Yes, I Did Remove a Comment Here about "Ethnocentric Racists" Promoting "Sodomy" in Western Nations — Here's Why

A quick note to let you know about this situation, in case it explodes in some way in threads here: those who have followed postings here for some time may know that I posted a number of pieces back in September 2013 about comments (ugly ones) left here by a gentleman living in Nairobi, Mr. Njonjo Ndehi (see here, here, and here).

Provocative One-Liners from News, First Week of 2014

Provocative one-liners from smart news commentary or articles I read this past week:

Bishop Desmond Tutu: "I Would Refuse to Go to a Homophobic Heaven"

Bishop Desmond Tutu yesterday in Cape Town:

Desmond Tutu Appeals to Ugandans' Conscience, and Another Gay Teen Commits Suicide

Josh Pacheco (1995-2012)

And (piggybacking on what I just posted about Justice Scalia and his recent response to a gay Princeton student re: homosexuality and murder) in contrast to Scalia the defender of Catholic orthodoxy, there's Desmond Tutu, the defender of humane values and human rights: at Box Turtle Bulletin, Jim Burroway publishes an editorial by Tutu in today's Daily Monitor.  The editorial appeals to the conscience of the Ugandan people as their parliament is poised to pass draconian anti-gay legislation as a "Christmas gift" to the people of this nation.

Dolan to Pray at Democratic Convention: My Reflections

And speaking of not walking in a vain shew (I'm building on what I just posted about the two Romneys), and of standing on principle and valuing integrity above all vain riches: Common Dreams reports today that Archbishop Desmond Tutu has withdrawn from a leadership summit in South Africa because Tony Blair will be another high-profile participant.  Tutu characterizes Blair's support for the Iraq war as "morally indefensible."

Situation for LGBTI Folks in Uganda Grows Graver, Nobel Peace-Prize Winners Respond

The situation for LGBTI people in Uganda grew more grave lately, as the Anglican archbishop of Uganda Stanley Ntagali joined other Christian leaders in that country in asking the Ugandan parliament to pass the infamous anti-homosexuality legislation that has been under consideration in Uganda for some time now.  As this press release by the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights also indicates, on Wednesday, the Ugandan Minister of Ethics and Integrity Simon Lokodo, a former Catholic priest who still uses the title of "right reverend father," also  announced last week that he is banning 38 human rights organizations for "promoting homosexuality." The ban announcement came two days after Lokodo ordered a raid on an LGBTI rights workshop in Kampala.

Weekend Resources to Feed the Spirit: Phil Ewing on Desmond Tutu, Tom Beaudoin on Occupy Wall Street

Food for the spirit at the end of a long week:

At her beautiful Blue-Eyed Ennis site, Phil Ewing posted two tributes to Desmond Tutu recently on the occasion of his 80th birthday--here and here.  I particularly like the video resources Phil includes in both postings.  In the first of the two pieces, Michael Scherer of Time interviews Tutu in one of the magazine's "10 questions" segments.  And the second links to an AP clip of Tutu's birthday celebration at St. George's cathedral in Capetown, in which Bono sings for his "boss."

Anglican African Bishops Meet to Fight Western Pansexualism: Anglican Version of Theology of the Body

Here's the polite Anglican version of right-wing Catholic rhetoric about keeping African men men and African women women: this is David W. Virtue reporting on the current Council of Anglican Provinces in Africa's All Africa Bishops' Conference (CAPA): the Anglicans are fighting "Western pansexualists" who do "not hold fast to a biblical view of Christian morality."

Diana Butler Bass on Continued Attempt of U.S. Religious Right to Use African Christians in American Culture Wars

Huffington Post recently carried a fine article by Diana Butler Bass, author of A People's History of Christianity (NY: Harper, 2009).  It's about a topic re: which I've blogged repeatedly in the past: the misreading of African versions of Christianity by Western Christians intent on using Africans and the churches of Africa as pawns in lethal culture-war games in the West.

The Place of Gay Human Beings as a Church-Dividing Issue: Again

I’m thinking these days about a theme I discussed briefly back on 22 April in my posting entitled “The Church’s One Foundation” (see http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2008/04/churchs-one-foundation-homosexuality.html). This is the claim of some church groups that homosexuality should be placed on the back burner of church discussion, since the gay issue is not truly a church-dividing issue.

The Florida United Methodist Conference has just held a “Conference Table” to which anyone in the conference is invited. The headline announcing this conference table noted that this was a table at which everyone was welcome.

The topic of this roundtable public discussion was “In Defense of Creation.” A description of the conference table topic on the website of the Florida UMC Conference notes, “IDOC2, as it is called, is the church's attempt to engage public policy on issues that most affect the human race, according to Florida Conference Bishop Timothy Whitaker, task force chairman. The document addresses three areas: nuclear proliferation, global poverty, and environmental issues” (see http://flsite.brickriver.com/event_detail.asp?PKValue=1845).

Issues that most affect the human race: nuclear proliferation, global poverty, and the environment. From one standpoint, it’s hard to argue with the claim that this configuration of issues covers the terrain admirably well—these are, indeed, among the issues most affecting the human race, the ones churches most need to address in their preaching and ministry today.

From another standpoint, however, there’s something wrong with this picture. In the first place, search as one will through the entire Florida UMC Conference website for any mention at all of homosexuality, and one draws a complete blank. Scrutinize the program for the recent Florida UMC Annual Conference meeting for any mention of the term “gay” or “homosexual/ity,” and you’ll come away with the impression that any issues revolving around those terms must have been resolved.

Because the church is totally silent about them. The church is totally silent about issues relating to homosexuality as issues most affecting the human race today.

The implication of the church’s claim that nuclear proliferation, global poverty, and the environment are the key issues affecting the human race today is that the issue of homosexuality—the place of gay human beings within the human race and the churches—is a non-issue, a side issue, one beneath notice.

But if this is the case, why did the most recent General Conference of the United Methodist Church spend an inordinate amount of time discussing that very issue? Why have state conferences such as the Florida Conference almost come to blows about that issue, such that there are fears the church may split?

If the issue of where LGBT human beings fit into the human race and the churches is a non-issue, why has every UMC General Conference for almost a decade now battled through this issue? Why is the worldwide Anglican Communion in anguish over this issue? Why are almost all the churches in the world groaning through this critically important moment of human history in which, for the first time in history, LGBT human beings are claiming the right to a place at the table, as openly gay people affirming their own God-given identities and refusing to apologize for these identities as they approach the Lord’s table?

If the question of where gay human beings are to be “placed” within the human community and the churches is a non-issue, one about which churches can justifiably be silent while discussing issues of key importance to the human race today, why have some Anglican churches in the United States chosen to break communion with gay-affirming bishops, placing themselves under the episcopal jurisdiction of bishops far from their own dioceses? Why have bishops such as Peter Akinola in Nigeria bitterly resisted inclusion of LGBT people in the churches, while bishops such as Desmond Tutu have spoken out courageously about homophobia as the new apartheid of the human race and the churches?

If the issue of where gay human beings fit is a non-issue, one about which churches may justifiably be silent when discussing the important issues facing the human community today, what is one to make of the recent announcement of the president of Gambia that he wished to see all gay persons in his country sought out and beheaded?

If the question of how to fit LGBT human beings into human society and into churches is not a premier issue causing conflict within the human community today, why did the Human Rights watch send a letter to the president of Gambia—only days before the Florida United Methodist Conference held its discussion of “the” issues that most affect the human race—noting that the president’s violent rhetoric and actions towards gay human beings violates human rights covenants and “abdicates one of the most important responsibilities of political leadership: to respect, protect, and promote the human rights of all” (see http://hrw.org/english/docs/2008/06/10/gambia19088.htm)?

If the question of how our gay brothers and sisters are to be included in our human and church families is a non-issue, why did the Pope announce immediately before new year’s day that he considers the issue of protecting the family (read: of resisting gay marriage) to be one of the premier issues confronting the churches today, one to which he intended to devote primary attention in 2008?

I sense more than a bit of flim-flammery in the claim of many church folks today that the question of how to place our gay brothers and sisters is not a significant, crucial, noteworthy issue for discussion—not truly a church-dividing issue. What is really going on with this claim is a dishonorable attempt to keep gay people in the shadows—and to keep in the shadows, as well, the shameful way the churches continue to treat gay human beings.

It goes without saying that nuclear proliferation, poverty, and the environment are among the most significant issues facing the human community today. It goes without saying that churches which wish to be faithful to the example of Jesus and to the gospels should be discussing and trying to deal proactively with these issues.

But these issues do not exist in isolation from issues of gender, from issues of patriarchy. The militarism that is at the root of nuclear proliferation is rooted in male domination and exploitation of women, of anything regarded as feminine. Exploitation and destruction of the environment is intrinsically linked to patriarchal systems of social order that give men unmerited dominance over women.

As feminist theologians have long noted, the social issues demanding the critical attention of churches are all interconnected in a web, all interwoven. One cannot understand and deal with militarism, economic exploitation of minorities, or destruction of the environment without understanding and dealing with patriarchy, misogyny, and homophobia. As feminist theologians have long noted, societies that are racist are also not coincidentally almost always societies that are misogynistic and homophobic.

Nor can one understand and deal with the key issues confronting society today without confronting the unjust domination of the churches by white males who profess to be heterosexual.

Part of the silence—a big part of the self-censorship of bishops and other church leaders today, when it comes to gay issues—is a tactic of keeping at bay critique of the ways in which white males who profess to be heterosexual still control most everything in the world, including in the churches. Or perhaps particularly in the churches.

The issue of how to fit our LGBT brothers and sisters into the churches is neuralgic because it casts a spotlight on church leaders themselves—an unwanted spotlight. It casts a spotlight (an unwanted one) on how the churches treat LGBT people.

The discussion unmasks the claim that everyone is invited to the table as a false claim—a shamefully false, starkly false claim. A lie.

Churches must find ways to keep at bay the discussion of the place of their LGBT brothers and sisters at the table, because that discussion will open too many doors to questions about how the church pursues its ministries, how it deals with money, what kind of alliances with powerful people drive the churches and their rhetoric and actions.

The question of how or whether to provide a place at the table for gay human beings should, of course, never have become a church-dividing issue. No church can justifiably claim to be church, when it excludes any group from the table. Every sinner has a place at the table of the Lord. Period. No questions asked.

That is, every sinner has a place at the Lord’s table if the church setting that table wants to claim to be following in the footsteps of Jesus.

No, the question of the place of LGBT human beings at the table should never have been made a church-dividing issue. We who are gay did not choose to make this an issue. Other forces in church and society have done so, and have done so with a vengeance.

That being the case, no church today can flim-flam around the gay issue, claiming it is not and should not be a church-dividing issue, or an issue of key importance to the human community. Indeed, it might well be argued that this question of how to set a place for gay brothers and sisters is the premier issue facing all churches today—the one with the most potential to test the fidelity of churches to the gospel, the one with the strongest ability to test whether churches intend to be church at the most fundamental level possible, the only level that counts: whether churches intend to set the Lord’s table for all sinners.

The church and its bishops don’t pay any price at all, do they—really now—when they take a stand on nuclear proliferation, poverty, and the environment? But the church and its bishops do pay a price, and a steep one, when they resolutely and without qualification announce that their table is open to all, including their gay brothers and sisters, and that their institutions will demonstrate this praxis of discipleship by resolutely and without qualification discarding all forms of discrimination within church institutions against LGBT human beings.

Perhaps Bishop Whitaker and other church leaders who are flim-flamming around discussion of the place of gay brothers and sisters at the table will make the topic of their next roundtable discussion of key issues confronting the churches the following excerpt from a sermon that retired Catholic Bishop of Detroit, Thomas Gumbleton preached recently on what the Catholic liturgical calendar calls the 10^th Sunday in ordinary time. The gospel for the day was Matthew 9:9-13 (see http://ncrcafe.org/node/1907):

There are so many other ways in which we must become a welcoming community, a community that is like Jesus, that is ready to welcome sinners, to be with sinners, to be with those who others would think as not worthy. We have to become a church of great diversity, where we welcome everyone regardless of race, sexual orientation, poverty, wealth. We have to be a church of diversity. We have to share our Eucharist, we have to share our banquet, with all who are out there in the world with us.

When we can reach out as Jesus did and welcome tax collectors and sinners into our midst without making judgment, simply welcoming everyone as God does, God says, "I want mercy more than sacrifice; love more than ritual," this is what is very important and this is what we must try to make happen in our communities, in our church, and in our civil society, so that we really become one beloved community, one family of God where everyone is welcome and everyone gives thanks and gratitude for the God who shows them such love through those who follow his son, Jesus.

This is what is very important and this is what we must try to make happen in our communities, in our church, and in our civil society: to welcome everyone regardless, to share our banquet with all who are out there in the world with us.

We Are All Care of One Another

I’m thinking these days about why so many avid readers around the world love Alexander McCall Smith’s African lady detective Precious Ramotswe. I suspect the love affair has much to do with Mma Ramotswe’s profoundly humane (and religiously informed) moral sense.

Precious Ramotswe is both an Anglican and a defender of the traditional moral code of her beloved Botswana—though, as an enlightened and determined woman in a society long dominated by men, she also challenges traditional norms when they conflict with overriding norms that demand that we respect each other at a human level transcending nationality, gender, race, and so on.

The title of the first chapter of Smith’s latest Precious Ramotswe novel The Miracle at Speedy Motors (NY: Pantheon, 2008) is, “We are all care of one another.”

As the novel proceeds, Mma Ramotswe muses,

Yes, we were all care of one another in the final analysis, at least in Botswana, where people looked for and valued those invisible links that connected people, that made for belonging. We were all cousins, even if remote ones, of somebody; we were all friends of friends, joined together by bonds that you might never see, but that were there, sometimes every bit as strong as hoops of steel (pp. 5-6).

I’m thinking of this profound Afrocentric (and Christian) moral code stressing the kinship of everyone, as I read reports today about what happened at the United Methodist General Conference yesterday. In a session presided over by Florida Bishop Timothy Whitaker, the Conference chose to endorse a minority report on the church’s stance towards its LGBT brothers and sisters that is actually somewhat harsher than the church’s previous obdurate stance.

The majority report proposal would have left the door open for, at the least, honest recognition that Methodists are divided about the moral assessment of homosexuality. The proposal called for United Methodists to recognize that “faithful and thoughtful people who have grappled with this issue deeply disagree with one another; yet all seek a faithful witness.”

I say “the moral assessment of homosexuality,” yet this debate is about human beings. It is about brothers and sisters. It is about mothers and fathers. It is about aunts and uncles.

It is about all those human beings to whom we are bound by invisible ties of kinship and connection in our shared journey towards salvation. As Rev. David Dodge, Executive Director of the Center for Clergy Excellence in Lakeland, Florida, who stood up in protest following the vote to endorse the minority report, notes, "Some folks I know are deeply devoted followers of Christ, faithful church people. I see their faces in my mind. It's hard for me to support language that seems to exclude them” (see Cary McMullen, “Methodists Hold Line on Homosexuality,” The Ledger [Lakeland, FL], 1 May 2008, at www.theledger.com/article/20080501/NEWS/805010532/1039).

“I see their faces in my mind.” How is it possible to claim that one is a faithful follower of Jesus, and not be able to say this—after a vote that excludes gay and lesbian, bisexual and transgendered, brothers and sisters from full communion in the church? How is it possible to say that one sees these human faces in one’s mind, and shove some people from the table, inform some people that their human nature is not as complete as one’s own human nature?

Can we look a blood brother or sister, a mother or father, an aunt or uncle, in the face, and make such a claim? If not, how do we imagine that we are living according to Jesus’s teaching, and treat those within the family of God with such egregious inhumanity?

A report by an eyewitness delegate at General Conference on today’s “Religion Is a Queer Thing” blog is enlightening (see http://welcomingministries.blogspot.com/2008/05/skunked-by-fox.html). The delegate is Will J. Green. His report is entitled “Skunked by a Fox.”

In Green’s view, Bishop Whitaker did not encourage or permit substantive debate about the two proposals in front of the body. Instead, he used up the time for debate by entertaining amendments presented in soundbite statements pro and con, as a preliminary to ushering in Rev. Eddie Fox, Director of UMC World Evangelism. According to Green, Whitaker allowed Fox to hold forth for a full half hour in an impassioned wrap-up sermon calling on Methodists to hold the line regarding homosexuality . . .

That is, to continue holding the door shut against LGBT human beings, gay and lesbian, bisexual and transgendered brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers, aunts and uncles. To continue setting one table for ourselves, the high and mighty of the world, and another for our lowly and despised relatives who deserve only crumbs at the small table.

Fox and various African delegates associated with him argued that acknowledging kinship with LGBT brothers and sisters would fracture the worldwide communion of Methodism. Interestingly, though both Bishop Whitaker and Rev. Fox are white Southern men of late middle age (as I am: these are my people; I cannot deny my kinship with them), they are apparently among the strongest advocates for “diversity” and “inclusion” in the United Methodist Church—as long as those being included are not LGBT (as long as white Southern men continue to sit in the seats of power and dominate the conversation of worldwide Methodism?).

Is African Christianity inherently opposed to recognizing gay people as brothers and sisters, as Dr. Fox and Bishop Whitaker evidently assume? If so, what must we make of the countervailing voice of Desmond Tutu?

Is Tutu not African? When he apologizes to his gay brothers and sisters for the savage and demeaning apartheid practiced by the church against them, and when he says he will not worship a homophobic God, is he not speaking as an African—as an African Christian? Is he not echoing the traditional African (and deeply Christian) ethic of the inextricable kinship of all human beings articulated by Precious Ramotswe?

“We are all care of one another.” “I see their faces in my mind.”

Make no mistake about it, Bishop Whitaker, my brothers and sisters of the Methodist communion who profess mercy while practicing injustice: we are related.

We are brothers and sisters. You may deny the kinship in how you continue to treat us, but God does not do so. You may set a greater and a lesser table, but God does not do so.

You may participate in ugly schemes that deny us job security in your institutions merely because we are gay. You may make our lives miserable through unemployment and lack of healthcare benefits, through acts of exclusion intended to demean us and kick us to the curb, to let us know that this is all we should hope for as long as we do not apologize for being gay. God does not behave this way.

You may assume that once our face has been banished from your sight, that once we have been shoved from your table, we will vanish forever. And we may indeed vanish—from your sight, at least.

But not from God’s. As Mary Doria Russell says in her novel A Thread of Grace (NY: Ballantine, 2005):

“Nothing you were, or are, or will be, is in your own hands. Society is held together by the simplest of human ties. A person in need stands in front of you; if you can help, you must help” (p. 402).

A person in need stands in front of you; if you can help, you must help: this summarizes the Wesleyan perspective on society and ministry beautifully. It is on those ties—our recognition of them, our willingness to acknowledge the person in need standing in front of us—that we will be judged at the end of our lives, when we all stand together, face to face, before God.

I cannot rest easy when I try to banish from my sight those I do not wish to see as the person in need standing in front of me. I struggle daily to continue seeing those whose faces I would prefer not to see, those with whom I would prefer not to claim kinship.

I challenge my brothers and sisters in Christ who appear able to continue resting easy while refusing to see the human face of the gay brother and sisters you exclude from sight, from your table, to struggle to see, to hear, to acknowledge kinship—and the excruciating pain of those whose kinship (and humanity) is denied as you appeal to Jesus as Lord.

An Open Letter to Bishop Timothy W. Whitaker: Only One Table

Dear Bishop Whitaker,

In conclusion, I want to thank you for listening to my testimony in this week of preparation for General Conference. Thank you for your public appeal for commentary on your essay “The Church and Homosexuality.” My comments are a response to your invitation to hear the reflections of the Christian community regarding your essay.

I do not speak as a United Methodist. I do speak, however, as someone whose life and vocation have been strongly influenced by the Wesleyan tradition, and who has served in a leadership capacity at two United Methodist institutions. I speak as well out of an experience of gross injustice at a United Methodist institution under your pastoral charge.

In discerning God’s will in our lives, we must speak from where we are placed—by biological inheritance, by economic structures beyond our control, by social and ecclesial structures, and so on. For many of us, including those of us who are gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered, the place to which the churches relegate us is a place of second-class citizenship. We are invited to partake of crumbs at the lesser table while other believers feast at the great table.

Being placed in marginal positions, being subject to injustice, certainly does not automatically make us holy. The experience of repeated injustice can cause us to be bitter and angry. If we do not learn to let our justifiable anger at injustice enter the depths of our soul, and be transformed there into a passion for justice for all God’s creatures—and, in particular, for all subject to injustice—our anger can eat us up.

For some of us, finding ways to speak out about our injustice, to make links between the injustice we have experienced and that experienced by other communities subject to historical marginalization, is a way of trying to respond redemptively to the place offered us. We hope, in recounting our painful experiences, to offer the church in return the opportunity to transform injustice into mercy. We hope to make the passage from bitterness to redemptive love for all in our own lives, by offering our reflections as honestly as possible to the Christian community.

Thank you for taking these reflections into your heart prior to the upcoming General Conference. I hope to have provoked you to give consideration to at least one overriding concern: this is the recognition that, in order to be effective and compelling as it challenges social injustice everywhere in the world, the church cannot itself practice injustice. Acts of injustice within the church and its institutions radically undercut the church’s effectiveness, as it offers the world the redemptive love of Christ, in which justice and mercy meet.

I read yesterday an interesting reflection on the fact that, in the past two weeks, two prominent men representing the contemporary church have been in the United States. As Hilary Rosen’s Huffington Post article entitled “I Am a Papal Party Pooper” notes, just prior to the current visit of Pope Benedict XVI to our country, Archbishop Desmond Tutu was among us (see www.huffingtonpost.com/hilary-rosen/i-am-a-papal-party-pooper_b_96976.html).

The article reflects on the very different message these two men offer gay and lesbian human beings. On the one hand, Benedict offers a teaching centered on the proposition that gay and lesbian human beings are intrinsically disordered in our very natures. Many of us who are gay and lesbian Catholics have rejected that teaching, since we do not experience ourselves as disordered. To the contrary, we experience our nature, including our sexual orientation, as part of the inestimable artisanship of the Creator God, who has chosen to fill the world with many different types of human beings, to mirror the tremendous diversity within the Creator’s own nature.

We reject the tag of “intrinsic disorder” as well because, in dehumanizing us, it implicitly justifies discrimination against us. Just as in the United Methodist Church and some of its institutions, in my church, the Catholic Church, gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered human beings are subject to many forms of discrimination. In the Catholic Church as in the United Methodist Church, we are bidden to sit at the lesser table where crumbs are handed out, and not the one great table the church offers to all believers.

Archbishop Tutu offers a radically different word to gay and lesbian believers. He speaks to our hearts and to our experiences of injustice and exclusion. He speaks prophetically. In listening to him, we hear the church offering us the redemptive love of Christ—an unconditional love that encompasses all of creation. Out of his own struggle with draconian structures of racial injustice, he has come to name homophobia as a new form of apartheid. He tells the church that if it offers a homophobic God to the world, the world will not find the message of redemption in the image of God offered to the world.

Archbishop Tutu challenges the church to stand against savage injustice towards gay and lesbian believers, just as it has stood against slavery, segregation/apartheid, and the subordination of women to men.

Which of the two speaks for the future of Christianity? For those of who are LGBT, the answer is plain: we cannot see the face of God in the word the Pope offers us; we do see the face of God in the word Archbishop Tutu offers us.

These two radically different words spoken by the contemporary church: they call for believers to take sides, to be engaged, to discern what currents within contemporary culture point to God’s redemptive yes to all of creation.

We who are believers now look back and confess our previous lack of justice and mercy in upholding slavery, segregation, subordination of women. We will, many of us believe, one day look back as well and confess our lack of justice and mercy towards gay and lesbian persons. As Mr. Obama, in challenging the deeply entrenched homophobia of his African-American community, has reminded us, equality is a moral imperative.

To remain credible, the church must respond to that moral imperative. Moral imperatives demand a response . . . .

As you go to General Conference, where once again, God will set this particular moral imperative before United Methodists and will ask for a response, please remember the guidelines for ethical treatment of gay employees I offer in my “Open Letter to the United Methodist Churches” cited in yesterday’s blog. These arise out of my experience at a United Methodist university under your pastoral charge. They are as follows:

1. United Methodist institutions that claim to deplore discrimination against gay employees MUST have non-discrimination policies enshrined in the documents that constitute the institution’s official statements of policy.

2. Official policy statements forbidding discrimination on grounds of sexual orientation are particularly needed in areas in which local laws afford NO legal protection to gay employees, and permit at-will firing without any stated reason on the part of the employer.

3. When United Methodist institutions hire openly gay employees with the full acknowledgment and approval of the governing board of the institution, and when those employees are summarily dismissed without even having received an evaluation of their work, the governing board has an exceedingly strong responsibility to investigate what has happened in the dismissal.

4. United Methodist institutions should not hire openly gay employees who are also couples if the institution is intent on treating the gay couple differently from other married couples in the same institution.

And please remember, as well, the prophetic words of Bishop Kenneth Carder in his Episcopal Address to General Conference, 2004 entitled “The New Creation and the Church’s Mission”:

When we welcome the stranger, extend hospitality to the marginalized, embrace with agape love the despised and rejected, we are pointing toward Christ’s redeemed and reconciled community.... When we live the oneness of the human family that Christ makes possible, we are providing a foretaste of the heavenly banquet when people will come from the north and the south, the east and west and sit at table with Abraham and Sarah, Joseph and Mary, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Mary McLeod Bethune, Oscar Romero and Mother Theresa, Desmond Tutu and Albertine Sisulu.

When God’s new heaven and new earth come to completion, justice will permeate all relationships, institutions, and policies. Biblical justice is defined primarily as extending God’s loving righteousness throughout the whole of human existence, enabling the poor, the vulnerable, the marginalized, ‘the least of these’ to have access to God’s table of abundance and to flourish as God’s beloved children.

Thank you for listening, Bishop Whitaker. Blessings on your ministry at General Conference. Please feel free to copy and share these reflections with other delegates, as the Spirit moves you. I am happy to have them shared with anyone at all who is concerned to listen to the experience of one gay believer.

Only One Table: An Ethical Analysis of the Churches' Treatment of Gay and Lesbian Persons

Today is an historic day for those engaging in moral analysis of the treatment of gay and lesbian human beings by the Christian churches. Today, Archbishop Desmond Tutu will receive the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission's Outspoken Award at San Francisco's Grace Cathedral.

When I speak of “engaging in moral analysis of the treatment of gay and lesbian human beings by the Christian churches,” I am choosing my words carefully. In the heated politicized discussions that have passed for moral analysis of homosexuality in church circles in recent years, the focus has been almost exclusively on sexual ethics. The central ethical question has been whether the churches can “accept” or “tolerate” gay persons or the gay “lifestyle,” given the reproductive intent of human sexuality.

The focus of moral analysis has been on the tiny handful of biblical passages taken by some Christians to condemn homosexuality—despite the fact that the term “homosexuality” was not coined until the end of the 19^th century, and that the biblical writers could not have used a term for a psychological concept (the innate psychological disposition of some persons to erotic attraction to members of their own sex) that was completely unknown to them.

I have argued ** that it is time to shift the focus in ethical analysis of the relationship of the churches to gay and lesbian human beings, to shift it away from sexual ethics and towards justice. Once the preponderance of evidence in the natural and social sciences has shown that sexual orientation is a biological given, not something people choose—and most scientists and people of good will have long since accepted that the evidence does suggest this—the ethical discussion of homosexuality has to shift its focus, unless churches choose simply to reject scientific findings—as they did when Galileo showed that the earth orbits the sun, or as some churches still do when confronted with irrefutable evidence of biological evolution.

The churches have to shift focus because they cannot claim to walk in the footsteps of Jesus and justify excluding anyone on the basis of innate characteristics that are stigmatized by some groups in society. The churches have a history of such behavior, of course. They have discriminated—and savagely so—against Jews, women, people of color.

The churches also claim to have repented of such behavior, once their savagery was made apparent to them. As currents of social change originating both within and outside churches forced the churches to hold a mirror up to themselves, to see the ugly evidence of discrimination premised on innate characteristics of demeaned groups (pogroms, Nazi death camps, crusades, witch burnings, enslavement of people of color, second-class citizenship for women and blacks), the churches have gradually repudiated the discrimination they once practiced and defended against these groups.

They have done so because the churches have recognized that one cannot claim to be church, and behave in a way that belies what churches stand for at the most fundamental level. In excluding stigmatized social groups, in failing to provide inclusive and healing social spaces for minorities despised for no reason other than the color of their skin, their ethnic origin, or their gender, the churches fail to be church.

Jesus ate with outcasts. In practicing (and preaching) table fellowship with despised social outsiders, Jesus made himself one with these outsiders, and earned their fate. By breaking bread with prostitutes, tax collectors, lepers, and others placed beyond the pale of his society and religion, Jesus made himself ritually impure: the act of eating with a public sinner turned him into a public sinner.

The memory of Jesus’s table fellowship with outcasts is enshrined in the central liturgical act of the Christian community, the Lord’s Supper or Eucharist. In taking bread and proclaiming that it is his body broken for everyone, Jesus remembers his table fellowship with outcasts. In enjoining his followers to break bread in remembrance of him, as they repeat the words proclaiming that the bread is his body broken for everyone, Jesus bequeaths a crucial legacy to his followers: this is the recognition that one cannot remember Jesus and what he stood for, one cannot break holy bread at the Lord’s table, without committing oneself to the practice of table fellowship with outcasts.

The church exists, it makes itself church, it fulfills its sacramental calling in the world, by remembering Jesus faithfully in the social context in which the church lives. The church demonstrates that it is church by exercising its ministry of radical inclusivity within the context in which it lives its everyday life. The church remembers Jesus and makes Jesus present by breaking the bread of remembrance both liturgically and in the daily lives of its followers, insofar as it makes itself into a place of welcome, healing, and refuge for those put beyond the social pale, those tormented for no reason other than that they are the despised Other.

Archbishop Tutu’s witness to the church’s call to include (to welcome, heal, affirm, and celebrate) everyone is unequivocal. It is for this reason that he stands out as a beacon in contemporary discussions of what makes church truly church. More clearly than many Christian leaders dare to acknowledge, Desmond Tutu defines church by its radical, simple willingness to embody what it proclaims about Jesus in word and sacrament: in a 2006 speech at Union Theological Seminary, Archbishop Tutu notes, “All are insiders [i.e., in God’s vision of the world]. All belong—white, black, red, yellow, Arab, Jew, Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, young old, male, female, rich poor, gay, lesbian and so-called straight—all belong" (see www.utsnyc.edu/NETCOMMUNITY/Page.aspx?pid=734&srcid=734).

As Archbishop Tutu noted in a 1998 Capetown interview with Episcopal News International regarding the World Council of Churches and homosexuality, the very credibility of the churches today is at stake, in how the churches choose to relate to gay and lesbian human beings (see http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~lcrew/tutu.html). Whereas some African and African-American Christian leaders (and many of their advocates in traditional “white” churches) combat recognition of the clear links between how the churches once chose to treat people of color and how they treat gay-lesbian persons today, Desmond Tutu has been prophetically clear about these links. He has repeatedly stated that homophobia equals apartheid, and that discrimination against gays and lesbians by the churches is equivalent to racial discrimination by the churches.

In a 2004 article The Times (London), Archbishop Tutu notes, "We struggled against apartheid in South Africa, supported by people the world over, because black people were being blamed and made to suffer for something we could do nothing about-our very skins. It is the same with sexual orientation. It is a given. I could not have fought against the discrimination of apartheid and not also fight against the discrimination that homosexuals endure, even in our churches and faith groups" (www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest_contributors/article451901.ece).

More recently, in a 2007 interview with BBC radio, Archbishop Tutu states, "If God, as they say, is homophobic, I wouldn't worship that God," he said. Desmond Tutu takes the church to task today for "being almost obsessed with questions of human sexuality" at a time when "our world is facing problems—poverty, HIV and AIDS—a devastating pandemic, and conflict" (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7100295.stm).

Why should the Christian churches address the issue of homosexuality—honestly, openly, dialogically—today? If Desmond Tutu is correct, they must do so, first and foremost, because the churches undermine their most fundamental proclamation—God’s inclusive welcome of every human being—in a way that is not merely incidental, but goes to the very heart of the gospel message, when they continue to foment and engage in injustice against gay and lesbian persons. Put simply, the churches forfeit the right to claim that they are church—in any sense that retains close contact with the behavior and message of Jesus—if they continue to harm, exclude, punish, and discriminate against people who are born with a same-sex sexual orientation.

The churches lose the right to speak of having open hearts, open minds, and open doors when they continue to bolster unjust social practices of discrimination against gay and lesbian human beings. It is impossible to be church, to claim faithfulness to the principle of sacramentality that guides the church’s salvific enterprise in the world, when the church practices exclusion of any social group premised on demeaned innate characteristics.

In the scriptures, from the Deuteronomic strands of Jewish scripture through the Jewish prophets to Jesus, mercy and justice are intimately linked. They are linked not as complementary virtues, but as two aspects of a single virtue. One cannot be merciful without practicing justice; justice lacks life without mercy attending it. To be real, the scriptures constantly insist, mercy has to be embodied in action. Justice points the way to action: it tells mercy what needs to be done to heal the world, the world in which I live, the world in which the church lives.

The scriptures are all about healing my world. They are never about healing someone else’s world, some idealized version of the world. They are about healing, first and foremost, the world in which I myself live, move, and have my being. They are about seeing the stranger in my midst, not across the globe. As Edith Stein wrote before being killed at Auschwitz for no reason other than the fact that she was born Jewish, “For the Christian there are no ‘strangers.’ In every case it is the brother before us at the moment who needs us the most, independent of whether he is related to us or not, whether we ‘like’ him or whether he is ‘morally worthy’ of our help.”

Why must the Christian churches address the issue of homosexuality—honestly, openly, dialogically—today? They must do so if for no other reason than because they obstinately refuse to recognize a stranger in their midst, whose very presence—as a human being making the simplest of demands on the church, to be included, to be treated with justice and mercy—raises disquieting fundamental questions about the fidelity of the churches to the gospels today, as long as she/he is unjustly and unmercifully treated.

In a unique way, gay and lesbian persons are the demeaned Other for the churches today. This is particularly the case in the United States, a nation with the soul of a church, where church attendance remains higher than in other Christianized areas of the globe, and where overt religious influence permeates our political process. Though the Catholic church continues to be, at its highest magisterial levels, intransigent and belligerent on the question of the full human status of gay persons (insofar as it continues to deny justice to gay human beings), polls indicate that, with the exception of some Eastern European nations, European Catholics have long ago decided to shrug their shoulders at the Catholic teaching that gay human beings are intrinsically disordered.

In the United States, the situation is quite different. Here, the churches overtly fuel resistance to gay rights—to legal and ecclesial recognition of the full humanity of gay and lesbian persons.

In the United States, churches that fail to grant full human rights to gay and lesbian persons and thus to accord full human status to gay and lesbian human beings are forfeiting the right to proclaim the gospel. Insofar as churches continue to behave in this unjust and unchristian way, they are belying all that the church stands for and is, at a fundamental level. They are failing to receive the stranger in their midst.

The churches in the United States underscore their savagery to gay and lesbian human beings by issuing statements of repentance for their previous savagery to women and to people of color. This makes the churches’ silence about—or, indeed, their continued noise about the bracketed difference of gay-lesbian persons—all the more ominous. Given the willingness of the church to reconsider and repent its previous behavior towards some groups, the distinction between groups previously stigmatized on the basis of innate characteristics and “the” group currently stigmatized in this way by the churches strengthens the undeniable conclusion that, in singling out gay-lesbian persons today for exclusion, the churches are behaving cruelly and capriciously, and are doing so primarily because there is a price to be paid today for expressing solidarity with gay and lesbian human beings.

The singling out today of the gay-lesbian stranger in their midst calls into question the churches’ sincerity about its repentance for the sins of racism and sexism in the past. The singling out today of the gay-lesbian stranger in their midst allows the churches, and some groups within both the churches and the political realm, to play African Americans and women against gays and lesbians, as if the former have a bona fide reason to seek full inclusion, whereas the latter are simply riding on the coattails of other civil rights movements whose legitimacy is unquestionable. The singling out of the group for which the church would pay a price today, if it expressed solidarity, suggests that the church’s after-the-fact repentance for its sins of racism and sexism, when there is little price to be paid today for this repentance, is a matter of cheap and not costly grace.

Why must the Christian churches address the issue of homosexuality—honestly, openly, dialogically—today? They must do so because the churches are at the very center of legal and social injustice towards gay and lesbian human beings; they are at the very center of this form of discrimination in the United States. The churches resist full human rights for gay persons in the U.S. They fund movements to resist not only gay marriage, but to stop the legal permission for churches themselves to practice discrimination in hiring and firing gay and lesbian employees.

The churches resist laws that protect gays and lesbians from being targeted by proponents of hate, simply because they are gay and lesbian. The churches fuel resistance to laws prohibiting discrimination against gay and lesbian persons in the area of housing and employment. The churches collaborate with some of the most regressive movements in American society in disseminating misinformation—lies—about gay and lesbian human beings, in turning gay and lesbian human beings into political chits to be moved about the board of the public sphere when it is expedient to use homophobia for political gain.

Above all, the churches themselves practice overt discrimination against gay and lesbian persons perhaps more blatantly than do almost all secular institutions in American society today. I have recounted some of my own experiences of such overt discrimination at church institutions on previous blog threads, as well as those of my partner Steve.

These experiences are not ones we uniquely have had. Though the fact that we are theologians living together unapologetically in a committed gay relationship may have made us lightning rods, we know many other gay and lesbian persons who have found themselves without employment in church institutions when it was expedient for the institution to make an issue of their sexual orientation. It remains, unfortunately, the exception rather than the rule in church institutions to treat openly (emphasis on “openly”) gay and lesbian employees differently than our straight brothers and sisters.

In their internal life, in how they accord power, the churches engage in gross discrimination against gay and lesbian persons—against openly gay and lesbian persons. Few churches permit the ordination of openly (emphasis on “openly”) gay and lesbian persons. Ordination is power within the churches. Being ordained introduces one into the hierarchical power structure of the church.

In refusing to ordain openly gay and lesbian persons, the churches exclude gay and lesbian persons from sharing in the power through which decisions are made in the churches, through which the future of the church is determined, through which all groups constituting the church are recognized as equally human. In refusing to accord gay and lesbian persons—openly gay and lesbian persons—a full share of the institutional power by which they are governed, churches tacitly but nonetheless decisively exclude gay and lesbian human beings from the table.

The way churches themselves operate, towards gay and lesbian human beings, creates a two-tiered system of humanity that undermines the churches’ most fundamental proclamation of God’s inclusive welcome of everyone to the table. In behaving this way, churches tacitly set The Table and a table—the Table at which first-class believers are invited to dine, and the phantom table at which second-rate believers receive the crumbs from the great table.

In authentic church, in churches that wish to live the gospel authentically, there can never be any table other than the Lord’s Table. At which all are welcome . . . .At which the despised outcast has a special welcome place . . . . In churches that live the gospel authentically, there is only one humanity, the shared humanity of all, who receive their human nature from the hand of God. Churches living the gospel do not make distinctions between first- and second-class humanity, when it comes to setting the Lord's table and inviting the church to it.

I have spoken of the pain I still bear, because my friend and supervisor knelt at the Lord’s table beside me

I have had similar experiences in my own church, the Catholic church. They have caused me to be unable to approach the Lord’s table in my own church. I refrain from doing so because, having been treated as non-human by my church (and now by the United Methodist church), I find it impossible to be persuaded that the churches truly believe what they proclaim about the Lord’s table, given how they continue to treat gay and lesbian persons.

If I wish to retain any belief in the Lord’s table—and I do; it is precious to me—I have to absent myself from that table, as long as the churches setting that table create a lesser table of crumbs for me and my kind.

There are people—many of them, many of them representing what claim to be the most progressive strands of Christianity today—who dismiss the churches’ treatment of gay and lesbian persons today as an issue of secondary moral importance. These liberal Christians often maintain that the churches are tearing themselves apart over the “unreal” issue of homosexuality, while real moral issues and needs, including poverty or destruction of the environment, are ignored by the churches.

I reject this liberal analysis for the reasons I have outlined above. In blatantly excluding gay and lesbian persons from their real table, the churches undercut their most fundamental proclamation about themselves, about God, and about the world. As Archbishop Tutu has noted, they do so in a way that undermines the credibility of the churches themselves—at a very fundamental way.

The liberal refusal to understand or accept this recognition is, in the final analysis, a refusal of my liberal brothers and sisters in the churches to stand in solidarity with me and with other gay and lesbian believers. The church at its best—the “progressive” church—wishes always to remain uncommitted until it has sniffed the winds of power and change to determine which way those winds are blowing.

What is called for now, particularly among liberal “supporters” of gay and lesbian persons in the churches, is costly grace, the kind of grace that walks with the outcast, that sits at the lesser table with the outcast, until there is only one table for all. What is called for now, particularly on the part of liberal “supporters” of gay and lesbian churches, is the costly grace that walked with African Americans and women when those who sojourned with these despised minorities paid a price for such sojourning—when they became one with the despised outcast.y worthy’ of our

Until the churches—and the liberal “best” among the churches—make such solidarity with gay and lesbian persons today, the churches will continue to undermine their arguments against racism, misogyny, economic exploitation of the poor, destruction of the environment, or militarism. All these issues are interconnected. It is only a church that clearly and unambiguously demonstrates that it has chosen the path of costly grace by setting a welcome table for all, and in particular the most despised stranger in its midst, that can speak forcefully about justice in the world, wherever injustice occurs.

The life of the churches—how the churches function and do business—is shot through with homophobia. Until the churches address the homophobia intertwined with their institutional life, the homophobia that prevails in church institutions, the churches cannot effectively address any “serious” questions of injustice in the world.

And until the churches break with the lies of those powerful persons and interest groups that benefit by promoting the particular form of social hatred known as homophobia, the churches will continue to suggest to those seeking signs of God’s salvific presence in the world that salvation, healing, welcome, inclusion, are more readily available outside the churches than inside them. Until the churches break with powerful rich supporters whose money silences the voice and quiets the conscience of the homophobic church, the churches will be seen by many people of good will as advocates of cheap rather than costly grace.

And to the extent that they are viewed this way, they will not be taken seriously—not by people of good will.

** See “On Being Church in the New Millennium: The Challenge and Gift of Gay Believers,” cited in the "Selected Publications" section of this blog.