Sister Joan Chittister famously said, "We are each called to go through life reclaiming the planet an inch at a time until the Garden of Eden grows green again." Reflecting on that journey -- a blog at a time -- is the focus of this site.
Please take a minute to read this letter from our Presiding Bishop and President of the House of Deputies calling for a repeal of HB2 in North Carolina and for solidarity with our transgender brothers and sisters being denied dignity and humanity as children of God.
And indulge me, if you will, in a moment of personal pride and bittersweet celebration that my late wife Louise’s last documentary project – “Out of the Box” – is called out and commended to the church for the work ahead:
In the face of the violence and injustice we see all around us, what can we do? We can start by choosing to get to know one another. TransEpiscopal, an organization of transgender Episcopalians and their allies, has posted on their website a video called “Voices of Witness: Out of the Box” that can help you get to know some transgender Episcopalians and hear their stories. Integrity USA, which produced the video, and the Chicago Consultation are two other organizations working for the full inclusion of LGBT people in the church. Their websites also have online materials that you can use to learn more about the stories of transgender Christians and our church’s long journey to understand that they are children of God and created in God’s image.
Louise's inspiration to capture the TransEpiscopal stories that changed hearts and minds at General Convention in Anaheim in 2009 and make them available to the wider church in her last film project released for General Convention 2012 is a powerful tribute to her vision, tenacity and commitment to leave the world a better place than she found it.
It was a true labor of love – supported by Integrity, TranEpiscopal and a truly stellar production team – which she embraced through the battle with cancer that eventually claimed her life in September 2012 – just weeks after “Out of the Box” premiered in Indianapolis.
The struggle continues – and it delights me in a deep, profound way that Louise’s legacy lives on in that struggle.
A sermon preached on Sunday, June 19th at All Saints Church in Pasadena -- with thanks to Michael Hopkins, Anne Lamott, Michael Curry, Salam Al-Maryati, Mike Kinman, Diana Butler Bass and ... as always ... Jesus.
O God of deep compassion and
abounding mercy, in whose trust is our perfect peace: Draw near to us in this
time of anguish, anxiety and anger, receive the dead into your eternal care, comfort
those who mourn, strengthen those who are wounded or in despair, turn our anger
into the conviction to act, channel our passion to end our dependence on
violence for our sense of security, and lead us all to greater trust in you and
in your image found in the entire human family; through Jesus the Christ, who
with you and the Holy Spirit lives and reigns among us and eternally. Amen.
And here we are again – a
shell shocked nation gathered for candlelight vigils, press conferences and
solidarity rallies in the wake of yet another mass shooting – this time
targeting the LGBT community in Orlando, Florida.
Our Twitter feeds and
Facebook pages are full of earnest memes and links to statements, prayers and
press releases. The collective will of the nation seems – for the moment – to be galvanized to call for the kind of systemic change that
will end the scourge of gun violence that plagues our nation and bloodies our
streets, our homes, our schools, our churches, our movie theaters and our
nightclubs.
#WeAreOrlando is trending on
Twitter and will be until it isn’t anymore … until the hashtag joins the
archive of outrage that has so far inexplicably failed to rouse our nation to
address the carnage with sensible gun laws.
In the vortex of the longest
election season in the history of voting, the June 12th shooting in
Orlando has brought into sharp relief the choice in front of us: Will we be a
nation that lives in fear or a
nation that overcomes fear?
If children slaughtered at their desks, college students murdered in their classrooms,
and church members massacred in their Bible Study class hasn’t been enough to
overcome the gun legislation impasse then what makes us think that this latest
attack on an LGBT nightclub will be the tipping point?
I am daring to hope that it
is.
Our friend author Diana Butler Bass wrote on Facebook this week: When I was a church
history professor, I used to ask every class this question: "Think 100
years in the future. What will those people look back to our time -- to us -- and say 'How could
they have been so stupid? Why couldn't they see how wrong they were?' What do
we do now that will look completely immoral to them?”
“This week,” Diana said “my top answers are gunphilia and homophobia.”
Those would be my answers, too.
And yet I am daring to hope that today – now – this moment – June 19, 2016 – will
be a date history will recognize as the day we turned the corner to end the
scourge of gun violence that afflicts our nation and to heal the systemic homophobia
that infects our nation; as a moment we embraced our high calling to – as
Michael Curry puts it – change the world from the nightmare it often is into the
dream that God intends.
June 19th is
already an historic date. A date of transformation. A date of liberation.
Also known as “Juneteenth” it is the oldest known celebration commemorating the
ending of slavery in the United States. June
19, 1865 was the date Union soldiers landed at Galveston, Texas with news that
the enslaved were now free.
Note that this was two and a half
years after President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation become
official in January 1863.
Official or not, the Emancipation Proclamation had virtually no impact on those
enslaved in Texas -- because the Good News of liberation was withheld from the
enslaved by those with the power to withhold it; by those refusing to accept
the authority of the President who proclaimed it.
Not knowing freedom had been
declared they suffered under the yoke of slavery – until June 19th when
the word finally came to them that they were no longer enslaved but free. Juneteenth.
And what is the word that
comes to us today – June 19, 2016 at All Saints Church?
In Christ there is no longer Jew or Greek, slave or free,
male or female. All are one in Christ
Jesus.
Those powerful words -- those
liberating words of Paul in his Letter to the Galatians -- are a kind of
Emancipation Proclamation: freeing the entire human family from the artificial
constructs that the world tells us divides us.
Yet just as those enslaved in
Texas did not hear the word of their freedom until years after it was
proclaimed, there are still those waiting to hear that Paul’s proclamation
applies to them these many centuries later.
And the wake of this week’s
tragedy in Orlando has exposed the harsh reality that like those who
intentionally kept the news of liberation from reaching the enslaved there are
those who intentionally work to keep the news of God’s inclusive love available
to absolutely everybody from reaching all God’s beloved children.
It has become so predictable that
you can practically set your clock by it. I’m talking about the point after a
national trauma when actual
Christianity gets hijacked by someone spewing the kind of hateful, harmful
utterly unchristian diatribes that make Jesus - in the words of Anne Lammot - “want
to drink gin straight out of a cat dish.” It is a sad and crowded history.
Jerry Falwell blamed the 9/11
attacks on “gays, abortionists and feminists.” Pat Robertson narrowed the blame
for Hurricane Katrina down to “the gays.” And Terry Jones burned copies of the
Quran to mark the anniversary of 9/11.
One of this week’s hijackers of
actual Christianity – and there were sadly more than one -- was SacramentoPastor Roger Jimenez. In his Sunday sermon on June 12 — just hours after the
Orlando massacre — he asserted “these deaths shouldn’t be mourned because if
the victims were gay, then the Bible calls them sinners, and they deserved to
die.”
He went on to say “If we lived in a righteous government, they should round
them all up and put them up against a firing wall, and blow their brains out.”
And as I listened to him – in
horror and outrage that my faith was being hijacked by this homophobic wolf in pastor’s clothing and being represented as
“Christian” – I realized my outrage was a tiny window into what billions of
Muslims feel every time they hear the horrific distortion of their faith being
called “Islamic.”
Roger Jimenez is to
Christianity what ISIS is to Islam ... and it is up to every single one of us
to speak out against this hijacking of the core tenets of our faith by those
who would distort them as weapons of mass discrimination; lob them like
incendiary devices to ignite hate and division; and convince any sane person that
Christianity is that last thing they want anything to do with.
It is also up to us to stand
with our Muslim brothers and sisters when their religion is hijacked by media
pundits and political candidates who ignore the billions of faithful followers
of Islam - a religion of peace, justice and compassion - and feed into the agenda of the terrorists.
Speaking at the June 13th Interfaith Vigil in Los Angeles, our friend
Muslim leader Salam Al-Marayati called ISIS a “cult of death” that “does not
represent me and does not represent 1.5 billion Muslims — it represents the
worst of humanity, not just a distortion of the faith.”
And then – in a moment I
truly did not think I would live long enough to witness – one of those moments
that gives me hope we truly are at a “tipping point” –Salam went on to address the
LGBTQ community saying: “We are your shield. The Muslim community stands
shoulder-to-shoulder with the LGBTQ community. We are one, we are all part of
one humanity, and we will defend each other — we will work together.”
Glory!
This is what a “radical”
faith looks like: a radical vision of love, justice and compassion that
transcends dogma and doctrine and focuses on our common humanity as children of
the same God — refusing to be hijacked by those who would divide, polarize and
terrorize us. It is the kind of faith that can and will change the world: if we
work together.
That is the radical faith we
gather here, in this sacred space, week after week, year after year, rector
after rector, to embrace and to proclaim; and then to take out in the world in
desperate need of love, justice and peace as an antidote to hatred, oppression
and violence.
This is the radical faith into
which we welcome 22 new members at our 11:15 service and it is the radical
faith into which we will baptize Grete, Christian, Deborah and Nicholas today.
It is a radical faith that
says we do have the power as old as
the words of Isaiah
that Jesus preached in his first sermon in Nazareth: to proclaim good news to the poor.
to
proclaim freedom for the prisoners
to
set the oppressed free,
to
proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.
It is a radical faith that
says we do have the power to cast
out the demons that afflict us as a Body of Christ and as a Body Politic just
as surely as Jesus cast out the demons we heard about in today’s Gospel.
Speaking of demons, here are some words of wisdom from our Rector-elect Mike
Kinman … with a hat-tip to Christina Honchell for pointing me to them online:
We don't talk about demons much ... probably either
because it's too scary or because they sound like superstition and we consider
ourselves too intellectually evolved. We'd rather think of them as a literary
device. Whether or not that is true, there are demonic forces out there. Demons
change people, separate and isolate people, and are incredibly powerful: so
powerful we feel like we are powerless against them. But we are not.
No, my friends, we are not. We
are equipped and empowered with the powerful Good News that our church, our
nation and our world is longing to hear. It is the Good News of the liberating
love of God that is as long overdue to those enslaved by oppression and marginalization in 2016 as the Good News of the Emancipation
Proclamation was overdue to those enslaved in Texas in 1865.
It is the Good News of the
dream that God intends
where there is no longer Jew or
Greek,
no longer slave or free,
no longer male or female,
no longer gay or straight,
no longer white, black, brown or any
variation thereof,
no longer cisgender or transgender,
no longer theist or atheist,
no longer Democrat or Republican,
no longer Christian, Muslim,
Sikh, Hindu, Buddhist, Wiccan or
None of the Above.
In the dream that God intends
there are ALL of the above, no
longer divided but united -- woven into one human family created in love by the
God whose deepest desire is that we love one another as much as God loves us.
That is the dream we claim as
our own -- the vision we proclaim to the world; It is the radical faith that dares to tell us
we have the power to cast out not only
the demons of gunphilia and homophobia but to banish any demon that separates,
isolates or enslaves us until there is no
longer anything that keeps us from being
the beloved community we were created in love to be.
My email inbox, FB page and Twitter feed are all full of poignant, powerful statements in the wake of yesterday's tragic shooting in Orlando. None more eloquent and spot on than this one from Hillary Clinton.
So many of us are praying for everyone who was
killed, for the wounded and those still missing, and for all the loved ones
grieving today.
We owe their memories and their families more
than prayer. We must also take decisive action to strengthen our international
alliances and combat acts of terror, to keep weapons of war off our streets,
and to affirm the rights of LGBT Americans -- and all Americans -- to
feel welcome and safe in our country.
Here’s what we absolutely cannot do: We cannot demonize Muslim people.
Inflammatory anti-Muslim rhetoric hurts the vast majority of Muslims who love
freedom and hate terror. It’s no coincidence that hate crimes against American
Muslims and mosques tripled after Paris and San Bernardino. Islamophobia goes
against everything we stand for as a nation founded on freedom of religion, and
it plays right into the terrorists’ hands.
We’re a big-hearted, fair-minded country. We teach our children that this is
one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all --
not just for people who look a certain way, or love a certain way, or worship a
certain way.
I want to say this to all the LGBT people grieving today in Florida and across
our country: You have millions of allies who will always have your back. I am
one of them. From Stonewall to Laramie and now Orlando, we’ve seen too many
examples of how the struggle to live freely, openly, and without fear has been
marked by violence. We have to stand together. Be proud together. There is no
better rebuke to the terrorists and all those who hate.
This fundamentally American idea -- that we’re stronger together -- is why I’m
so confident that we can overcome the threats we face, solve our challenges at
home, and build a future where no one’s left out or left behind. We can do it,
if we do it together.
Thank you for standing together in love, kindness, and the best of what it
means to be American.
"I know how hard this job can be. That's why I know how good Hillary will be at it." BAM!!
Tomorrow I turn 62 ... which I just have to say sounds ridiculously old to be still figuring so many things out. But today I'm deeply grateful for the early birthday present of a clear path forward for a united Democratic Party from Bernie & Barack. Elizabeth Warren's endorsement will be the icing on my birthday cake ... and my "blow out the candles" wish will be for an issues driven campaign and a clear mandate in November for the Clinton White House. BAM!!