Out in Scripture Newsletter

Who's in the Conversation
A conversation among the following scholars and pastors

 

“Ash Wednesday is a good time to take stock of just how many ‘afflictions, hardships, and calamities’ each one of us has been willing to endure to bring about lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender justice, and justice for all creation."

Chris Smith

 

“We have to be very careful when we speak of repentance in relation to the LGBT community. Some have internalized the negative and oppressive views expressed in cultural, political and religious realms. Others may blame themselves for not being more vocal or outspoken in response to these views and their attendant policies.”

Dierdre Hinz

 

“Repentance for the LGBT community has historically been an indictment of sin. Being called to repent and then being denied an opportunity to experience forgiveness within a faith community is the reality many LGBT people endure.”

Douglas Abbott

The themes of this week’s texts range from judgment and repentance to an attack on self-serving, dehumanizing religion.  They also include a personal plea for forgiveness, enemies making peace and the gospel’s admonition to humbly practice our religious and spiritual acts. There is much to be said about LGBT lives in relation to each of these themes.  Yet the prevailing theme haunting the imaginations and hearts of the writers this week is the horrible plague and ravaging that the prophet Joel points to so vividly. The writers of this week’s commentary pretend no objective reading and experiencing of these passages. Rather as two lesbians and a gay man, we invite you to “listen in” on the face-to-face conversation we had in struggling with these texts in relation to our own lives and the lives of our LGBT community.

In Joel 2:1-2, 12-17 the prophet is calling for repentance in the face of terrible disaster descending upon the land unless the people “tremble” (verse 1) and mend their ways with fasting and with weeping and mourning (v. 12). If the priests and ministers of God weep “between the vestibule and the altar” (verse 17) and the people “rend their hearts” (verse 13) and radically change, perhaps God will turn from punishing them.

	How do you understand repentance in your own individual life and in the life of a religious community?  What kind of repentance is needed in many of our churches to end the ravaging of LGBT lives?

One of the first things religious people must contend with when reading these kinds of judgment and repentance passages is the way God and God’s action was understood at the time the text was written. People often thought: If something terrible happened personally or to the whole people, then God must be angry and the whole people must deserve to be punished. Today, those of us looking at this text might want to think less about God’s wrath and punishment in interpreting personal and social tragedy, and more about the violence and oppression that human beings perpetrate upon one another.

Perhaps we might want to think about how we are the “locusts and armies of enemies” (verses 1 and 2).  When have we become such enemies in relation to our sisters and brothers, and to the planet itself? We do indeed need repentance in the land and around the globe not as a means to “persuade” (verses 13, 14) God, but as a righteous and just act of accountability for all that humans have done unjustly. 

The ravaging that the prophet Joel predicts as impending in verses 1 and 2 has already come across the landscape of LGBT lives.  The locusts of hatred and violence are still daily realities in the lives of our community. The ravaging from many arms of the church and society continue to literally destroy the lives of young LGBT people, and have cost many of us our jobs, our family connections, and our intimate, partnered relationships. 

The God that Joel describes seems to be both our ally and our enemy. God seems to be on the side of the ravaging and against the lives of LGBT people.  Yet, on the other hand, this same God is also the one to whom we must repent. It feels exhausting to encounter yet again a God who has to be pleased in order for the “plague of violence” to stop, and to come face to face with a God who needs for us to beg for mercy and forgiveness in order for the heterosexist punishing to end.

For the three of us, however, it felt too easy to simply sit and talk about all the ways that the heterosexist church and society has perpetuated this “army of violence” upon our lives.  It is abundantly clear that Joel is calling “all” the people to repent (verse 1), not just some of the people. The LGBT community has some repenting to do as well. This repentance is not for who we are as LGBT people, or for our same gender love and sexuality, but for the ways we have not been bold enough and outraged enough about what continues to happen to our own lives and to the lives of our families and friends.

Perhaps we have not always lifted our voices against the self-serving, dehumanizing religious practices that the prophet Isaiah speaks about this week. A part of what is so insidious about abuse and violence is that it drains away a persons’ energy to respond and to act with outraged resistance.  We have not always called for the kind of “moral reformation” that Isaiah 58: 6-8 calls for so prophetically. In reality, many members of our own community are the “naked” (verse 7) and vulnerable ones that Isaiah demands we respond to with our concrete actions. Sometimes it has simply been easier to protect our own “small sphere” of safety in our own neighborhoods and among our chosen family, than to become the ones who “loose the bonds of injustice” (verse 6) and “undo the thongs of the yoke” (verse 9) from members of our own LGBT community who are much more marginalized, oppressed and vulnerable than those of us who have assimilated well into mainline communities and churches.

We have not always prayed for forgiveness in the powerful way Psalm 51 confronts us to pray.  We have had some of the same defensive excuses that the psalmist urges the people to turn from in order to have their hearts and lives renewed (verses 1-17).

	For members of the LGBT community, what forgiveness do you seek in relation to other members of the LGBT community?  For our allies, what prayer of forgiveness will you offer God for the ravaging of LGBT lives, and how might you concretely loose the bonds of injustice that abound all around us?

As LGBT people we humbly and boldly claim God of the prophets as our God too. Even though we are not responsible for the major ravaging of homophobic and heterosexist violence in our land, as part of the human community we feel compelled to take repentance, turning or returning seriously. We have not always done the work that is needed to stop the ravaging, but have rather done whatever was required of us to “blend in” and just try to live a “normal” life. The constant plague of locusts is painful and exhausting to resist.

The locusts have been coming for a very long time and sometimes members of the LGBT community need to pull back and regenerate and renew ourselves for the long struggle for social and religious transformation. Ash Wednesday is an important time for all people to discern whether it is a time for decisive and courageous action or a time to pull back from the ravaging in order to renew ourselves.

While encountering Matthew 6:1-6, 16-21, we acknowledged to ourselves that often we practice our spiritual disciplines in the kind of “privacy” that Matthew urges (verses 2-6, 16-18). We engage in symbolic and actual acts of prayer, fasting and almsgiving in the secrecy of our community’s life. We do this not because this is a good and humble thing to do as Matthew instructs, rather we do this because we are afraid to be more public, to be more visible. We are afraid to be more radical in our “true righteousness” in a world where gay men are tied to a Wyoming fence to die, and lesbian mothers lose their children when they come out. This is not an excuse for being less visible and radical, and yet it always has a particular and unique impact on LGBT lives.

In reading Matthew’s words we realize that the LGBT community often lives out its true righteousness in the private and secret worlds of safety that we create for one another.  We are hard to see, hard to spot at times. Often we seem to have no overarching, unifying fabric of culture or reality that holds our community together. So we are forced at times to practice our “true righteous” within the privacy of our community. Yet what is so powerful about Matthew’s mandates is that he counts on the fact that every faithful Jew will simply be praying, fasting and participating in acts of charity and justice, and thus urges them to be humble in doing so (verses 1-6). 

The gospel reading from Matthew is one of those texts that demands we take “context” seriously. For LGBT people we might turn Matthew’s words around and instead strive for more courageous public expressions of our lives and our “justice” practices – as well as challenging the heterosexual community to such a just witness as well.  Matthew is calling for constant just behaviors and for those actions to always be done with humility.

	How might God be calling LGBT people to call all faithful religious people to engage in these profound religious acts on behalf of our community and of other oppressed people – and to do so with deep humility?

When we encountered the words in 2 Corinthians 5:20b-6:10, we were challenged to be the community of God’s new creation.  We realized how often we are “unknown and yet known” (verse 9) and treated as “impostors” and yet we “try to be true” (verse 8).   Paul is defending the new religious community of which he is a part and claiming that they are to be about acts of reconciliation and peace. He is rehearsing all the oppressive things they have endured in the name of God and in the name of transformed world.

Ash Wednesday is a good time to take stock of just how many “afflictions, hardships and calamities” (vv. 3-10) each one of us has endured in order to bring about LGBT justice, and justice for all creation.

	What actions have you taken on behalf of LGBT people that truly have brought hardship or afflictions into your own life? Where do you see examples of God’s new creation in terms of LGBT lives being less ravaged and less oppressed?

Who's in the Conversation
A conversation among the following scholars and pastors

 

“These readings reinforce the radical and universal inclusivity of God’s grace and salvation for all. God’s grace, demonstrated to us in the flesh by Jesus’ sacrificial love, is so great, powerful and effective that it gives life and salvation to all, not just some.”

Helene Tallon Russell

 

“The theme that jumps out at me is: ‘Trust in God’.”

Michael Miller

 

“We need not fear to be ourselves — no more, no less, no better, no worse — because God takes us exactly as we are.”

Charles W. Allen

“Repentance for the LGBT community has historically been an indictment of sin. Being called to repent and then being denied an opportunity to experience forgiveness within a faith community is the reality many LGBT people endure.”

Holly Hearon

When we live and love unconventionally, we’re often accused of ignoring God’s clear commands. Sometimes it’s said that everything went wrong the moment Adam and Eve started asking questions. Because God’s welcome, lived among us in Jesus, outweighs any fear of expulsion – God calls us to live open lives.

According to Matthew, when Jesus was baptized, the Spirit of God outed him as God’s own beloved. This week’s gospel reading, Matthew 4:1-11, shows Jesus struggling to discern how to live with that knowledge. Like Adam and Eve, says Charles Allen, Jesus considers whether it is enough to be the fragile creature that he is. Holly Hearon sees Jesus wrestling with whether he will let a hostile other (the tempter of verse 3) define his identity for him, or whether he will define for himself what it means to be a child of God. Likewise, Michael Miller wonders if Jesus is being tempted by the very idea that he should be expected to prove his “belongingness” to anybody else. Who among any of God’s creatures has the authority to question Jesus’ standing with God — or yours or mine? Helene Russell focuses on issues of power. Jesus is tempted to see God’s reign in terms of controlling everything — making the world and himself pain-free by taking all power to himself, and thus making a sham of any genuine love.

	When has God called you “Beloved”? How do others’ doubts tempt you to question God’s words of unconditional welcome? Who says you have to prove anything to anybody?

It is no surprise that stories of Jesus’ temptation would be linked to the story of the first temptation in Genesis 2. A talking snake tells Eve the truth.  She and Adam won’t drop dead when they eat the forbidden fruit; instead they will become more God-like. Their eyes will be opened to know good and evil. And that, even God observes (Genesis 3:22), is more or less what happened.

Yet ironically, says Charles Allen, once Adam and Eve knew the difference between good and evil they misjudged their own nakedness as somehow “not good.” They grew ashamed of their fragility as creatures and “closeted” themselves with fig leaves. They hid from God, and in so doing, expelled themselves from God’s presence even before they were expelled from Eden.

Michael Miller cautions that we can’t always tell the difference between disobedience to God and a legitimate questioning of established boundaries, though either way those who push at boundaries are going to feel exposed and vulnerable. Holly Hearon questions whether nakedness was the issue when the couple’s eyes were opened. Maybe it was their awareness of how easily they could be tricked, their potential for sin. In that, they were still a far cry from being God-like.

	How do you tell good from evil? To whom do you listen? When is it good to challenge established rules? When are you tempted to hide who you are?

In Romans 5: 12-19, Paul uses the Genesis story to set up a contrast with the story of Jesus. Eve drops out of the story, and Adam gets all the blame. Adam prefigures Jesus, in that both figures’ actions have an effect on all of humanity. Both are universal, Helene Russell observes. But for Paul, Jesus’ faithfulness (or God’s faithfulness in Jesus) outweighs Adam’s trespass.

God’s unconditional welcome in the life, death and risen life of Jesus is the final truth about God, and about us. Indeed, says Holly Hearon, God in a sense “transgresses” our sense of what is just and right because God’s desire is that all might have life. This ever-increasing, “transgressive” gift of grace provides a safe space, says Michael Miller, in which we can struggle honestly with all that is entailed by the explorations, adventures and discoveries of our lives, including our challenging of established boundaries. In fact, Charles Allen suggest, we’re invited to bring even our most skeptical moments into God’s very presence, without fear of expulsion. We don’t have to closet any part of ourselves.

	Do you feel welcomed by God, welcomed unconditionally? What do you allow to get in the way of God’s welcome? What are you hiding?

Psalm 32 celebrates the joy of living without pretense. “Happy are those ? in whose spirit there is no deceit” (verse 2). Living without pretense does require confessing our wrongdoing. We need forgiveness, suggests Holly Hearon, not for our same-gender relationships, but for any failing to embody God’s unconditional welcome even in our most life-giving relationships. We  lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender folk should never hesitate to admit that we are sinners just as much as anybody else, Charles Allen insists. We fail to love extravagantly, transgressively, the way God has loved us. And perhaps the gravest failure is hiding our failures. Confession is the moment when we realize that God is the true “hiding place” (verse 8), the safe space where we can live in full openness.

	How do you feel about naming yourself as a sinner? Does it feel demeaning, or can it feel liberating?