Tag Archives: LGBT

Methodists and Marriage Equality

I have been researching and writing a non-fiction book about the LGBT journey to full inclusion in the mainline churches. These include the United Methodist Church (UMC), ELCA, Presbyterian, Episcopal, and United Church of Christ. I will travel to Cleveland later this week to meet with persons in the home office of the UCC. Later this month, I will travel to Tampa to attend the quadrennial UMC General Conference.

The UCC has ordained openly gay clergy since 1972. The Episcopalians legislatively voted to ordain gays to all levels of clergy in 2009, but many bishops and dioceses had already been ordaining gays for many years. The ELCA and the PC (USA) both voted to allow openly gay clergy in 2009.

Thus, of the five, principal mainline denominations, the UMC is the only one not yet ordaining gays. Part of that is size; the UMC is by far the largest of these denominations, and there is simply inertia involved. The bigger reasons, however, are geographic. While the UMC has a significant southern contingency, the biggest roadblock is that their General Conferences include large numbers of international delegates, and they tend to be quite conservative.

The largest Methodist gay advocacy group is called Reconciling Ministries Network. During recent visits with their executive director and the Board President, I heard the suggestion that there is likely a healthy majority of US delegates in favor of change, but their number needs to approach 65% to offset the expected bloc of negative votes coming from Africa and other foreign delegates.

We shall see, and I hope to live blog from the General Conference with updates beginning April 30th.

There certainly are local and regional pockets that are fully inclusive. One of these is Foundry United Methodist Church of Washington D.C. that was recently featured in a newspaper report that offers a good summary of the Methodist journey. The story calls attention to a YouTube effort that includes a series of personalized videos. Here’s a link to the church news article and here’s a link to the YouTube videos. One of these videos is embedded below.

In my research, I frequently encounter the idea that progress toward full inclusion comes as a result of meeting gays face-to-face and less so from attempts at rational debate. Here is how author Chris Glaser in his book Uncommon Calling states it:

After every biblical, theological, ecclesiastical, historical, psychological, and biological question has been answered, antigay feelings will still be present in church and society. “One can’t use reason to argue someone out of a position not arrived at by reason” … Phobias, irrational fears, are not overcome by reason so much as experience. I believe the church and society’s phobia regarding homosexuality and homosexual persons will be overcome by experiencing us. pp. 161-162.

I’ll keep you posted. In the meantime, meet Jan Lawrence and Lindi Lewis, a lesbian couple from Foundry UMC.

ELCA Gay Icons Move On

Two ELCA pastors, a gay man and a lesbian, who made national news in the last decade, have accepted new positions. Anita Hill of St. Paul Reformation Lutheran Church in St. Paul, Minnesota will soon move to a new position as a regional director for Lutherans Concerned. Bradley Schmeling of St. John’s Lutheran Church in Atlanta has accepted a call to be the senior pastor of Gloria Dei Lutheran Church, also in St. Paul.

In some respects, Pastor’s Hill’s return to Lutherans Concerned is a homecoming. Way back in 1980, she was elected co-moderator of the organization, then a fledgling pan-Lutheran gay advocacy group. Of course, that was a volunteer position, and her current assignment as regional director for Minnesota and the Dakotas will be a paid position.

Her departure from St. Paul Reformation will seem strange; arriving in 1987 to serve as lay director of Wingspan Ministries—a gay outreach ministry—Pastor Hill and St. Paul “Ref” will forever be tied together as icons of the Lutheran journey to full inclusion for the LGBT community. In 1999, St. Paul Ref asked St. Paul Area Synod Bishop Mark Hanson whether an exception could be made to the ELCA policy excluding gay clergy. Bishop Hanson forwarded the inquiry to churchwide, which quickly rejected the request. Two years later, St. Paul Ref made national news by calling and and ordaining her anyway, one of the more prominent extra ordinem ordinations of Extraordinary Lutheran Ministries (ELM). St. Paul Ref was censured, a relative slap on the wrist compared to the expulsions of two San Francisco congregations following extra ordinem ordinations a decade earlier. Anita Hill actually played a role in those earlier ordinations also—she had recommended that her St. Paul friends, Ruth Frost and Phyllis Zillhart, apply for a pastoral position in San Francisco. They did, and the church would never be the same.

After her ordination, Pastor Hill remained a highly-visible spokesperson for the cause of full inclusion, and when the ELCA reversed policies in 2009, Pastors Hill, Frost, and Zillhart were received onto the roster of ELCA clergy in a celebratory Rite of Reception, which I attended and blogged about here.

Pastor Schmeling made history of his own in 2006. He was ordained as an out but celibate gay man, and he promised his bishop that he would advise him if his relationship status would ever change. When he met fellow ELCA pastor Darin Easler at a conference at Augsburg College in Minneapolis, his life and status changed. True to his promise, he notified the bishop. St. Johns, his Atlanta congregation, responded with support and publicly stood in solidarity with Pastor Schmeling as the synod bishop brought disciplinary charges against him. Eventually, he was removed from the clergy roster, but he remained pastor at St. Johns. Click here to go to the St. John’s webpages about the trial history.

Pastors Schmeling and Easler were the first to be returned to the ELCA clergy roster after the decisions in 2009.

Pastor Schmeling’s new call to Gloria Dei carries its own significance as a marker of how far the ELCA has come. Gloria Dei is a “high steeple” church, a cornerstone congregation with a membership of 2,300.

Gloria Dei is now the largest Lutheran church with a senior pastor who is openly-gay and in a committed same-gender relationship. This 2300-member congregation is heavily involved in social justice work and was also in the past the first large congregation to have a female senior pastor.

Godspeed, Pastors Hill and Schmeling as you step out on the next legs of your journeys.

NOTE: The details of Pastor’s Schmeling’s Atlanta call and trial have been revised above. The original post contained several factual errors, which have now been corrected.

Jen Rude Rite of Reception

Like much of the country, the greater Chicago area is enjoying unbelievable early spring weather. Last Sunday, I drove through NW suburbs to Evanston. There were bikers, joggers , and dog-walkers everywhere. Leaves are budding, flowering crab apple trees exploding in pink, and brown lawns are turning green. Life abundant, life abounding, life amazing.

I attended a festive celebration at Grace Lutheran of Evanston where Pastor Jen Rude became the latest to join the official roster of the ELCA through a Rite of Reception. Grace is a delightfully diverse congregation that had plenty of gray haired ladies, but also a healthy contingent of blacks, and a growing LGBT community, especially following the breakthroughs of CWA09. “Here is a church where we are welcome” is the word of mouth message that spreads through the gay community just to the south, which Pastor Dan Ruen jokingly referred to as “Grace Lutheran south campus”.

A Rite of Reception is the process worked out between ELCA leaders and Extraordinary Lutheran Ministries (ELM) that recognizes earlier extra ordinem ordinations but also celebrates in a formal way when the pastor joins the ELCA clergy roster. Bishop Wayne Miller of the Greater Chicago Synod laid on hands and presided over the rite and the Eucharistic celebration.

Pastor Rude was extraordinarily ordained in 2007 at Resurrection Lutheran Church in Chicago. She is called to minister to homeless youth, many of whom are gay, at the Night Ministry in Chicago, a ministry of “presence of faith in the nighttime streets”. She also serves on the board of directors of ELM and as director of “Proclaim”, a new auxiliary of ELM:

“the professional community for publicly-identified LGBTQ Lutheran rostered leaders and seminarians. This network of rostered leaders and seminarians from multiple Lutheran rosters are committed to changing church culture and transforming society through their ministry as publicly-identified LGBTQ rostered leaders.”

As a seminarian, Jen was the first recipient of the Joel Workin scholarship. From my research into my current book project, I have learned that Joel was a seminarian in the late eighties who “came out” along with three of his fellow seminarians during the candidacy process. Though he and the others were initially approved, the newly formed ELCA caved under a public outcry and yanked the approvals. This is all part of a larger and fascinating story of the extraordinary ordinations in San Francisco in the early 1990s. Joel died of AIDS in 1995 after distinguished service through the Lutheran Volunteer Corps. Rising from his coma, Joel proclaimed to the family and friends surrounding his deathbed, “We’re all children of God. Can I get an amen to that!” ELM is currently re-releasing a book of Joel’s writings.

Check the ELM website for more about Pastor Jen.

Congregation pastor Dan Ruen offered a prophetic, emotional, and inspiring sermon, reminiscent of civil rights oratory, and punctuated with plenty of amens from the congregation.

Interpreting Paul the apostle

Paul is such fun.

While his preeminent importance in the development of normative Christian doctrine is indisputable, his writings are enigmatic at best and indecipherable at worst. What is the heart of Paul? Does Paul reveal himself in Galatians 3:28, the so-called “Christian magna carta” —no longer Jew or Greek, slave or free, male or female—or in other writings that seemingly support slavery and the subjugation of women?

Paul also finds himself plopped down in the midst of 21st century debates over gays. Again, the question arises whether he was the great inclusivist who encouraged Gentile participation in the early church without precondition, without the proper male genitalia, against the wishes of church leaders, and contrary to scripture and centuries of tradition, or was he the greatest gay-basher in history? Though his “vice lists” have been dubiously translated to include homosexuality, his ranting in the first chapter of his letter to the Romans may be the favorite “clobber passage” of modern gay-bashers.

they exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling a mortal human being or birds or four-footed animals or reptiles.

²⁴Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the degrading of their bodies among themselves, ²⁵because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen.

²⁶For this reason God gave them up to degrading passions. Their women exchanged natural intercourse for unnatural, ²⁷and in the same way also the men, giving up natural intercourse with women, were consumed with passion for one another. Men committed shameless acts with men and received in their own persons the due penalty for their error.

²⁸And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a debased mind and to things that should not be done. ²⁹They were filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, covetousness, malice. Full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, craftiness, they are gossips, ³⁰slanderers, God-haters, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, rebellious toward parents, ³¹foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless. ³²They know God’s decree, that those who practice such things deserve to die—yet they not only do them but even applaud others who practice them.

How do modern exegetes unpack these harsh words? Yes, this passage is about idolatry, first and foremost. The evils of homosexual behavior are his assumption not his point. Yes, Paul’s words must be viewed from the cultural perspective of the 1st century Greco-Roman world, and yes, Paul must be understood as a Jew learned in the law to include the Levitical abominations. These influences certainly colored his perception, and it is unfair to ask a 21st century question of this 1st century man. He simply would have harbored a radically different understanding of human sexuality than we do today.

But, we can go further. What was Paul’s central theme of his letter to the Romans? Grace. That humankind is made right with God through God’s own offer of welcome and not through human effort, achievement, or merit—“works of the law” in Pauline terms. Trust God and rely upon that promise (faith). Paul works this out as he wrestles with the premise of Hebrew religion that Jews are God’s chosen over against his view that Gentiles should also be included. Justification by grace through faith and not by works is the simplified summary. So, if these are Paul’s themes in his letter to the Romans, where do his introductory remarks (quoted above) fit in?

Paul is setting a trap. He is speaking to Jewish listeners, and he gets them nodding as he recites their cultural stereotypes about the unclean gentiles. But wait, he suggests as chapter two unfolds, aren’t we Jews also guilty of breaking the rules? How are we different? Don’t we also depend upon God’s grace? And then Paul is off and running with his interplay of the themes of grace, faith, works, Jew and Gentile, etc. throughout the remainder of his letter to the Romans.

In doing research for my current book project about the history of the movement for full inclusion of gays in the life of the church, I came across a succinct version of this exegesis, which came in a 1977 Presbyterian debate. George Edwards of Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary, a member of a Presbyterian Task Force on homosexuality, spoke these words:

Paul says here that “God gave them up to dishonorable passions”. Is this, then, Paul’s theology? Of course not! God never gave anybody up! What kind of theology would that be? Paul is here using a rhetorical device to get his legalistic reader all worked up in self-righteous frenzy before he hits him over the head with his own inadequacy and dependency on God’s grace.**

Perhaps we can take meaning from this passage of Paul after all. Perhaps it is a clobber passage that offers an analogy for our current debate, but no, not to strike gays but to slam the “self-righteous frenzy” of 21st century legalists and to point them, and all of us, toward our inadequacies and dependency on God’s grace.

Paul, you sly fox. What a wretched man you are. Sounds like a good book title.

**Quoted in Chris Glaser, Uncommon Calling: A Gay Christian’s Struggle to Serve the Church (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1988) p. 164.

Lutheran Gay Clergy Retreat

In 1990, a pair of Lutheran congregations in the “Castro”, the San Francisco neighborhood called the “gay capitol of the world”, ordained an openly gay man and a lesbian couple. That was the start of Lutheran Gay and Lesbian Ministries. Later renamed Extraordinary Lutheran Ministries (ELM), this agency would ordain and roster over thirty gay and lesbian Lutheran ministry candidates because the ELCA refused to do so. Of course, ELCA policy changed with the momentous churchwide assembly of 2009.

So, what should ELM do now? A new course was charted for ELM at their January board meeting.

Far from feeling it was time to close our doors; we concluded that by creating a network for publicly-identified LGBTQ rostered leaders in a major Protestant denomination, we can participate in changing the church and transforming society. Furthermore, we concluded that we are strongly positioned to provide much needed support to LGBTQ people seeking to become rostered leaders in the Lutheran church. LGBTQ people know what it is like to be on the margins of the church. Through their ministry, LGBTQ rostered leaders are poised to offer an evangelical outreach to many and to work alongside others longing to be connected to a church that truly welcomes all.

ELM will soon be hosting a workshop/retreat at Stony Brook Conference Center in New York. Here are the details, cut and pasted from the ELM website:

The Proclaim retreat is a gathering of publicly identified LGBTQ rostered leaders and seminarians for a time of renewal, community building, and professional development. The 2012 retreat will be held at Stony Point Center, New York, April 18-21. Our keynote speaker is Episcopal Bishop Gene Robinson, who will join us for most of the retreat.

This retreat is open to members of Proclaim, significant others, and children 3 and under. For information on joining Proclaim go here.

The retreat begins with dinner on Wednesday evening and concludes with lunch on Saturday.

More about the Event:

This retreat will be the second gathering of Proclaim. We will gather together and embrace what it means to be publicly identified leaders as we care for ourselves, as we live in and amongst our communities, and as we serve as public witness to the Gospel.

The keynote speaker this year is Bishop Gene Robinson, the current bishop of the New England diocese of the Episcopalian church. Bp. Robinson is the first publicly identified gay person to be elected bishop in a major Christian denomination. His story is featured in the 2007 feature-length documentary, “For the Bible Tells Me So,” and his book In the Eye of the Storm: Swept to the Center by God (Seabury Books, New York) was released in 2008.

Program:

Here is a sample of sessions and discussion items for our time together:

What is the banquet that we are invited to? What motivates/propels us forward? What feeds our souls?

Discuss how LGBTQ leaders can shape and reshape church and community in the present and into the future.

Examine how LGBTQ leaders are a gift to the church.

Offer opportunities for LGBTQ leaders to hone and sharpen skills for ministry.

Create a vision of what this community and church might look like in 10 years–when we are all moving/going together.

Registration is OPEN. Go here to register.

Registration Deadline is March 16, 2012.

If you have questions, please contact Rachael Johnson, operations@elm.org

Tampa, Washington & Chicago: hope to see you there

Here are three upcoming events that I’m marking on my schedule. Perhaps a reader or two will decide to attend, but all of you should follow from afar.

April 24 – May 4: United Methodist General Conference, Tampa, Florida

The national (international) convention of United Methodists only convenes every four years. Thus, when they do gather, there is a lot of business to take care of. The first week consists of committee meetings and hearings, and the plenary sessions take place the second week.

The Methodists are the largest of the “mainline” Protestant denominations with over 8 million members. For comparison, the ELCA has around 4 million, the Episcopal and Presbyterian churches slightly over 2 million each, and the UCC slightly over 1 million. Of these five denominations, the Methodists are the remaining holdout for ordaining gay clergy, and that will certainly be the issue at the forefront of the upcoming General Convention.

The Methodists are also the most international of the American denominations. While the ELCA belongs to the worldwide Lutheran Federation, that is not a governing body that decides ELCA policy. The same is true with the Episcopalians who are part of the worldwide Anglican Communion. But, within the polity of the UMC, their international sister congregations and conferences are not mere affiliates but actually belong inside the denomination; thus there will be large numbers of international delegates to the upcoming General Convention.

This is also a significant part of the reason why the UMC has not yet voted to ordain gay clergy—the international delegates tend to be much more conservative than the US delegates. The principal gay advocacy group within the UMC is the Reconciling Ministries Network, and I recently visited with Troy Plummer, their executive director, and Pastor Bonnie Beckonchrist, their board chair. Both are cautiously optimistic about prospects for favorable legislation in Tampa, but suggest it will take nearly 65% favorable vote from the US delegates to bring the total margin to 50% or better.

I’m hoping to be there for the plenary sessions to do some live blogging.

June 25 – 28: UCC Coalition National Gathering, Elmhurst College, Illinois

The United Church of Christ has the most progressive history regarding gay inclusion of any of the five principal mainline denominations. The UCC Coalition is their advocacy arm, and this year’s national gathering will be historic. In June, 1972 openly gay seminarian William Johnson was ordained in a UCC conference in northern California, and this year’s gathering will celebrate the 40th anniversary of his ordination. Elmhurst College of Elmhurst, Illinois (a west Chicago suburb) will host the gathering and will also be the home of The William B. Johnson “Guestship”.

Elmhurst College has named its annual LGBT Guestship in honor of an esteemed alumnus, the Reverend Dr. William R. Johnson. A member of the Class of 1968, Johnson is a United Church of Christ minister and vice president for member relations of the UCC’s Council for Health and Human Service Ministries. In 1972, he became the first openly gay person in modern history to gain ordination to the mainstream Christian ministry.

“For four decades, he has worked tirelessly and effectively on behalf of the rights and dignity of all people and, in particular, of LGBT people of faith and their loved ones,” said President S. Alan Ray in announcing the William R. Johnson Guestship. “He has provided counsel and support to hundreds of LGBT seminarians and clergy in the UCC and beyond.” Ray noted that a scholarship in Johnson’s name supports openly gay UCC seminarians studying for parish ministry.

July 6 – 10: Biennial Assembly of Lutherans Concerned, Washington, D.C.

I attended the 2010 Biennial in Minneapolis, and I hope to attend this year also. In 2010, LCNA celebrated the momentous changes at the ECLA Churchwide Assembly of 2009. The preacher during the primary worship service was former NY Synod Bishop Stephen Bouman, who currently works within the ELCA home office as Executive Director of Congregational and Synodical Mission. His participation symbolized that gays and their advocates were now insiders, and Bouman’s sermon encouraged LCNA to use their gifts of advocacy for those who remain on the margins, especially the immigrant.

This year, the symbolism will be heightened as the keynote address will be given by none other than Mark Hanson, the Presiding Bishop of the ELCA.

Reconciling Works 2012 is more than a conference. It is an opportunity to explore and live out the work of reconciliation that we are called to do. Justice requires reconciliation, and reconciliation takes effort. Throughout our time together, we will work on justice issues from the intersection of oppressions (racism, sexism, ablism, etc.) and through the lens of full participation of people of all sexual orientations and gender identities in the life of the Lutheran Church.

We’ll worship together, using a rich variety of traditions of the worshipping community. We’ll provide a blend of the familiar and the unique drawing on our Lutheran heritage and the wealth of liturgical practice in the area. We’ll network with one another, hear stories of joy and frustration, and make decisions together about the future direction of Lutherans Concerned / North America and our Reconciling in Christ communities.

I’m back!!

Well, at least for the moment.

I have been pouring hours and hours into my book project, Gays in the Pulpit. My working draft is now over 170 pages, which is probably half. And the stories! And the people!

Chicago is home to Reconciling Ministries Network—the Methodist LGBTQ advocacy group–and I have visited with Troy Plummer (their director), Pastor Bonnie Beckonchrist (their board chair), Pastor Morris Floyd (activist in the 80’s and 90’s), and Mark Bowman (original founder). Bowman is also the director of LGBTran Archives, which contains biographies and more about leading LGBTQ icons. Turns out I already knew Steve Webster of Madison, Wisconsin who organized the first Methodist gay caucus back in 1975.

Thanks to these excellent resources, my draft includes chapters covering the Methodist history up to around 2000. The Methodists are the remaining holdout among the five principal mainline Protestant denominations. The others (ELCA, Presbyterian, Episcopal, and United Church of Christ) all ordain gay clergy, but the upcoming UMC quadrennial General Conference may change that. It’s close, with US delegates firmly on board, but because the UMC also has delegations from Africa, the Philippines, and elsewhere who tend to be very conservative vis a vis LGBTQ issues, the US delegates may need around 65% positive to offset the likely 90% negative from outside the US. The Conference is scheduled the end of April in Tampa, and I’m thinking I may attend and do some live-blogging as I did during the historic ELCA Assembly in 2009.

I am also up to around the year 2000 in my ELCA chapters. Chicago is home to both the ELCA archives and the Lutherans Concerned (LCNA) archives. I recently returned to Minnesota and had a delightful lunch with Ruth Frost and Phyllis Zillhart of the famous extra ordinem ordinations in San Francisco in 1990, and I have been in email correspondence with Pastor Jim Siefkes (who organized the first Lutheran gay caucus back in 1974), Jeannine Janson (who compiled a booklet containing early LCNA history), Amalia Vagts (the director of Extraordinary Lutheran Ministries), and others.

Louie Crew, the founder of the Episcopal group Integrity, has been very helpful during phone conversations and email correspondence. His stories also go back to the mid 1970’s. I have exchanged emails with Ellen Marie Barrett, the first Episcopal lesbian priest way back in 1977, who provided a poignant look back at the pain of rejection but also the triumph—“I am a priest forever!” My Episcopal chapters go to around 1990.

The Presbyterians and the UCC still require a lot of work—those chapters only cover the very early 1970’s. I have been in touch with More Light Presbyterians and the UCC Coalition, but I now need to follow up on the leads they have provided. Retired dean of the United Theological Seminary Clyde Steckel has been helpful with early information about the UCC. Trips to Cleveland and Drew University in New Jersey are likely in the offing, which is where many key persons and records are located.

In addition to these contacts, I have also kept the nearby Arlington Heights Library busy with dozens of inter-library loan requests. Many official records of national church conventions are available online as well.

Gays in the Pulpit

I have several writing projects underway. I recently posted about Prowl, a compilation of five short stories based upon my Vietnam experience. I have also been working on a sequel to A Wretched Man. Third, last spring I started work on a non-fiction piece, tentatively titled Gays in the Pulpit, which will be a forty-year retrospective on the gay rights movement within the church. Now that we are settled into our new digs in Arlington Heights, I have again picked up that project in earnest.

I am personally acquainted with many of the more recent heroes of the push for full inclusion including Lutherans Anita Hill, Ruth Frost, Phyllis Zillhart, and Emily Eastwood; United Methodist Amy Delong; and Presbyterian Scott Anderson. If you click on their names, you will link to prior blog posts about these individuals.

My current research is also introducing me to earlier heroes. In 1968, Troy Perry was a gay Baptist/Pentecostal preacher who founded the Metropolitan Community Church, which now numbers over 250 predominantly gay congregations internationally. Father Robert Mary Clement was a gay priest who marched in the first gay pride parade in Greenwich Village and whose Beloved Disciple Church ministered to the gay community of New York City in the early ‘70s. Bill Johnson was the first openly gay man ordained by an established denomination way back in 1972 by the United Church of Christ. Ellen Barrett was the first out lesbian to become an Episcopal priest in 1977.

As I am reviewing the data from these early days, I have received invaluable assistance from Rev. Clyde Steckel, retired dean of the United Seminary of the Twin Cities. Rev. Steckel was witness to and participant in the UCC steps toward gay inclusion in the ‘70s. The record in the UCC is striking because they were so far ahead of the other mainline denominations. The UCC accomplishments in the 1970s foreshadowed the actions of the Episcopalians, Lutherans, Presbyterians, and Methodists a full generation later.

More to come.

Home in Arlington Heights

The Village of Arlington Heights began to take shape in the 1850’s when a New York land speculator persuaded the railroad to build a terminal in the local farming community consisting of recent German immigrants. The railroad allowed the farmers to ship their produce to the far-off city of Chicago, twenty-five miles to the south and east. Originally the town of Dunston, the Village of Arlington Heights was incorporated in the 1880’s.

Today, Arlington Heights boasts a population of 75,000, a “Village” budget in excess of $60 million annually, and the railroad terminal is now a popular waypoint along a spoke of the “Metra” light rail that delivers commuters into the Chicago hub. Downtown Arlington Heights consists of fine shops, restaurants, Yoga studios, theaters, high-rise luxury apartments and other indicators of an affluent community. Several of you who sent well-wishes noted personal connections with this area.

We have rented a century-old, four-bedroom (all small) house just a block away from downtown. We can see the Metra trains pass by from our spacious porch. I have set up my new office in a cheery sunroom that catches the morning sun and from which I can watch the teenagers next door play frisbee. We have received welcoming gifts of chili, sweets, and salads from several of the neighbors who were pleased to learn that we hold a humorous disdain for our fellow Minnesotan, Michelle Bachmann.

Yesterday, we visited the 2,300 member Our Saviour’s Lutheran Church just a few blocks up Arlington Heights Road. I nudged my wife as Senior Pastor Dan Hoeger offered the morning announcements.

“I know him from somewhere,” I said.

After the service, we confirmed that we had met a year ago at the Lutherans Concerned Convention at Augsburg College in Minneapolis. Our Saviour’s just concluded a congregational advisory survey in which 82% voted to authorize the pastors and the congregation to bless same-gender unions.

So, we’re settling in. We still have a few boxes to unpack, and I need to get untracked with my writing. Several projects have languished in recent months, but now it’s time. Thanks to all who sent comments to this blog or private emails wishing us well in our new adventure. I will be returning to host a series of retreats in Minnesota in upcoming weeks, and I hope to see many of you then.

Earliest Christian Manuscript Discovered

Antiquities experts have released the contents of a Christian manuscript that may predate Paul’s letters and the gospels. Discovered in one of the many caves of the Arbel cliffs overlooking the Sea of Galilee, the fragment appears to be an early version of a passage that later appeared in Mark and the Synoptic gospels. Carbon dating places the document in the third or fourth decade of the first century near the time of the crucifixion. Some suggest the fragment contains the actual words of Jesus of Nazareth.

Here is the translation from the Aramaic text:

Some Pharisees came, and to test him they asked, “Is it lawful for a man to marry a man or a woman to marry a woman? He answered them, “What did Moses command you?” They said, “You shall not do as they do in the land of Egypt, where you lived, and you shall not do as they do in the land of Canaan, to which I am bringing you.” But Jesus said to them, “Because of your hardness of heart he wrote this commandment for you. You shall not lie with a male as with a woman; it is an abomination. But from the beginning of creation, ‘God made them male and female.’‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.’ So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has not made to lay together, let no one join in marriage.”

I apologize for my falsehood. Of course, no such text has been discovered or exists; yet, the actual passage on divorce, which has nothing to do with same-gender relationships, has been coopted by conservative defenders of “biblical marriage”, who latch onto the phrase “God made them male and female” and take it out of the context. As the nation and our churches wrestle with marriage equality issues, this divorce text has become the “clobber passage” du jour. My purely fictive version of Jesus’ teaching on divorce is no less perverse than the interpretation that twists this passage into authority against marriage equality. I have merely written down in plain language what some infer from the text.

When you see it in black and white, it seems rather far-fetched, doesn’t it? Is my fictive version equivalent to the actual version below? Of course not, yet some would have you believe so. Exegesis is the process of getting ‘out’ of the text what is truly there in the first place. The opposite of exegesis is eisogesis. This is the process of putting ‘into’ the text something that wasn’t intended by the author.

For reference sake, here is the actual text from Mark 10:2-9 (NRSV).

Some Pharisees came, and to test him they asked, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?” He answered them, “What did Moses command you?” They said, “Moses allowed a man to write a certificate of dismissal and to divorce her.” But Jesus said to them, “Because of your hardness of heart he wrote this commandment for you. But from the beginning of creation, ‘God made them male and female.’ ‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife,and the two shall become one flesh.’ So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.”