June 3, 2008 by Pastor Dan.

I feel unprepared and humbled and honored, and I’m at a loss where to begin. A young man came to my office door asking to see me. I am used to strangers coming, almost always asking for money, or food. In a nutshell, this young man was a Muslim, asking to learn more about Christian faith and about Jesus.

He is foreign born, in this country on a brief visa, but engaged to be married to a citizen of the U.S. whom he met in his home country. She is a Christian, and out of a life-long curiosity about Jesus, and respect for her, he wanted to know more —much more— about Christian teaching. An important factor is that he is not entirely free to express his curiosity about Jesus openly, not within the home of friends where he is living, and not among his own people at home.

After my first insecurity about teaching someone subsided a bit, I expressed my respect for his great faith tradition. He too was respectful, knowing that so much is gained when all people listen to the faith experiences of others.

But where to begin with the story of Jesus? We have some common ground, because Jesus is a figure spoken of in the Qur’an. How to explain that for Christians Jesus is not merely a prophet, but the presence of God incarnate. How does one explain what “incarnate” means to someone whose entire faith tradition rejects that?

He made it easier for me by asking, “How did Jesus die?” Somehow this led to explaining revelation and grace, and to the highest story of our spiritual awakening, the parable of the prodigal son. I explained the basic contents of the New Testament — not written with a single voice as if verbally revealed from heaven, as the Muslim scriptures are believed to be, but the testimony of many Christians over a period of several generations, through which God’s voice speaks.

I called to mind the meager explanation of what is written, what is explained in the New Testament, from John’s Gospel (20:30–31): “Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book. But these are written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name.”

So I found myself struggling with what is best and most essential from the Bible to tell to someone who has scarcely had a chance to look inside its covers without enormous scorn from others. So much of the Bible is profound beyond words, and so much is trivial or downright embarrassing to read as an outside would read it. So much is completely opaque — occupying the best scholarly minds for a lifetime to make heads or tails of it. Where are the parts which are transparent, clear as crystal, and allow the reader to glimpse what is of greatest value, or to be digest that which is spiritually most nourishing?

I found myself on the desert road with Philip the deacon, approaching the chariot of the Ethiopian eunuch. (Acts 8:26–40) “Do you understand what you are reading, he asked, about the passage from Isaiah which was in his hands.

“How can I unless I have someone to guide me?”

And so beginning with the ver passage of scripture the eunuch had been reading, Philip began to tell him the story of Jesus.

Now I am praying for this stranger/new friend, and for his fiancé, hoping that the Holy Spirit finds me worthy as a vehicle for God’s message. Would I be happy to convert this man to Christ? Yes.

But is that my role and place? No.

We come from places in this world very far apart. We come from different cultures, economic classes; we have different native languages; our life circumstances and sexuality and experiences completely differ.

I don’t know if I am qualified to teach such an important student. I have more misgivings than there are verses in the Bible and the Qur’an combined. Yet it now looks possible I may become this man’s teacher. I only hope that I can provide what God decides to grant to him.

— Pastor Dan Hooper, Los Angeles

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May 18, 2008 by Pastor Dan.

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

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

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

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

A Viking cross, 10th century 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—Pastor Dan Hooper, Los Angeles

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May 17, 2008 by Pastor Dan.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—Pastor Dan Hooper, Los Angeles

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April 8, 2008 by Pastor Dan.

The Good News of Christ’s reconciling mission in the world has been unbelievably snagged in the nonsense of papal counter-reforms. His Bavarianess, Pope Benedict XVI is trying to rip out of the Catholic cloth all the tailoring which was sewn by the Vatican II reformers two generations ago. The Latin Mass is back—strongly encouraged by Benedict. Apparently continuity with the irrelevant past into an irrelevant future is more important than the participation of the faithful.

And now even his choice of liturgical vestments is going retro. An opinion piece, “Papal Dress Code“, —by former altar boy and senior editorial writer for the Los Angeles Times, Michael McGough —ventures into the world of papal vestments which Benedict prefers and likely will model when he comes to the United States later this month.

In trying to find suitable graphics with Google, I have followed the threads into an arcane world of medieval repristinators who, like sleeping dogs, should probably be left to their own dreams.

(Above) Here you see Benedict celebrating mass with an enormous host (I guess everything papal can be super-sized), surrounded by attendants dressed in what appear to be clear plastic raincoats. Hmmm.  A blog comment identifies these as “Shantung silk.” What would Jesus wear?

If you want to peek further, there are sites and blogs such as “Save the Liturgy Save the World“ which devolves quickly from believing that the Eucharist is the source and summit of Christian life (okay, I can’t disagree), to stating that violations of rubrics, like a pebble tossed in a pond, create spiritual ripples in the Church and the world!

Violation of rubrics? Does anybody but the gay boys in the Sacristy remember what rubrics are? They are the little ceremonial notes, usually written in red ink, which ride along with liturgical rites in those big, dusty altar missals, to help the ministers perform the services “decently and in order.”

Rubrics are like stage directions for a play—lines which the actors don’t deliver but must remember (”cross to stage left, waving right arm and shouting …”). But apparently for some faithful believers, violations of these stage directions are tantamount to irreverence and cause spiritual ripples felt around the world.

Is it any wonder that bumper stickers (which are also seen everywhere, at least everywhere around my world) poke such fun, “Jesus Save Me from your followers!”? Is it any wonder that the Barna Group research says today’s young adults admire Jesus and avoid the Church?  (see also: “Spirituality: Do We Look Like Jesus?“)

Could it be because the Church takes its eyes off of its Lord and starts gazing at its own embroidered navel? I was frankly aghast last year to see a photo of Cardinal Mahoney washing the feet of his disciples on Maundy Thursday in full liturgical vestments,

after having read the same Gospel passage he did, where Jesus took off his outer vestments and simply tied a towel around his waist (John 13:3–4). Can’t we serve Christ with humility, boys?

I say these things not to beat up on traditional Roman Catholics, or to put the Pope down for his three-times-head height miters, but to call the true church to repentance and faith in the Christ who empowers us to serve God by serving others, not serving ourselves. I myself wear a chasuble for the Eucharist. But I remember the good counsel I received more than 30 years ago about the reform of Christian worship practices – there are three criteria which should not be out of balance with one another: historic precedent, ecumenical consensus and contemporary need. Benedict has apparently decided to blow off the latter two.

I have always tried to keep my high church tendencies in check (”must control the wrist of death”), and only recently have allowed a little more elaboration and festive stuff in our parish worship because of the large number of recovering catholics in our community. But at the same time I am committed to proclaiming Gospel, not navel, and to prayer from the heart, and to serving the community around us with compassion and humility. If anything causes spiritual ripples in the world, it ought to be the deeds by which we feed the hungry, clothe the naked, welcome the stranger, visit the prisoners, and proclaim liberty to the oppressed. Benedict, would you care to join us?

But who am I? I am only the voice of a heretic (demoted from “separated brethren” under Vatican II) who belongs to a nearly 500 year old movement (the Evangelical Lutheran Church) that the present pope does not consider to be a church.

—Pastor Dan Hooper, Los Angeles

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April 7, 2008 by Pastor Dan.

Dedicated to the memory of Marc Anthon Reilly

Be ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you with meekness and fear, having a good conscience; that, whereas they speak evil of you, as of evildoers, they may be ashamed that falsely accuse your good conversation in Christ. —1 Peter 3:15–16, KJV

In the 1980s, Marc came to our small gatherings in an upper room of a church that was uneasy about our being there.  But we talked and talked, as he asked questions and I scrambled to frame potential answers about faith and sexuality, love and ethics.  We challenged each other, and I especially needed that, to better understand my own struggle to keep faith.

When my friend Marc died of AIDS in 1989, I inherited some of his own books, among them a Bible given to him by his family on his birthday, October 14, years before.  Recently, I needed an open Bible for the main photo for my new site site, www.gaycatechism.net (a soft-covered Bible that would flop open for a pleasing picture), and I picked up Marc’s Bible quite randomly from my bookshelf.  The flyleaf was inscribed:

Dear Marc:

This Book contains the Word of God, the state of man, the way of salvation, the doom of sinners, and the happiness of believers.

Its doctrines are holy, its precepts immutable. Read it to be wise, believe it to be saved, and practice it to be holy.

It contains Light to direct you, food to support you, and comfort to cheer you.  Christ is its grand object, our good its design, and the Glory of God its end.

It should fill the memory, rule the heart, and guide the feet.

Read it slowly, frequently, and prayerfully.  It is given to you in life, will be opened at the judgment, and will be remembered forever!

I met them briefly at the end of Marc’s funeral, knowing from his prior warning that they would likely be judgmental.  Most of us shrug off such momentary meetings at funerals, but I was the preacher for that service, and I had done my best to proclaim pure, unadulterated Gospel to everyone present:  to a congregation that had long since gotten over its antipathy to gay and lesbian people, and had become a “Reconciling in Christ” congregation; and to these parents whom none of the rest of us knew, except that Marc had told us they did not accept his homosexuality and probably believed God was punishing him with AIDS.

So, in reading this inscription page, apparently in Mom’s handwriting, I came face to face with what my friend had felt in his own struggle both to live as a beloved child of God and to die an untimely death comforted by friends but estranged from his parents.

What do we make of stuff like this?  LGBTQ people might blame the church, or would blame the parents for this estrangement.  The parents would blame the sin (”love the sinner, hate the sin.”)  The Church would go on studying the issue for another couple of decades, and blame its lack of resources for dragging this out at a snail’s pace.  But what do we make of this?

Personally, I am absolutely sick of hearing about the latest skirmish in the “culture wars” over homosexuality.  But unlike the right-wing person who is equally sick of it, I cannot close my ears or eyes to an unpleasant, tiresome “issue.”  Because I am gay, I must be ready to defend the hope that is within me, and even more, always be vigilant for the possible violence coming at me (whether physical, verbal, psychological, political or judicial) because of the underlying homophobia and hatred, much of it based on this Book.

I don’t formally disagree with the intentions of what Mom wrote to her son —she must have labored over the prose more than a little — but I see within it the smug and pious language of a faith which considers itself so superior to doubt or unbelief.  Why is it that the Christian hope, the Christian Gospel, cannot be proclaimed without this smug, sharp edge in its voice?

“The doom of sinners, . . . [this Book] will be opened at judgment.”  That is the kind of imagery which fundamentalists crave, but which kills relationships, estranges fathers from sons, and launches culture wars.  Can LGBTQ people find words of life here that aren’t dripping with the blood of apocalyptic warnings?  Can heterosexuals love the Lord without constantly arming themselves for a moral Armageddon?

My friend Marc was one of the lucky ones.  He died faithful to a Gospel which his parents did not fully understand, with a degree of honor and respect from the congregation which undoubtedly surprised them.  Through his battle (and his partner’s battle before him) against HIV and AIDS, he did not desert Jesus Christ in a time when cynicism and bitterness could easily have taken him down long before his death.

And thankfully he is not forgotten.  Marc left a small bequest to Lutherans Concerned/Los Angeles to help us carry on our teaching ministry through periodic lectureships.  And his faithfulness left a mark (a marc?) on me that has impelled me to keep teaching, writing and proclaiming the Gospel, without an edge to it.

Thank you, Marc.  I will always remember the gift you gave me through your faith.

—Pastor Dan Hooper, Los Angeles

Posted in HIV and AIDS, Gay Catechism, Bible & Interpretation, Fundamentalism, Faith, LGBT Christian, Spirituality | Print | No Comments »

April 6, 2008 by Pastor Dan.

For better or worse I am launching another project that has been lurking in my consciousness and blogosphere for more than a year.  Today, a Gay & Christian Catechism is born (www.gaycatechism.net).

In our times, many lesbian and gay people–or really, sexual minorities of all kinds— know the basic teachings of the Christian faith.  We know about God, the Bible, Jesus, salvation, etc.  We grew up with some religious instruction, in many different Christian denominations.

The Gay Catechism has been written with young adults and adults in mind — to help LGBTQ people who have already come to terms with being a sexual minority person, but now want to come to terms with the Christian faith which has harmed us deeply since we came out to ourselves or others.

For even though many of us had Christian instruction or catechesis as children and teenagers, at some point we walked away from the church and from God.  Some of us even fled from the churches in which we were instructed as children and in which we once had found love, comfort and belonging.

After coming to terms with our sexuality and gender identity, feelings of insecurity, unworthiness, fear or even outright terror simply eclipsed all other aspects of the Christian faith.  In the process of coming to awareness about our sexual orientation or gender identity, and the “coming out” process, it didn’t seem to matter that we had once learned and believed that:

• God is love
• all sins can be forgiven
• we are accepted by God because of God’s grace, not because of our good deeds.

The secondary message which was being taught to us both privately and publicly, was that we are unloved, worthless, and damned.  And this secondary message seemed to erase everything loving, everything good and hopeful and reassuring we had once learned.

Because of this tragedy, two other even worse effects have captivated many sexual minority persons:  many have abandoned all forms of spirituality, thinking that the only thing real is material—wealth, power, pleasure, food, drugs and good times.  And others have simply committed suicide because of the profound suffering they experienced in their spiritually dystonic state:  “God loves everybody, except me.”

From my Mission Statement:

The mission of the Gay Catechism project and this site is to provide a simple framework in which LGBTQ Christians can re-understand their faith with honesty and integrity, and to enable more of God’s children to come home to their faith.

The mission of the Gay Catechism is not to convince hateful, rejective and punitive Christians to change their mind about LGBTQ Christians, although this occasionally happens.  Sadly, most of them have their answers and their answer books, well-rehearsed and cemented into their consciousness so rigidly that they cannot hear a new truth or listen to a different voice.

Jesus said, “Let the dead bury their own dead” (Matthew 8:22) and he was speaking about those who were so stuck in spiritual concrete that they could not accept his teaching and follow his lead.  Those who believe that their view of Christ’s teaching is so complete, so perfect, so flawless, are actually in danger of missing his teaching, for he speaks to us in the Bible as a spiritual teacher of enormous openness and flexibility.

So, here goes.  I will keep updating the new site, adding topics according to an outline I’m developing, with bits from Luther’s Small Catechism, from biblical, contemporary and even secular sources.  I would appreciate your feedback.

—Pastor Dan Hooper, Los Angeles

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

March 27, 2008 by Pastor Dan.

It is funny–to me–that Christians can get into such arguments about whether one can be gay and Christian, or lesbian and Christian, etc.  Those on the religious extreme right insist that it is impossible, as if to be who we are as human beings is contrary to Christian teaching.  This religious right is not made up only of “Narrow Baptists” in the American “Bible Belt.”  It also includes other fundamentalists, such as Archbishop Peter Akinola of the Anglican Church in Nigeria, who has made it his personal mission to split that worldwide church communion down the middle over homosexuality.

But there have to be some standards, they say, some benchmarks.  They feel that there is a “slippery slope” or a complete sell-out of Christian doctrine if we invite homosexuals in the door.

Aside from the obvious fact that we are already in the door because we were baptized as young people and accepted the faith and have never departed from it, there is something fundamentally wrong with their reasoning.  Let’s take a look:

Christian teaching is first and foremost teaching about Jesus Christ.  It is teaching about God’s gracious redemption of the human race for the sake of Jesus Christ.  It is teaching about the Good News that Jesus died upon the cross in order to reconcile God and humanity.

If there is a standard or a benchmark, it would be the Nicene Creed, which was finalized in the 4^th Century.  This is the same creed that I used to bring some clarity to whether former presidential candidate Mitt Romney is really a Christian.  I didn’t do that on the basis of whether Mitt Romney is a person of great integrity, and lives a clean life.  I did it on the basis of whether Mitt Romney confesses the faith which all Christians have confessed in the defining doctrines which have never changed since the 4^th Century.

A Creed is a concise statement of what a person or a group believes.  The essential thing about this defining document of the Christian faith is that it states what Christians believe about God, about Jesus, about the Holy Spirit, the Christian Church and the sacraments.

It does not state what our opinions are about each other. It does not enumerate sins.  It does not set admission standards except this faith in God and Jesus Christ.  It does not include a doctrine about the Holy Bible, so as to whether the Bible is to be taken literally or figuratively in different spots, whether every word of the Bible is binding upon all Christians forever, the Nicene Creed doesn’t even go there.  And most importantly, it makes no statement about human sexuality.

Is the argument over homosexuality really an argument of the Bible vs. the Creed?  Those who are extreme right-wing Christians insist that the Bible trumps everything else.  Yet the Bible, even more than the historic Creeds and other dogmatic statements and teaching, must be subject to study and interpretation.  And the Bible itself must ultimately take the back seat to the authority of Jesus Christ.  (”All authority has been given to me…”, Matthew 28:18; “You search the Scriptures…”, John 5:39)

Since at least the year 381 a.d., the Nicene Creed has been the statement which gave Christians unity.  It formed the Church’s catholicity by defining a common faith in God and in the work of Jesus Christ.  It did not attempt to settle all matters, least of all, human sexuality.  After all, we put our faith in Christ, not in sexuality:  not in heterosexuality or homosexuality, bisexuality or asexuality.

Can one “be a Christian” and be LGBT?  To confess my faith in Christ makes me a Christian, whether or not I fully understand myself, my sexuality, my gender, or my fellow believer. Is that clear?

— Pastor Dan Hooper, Los Angeles

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

February 11, 2008 by PD.

For our parish life, I have settled on a “theme” for our Thursday evening Lenten services, which begin on February 14.

Each year we use the Holden Evening Prayer service— which is entirely sung except for readings, and takes perhaps 20 minutes total. For the past several years, I have provided something different each year for brief meditations during these services. Two of the last three years I have written brief dramas, either contemporary or biblical, usually in “readers theatre”style for 2-3 actors.

This year I intend to guide us in a series in contemplative prayer. Each week will be different, not “stuffy” or “pious.” In addition to the selected readings, I will make very brief comments, and then guide us in contemplative prayer for no more than 5-7 minutes. It is my hope this year only to plant seeds, not teach an exhaustive course in prayer.

Our age is beginning to get hungry again for a more mystical experience. Many people in the “Emerging” or “Emergent” church movement are experimenting with contemplative prayer and centering prayer. (The two are quite distinct.) But because so many faithful Christians have little experience with contemplation and meditation, our prayers are usually at best intercessions – requests that God will help, heal, rescue, fix or forgive something. Our prayer life is rather like small children who want to run and play outside all day, and only come in to their father’s presence to ask for something (usually, permission) and when they have received it, they exit at top speed to go out and play again.

Contemplative prayer asks for nothing, petitions for nothing, seeks nothing. It does not demand, plead or intercede. Contemplative prayer puts us in the presence of the holy because we both enjoy and hunger for that presence.

Contemplative prayer invokes the name of God. It is not self-emptying as much as God-focusing. It is not based on the human search for aspiration for God, but on the revelation which God gives to us. As Lutheran theologian Kelly Fryer (”Reclaiming the F word“) constantly stresses, God always comes down.

If God is spirit, God is mystery. That we may receive God remains suspended in mystery also. Contemplative prayer allows us and invites us to enter into God’s mystery as redeemed children of God. We are born “of the spirit,” after all. If we allow our own spirits to atrophy, we would find that we have lost ourselves. In order to find ourselves, we must be willing to enter into God’s mystery. Contemplative prayer asks us to shift gears, slow down and give ourselves time to experience the mystery of God.

What blocks us? But too often our interior life is crammed, crowded, with our worries and concerns, our desires, our random thoughts, and even unhealthy obsessions of guilt, shame, and grief. It is as if our interior life is a large house full of cluttered rooms, and we are stuck, constantly sorting and sifting through the clutter we have accumulated, looking for something we have lost, or something of value, or something to amuse ourselves. Spiritually, what happens to us is like “writers block” in the soul. We become blocked, stuck, immobilized by our own concerns and problems. Contemplative prayer summons us to open more of our consciousness, to open the door, as it were, to an unused room, to open ourselves more and more to God’s presence than we do.

We always pray “through Jesus Christ our Savior.” In his name we have confidence to draw near to God’s presence, rather than to run from God in fear and terror. We see that Christ is the open door to God, and that his merciful sacrifice is a sign of God’s reconciliation with humanity. In Christ, we are invited, urged, even commanded to come into God’s presence with prayer.

— Pastor Dan

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February 6, 2008 by Pastor Dan.

This caught my eye in the e-mail box recently. I was tempted to scoff at their efforts but at the same time wanted to understand more of why they are profoundly skeptical about matters of faith.

“Sometimes, if you’re trying to find an answer to a problem, finding the edges, and working in from there works quite well — it’s known as approximation. Military gunnery works in the same way, overshoot, undershoot and bingo! In some topics this can be done through opposing statements. Here’s what I and my youngest son came up with—a doubters creed.

“A dubious Credo

“I do not fear God;
I fear mankind.
I do not fear my death;
I fear for my posterity.

I do not believe in Heaven or Hell;
I believe that all sentient life has a spiritual element.
I do not believe in the concept of sin;
I believe that love, in all its forms, is the most vital part of human experience.

I do not know if any religion is “true” or “false”;
I do know that there is a greater presence outside ourselves.
I do not know if God still exists;
I do know that once I did not exist, now I do, and soon I won’t.

I must not harm anyone else;
I must live every minute as if it is my last.
I must not allow the past to cripple the future;
I must make the day of everyone I encounter better.

Amen”

For openers, these Doubters appear to think of a Credo (”I believe”) as a statement of what they observe, rather than what they put their trust in—what they believe about, not what they believe in. For them a “greater presence” is something they are “approximating”—working in from the edges of what they observe, supposing something must be there and letting that suffice.

This view of reality is an inch or two over from the man I met at a New Year’s Eve Party a few weeks ago who thinks that all spirituality is simply “brain chemicals.” He told me he is a practicing Quaker. But he is also a Doubter of one of the higher orders.

Spirituality is something that even doubters, skeptics and secular philosophers acknowledge; yet their rejection or suspicion of religious doctrines really eviscerates human spirituality: it cuts the guts out of it.

With very little effort, as on that proverbial “slippery slope,” spirituality devolves to mere sentiment, limited by consciousness—for example: your trying to live each day “as if it were your last.” (Maybe I should go see The Bucket List while it’s still around.) But I suspect that a lot of loud, young, male, speeding pickup-drivers would be even more self-absorbed and rude and violent if they really believed that today was their “last day.” If you don’t fear death or God, Heaven or Hell, then why not just do whatever brings me instant gratification because, after all, this might be my last day on earth!?

Spiritual uncertainty, or a lack of spiritual consciousness, is clearly expressed here over and over: “I do not know . . .” Perhaps that phrase is offered as a mark of spiritual humility. But it doesn’t nearly approximate human experience. It lets humanity off the hook quite easily. It misses the moral mark by a mile. I do not always know, for example, if my actions today are in fact hurting someone else, rather than making other people’s day “better.” And if I do not know, then I am not responsible, right? Think of the long-term effects of greed, waste, and environmental damage of which generations of moral people were completely unaware while they sentimentalized the act of making somebody’s day better.

The most troubling and naive part of this dubious Credo, in my opinion, is the line “I do not believe in the concept of sin.” Do you really think “sin” does not exist? Or that the “concept” as you understand it is something you can’t subscribe to? If there is no God, then sin defined as an offense against God would not exist. That’s clever! But sin has been understood for thousands of years as also an offense against my neighbor. Most of the Ten Commandments are guidelines to keep us from sinning against—harming or exploiting—other people. The Old Testament is a confusing and quirky collection of moral commands, of actions and consequences (karma), but the majority of its moral wisdom falls in the column of justice, not merely religion.

Or is the “concept of sin” one these writers just associate with a penalty phase? (”Hell”?) In other words, can I simply adopt a personal ethic not to harm my neighbor without having to admit my failure to live up to my own ethic a lot of the time? Or attempt to make amends for the things I inadvertently do which harm others? Or to accept the consequences of my failures?

Someone wise remarked that “Sin is the one Christian doctrine which is empirically verifiable.” You can see it and document it, even if some doubter simply says “I do not believe in the concept of sin.” Was the Nazi extermination of six million Jews and unnumbered homosexuals and gypsies not sin? Or does the Doubter have a different term for it if the word sin isn’t used? Is “I do not believe” the escape line for the men who gutted the assets of Enron, including the retirement savings of thousands of their own employees? For the sub-prime lenders who have manipulated millions into Option-ARM loans no one could possibly afford, and has now left them homeless, bankrupted and with terrible credit scores? For Iraq war independent contractors who are bleeding the American government and therefore the American people for billions of dollars? For mass-murderers in our malls and schools? For men who mercilessly kill their wives and children before turning the gun on themselves? For drive-by shooters? For those who write computer viruses, or devise Ponzi and pyramid schemes, who defraud gullible senior citizens through phoney “investments”? All of those obvious examples are not “sin”? Then what are they? If there is no “sin” then what is it these Doubters fear in mankind?

To borrow a phrase from a well-known bumper sticker, “If you don’t believe that sin is real, you haven’t been paying attention.” If you can’t “buy into” a lot of religious talk, well okay. But the “spiritual element” of human life includes a sense of personal responsibility, self-examination, self-discipline, consciousness, humility, and an openness to change oneself and one’s life when confronted with the error of one’s ways. See, for example, the accusation of the prophet Nathan against King David, “You are the man!” (2 Samuel 12:7)

Ash Wednesday is the Christian acknowledgment not only of our sinful predicament—our sinful nature—but also our finite nature. As the liturgical phrase has it, “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” Or as the Doubter puts it, “I do know that once I did not exist, now I do, and soon I won’t.”

—Pastor Dan Hooper, Los Angeles

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January 12, 2008 by Pastor Dan.

I just learned this morning of the death of someone I’d been trying to get closer to. He died apparently of a drug overdose after a drug binge—depressed?—that had cost him his job.

This news has triggered a lot of shock in me, and I found myself questioning our mutual friend hard, as if it were not possible, or somehow the news was not true.

He had a lot going for him, which makes this seem like a total failure of hope and grace. He was a Christian, knew his Bible well, was confident and enthusiastic about both his work and his children (although divorced), and knew the 12 Steps of recovery. He had come with a good friend to our Bible studies on numerous occasions, was affable and stable.

Something completely eclipsed my friend’s path to recovery, however, and snatched his life away.

And sadly—as so often happens—he shut others out when he was in his greatest need and hitting bottom in his greatest depression. I have learned that he refused to go into a detox and rehab facility, and was found dead in his home days later.

As a Christian teacher and Pastor, I feel a huge sense of defeat that I never got or found the right opening or opportunity to get closer to this man. Could I have played a role in redemption for him? Would I ever have been the one he might have called when he hit a low point in life?

It strikes me how often religion plays such a feeble role in the recovery and redemption of human life. Yes, he knew the Scriptures and could quote them as well as may lay people. But what happened? Where had the Christian faith let him down so that in successive moments of poor judgement and discouragement evil forces could pull him completely under?

The pull, and the destruction, of addiction is real and powerful. These are the demons of our times, and they are legion. Thanks to the law of supply and demand, they remain quite plentiful and available in our country. Drugs and alcohol are costly but not so prohibitive as to make anyone avoid them because of money. In any big city, drugs are especially easy to get.

What is not easy to come by is an absolutely confidence in God’s redemption and grace. This seems to be in short supply– and those who have it cannot always successfully reach those who long for it or need it the most.

And the recovery process is not for wimps. The Twelve Steps are not twelve wishes. They are hard, even demanding work. They require our attention over the long haul—for an entire lifetime—in order to grow in the spiritual strength that nothing can shake or damage or pull under.

As much as I feel defeat in this dark moment, my defeat tells me not to give up or become cynical. My effort—and all of our effort—is critically needed somewhere out there to chase the evil demons of life away, and to be a steady, reliable, unshakable friend for those who lose their nerve or their way. Probably more than anything, we need “street smarts” to understand the demons and to recognize their power.

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