Jesus' Crucifixion and Resurrection, and His Table Open to All: Why Politics Are Unavoidable on Good Friday and Easter

Because of the very powerful slaveholder religion (and here) crafted by Southern Christian apologists for slavery, which pretends that salvation and Jesus are all about the "spiritual" realm and not this world and the muddy, sordid political realities that shape this world, many American Christians find it distasteful to talk about Jesus, or Easter, and the political at the same time.

Quote for the Day: "I Find Very Little Evidence in Christian Scriptures That Jesus Preferred Ritual Purity to Compassionate Love"

In a sermon-essay just uploaded (pdf file) to her Enduring Space website, Ruth Krall talks about the struggle within the Mennonite church, in which she is actively involved, over issues of LGBT inclusion. She notes the deep theological-scriptural roots pointing towards an inclusive stance that is being hotly contested by some Mennonite leaders and by groups using threats of financial reprisal if the Mennonite church becomes more welcoming to gay members.

Droppings from the Catholic Birdcage: Pope Francis Doesn't Want to Give Communion Accidentally to "An Unworthy Individual"

This is one of the stinky sort of Catholic birdcage droppings: in a discussion of Michael Sean Winters's article "Pope Francis Effect II?" at National Catholic Reporter, Mary Elizabeth writes, 

Whores and Tax Collectors and a Table Open to All: Adam Gopnik on Jesus's Eating with Outcasts

I just finished Adam Gopnik's book The Table Comes First (NY: Vintage Books, 2011), and found this observation in the final pages of the book insightful:

More Signposts for Exiled Believers, More Reflections on the Mike and Cathy Club

More signposts for me from people who speak to my soul as I flounder in the wilderness, crying out to God, asking how to sustain a spiritual life--any kind of spiritual life at all--when the church that has been foundational to my spiritual life betrays its originating vision (and its founder) in its ugly, unrelenting attacks on gay and lesbian human beings (on me) at this point in history:

Eating, Drinking, and Living in Exile: Chick-Fil-A Appreciation Day and American Catholic Identity

As I flounder in the wilderness, words that are signposts for me (I choose the word "flounder" instead of "wander" deliberately: "wander" doesn't begin to touch the depths of spiritual alienation I feel in response to my Catholic church at this point in time):

Testimonies of Grace and the Vanishing Table

I'm struck this morning by how perfectly congruent two postings are on blogs I follow: Claire Bangasser writes at her Seat at the Table blog about how her heart has been warmed by the sweetness of divine encounter in which she finds Godde reaching out to embrace everyone, and not merely an approved elite; and Thom Curnutte writes at his Faith in the 21st Century blog about the tears that ran down his face when he first heard the hymn "All Are Welcome" at a Catholic liturgy.

Do As I Say, Not As I Do: Debates about Kosher and the Limits of Paternalism in Making of Religious Meaning

With my recent focus on the aftermath of the California Supreme Court decision about prop 8, I don’t want to lose sight of a valuable article that updates a previous discussion on this blog. In a number of previous postings (here and here), I looked at a fascinating discussion now underway in American Judaism, following the raids at the Agriprocessor meat-processing plant in Postville, Iowa, in May 2008.

As those postings note, the plant at which immigrant workers were rounded up by federal officials processed kosher meats, in conformity to Jewish dietary laws. Following the federal raid, questions arose about the labor practices of the plant’s owners and managers. There were allegations that those working under rabbinic supervision at Postville included children, and that laborers were physically abused and forced to work 17-hour shifts six days a week.

These revelations gave rise to a discussion in American Jewish communities about what kosher can possibly mean, when food that is declared ritually pure is produced in circumstances that violate a religious tradition’s ethical norms regarding just treatment of workers. As Rabbi Shmuel Herzfeld noted in a New York Times op-ed discussion of the issues last August, when ritual action is done by a ritual authority figure whose behavior undercuts the ethical tenets of his or her religious tradition, the significance of the ritual action is itself undermined. One may ask, in light of what came out following the Postville raid, whether one can really kosher meat when one treats any human being as tripe.

Other Jewish thinkers commenting on the revelations about the Postville plant called for the creation of a set of “social justice criteria” to accompany the koshering of food, so that food stamped as kosher would also receive a stamp of approval verifying that it was produced under ethically tenable working conditions.

Several days ago at Religion Dispatches, Benjamin Weiner offered a summary of this discussion, as it now stands. Weiner notes that while some ultra-orthodox believers have rejected criticism of the labor practices at Postville’s Agriprocessor plant as a “blood libel” against a pious family, other Jewish communities have continued the discussion of what kosher can mean, when a kosher food producer contravenes ethical teachings about the treatment of workers.

As Weiner indicates, some groups are now proposing that food declared kosher would receive a seal that simultaneously declares it to have been produced under fair labor conditions: heksher tzedek, a phrase that combines the terms "kashrut seal of approval", and "righteousness." Other groups are proposing the development of what is called a Tav HaYosher—an "ethical seal" that would supplement the kosher designation, assuring that the food which is declared kosher was also produced in circumstances that do not violate norms of ethical treatment of workers.

As Weiner notes,

The ancient rabbis taught that since the destruction of the Temple a Jew's own table is his or her sacred altar, and should be subject to the same degree of sanctity. Kashrut is not meant to be a system of arbitrary food taboos, but a discipline that elevates the human drive to eat above the kind of desecrations Agriprocessors may have committed.

And this observation captures why this Jewish argument should be of significance to Christians, I would argue. Christianity shares with (and borrows from) Judaism the sense that table practice has sacred significance: that a home’s table is its altar, and that when a family gathers around the table for a meal, it does so not only to eat, but to pray and give thanks, as well.

This understanding of the “secular” table of families is built into Christianity through Jesus’s own constant emphasis in the gospel stories on table fellowship with outcasts. Again and again, Jesus chose to share his meals with those pushed to the fringes of his society, those not welcome at the tables of the righteous and the “normal” or normative.

The Christian practice of Eucharist or Lord’s Supper incorporates these themes, reminding Christians every time they gather to worship that breaking bread with others in the ritual action of communion obligates us as well to share the bread of daily life with others—particularly with the dispossessed and marginalized—in our workaday lives. For Christianity—if we read the gospels aright—there is no separation between the ritual action of church and the “secular” action of breaking bread together at the family dinner table. We cannot claim to be celebrating the Lord’s Supper faithfully if our behavior at the other, everyday tables at which we sit to share food violates all that is implied in ritual communion.

I am especially taken with the argument that the very designation of a food as kosher implies that it is not merely ritually pure, but also produced in ethically defensible circumstances. One of the most significant developments in the world of religious thought during the modern and postmodern periods has been the recognition that ethics is not somewhere over there, as we determine the meaning of religious beliefs. It is part and parcel of what religion and the beliefs of a religion mean.

Prior to modernity, various religious groups established the “truth” of their religious teachings entirely apart from any consideration of the ethical behavior that lay behind those “truths,” and often without serious consideration of the ethical implications of the “truths” under consideration. With modernity and its turn to the subject in philosophical thought, the divorce of systematic theology from ethics became insupportable.

We now recognize that what a religious teaching does—what it does to real-life human beings, in their everyday lives—is part and parcel of what it means. It is no longer possible to talk about the meaning of religious ideas without examining what those ideas do to people—without examining their ethical effect on people.

This is a turn that has long been resisted by authoritarian and literalist religious traditions, including the current leaders of the Catholic church, as they continue the battle against modernity even as we enter the postmodern period. The reason for that resistance is obvious: as long as we can determine the meaning of religious ideas from some center of authority, without attending carefully to the ethical significance of those ideas—and, above all, to the ethical behavior (or lack thereof) of those occupying a community's center of authority—we do not have to look at the connection between what we proclaim and what we do and live.

But once it becomes clear that what we proclaim is inherently connected to what we do and what we live, the question of establishing authentic meaning (“truth”) in religious communities becomes much more challenging. And at the same time, far more like what the founding figures of religious traditions, like Jesus and Moses, usually envisaged as they set their communities of faith into motion . . . .

The Groaning Table: Holy Week Resources for Readers

For readers for whom the theological-liturgical language of the Christian tradition is not yet an impediment to spiritual life, there are some rich resources at blog sites during Holy Week. Michael Bayly’s Wild Reed blog is featuring a series on the passion of Christ, with beautiful, provocative Stations of the Cross-like paintings by contemporary artist Doug Blanchard.

The first in this series is here. From it, readers can click their way through each subsequent offering. The postings are also a wonderful smorgasbord of important statements by contemporary theologians with pertinence to the passion story. I find the third meditation (on the Last Supper) reflecting on John Dominic Crossan’s notion of Jesus’s “open commensality” especially illuminating.

As Crossan notes, one of the leitmotivs of the gospel account of Jesus’s life and ministry is his astonishing practice of inviting anyone and everyone to his table, in a culture in which table fellowship was governed strictly by religious and social norms that prohibited such free-wheeling mixing of people—of men and women, of rich and poor, of slave and free, of sinners and the righteous. As Crossan has long insisted, these stories of Jesus’s open commensality are the germ from which the Christian practice of the Lord’s Supper/Eucharist has grown.

Unless we incorporate into our own understanding (and practice) of the Lord’s Supper/Eucharist Jesus’s notion of open commensality, we betray something very central to Eucharistic life. The ravenous need of some contemporary Christians to draw insider-outside lines at the Lord’s table could not be more antithetical to the practice of Jesus, at his own table.

I also highly recommend—always—Colleen Kochivar-Baker’s Enlightened Catholicism blog (here). During this Holy Week, it has contained powerful reflections on themes that should be important to contemporary believers, including a persuasive (for me, at least) call for the pro-life movement to practice holy silence at a time in which its loud claims about its goals and objectives all too often undermine those goals and objectives.

Finally, I also want to draw readers’ attention to a beautiful essay by Clarissa Pinkola Estés entitled “Political Catholicism vs. Christ’s Catholicism” at the National Catholic Reporter website (here). Pinkola Estés addresses the growing number of believers (and they include me) who find it increasingly difficult to find a way in the highly politicized culture of the church today.

She argues that there is a third way for such believers. It is the way of the Lone Man (that is, Jesus) who stood against the priests-thugs of his day. It is a way that renounces the desire to coerce, do violence to, or punish those who see things differently than we do. It is a path that refuses to hunt down the souls of others, even when strong, baying cries all around us urge us to engage in such a hunt.

As Clarissa Pinkola Estés notes,

In our time, when it too often has come down to our listening hard, but not being able to tell some priests from most politicians -- as they too often sound exactly alike, choosing the same rhetorical references and processes to defeat or demand a cause ... we, in our beliefs, our striving to hold life sacred, have to go a different way.

I find this meditation moving because I myself am searching for that different way. As I have noted in the past on this blog, for me, the church, in the lives of some of its pastoral leaders and its most ardent defenders today, has become an impediment. Im-ped-iment: something that stands in the way of our feet as we walk, trips us, blocks the path.

The church, in the lives of some of its pastoral leaders and most ardent defenders, is becoming an obstacle to me on my own spiritual path. I write about these issues because I am struggling to find a way. This blog is my attempt to journey further along the path that the church itself has placed me on, by its practiced cruelty towards me, my partner, and other gay believers.

To put the point bluntly: the church simply closes the way to us as believers. It does not invite us along its liturgical, spiritual path. Many of us long for that path during Holy Week (and all throughout the liturgical year), but the price of participation—pretending that we are not there, that we are someone other than who we are; rejecting, renouncing, despising ourselves as God has made us—is impossible to pay, if we are to retain any spiritual core at all.

That places us . . . nowhere. We have no clear path. With all its beauty and power to move our hearts, liturgy and theological language become a double-edged sword. It feeds us and at the same time often betrays us, denies us, tells us we do not belong as God has made us.

To illustrate the point I’m making here, the problem the church presents to many of us, the problem the church has become to many of us: yesterday, in Holy Week, the legislature of Vermont overrode the veto of the state’s governor, making Vermont another in a series of states that now offer gay citizens the right to marry. This follows on the heels of an historic Iowa Supreme Court statement about which I blogged several days ago (here), in which that body unanimously struck down an anti-gay marriage statue.

Following the Vermont decision yesterday, a friend called me. She was traveling through the Dallas airport and happened to see the news on television. She had to share her joy with me. This friend is a straight, married woman who has lost a son to AIDS. She and I butted heads when we first met. I did not know anything about her personal drama, that she had a gay son, that she was struggling with his illness and then his death.

I found her cranky and off-putting, and wrote her off the list of people I wanted to know. Fortunately for me—and as a sign that she is a better follower of Jesus than I am—she continued to reach out to Steve and me and then shared her story with us.

I’m extremely happy about this, because I now find her a valuable source of inspiration and grace. Her son’s death led her in a fairly astonishing way to a small Episcopal church whose saint’s name is the same as her son’s—Stephen—where she finds a nurturing community. After her son died, she began to do volunteer prison ministry with her parish.

Her experience with the HIV community has stood her in good stead in that ministry, and has allowed her to affirm people who would otherwise not be reached by her ministry. The stories she tells me from her ministerial experience nourish my soul. They are stories about the teacher learning from the one who is taught, about the righteous one with the answers and the grace receiving answers and grace from the despised, rejected outcast.

It was good to share my joy at the Vermont decision (and the Iowa one) with this friend.

But as I do this, it does not escape my attention that, when I click to the websites of my brothers and sisters at the center of the American Catholic church, I find nothing at all—total silence—about these two historic events. Though those websites profess to provide Catholic perspectives on current events, politics, culture, the church, they are deafeningly silent about important gay issues.

About me and my life. About all the gay brothers and sisters who find no place in the church these brothers and sisters of the center celebrate.

We go to these websites, and we read fulsome welcome statements for Mr. Gingrich, but never a welcome for us. We read abashed apologies to Cardinal George, but never an apology to us—for our exclusion. For the ways in which we are stereotyped, tacitly banned from conversations about us, as well as from all holy conversations of the center.

Silence. Silence that speaks volumes. It tells us that we do not exist.

And no message can be more painful than that, in the final analysis. Particularly during Holy Week.

A Table with Room for All: Celebrating Steps to Racial Inclusion

I awoke in the night with the picture at the head of this posting in my mind. It’s a picture taken from the first dinner the president-elect and his wife Michelle were able to have together following the election. The picture appeared on many news sites last Sunday, following the Saturday night dinner.

That picture sticks in my mind largely because of the radiant smile on Mrs. Obama’s face. It’s a smile that brings light to one who sees it. And I hope that it’s a smile of joy at a long struggle ended, of a victory won.

Not just a personal victory, but a victory for an entire group of citizens whose rights have been assaulted time and again over the course of American history . . . . As I lay awake remembering this picture in my head, I thought, too, of all the pictures from my own lifetime, pictures of pain and hardship as people of color fought for basic human rights. I thought of pictures of the Little Rock Nine integrating Central High School, as white students and adults jeered and screamed beside the sidewalks on which those students walked to school.

I thought of the pictures from Birmingham, of Bull Connor’s dogs and fire hoses turned on peaceful demonstrators. I remembered the pictures of the churches in which black children died after those churches were firebombed. I thought of pictures taken in the period of slavery, of somber faces, work-worn bodies.

It gives me great joy to take the picture of Mrs. Obama smiling as she leaves a dinner with her husband and juxtapose it with all those other pictures in my head. A diptych of hope to keep in mind as we struggle to extend rights to other groups of despised human beings . . . .

And a reminder that as I continue to fight for my rights and the rights of my brothers and sisters, I should stop and celebrate the accomplishments of other groups who have achieved a measure of victory in the ongoing struggle to bring everyone to the table of participatory democracy . . . .

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.

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.