Go Bill!

Recently I shared a brief reunion with a significant community in my life, a Church authority with responsibility to hundreds of thousand of local church members and hundreds of contexts in which the member churches' work is located. Walked right into the midst of many deeply held shared passions, and some longstanding disagreements.

Ahead of time I’d given thought to avoiding this particular moment in the collective body’s life, because I’m not really a part of that in the same way at the moment. We are in a figurative marriage through my membership and ordination, but I have chosen a mild trial separation while I do some intentional study and experience life and the world from different angles.

Here, outside responsibilities of the pulpits I’ve filled, I make this assertion: I don’t believe homosexuality is a sin. I don’t think earnest investments in mutually loving relationships are ever in the most idealistic sense sinful.

I realize this can be a very troubling statement. Nonetheless, this is what I have come to believe. God will continue to breath life into my understanding, I’m confident of that, and I will seek God continually.

We seem to need to see others within a template, in comparison to standards; I don't believe our infinite Creator has such limits.

I’m not a radical libertine. I do think homosexual acts on my part would be sinful, but I won’t go into specifics on that apart from offering that it is not a match for my spiritual understanding, desires, hopes or values. I do believe if some of the variables within me were different I could be both homosexual and a faithful disciple of Jesus Christ. I could not be a United Methodist pastor if this were so.

For me coming to this place started when a man came up to me in a park and propositioned me more than thirty years ago. I said ‘no’, and found that he did not accept my response. I was more clear and reinforced my message with eye-contact and expression. He understood and left me to finish writing letters in the park.

I found the experience personally troubling, and tried to process it within community. In some ways this didn’t help: I found a number of people who thought I should have responded with physical violence. “I would have slugged him,” several said. Things may have gone a similar direction in someones response: a week after my encounter in the park, in the local paper there was an article about a man being shot in the park.

Those who know me well know I have always been single, and I’ve not sustained a lot of long-term dating relationships -- so concurrent with this experience with this man in the park and my attempt to process it I was reflecting on my own experience with dating, and how challenging it can be to tastefully approach and discern mutual interest between yourself and another person.

Having now met this man, however unwillingly I’d been brought into contact, I pondered in my heart the thought that hunger for relationship was more complicated than I had to this point known it to be. I prayed the man in the park would find something good and nurturing which could resonate with who he was at that moment. (I was then a member of a more liberal denomination, so I don’t know what conclusions I would have drawn as a United Methodist youth, and know from experience one isn’t the same as another.)

I am thankful that God reaches out to me in my uniqueness and I have every confidence that God wants that for each individual. It is a sin of people, not the expressed will of God, that we people make homosexuality a part of a sort of ‘threshold’ we present to the world. It is a sin, we feel need to assert, and in doing so advance a prioritization of sins -- as if we didn’t all have sins -- homosexuality over gossip or consumerism or militarism or any of a number of things pretty destructive and harmful and beyond God’s hopes reflected in scripture.

Here are some other troubling assertions regarding sexuality I will make: In my ordination I have practiced celibacy in singleness -- and I’ve discovered what I discern to be nuances of celibacy which can be personally sinful. Among them, there are ways that walling myself off is not good. So it is complicated, it is my journey, prayerfully finding my way through my singleness. The fact that others have been single really doesn’t mean anyone can truly understand my life, simply that they have some understanding of their circumstances as a lens to interpreting what they perceive of my life.

In counseling folks in the midst of marriages I have also seen some discouraging ways in which sexual sinfulness can operate in marriage. I won’t go further in describing that, sensing that, as it is possible to go from preaching to meddling, it is also possible to go from blogging to meddling. Sexuality is not simply OK in marriage, not OK out of it. It’s a component of who each one of us is, uniquely expressed in each of us. Our responsibility for this gift is expressed moment to moment.

This week I went back to my community to express my best personal discernment, to vote that a good man after God’s heart, who practices as much commitment to the person he loves as our culture permits him to... can serve the Church he loves. By the grace of God he now gets the opportunity. Early indications are good, in so far as his part goes.

“I know what will make this work, and all that has to happen is for you to change!”

Haven’t we all been tempted to take that position at one time or another?! Sometimes the person we’re dealing with is pretty darned unreasonable; seems well within bounds to point that out.

Well, it’s only going to yield helpful results when the person you’re saying it to is highly motivated to trust you and work with you. It will only work when the person has some question about what they are doing or thinking -- and in the U.S.A. today, there seems to be almost no one who will admit to being less than certain! Wouldn’t want to seem “wishy-washy!”

Thought which recalibrates in the midst of changing circumstances and understandings seems today an underappreciated asset. To lose the capacity for listening to views different from one’s own, is to forfeit a significant part of what makes one a responsible citizen of a diverse nation. Unless it is simply up to persons different from you to change.

It may sound silly, but I suggest to you the position embedded in the quote at the top finds wide acceptance and use.

I see it embedded in the Franklin Graham ‘controversy’ over today’s National Day of Prayer. The Graham family has made many positive contributions to individuals, our country and our world; I wouldn’t count Franklin Graham’s comments about Muslims among the positive contributions. What’s more, I think the words he has shared fall short of the high calling of the Christian faith Franklin means to represent. They strike me as prideful rather than humble, and they certainly don’t make a constructive bridge to a way forward -- unless of course, all that needs to happen is for the other to change.

Christian faith is expressly NOT about conformity by the other. It’s about loving others as our selves (presumably we’ve found the personal health to love self). In the golden rule we don’t say ‘do to others as they do to you’, but rather “do unto others as you would have them to do to you.”

Our idealism calls us to be people of integrity and persistence of goodwill, regardless of what we get in return. We win others not by the use of a hammer as much as by the persuasive power of our own idealism and love on display, dare I say our reflection of God on display. This can seem so impractical we are tempted to take shortcuts and use coercion or worse. People notice our shortcuts -- it’s that way, when you tell people you mean to demonstrate one thing and then demonstrate another.

What is central to faith is a personal invitation to be changed, an invitation issued by self to God, inviting God to transform the person making the petition. The practice of faith, over time, is repeated choice, acceptance of God, to introduce constructive cycles and to supplant destructive patterns.

When people see the cycles of change bringing positive change in us, and when they experience our genuine love and humility, tempered by personal memory of small-mindedness and judgment we’ve been called to discard, this is noticed too. And in this humble living testimony great possibility is born.

The greatest possibilities available to us are made possible in our willingness to adapt, even to change.


Prayer of St. Francis:
Lord, make me an instrument of your peace;
where there is hatred, let me sow love;
where there is injury, pardon:
where there is doubt, faith;
where there is despair, hope
where there is darkness, light
where there is sadness, joy
O divine Master,
grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console;
to be understood, as to understand;
to be loved, as to love;
for it is in giving that we receive,
it is in pardoning that we are pardoned,
and it is in dying that we are born to Eternal Life.
Amen

I reached a figurative wall this month in studies, and I didn’t see it coming -- but then, surprise is often what gets us to new places.

I’ve been finding the counseling program here to be an easy match for my interests and passions. Studies have been adding a lot to what’s been learned and observed over my life to this point.

Not that there haven’t been revelations which have given pause. Last semester it occurred to me that nearly all of the pastoral care I’ve given, in the terminology of the counseling field, would be viewed as having taken place in the context of dual relationships. That is, those sessions have taken place in the midst of a relationships complicated (in many ways enriched) by competing responsibilities toward the counseled: in the context of relationships sometimes professional, sometimes social... you can name other descriptors. Any of us would get complications when we try to ‘counsel’ friends too, in fact we can’t properly counsel them -- that’s not to say that we can’t be helpful friends.

Dual relationships are acknowledged to be very dicey from an ethical standpoint. Partly a matter of which role one is acting in at each encounter, and partly a recognition that even though you are trying to act from one role, the other roles by which you know one another will influence the role from which you are attempting to operate. Are you the guide, sounding board, advisor? Pastors get up in front of the ‘counseled’ (and a crowd of other people, each with different stories) and preach. Counseling relationships don’t usually introduce that magnitude of complication. To what effect? It is the counselors responsibility to live in awareness, and even to inform the counseled what is being offered so the counseled can make informed decisions.

In that moment I felt vindicated in past policy, referring out after no more than three meetings. Counseling is not pastoral care, and the first is properly the province of individuals who’ve taken part in more extensive preparation, who don’t have so many competing responsibilities to the persons in front of them.

Jolting me to attention more recently was my study of group counseling. In group discipline so much is made of the construction of the group, screening for participation, methods of exercising leadership and subsequent developmental stages in group function.

Some of you may know my story well enough to know that I had my butt kicked by a congregation. It wasn’t a one-time experience we later got beyond; it happened early and often for five years. Not everybody willfully added to my butt kicking, but there was enough of a continuing presence to make it a significant challenge. The first year was painful; after a couple of years, when I was traveling, old friends in conversations would say, “why are you apologizing, you’re not responsible for X” [X = some innocuous shared disappointment, like missing the train]. But I’d taken on so much of the weight of the circumstances of my butt-kicking that accepting responsibility for this other thing just seemed a natural extension, it had become a default position.

Then somebody in the larger church’s administration told me my record didn’t look so good -- to be fair, that individual hadn’t been present for any but the last of those years, but the presented conclusion, given not in the context of an invitation to examine, but rather as a settled judgment, was to me shattering. It did severe damage to the impression cultivated by his predecessor, and continuing hope, that I was operating as part of a team. Suddenly I saw Uriah differently.

Pastors don’t seem to talk about this. As I transitioned from that painful assignment to the next I sought out some colleagues who’s work in ministry I respected, individuals who I heard had at some point had a tough time with a congregation. I didn’t get anyone to talk. Given the way we are together I don’t blame those I approached. If you are lucky enough to get beyond such things, I suspect you don’t want to get near that taint again. You know what it is to be marginalized and perhaps on some level fear that giving out insight about you might again empower unreasonable people. Stigma would accompany the work of any recovery network.

From the beginning of that awful time I used to say to my superintendent that the congregation had a pretty low regard for the role of a pastor among them. Some thought the pastor’s role was simply to deliver what they wanted, as reflected in the individual who told me, “the will of God is what we say it is!”

I now realize that early on I’d been screened out of that church, by a relatively small but influential control group, and to a lesser extent by others who in innocence didn’t know the screening was taking place, but who placed high value on continuing to do what had been done -- ‘No, this isn’t in line with our purposes, but Charlie has done a lot. Shouldn’t we give Charlie this show of support’.

Like all of my colleagues I’m not a perfect pastor, but I am an earnest servant of the Lord -- not simply self-identified as a pastor, but carefully and prayerfully screened by others in a wide-ranging community.

Screening me out largely deprived that local community of what could be brought. In some churches which function like twelve step groups, not acknowledging formal leadership, churches where longer-tenured individuals can establish influence, and can use their influence to work their way -- speaking as if all has been left to fate -- this isn’t all that uncommon a story.

As for me, I now take comfort in the existence of screening procedures in group counseling. We may be once saved, but the obligation to respond is moment to moment. It’s an active process, not a box to check.

To be willing to try new things and make changes to improve life circumstances -- that is very consistent with Christian teaching and discipleship. Yet resistance to personal change is at the heart of struggles. Churches struggle because individuals within them think they are the exception to that commitment to personal change, too many think they needn’t adapt to continuously evolving circumstances.

A few months after my new start one of my new church’s leaders confided to me: ‘I thought all that talk about change at your introduction was for the benefit of the Superintendent’ (my new boss, leading the introduction). Putting aside my concern that this individual apparently thought I would say things I did not believe if the circumstance called for it, prayerfully, I began to consider with them the circumstances of our setting, and attendant implications for we disciples who find ourselves there...