February 28, 2020

Here is what I perceive.

I perceive that the United Methodist Church has for years been willing to look away from the profanity of exclusion practiced toward its LGBTQI+ kindred.

This unwillingness to confront injustice created a culture of collusion.

The system was unwilling to name injustice toward LGBTQI+ children of God in any sort of prophetic and tangible ways.

So it didn’t.

People were silenced and closeted and souls were violated.

Churches and those given charge to lead the churches colluded in this violation.

So when we wonder what happened to the United Methodist Church I think we can say that a church that is/was unwilling to resist evil, injustice and oppression on behalf of all of God’s beloveds; that church harmed the Body of Christ.

The harm persists.  The dissipation of Spirit energy is a palpable wound.

There is much talk about how the church must reach out to the younger generation.   People the age of my children and younger (age thirty and below) are targeted as those who must hear our message of mea culpa about what has been and they are targeted as those who must know our sincere desire to do better, to love more fully, to embody the Gospel of Jesus in ways discernible and real.

And I hear that fervent desire and I wonder: have we learned?

Is this yet another ploy of an organization aware that the gig is up?

Are we so frantic to replenish the future that we zoom past the wounds that must be named and gentled into newness of life?

Where is the naming of the pain?

Where is the willingness to name the pain of confirmation students told by their pastors that they are damned?

Where is the acknowledgement that there are clergy and laity who have been in this struggle for the fifty years (on paper, anyway) that discrimination has been part and parcel of what it means to be United Methodist?

How is it that courting the young can be done with any integrity while assuming that the “that was then this is now” will play?

The Spirit knows and demands better from the people of Jesus called United Methodists.

I sat at a gathering at Hamline University hearing the hearts of leaders who have given their life-force to a movement that must be dismantled.  I heard that awareness named.  Thank you, Bishops.

And, I caution us all to stop and consider the time it will take to heal and trust and believe.

There is a near-frantic need to evangelize to our youth and young people.  This I understand.

But we cannot build a new and healthy movement without the time it takes to name the wounds and fully examine how it is the people of Jesus the Christ participated in death-dealing.

For that healing to happen, the voices and wounds of the young people and the elders must be welcomed and honored.

In order for the Body to heal we need a healing movement of confession, lament and reconciliation to roll across the souls of Wesleyan Jesus followers.

I am a woman of 62 years.  

I have dedicated 24 years of ministry to the United Methodist movement.  For all of those 24 years I have been a vocal and public advocate for full inclusion.  

I have seen so much pain.  

I am legion.

And, I am aware that I cannot much bear to continue as a representative of this denomination unless and until we get to the business of naming and honoring the costs borne by too many for too long.

I am ready for a new day.

And, the new must be built upon the lessons we find the courage to explore, name, and own.

It is needful work.

You know the Edvard Munch painting entitled “The Scream”?

I am feeling it.

I am feeling it each time I try to plan worship or create a sermon in these days.

How to balance?  To name truths is to risk rupture.  To muffle truth is to risk madness.

The world is literally on fire.  Funeral processions are taking place in Iceland for a glacier gone extinct.

Our nation is being led by a man who incites violence and demeans the office of the presidency of a once-great nation and to name the obscenity of his utterances and actions, his misogyny and racism and ecologically debauched ways, is to court cries of partisanship and over-involvement in politics.

As though Jesus was not.  Politically engaged.

We are being led in a merry dance by manipulators skilled at their craft while  being incited to point fingers at people portrayed as suspect (those immigrants!  Those Muslims!  Those who are not white and male!).

We are losing our souls.

How to enter a pulpit and preach the good news of Christ Jesus when there is so much that is not to be said?

How to follow in the way of an insistent-upon-the-humnaity-and-sacred-worth-of-every-creature Jesus when it is somehow too political to preach the very gospel that so terrified the powerful that they silenced him?

As though Jesus and the heart of God could be silenced.

I serve a progressive church.  They are a people who lean in.

And, every week as I page through hymns in search of communal song that does not implicitly condone violence or triumphalism.

Every week as I consider the scripture text and how it might speak and must speak in a world gone mad with fear.

Every week as I long for the unfettering of my own voice and the joining of that voice with the so many others who are stunned by grief and disbelief.

Every week.

I feel the scream.

Thirty-two years ago we bought a chair.

We were living in Pittsburgh at the time.  One of us was in the middle of grad school.  The other – that would be me – was waitressing to support a family of three.

We lived, well, frugally.

And, we had a wee baby between years of grad school.  Doesn’t everyone?

When our blond fluff girl was born, we received monetary gifts.  

We decided that what our household needed was a rocking chair to rock our babies and save our backs.

We went to JCPenny and bought (what felt to us) a Cadillac rocker.  As we spent money inspired by Rachel, we agreed that when the time came for her to be rocking a wee one, it would be in that rocker.

The rocking chair left my house on Sunday.

Rachel is due to give birth to her first-born boy child in mid April.  She is nesting.  It is time.

But I have to tell you, my eyes were not dry as that rocker got carried out of my home.

For thirty two years that rocker has borne witness to my core identity:  Mother.

It now bears witness to a blessed evolution.  

She who nested in my body and arms is now mother and I, I am a mother of the grand variety.

In the grace of his home, I will rock my grandson.

In the chair we bought so long ago.

Some of my favorite things in Australia?

Kangaroos under our deck.  Really.

Fox bats, clouds of them.

So many languages and bodies and children and parents enjoying each other and being on a catamaran trampoline and feeling the spray and the wind.  The sun so hot it is remarkable.  The sand on the beach so white it is near blinding.

At the pool today there was a young man gigging.   He played his guitar and sang to those of us bobbing around in the water and I thought to myself:  It wasn’t so long ago that was me.

It was me singing while others played.

I find myself dazed by the immensity of this gift.  The time, the exotic beauty, the never-did-I-believe-I-could-see-and-be-in-it of it all.

I know that the Holy isn’t a deal-maker.

And yet.

Some forty years ago while on the way home from our honeymoon, Jim and I hit a semi truck head on.  In a two door Opel.  I had no seat belt on.

We lived.

It changed everything.

Given a chance to inhabit the years that may never have been is no small gift.

Forty bonus years.

I continue to relishing the unpacking.