. Lesbians, gay men, bisexual persons and most recently those who are transitioning from male to female or female to male, have come forward to be honest and tell their stories and also express their abiding faith in God’s grace. And like Simon Peter, and Peter Rogness, the church really finds that it must re-open its arms to its own—because the Bible tells us that this is the way Christ wills it to be.

—Pastor Dan Hooper, Los Angeles

Posted in Doctrine, Sex, Gay Catechism, Bible & Interpretation, Fundamentalism, Ministry, Faith, LGBT Christian, ELCA | Print | No Comments »

The Biblical Issue in Three Parts: Part Two

August 5, 2009 by Pastor Dan.

Friends, we are still in Acts 15, continuing from yesterday. The third part appears tomorrow.

James was serving as the presiding elder of the church, in much the same position as Bishop Rogness or any other bishop. He expressed not his opinion but his decision, based on the testimony brought to him that God had done many signs and wonders among the Gentiles—among people whom other strict conservative Christians considered reprehensible and outside the grace of God. James references both the Scripture (Simeon and the prophets) and the guidance of the Holy Spirit for the immediate context of this decision. In drafting the letter which communicates this apostolic decision, James and the other apostles said this:

^{23 “The brothers, both the apostles and the elders, to the believers of Gentile origin in Antioch and Syria and Cilicia, greetings. 24 Since we have heard that certain persons who have gone out from us, though with no instructions from us, have said things to disturb you and have unsettled your minds, 25 we have decided unanimously to choose representatives and send them to you, along with our beloved Barnabas and Paul, 26 who have risked their lives for the sake of our Lord Jesus Christ. 27 We have therefore sent Judas and Silas, who themselves will tell you the same things by word of mouth. 28 For it has seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us to impose on you no further burden than these essentials: 29 that you abstain from what has been sacrificed to idols and from blood and from what is strangled and from fornication. If you keep yourselves from these, you will do well. Farewell.”}Please note: “it has seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us.” This is the amazing confidence —apostolic certainty of faith—that the church has the authority from Christ himself to relax the rules and lighten the load, to “impose no further burden” than the essentials. Out are the complete 613 mitzvot or commandments of the Torah. All that is left are four essentials.The “essentials” of course don’t seem to make sense to us now. The human story moves on. The essentials in their day were to avoid foods that had been offered as sacrifices to idols, from blood, from what has been strangled — these seem to be hold-overs from kosher food law — and from fornication (in Greek, porneia).

This last is serious because it makes the “short list” of four things which Gentile believers should avoid. It is the only one of the four which has anything to do with sexuality, by the way. Problem is, we can’t say with absolute certainty what the early church meant by porneia, except we get the English word “porn” from it. It probably refers to prostitution or to sexual relationships which break the marital covenant, that is, infidelity. The notes in the New Interpreter’s Study Bible NRSV (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2003) says that fornication “likely refers to marriage with a close relative.” Incest, in other words.

“Conservative” Christians and fundamentalists, however, liberally expand their sense of what “fornication” means to include far more than what is meant in the original Greek New Testament. They include everything they want to condemn.

And for our purposes here, this is the sticking point: Does fornication also mean sex between two persons of the same sex because it is outside of heterosexual marriage? Is the intent here, in this key passage, to draw strict boundaries and remove all “wiggle room,” to build a wall or draw a line in the sand, to declare a “culture war” against anything that steps over the line? Obviously, conservatives and fundamentalists have drawn that line, and they insist that the Bible backs them up.

But the clear message in Acts 15 is that James’ decision, and the guidance of all the apostles in reaching this decision, was not to build walls but to tear them down, not to draw a line in the sand or declare a war, not to exclude but to include any people of faith (Gentiles) who had been very rigidly excluded by the religious rigors which the apostles are consciously abandoning.

I repeat part of the quote from Bishop Peter Rogness: “There are some who will simply say Leviticus calls homosexuality an abomination and that ends it. The problem with that, of course is that that reasoning would have most of us sinning because of wearing clothes with mixed threads or eating unclean foods or all the other things the Leviticus Holiness Codes condemn. Yet some of Leviticus we still take very seriously. So interpretation is involved.”

Catch the final phrase here: “So interpretation is involved.” Christians of the Lutheran Reformation have always been conscious that in order to be faithful to Scripture we must continually interpret that Scripture in the light of a changing world. The interpretive issue on the human sexuality and homosexuality question mostly comes down to two different questions to pose after reading and analyzing Acts 15.

1. Does the decision reached by this Jerusalem council give Christians a new final answer to our moral questions under the Law of Moses in particular and the teachings of the Bible in general? Or,

2. Does the process used by this Jerusalem council give Christians a model and a set of tools by which we are to draw our own conclusions and offer our own guidance for lives of faith in our times?

Clearly, we know that Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13 are not the final word from the Christian Bible on sexuality (these anti-same-sex rules are part of the 613 commandments or mitzvot of Judaism, and they did not make James’ short list). But we must together wrestle with whether or not Acts 15 is the final answer, sort of a “replacement commandment,” or a new approach to finding our own answers on moral questions.

It is pretty clear that I think the second is the correct interpretation. I say this not because it is self-serving, or because the Levitical laws and their threat of capital punishment is thereby set aside (they are already set aside for Christians either way you want to read Acts 15). I say this because the internal evidence of James’ decision reveals to us that all Christians must be prepared to hear testimony, listen for the guidance Holy Spirit, be surprised when a changing world invites a changing faith response on the part of Christ’s followers, which can easily have tectonic implications equal to the decision which stopped the practice of circumcision and set aside the commandments in the first century church.

—Pastor Dan Hooper, Los Angeles

Part Two appears tomorrow.

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