"This Is Happening in our Country Today and Is Being Done in All of Our Names": An Advent Sermon by Lisa Koop

Christian Trump supporters, take note. https://t.co/xn3kCgkjaA

— Stephen King (@StephenKing) December 24, 2019

I'm happy to be able to share with you this Christmas day an Advent sermon Lisa Koop preached at Assembly Mennonite Church in Goshen, Indiana, on 15 December. The sermon asks a question that haunts me as other Americans and I celebrate Christmas: How, in fact, does one or can one celebrate Christmas when this is happening in our country today and is being done in all of our names? How does anyone in the U.S. who claims a connection to Jesus and the gospels cope with the fact that what is happening in our country now — what is being inflicted on fellow human beings who are immigrants and refugees — was set into motion by the votes of more than half of the nation's white Christians in 2016?

Lisa Koop's sermon follows:

Recommended: Ian Gilmour, Slavery to Civil Rights

I'd like to recommend to you a little monograph entitled Slavery to Civil Rights, written by my friend Ian Gilmour, a Presbyterian pastor in Edinburgh who is currently serving the Scottish kirk in Colombo, Sri Lanka. Ian's small book reflects years of research into the role that spirituals and music in general have played among African-Americans and in African-American churches, to sustain hope and courage as people battle prejudice and discrimination. I find Slavery to Civil Rights — which is engagingly and clearly written — fascinating from a number of standpoints.

Was Dietrich Bonhoeffer Gay? Diane Reynolds' The Doubled Life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer on the Biographical-Theological Evidence

Diane Reynolds, The Doubled Life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Women, Sexuality, and Nazi Germany (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2016)

When I reported to you (and here) a month ago regarding Charles Marsh's biography of theological Dietrich Bonhoeffer entitled Strange Glory: A Life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer (NY: Knopf, 2014), I mentioned to you that, as Marsh does, another recent biographer, Diane Reynolds, sees Bonhoeffer as a gay man in love with his colleague Eberhard Bethge. Reynolds' biography of Bonhoeffer, The Doubled Life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Women, Sexuality, and Nazi Germany (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2016), proposes that as a man aware that his erotic inclinations moved in a forbidden direction in the savagely homophobic culture of Nazi Germany, Bonhoeffer lived a double life, often pretending to be who and what he was not (p. 4) — while he began to develop, especially in the latter part of his tragically truncated life, a "nascent queer theology":

Charles Marsh's Biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Strange Glory, on Bonhoeffer's (Highly Contested) Homosexuality

Here's another set of excerpts I'd like to share with you from Charles Marsh's excellent biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Strange Glory: A Life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer (NY: Knopf, 2014). Marsh ruffled feathers of conservative Christians (and the ruffling goes on and has become even more agitated with Diane Reynolds' 2016 Bonhoeffer biography The Doubled Life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Women, Sexuality, and Nazi Germany) by concluding that Bonhoeffer was a gay man deeply in love with fellow Lutheran pastor Eberhard Bethge.

Charles Marsh, Strange Glory: A Life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, on the Sordid History of German Church's Response to Hitler: We Forget at Our Peril

I've just finished reading Charles Marsh's Strange Glory: A Life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer (NY: Knopf, 2014), and would like to share some passages with you. These all have to do with the ease with which the Lutheran church in Germany capitulated to Hitler and his propagandists' claim that he was reviving a manly-man Christianity that would rehabilitate Germany's tarnished reputation. Marsh focuses on the Evangelical (i.e., Lutheran) (and Confessing) church and not the Catholic church because Bonhoeffer was situated within the Lutheran world. 

Wave of Queer Bashing in U.S. Catholicism and Cheap-Grace Christianity: Further Reflections on What's Going on with Viganò's Cabal

Shared by Chiara Giaccardi on Twitter

The letter written by Fordham theologians Patrick Hornbeck and Bryan Massingale to their colleagues — I posted about it yesterday evening — states, 

Wendell Griffen on White Christian Nationalism and Costly Grace in Era of Trump: Followers of a Palestinian Jew Whose Family Were Refugees

Wendell Griffen, in his just-published Fierce Urgency of Prophetic Hope (Valley Forge: Judson Press, 2017): 

White Christian nationalists who elected President Trump profess to follow Jesus. Yet Jesus affirmed and included women among his closest followers (Matthew 27:55-56), and they were the first to proclaim his resurrection (see Matthew 28:1-10). During the 2016 campaign, Trump bragged that his maleness, wealth, fame, and commercial success enabled and entitled him to sexually assault and disparage women.

"Christendom Adjusts Itself Far Too Easily to the Worship of Power": Theological Bases for Resistance in the Trump Era

John Pavlovitz:* 

And so right now a large portion of the American Evangelical Church sits pretty, believing itself victorious; momentarily giddy at its spoils, gloating in its apparent advantage, and oblivious to the cost. 

The cost, is that the Church itself, though winning this political battle has lost the greater war for its humanity and its dignity. It has been fully separated from its namesake. It is no longer synonymous with Jesus. It is no longer good news for the poor, the marginalized, the hurting, the downtrodden. It is an exclusive brothel where power lusting white Christians fornicate freely. 

The Evangelical Church is no longer a brilliant beacon of God's love in a dark place, it is simply another building upon which Donald Trump will slap his name, exploit for a bit, and eventually abandon, leaving behind lots of people hurting who are broken and bankrupt.

David Gushee on "My Discovery in Recent Years of Versions of Christianity That Actually Make People Worse Human Beings Than They Might Otherwise Have Been"

For Religion News Service, David Gushee writes today about how the hopeful view of how Christian communities relate to the world around him that he learned from his professors Glen Stassen and Larry Rasmussen, both indebted to Bonhöffer, has had to be complemented over the course of time with a more somber assessment of what Christian communities can really be capable of. As he has reflected more on the real role Christian churches played during the Holocaust (a much more ambiguous and shameful role than many Christian apologists would like us to see), on the role that Christian communities have played in promoting racist ideologies in the U.S., and the role many Christian groups are now playing in spreading Islamophobic ideas, he has had to revise the hopeful understanding of Christian ethics he learned from Stassen and Rasmussen.

"The Easiest Way to Make Oneself Righteous Is to Make Someone Else a Sinner": The Churches and LGBT People Today — Grace or No Grace?

"the easiest way to make oneself righteous is to make someone else a sinner." @rachelheldevans #searchingforsunday pic.twitter.com/H1Tfkq3E2h

— Joe Troyer II (@jtroyer2) June 25, 2015

The tweet at the head of the posting, which Joe Troyer tweeted last Thursday, captures a page from Rachel Held Evans's book Searching for Sunday: Loving, Leaving, and Finding the Church (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2015). As you can see, Joe zeroes in on the statement, "[T]he easiest way to make oneself righteous is to make someone else a sinner."

The Debate About Welcoming Those Who Are Gay — A Reader Asks: "What Are Catholics Afraid of? And Why"

In your comments about "the ideological warfare and spin-control struggles" that have broken out at the synod on the family over the word "welcome" (the fine phrase about warfare and struggles is Peter Montgomery's, in his valuable overview of this week at the Vatican), several of you (e.g., mgardener) have asked what folks are so afraid of with the word "welcome." What about the clear, unambiguous statement that human beings made gay by God are welcome, for God's sake, in the Catholic church is so threatening to some Catholics?

Bibles, Churches, Gays, Religion: Bilgrimage Readers Continue an Important Discussion

Recently, I responded to a question asked by a thoughtful reader of this blog (Bob/tinywriting) about how one determines when Christian groups have gone completely off-track as they appeal to the Jewish and Christian scriptures to ground their claim that they authentically represent the message of Christ. I also later added to that initial discussion several remarks about a recent study which appears to show that LGBTI folks who seek counseling from religious groups are at greater risk of suicide than those who seek counseling from non-religious sources.

Remembering Dietrich Bonhöffer: "The Table Fellowship of Christians Implies Obligation"

As the anniversary of German theologian Dietrich Bonhöffer's execution by the Nazi regime passes (it was on 9 April), I think of an observation he makes in his book Life Together that has long formed the framework of my understanding of the eucharist:

Reflections on the Death of Christopher Hitchens: Cheap Grace and American Exceptionalism

I haven't commented on Christopher Hitchens's death because, to be honest, I didn't much follow the debates in which he was involved.  I am interested in atheism, perhaps primarily as a defensible response to the misrepresentation of authentic religious values by adherents of many religious traditions.  I have long thought that Catholic theologian Karl Rahner is exactly right when he argues that, given the demonic face of "God" some people encounter through organized religion, they have a moral obligation, in fact, to reject "God."

Glenn Greenwald on Glee at Gaddafi's Death: A Reflection about American "Pro-Life" Values

As gruesome photos of the corpse of Mommar Gaddafi circulate online, Glenn Greenwald writes about the kind of people we Americans are becoming as our empire declines and our national identity becomes more and more about whom we can execute--and how loudly and long we can cheer the latest national execution:

Joan Chittister on Expulsion from Family and Minority Wisdom: Critical Questions for the John Paul II Era of Catholic Apologetics

When I posted yesterday about the recent NCR editorial re: the story of Bishop Morris in Australia, I had planned to post a follow-up about Joan Chittister's latest NCR essay, "Expulsions from Religious Orders, Family, and Minority Wisdom."  I thought of posting a comment about Chittister's piece because it's, to my mind, a perfect counterpoint to the discussion of what Benedict is doing to Bishop Morris, and of the inexorable, draconian logic of patriarchal hierarchy that underlies the pope's actions in this case.

Bonhöffer: “Only the Person Who Cries out for the Jews May Sing Gregorian Chants”

If I have ever read the following statement from Dietrich Bonhöffer, I’ve long since forgotten it:

“Only the person who cries out for the Jews may sing Gregorian chants.”

I think Bonhöffer captures an extremely important insight here—an insight into the fundamental difference between easy and cheap grace, and the cost of discipleship that flows from one or the other concept.

Newman and Jägerstätter, Kosher Ethics and Hurricane Fay: Ruminations on the News

John Henry Newman Exhumation Story

I’ve blogged several times about the plans underway to exhume the body of the 19th-century theologian and Catholic cardinal John Henry Newman (http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2008/08/update-on-churches-of-main-street-usa.html,
http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2008/07/men-who-rule-us-collusion-of-male.html, http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2008/07/flying-saints-and-anglicans-crossing.html). As my previous postings note, since Newman has been declared blessed by Rome (a preliminary to canonization, the step at which a blessed becomes a saint), the Vatican has announced plans to move Newman’s body from its resting place in a small cemetery in Rednal, England, to a shrine in Birmingham.

As I’ve also noted, the ostensible reason the Vatican is giving for this move is to allow the faithful to venerate Newman more readily than they can do at the present burial site—where Newman shares a grave, at his explicit end-of-life request, with his lifelong companion Ambrose St. John. I’ve also discussed the protest of gay activist Peter Tatchell, who views Newman’s exhumation as “an act of religious desecration and moral vandalism.”

The story continues. This past week, National Catholic Reporter published an outstanding overview of the story, including the question of Newman’s sexual orientation and relationship to St. John—Dennis Coday’s “Moving Cardinal Newman’s Body Runs into Controversy” (http://ncronline3.org/drupal/?q=node/1663). Coday’s article notes that the London paper Church Times has an online poll in which readers can vote regarding whether they approve or disapprove of the removal of Newman’s body. The poll is at www.churchtimes.co.uk/previousQuestions.asp?id=222.

Last I checked, the vote was 80% against the exhumation of Newman’s body and his separation from St. John, and 20% in favor. And how this whole thing feels to me? Frankly, as though churches that can’t do enough to make the lives of gay folks hell on earth won’t even leave us alone in death!

There. I’ve said it. And am happy to have that off my chest.

Newman Story in Light of Story of Franz Jägerstätter

As I reflected recently on the story of what the church wants to do with the resting place of Newman and St. John, it occurred to me that there’s an interesting parallel case that, to my mind, represents the disparity between how the churches treat gay relationships and gay human beings, and how they treat straight relationships and straight persons. This has to do with the Austrian martyr Franz Jägerstätter.

Jägerstätter was an Austrian layman who refused conscription into the Nazi army, and was executed for this refusal. He defied the pressure of priest and bishop to enter the army; these pastoral counselors told him that Christians have a solemn duty to obey the dictates of the state. Jägerstätter insisted that Catholic teaching stresses the inviolability of one’s sacred conscience, which one must follow even if church authorities tell one to do otherwise. He was executed because of his defiance of the Nazi regime.

Last October, Pope Benedict declared Franz Jägerstätter blessed. Insofar as I know, Jägerstätter is still buried in his parish cemetery, in a simple grave that is not marked with any conspicuous signs. If I am not mistaken, his elderly widow Franziska still lives, and is to be buried beside him in the rural parish cemetery.

My source for this information is a moving account by Jesuit writer John Dear in National Catholic Reporter of a pilgrimage he made to Jägerstätter’s grave in the 1970s (www.fatherjohndear.org/NCR_Articles/Feb6_07.html). Dear notes that no signs mark the way to the shrine, and that Jäggerstätter is buried in an humble grave outside the chapel in which he attended Mass, his grave marked by a simple crucifix.

And so it should be, in my opinion. And so it should remain—Franz Jägerstätter buried with his wife and family beside him in the simple churchyard where he attended church, to remind us that sanctity is accessible to all of us, is the call of every one of us, who achieve sainthood as he did, by living our “ordinary” lives in the light of the gospel. I would be appalled, frankly, if the church should choose in future to move Jägerstätter from his current burial site, and to separate him from his wife.

With churches, I’ve learned, anything is possible, no matter how outlandish and how obviously cruel to some folks’ eyes. It will be interesting to see if there will be any pressure in future to move Jägerstätter from his current burial site. If not, one cannot help concluding that the churches employ a cruel double standard, when it comes to how they treat gay persons and our relationships.

Discussion of Kosher Ethics

I blogged some time ago about how the federal raids on the kosher meat processing plant in Postville, Iowa (raids that led to the deportation of a large number of Mexican and Central American workers) have resulted in a discussion of the ethics of declaring food kosher (http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2008/08/what-god-has-declared-clean-kosher.html). In my previous posting on this topic, I linked to an op-ed article by Rabbi Shmuel Herzfeld, who quotes 19th-century Rabbi Yisroel Salanter, who is believed to have refused to certify a matzo factory as kosher because its workers were being treated unjustly.

I noted my own interest in this discussion: is ritual truly effective (in the literal sense of that word: it effects, it accomplishes) when circumstances in which the ritual is celebrated undercut the fundamental ethical proclamations of the religion mounting the ritual? I’ve noted on this blog that where I find myself vis-à-vis my own church, the Catholic church, and its central ritual, the Eucharist, is a position of alienation.

I am alienated—I cannot participate in the Eucharist—precisely because I believe in the Eucharist. I believe in what it means. I believe that communion in the sacred, ritual sense must be mirrored by the intent to effect communion within the body of Christ, or the ritual contradicts what it proclaims at the most fundamental level.

For me, as a gay person who has been hounded out of a livelihood and career—out of daily bread—by church officials who never have to question where their daily bread will come from, the disparity between how the church behaves and what it proclaims has become too stark to support. I simply can’t stomach that disparity by participating. My very presence at Eucharistic celebrations would be, I feel, a confirmation of the emptiness that surrounds the Eucharistic proclamation, until the church examines the radical injustices it is doing in the name of a clerical system based on power over others who are dominated by clerics. And until those of us at the receiving end of the clerical lash receive a mere apology.

As I have also noted, my gay believer’s experience at the Lord’s Table has not really been any different in some other churches—notably the Methodist church, with which I have had close contact due to my work in two United Methodist colleges. Though, as an alienated Catholic doing administrative work in Methodist institutions, I felt for some time a strong sense of welcome and communion within the Methodist context, that communion ended decisively when I knelt one Sunday at the communion rail beside a Methodist university president who, the following day, told me she/he wished me gone from the campus, and two days later, out of the blue, terminated me in the ugliest way possible.

One cannot believe in Communion when members of the body of Christ grossly violate the most fundamental principles of communion. I have now seen what the “welcome” offered me by the Methodist church really means. The total absence of any protest or pastoral outreach by the Methodist bishop and ministers sitting on the governing board of this university shows me how they regard me as a gay human being, and what that church’s open door slogan really means for me and my kind.

How can someone kneel beside a brother or sister in the Lord on Sunday, intending all the while to do a grave injustice to that same person on Monday—to deny him his daily bread, knowing full well that one’s reasons for doing so are vicious—how can one engage in this behavior, and mean what Communion is all about? My thinking about this issue has long been decisively shaped by German Lutheran martyr-theologian Dietrich Bonhöffer, who notes,

In the Eucharist . . . we receive not only Christ, the Head of the Body, but its members as well. . . . Wherever there is suffering in the body, wherever members of it are in want or oppressed, we, because we have received the same body and are part of it, must be directly involved. We cannot properly receive the Bread of Life without sharing bread for life with those in want.

When Christian institutions deny employment to people unjustly—in the cases I am addressing, solely because those people are gay—they radically undercut all they proclaim about the Lord’s Supper or Holy Communion. The current pope echoes Bonhöffer’s analysis of Communion and communion when he notes,

The consequence is clear: we cannot communicate with the Lord if we do not communicate with one another . . . . Fellowship in the Body of Christ and receiving the Body of Christ means fellowship with one another. This of its very nature includes mutual acceptance, giving and receiving on both sides, and readiness to share one's goods . . . In this sense, the social question is given quite a central place in the theological heart of the concept of communion.

All this as a preliminary to noticing another story about the fascinating discussion now going on in the American Jewish community following the Postville raids. Last week, Julia Preston reported in a New York Times article entitled “Rabbis Debate Kosher Ethics at Meat Plant” that a debate about the meaning of kosher regulations is now underway among rabbis (www.nytimes.com/2008/08/23/us/23kosher.html?scp=4&sq=kosher&st=cse).

To be specific: while some rabbis are urging the creation of a set of “social justice criteria” to accompany the koshering of food, others resist the proposal to add to the criteria by which food is koshered considerations about the social ethics of the food plant in which food is declared kosher.

This debate mirrors, in a theological context different from the Christian one, the discussion I have highlighted above. Is it possible for church or synagogue to keep engaging in ritual actions whose fundamental significance is belied by the behavior of those mounting the actions?

For me—and, I suspect, for many alienated believers—these are real questions, and profound ones. If communities of faith expect to be taken seriously when they call us to worship, they need to reflect much more seriously about the ways in which the lives of the members of the worshiping community either proclaim the message imparted in worship and ritual action, or impede that message.

And they need to listen to those of us who have been seriously hurt by communities of faith, and who can easily point to the areas in which the message is definitively broken by the behavior of the bearers of the message.

The Weather and God’s Wrath

This is another have-to-get-it-off-my-chest item. Following the California Supreme Court’s decision to legitimate gay marriage, not only blogs, but the mainstream media buzzed for weeks with stories about the “unprecedented” lighting strikes in California and the fires those lightning strikes caused.

The subtext was clear, and was particularly gross, when it appeared in “unbiased” “secular” media statements from places like the AP: God is hurling lightning bolts on Californicators because of their recognition of gay marriage. “Christian” blogs, of course, made the subtext very clear, as they jubilated about the wildfires even as the red states of the heartland were being inundated by unprecedented floods.
And now along comes Fay. And soaks Florida. Another red state, one in which a lesbian not too long ago was denied access to visiting her partner as the partner died, while hospital workers told her that she was in an anti-gay state with anti-gay laws and had better just accept it.

And news reports are noting that Fay’s constant twisting and turning around the peninsula of Florida, and its drenching rains, are highly unusual and unprecedented events. But never a peep of that ugly subtext of God’s wrath raining down on Florida.

Double standard? Indeed. This selective use of the weather to underscore God’s wrath has been going on a long time among the religious right. It’s really time for it to stop, and for the AP and other “unbiased” “mainstream” media outlets to stop taking talking points from people who not only predict monsoons as punishments for areas that try to be merely humane to gay folks, but who actually crow when any weather disaster occurs in a state they have targeted.

To say that such behavior is unbecoming among people of faith would be a gross understatement. Might be better, in this age of capricious weather when God seems to send rain on the righteous and unrighteous alike, to stop claiming that you can call down God’s wrath in the form of bad weather on anyone at all.

The Two Tables Again: Communion and communion

Dear Readers,

Some intent readers of my blog have questioned my emphasis on the connection between Communion and communion—between the bread we break with one another around our family tables, and the Bread we share at the Lord’s table.

It has come to my attention that some readers find it perplexing that I criticize the churches and their members and call churches to think about that connection—indeed, to take it seriously. For the sake of readers who seem puzzled by my insistence on connecting daily bread and the Bread of Life from the Lord’s table, I’d like to offer some explanatory remarks from my journey as a believer and theologian.

As my profile page states, I’m a theologian who have long been interested in connections between spirituality and social justice and in collaborating with others to build a more humane world. As my response to a comment on my posting for 29 May states, I’m interested in resources of all world religions that draw together spirituality and social justice, worship and practical, everyday, lived expressions of faith.

My book Singing in a Strange Land was an effort to explore those connections. In that book, I note key motifs running through all world religions that link justice and love: I agree with theologian Karen Armstrong (whom I’ve cited on this blog—see http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2008/02/equality-is-moral-imperative.html) that practical compassion is the soul, the very heart and center, of the ethical codes of the world religions. As the blog posting I am citing notes, Armstrong’s The Spiral Staircase states,

The one and only test of a valid religious idea, doctrinal statement, spiritual experience, or devotional practice was that it must lead directly to practical compassion. If your understanding of the divine made you kinder, more empathetic, and impelled you to express this sympathy in concrete acts of loving-kindness, this was good theology. But if your notion of God made you unkind, belligerent, cruel, or self-righteous, or if it led you to kill in God's name, it was bad theology.

Just as the religions of the world all stress practical compassion as the litmus test of authentic spirituality, almost all of the world religions envisage the act of sitting at table together as a concrete, lived experience of unity, of communion. All the religions of the world have rituals in which our breaking bread together commits us to live together—in love, unity, affirmation of one another, acceptance of one another, and practical concern for one another expressed in deeds of assistance to each other at times of need.

I have long been influenced by an observation of Lutheran theologian Dietrich Dietrich Bonhöffer in which he states,

The table fellowship of Christians implies obligation. It is OUR daily bread that we eat, not my own. We share our bread. Thus we are firmly bound to one another and not only in the Spirit but in our whole physical being. The one bread that is given to our fellowship links us together in a firm covenant. Now none dares go hungry as long as another has bread, and anyone who breaks the fellowship of the physical life also breaks the fellowship of the Spirit.

My undergraduate education at a Jesuit university gave me a great admiration for the prophetic leader of the Jesuit community Pedro Arrupe. Arrupe, too, links social justice and the Lord’s table. As does Bonhoeffer, he notes that when we receive communion, we obligate ourselves to commune not only with God, but with one another.

This rediscovery of what might be called the "social dimension" of the Eucharist is of tremendous significance today. In the Eucharist . . . we receive not only Christ, the Head of the Body, but its members as well .... Wherever there is suffering in the body, wherever members of it are in want or oppressed, we, because we have received the same body and are part of it, must be directly involved. We cannot properly receive the Bread of Life without sharing bread for life with those in want.

In the various rituals of the world religions, including Christianity, the act of gathering around the table of the Lord together commits us not merely to receive bread from God’s hand, whether divine bread or daily bread. If we understand this act—if it means anything beyond empty ritual—this act is also a commitment to share our bread with one another, with those around the table, as well as with all those in need of daily bread.

This is why I stated on yesterday’s blog,

My very belief in the sacred meaning of Communion (and communion: it is impossible to celebrate Communion as sacrament—and mean it—without intending to live in communion with those with whom one breaks bread) makes me abhor the thought of returning to churches where I encounter those who celebrate Communion on Sunday and break communion on Monday through Saturday. What can the Lord’s bread mean when we intend to shove anyone from the table of daily bread even as we partake of the Lord’s bread?

In speaking of Sunday and Monday, I am not, of course, speaking of two specific days in my life or in yours. I am contrasting what those of us who are Christian do ritually in churches on Sunday, and what we do the rest of the week, Monday through Saturday, in the “non-sacred” spaces of the home, workplace, and world. I am stressing that there has to be a confluence of the sacred action and the daily lived experience, if the sacred action is to have any meaning at all. Communion as a sacred church action must translate into communion as a secular action—an intent to share our lives together in love, peace, justice, and right relationships with one another. We have to live communion in our everyday lives, if the sacred act of Communion is to have any real meaning.

This is not a new theme in my thought or writing. I have written about it for some time now on various Internet sites. In these blog discussions, I have spoken of an experience of workplace injustice that first crystallized these theological themes for me. This was my experience of having been given a one-year terminal contract as the chair of a theology department at a Catholic university with no stated reason for the terminal contract. This contract came days after I had been given a glowing evaluation by the academic vice-president of the school. I was never given a written copy of this evaluation.

I will not recount the sordid details of that story, which I have told elsewhere. It was an experience of profound injustice. It was also a learning experience in which I began to understand the depths of malice the Christian churches (and many Christians) bear today towards gay believers, the willingness of those within the churches to treat gay human beings as non-persons, and the apparent belief of those within the churches dealing dishonestly and cruelly with us that they have God on their side as they behave this way.

As I note in postings at both blog sites, my experience at this Catholic college has alienated me profoundly from my own religious community. I have written about how, not long after I was shoved from the table of daily bread—placed in a precarious position of disemployment and lack of health insurance at a time when Steve and I were providing care for my mother in the final years of her life—I went to church at Easter time.

As I have noted in these accounts, on that Easter Sunday, I desperately wanted to go to Communion. But my legs just would not carry me to the communion table. I was physically repulsed by the sight of the priests who had been ultimately responsible for my terminal contract standing around the table of the Lord. I was repulsed by the thought that they themselves have comfortable lives, job security, social respect, health insurance, a safety net if something happens to interrupt their employment, and yet they could, seemingly so callously, exclude me from all of those things at a time when I needed economic stability and peace in order to provide care for an aging mother.

To be specific and precise: I was repulsed by the disparity between what the church and its representatives declare about the Bread of Life, and how the church and its representatives behave. In church that Sunday (and ever after), I ask myself if church members who invite each other to the table of the Lord, yet are willing to exclude anyone from the table of daily bread through unjust actions, can truly believe what is taking place at the table of the Lord on Sunday.

My very belief in all that Communion or Eucharist means makes it impossible for me to approach the Lord’s table when church leaders and church members practice conspicuous injustice towards others after they leave the table of the Lord and enter the world of work and family.

In my view, the churches today practice a unique kind of cruelty towards gay believers. I have written about that frequently on this blog and elsewhere. At the heart of this cruelty is a belief that gay persons are simply less human than “normal” Christians—that we do not suffer as the normal person would, when rights are violated and one is excluded from social and economic life.

The impulse of churches today is to exclude us. This impulse has everything to do with the need of church members to make themselves feel clean by identifying a scapegoat group as the unclean, and then sending that group into the wilderness to die carrying all the sins of the good, righteous, holy—the clean. Our very absence from the table—out of sight, out of mind—legitimates our exclusion, in the eyes of those doing the excluding. They would not have been shoved from the table, after all, would they, unless they somehow deserve to be shoved away?

This radically cruel and radically unjust exclusionist tendency militates against all that church means at its most fundamental level. If I believe church means anything at all, I have no choice except to keep addressing this exclusionism. The originating impulse of church is to gather and include, not to expel and exclude. The table of the Lord’s Bread preserves the memory of Jesus’s table fellowship with sinners. The two are connected. We cannot adequately celebrate the Lord's Supper without remembering Jesus's table fellowship with outcasts. Jesus sought out the social outcasts of his day, to eat with them. He ate by preference with unclean sinners, thus becoming unclean as they were unclean, in the ritual-purity belief system of his co-religionists.

In the final analysis, I have come to the conclusion that the behavior of the churches towards gay believers is often so savage because we human beings are simply savage—and particularly so when we wrap up our savagery in pious proclamations. We allow ourselves to be particularly savage when we do not connect what we profess with what we do. When we permit ourselves to engage in religious ritual that does not translate into practical compassion, we are capable of almost anything. When we convince ourselves that we are the righteous and some group stigmatized as dirty are the unrighteous, we can legitimate acts of cruel exclusion even within the sanctuary itself.

And if we exclude in the sanctuary, in the name of God, will exclusion in the workplace or the family be far behind? If exclusion seems legitimate at the Lord’s table, will we have any moral sensitivity about shoving others from the table of daily bread?

This is why I keep on keeping on, calling the churches to think about what it means to be church—to be church in the very core meaning of church, to be church in the world today. As Martin Luther King noted so beautifully in his Letter to Birmingham Jail, his expressions of bitter disappointment in the church—particularly the church of liberal sweetness and light whose words about compassion did not translate into action for justice—derived from the fact that he was a pastor, someone who loved the church.

My critique of the church arises out of my vocation as a theologian. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s thought and his prophetic witness remain critically important for the churches today, as we rehash again the question of whether churches ought to emphasize law or justice in the context of the battle for gay civil rights. Dr. King’s Letter to Birmingham Jail distinguishes eloquently between just and unjust laws, between a majority rule that permits itself power and privilege it denies to the minority, simply because it can do so, because it is in the majority and the laws on which it relies reflect the power and privilege of the majority.

These are questions the churches must revisit today as gay and lesbian people struggle for justice. As someone who grew up in the white churches of the American South in the 1950s and 1960s, I know in my bones that black citizens of this land would never have achieved civil rights had the majority been allowed to determine what was right and legal, or had those of us who call ourselves Christian been permitted to continue identifying what is legal with what is right.

Had civil rights for black Americans been dependent on the churches leading the way, we’d still be waiting for a long-deferred justice. Had civil rights for black Americans been dependent on enforcing unjust laws or on a legal system easily manipulated by those of us who considered ourselves right because we could do as we pleased (since we were in the majority and had wealth in our hands), justice would still be deferred.

There comes a time when those who know right from wrong simply have to stand up and be counted. There comes a time when Christians who know that Communion requires communion—yes, even with dirty, excluded gay people—have to insist that their churches stop offering Communion as long as they refuse to preach and practice communion.

There comes a time when justice can no longer be deferred, if institutions that talk about justice want to be taken seriously as they do their talking.