The Shooting at Pulse: Pastor Emmy's Response (from the Church Newsletter)

When worship began last Sunday morning, we had only begun to get reports out of Orlando of a mass shooting at a gay nightclub.  We now know that forty-nine lives were taken that night, almost all of them members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer community, and almost all of them Latinx.  Rumors are still circulating about the gunman's motivations, but we know that he (like many of the other men across America who have targeted minorities and marginalized communities in mass shootings) had a history of violence.

As a gay woman, I am still in deep grief over this massacre.  I am still struggling to put into words how vulnerable this makes the whole LGBTQ community feel.  I keep running through memories of dances at clubs, marches at Pride Festival, rallies at the legislature -- all times when I was vulnerable to violent attack because I believe that God made me beloved exactly as I am.  This week my partner Michelle and I have been afraid to hold hands in public, more aware of potential attacks than we have been before.  Already we are hearing that Westboro Baptist Church will be protesting at victims' funerals, where they will likely hold signs and blast music at full volume declaring God's absolute hatred for the victims and delight in their deaths.

In addition, the Muslim community in America is experiencing significant backlash over the attacks.  Many Islamic groups (including the Minnesota branch of the Council on American-Islamic Relations) immediately responded to the attacks with rejection and condemnation of the shooter's supposed ties to Islam.  The majority of the Muslim community continues to reject violence and murder, yet the actions of a few are often applied to the whole.  I am reminded of last year's massacre at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, carried out by a young man who belonged to the very same denomination we do.  The violence of one does not always reflect the values of the whole, and when the majority of Muslims condemn violent attacks, I am asked to listen to those voices.  To that end, I will be attending the iftar hosted at First Lutheran in Columbia Heights this coming Wednesday.  An iftar is the celebratory meal that ends the day-long fast Muslims perform during the month of Ramadan.  This iftar is open to the public and I invite you to join me -- you may RSVP here.

There are a number of vigils scheduled for Sunday evening to remember the victims.  Gustavus Adolphus has invited us to join them for a service at 8pm.

I will also be joining an ELCA Young Adults webcast on Sunday evening -- a live video chat among nine young adult leaders in the Christian church that will discuss and reflect on the shooting in Orlando.

Worship on Sunday will offer some time for prayers for the victims of the Orlando attacks.  I also invite you to reach out to LGBTQ family and friends -- this is an incredibly painful week for us, and every word of support and love counts.

In peace and hope,
Pastor Emmy

A sound of sheer silence: a commentary on Elijah, Legion, and Pulse

After the fire, there was a sound of sheer silence.
After the hail of bullets, the murderous flash of bullet light, the thunder of bodies against the floor.
After the earthquake of hope and joy and life torn from lives.
After the ringing and ringing and ringing and ringing of cell phones as friends and family tried to reach those who were no longer reachable.
A sound of sheer silence, and Elijah the prophet cowering in the cave of a nightclub bathroom.

Why are you here, Elijah?, the Lord said, as if the Lord did not know.
As if the Lord had not mourned every time a servant was slaughtered.
As if the Lord had not charged the last remaining prophet with destroying the gods who offered fertility in exchange for blood and violence and death.
As if the Lord had not heard the proclamation of Jezebel: may those gods do whatever they like to me if I do not tear your life from you.
As if the Lord God had not come down from heaven in a flaming and magnificent burst to proclaim that whatever might try to drown it, freedom and life and freedom and life and freedom and life would fight through.

When the Gerasenes, Gentiles who knew not of the God of Israel, arrived at the tombs, they found the man dressed and completely sane,
and the pig-herders said:  This Jesus cast the legion of demons out.
And the people said:  Who is this Jesus, this Jewish rabbi?
And the people said:  Who is this God which he proclaims?
And the people said:  This man has been so violent that leg irons and chains could not hold him.
And the people said:  This man has been so dangerous that we have let him live among bones and graves to protect ourselves.
And the people said:  This church has been so violent that it has broken our bodies and hearts and told us to be grateful that God might spare us from how we were made.
And the people said:  This church has been so dangerous that we have watched it work itself into a frenzy among dead bones, and we have let it go, in the hope we might be safe.
And the people said:  You are asking us to welcome home a man and a church who has tried to destroy us.
And Jesus left, but left the man behind, to live into the story of what God has done.

In the sound of sheer silence, the church began to speak, and said:
We mourn you!
We mourn you!
We mourn you!
As if the church had not been demon-possessed.
As if the church had not tried to tear Elijah limb from limb.
As if the church was not complicit in the wind and the fire and the earthquake.
As if the church had not seen devastation and demonization, death threats and suicide, the continual murders of trans women of color -- and responded with sheer silence.
As if the church had not beaten and broken the lesbian and gay and bisexual and transgender and queer children of God and stood over their bodies to mockingly say:  Where is your God now?

The church proclaims that its demons are gone, but dead bodies lie around it.

Meanwhile, the messenger of God finds Elijah.
Get up and eat, the angel said,
and spread a simple table:  a jar of water and a hot bit of flatbread.
Not much.  But enough.
Enough to take us back through the wilderness.
Enough to find each other,
to fight for life amid proclamations of death.
To fill the sound of sheer silence
with the powerful resurgence of ourselves.

They tried to bury us.
They didn’t know we were seeds.


---

( The last lines are from Dinos Christianopoulos, a Greek 20th century poet and gay man.  The lines were adopted and used often in the Zapatista movement, a Mexican revolution for social and agrarian reforms in the 1990s. 

Image by Oscar Keys through Unsplash. )

Finally: or, the day Isaiah promised

Finally.

Finally, finally, finally.

Finally!

We are laughing, we are crying, we are singing, we are dancing in the streets.  It is Pride weekend and we finally, finally, finally have won marriage equality for same-gender relationships in every state in America.

This is a day centuries in waiting.  This is a day I wasn’t sure I’d see in my lifetime, and here it is.  The exhale of a million long-held breaths is like the sound of the Holy Spirit.  

This is the day the prophet Isaiah promised, telling those with no family to sing as if they had a hundred children, offering love and redemption to those who had too long carried fear, shame, discouragement, and disgrace.

Finally! 

We will celebrate well this weekend.

Yet many voices remind us that there is much more work to be done.  Jennicet Gutiérrez’s interruption of President Obama’s LGBT reception has re-drawn attention to the oppression of trans women of color who are imprisoned or detained in American cells.  Nine trans women of color have been murdered in 2015 alone.  LGBT children and teens still comprise 40% of the homeless youth population, many cast out from hateful families and shunned by friends and churches.  Thousands of open or closeted LGBT people will hear today, from family and friends and coworkers and peers and even church leaders, that the Supreme Court’s decision is one more American backslide into perdition.

Nation-wide rights to marriage ends one part of legal discrimination; it does not end the cultural, societal, religious, and interpersonal hatred many of us face each day.  

So the question is:  what do we do now?  A person of faith might say:  Where is God calling us now?

Today’s ruling has only legal effect; it changes nothing about religious practices of barring same-gender couples from marriage.  But there is something glorious and godly in it yet.  The good news of the long arc of history that bends toward justice is the good news of a just and loving God.

This is the day the prophet Isaiah promised.  This is the day of rebuilding.

We have been torn down.  We, the LGBT community, have been gripped and pulled and ripped apart by those who opposed us, by strangers and family alike, who claimed we had no place in the law or in the house of God or even the world.  We have lived in legal and religious exile.  But God has been calling us back, relentlessly, pleadingly, fighting through the crowds of hate to offer a word of hope.

And today, the foundation for our house has been laid.  We have been afflicted and storm-tossed, and today, we see a foundation laid with silver and sapphire, towers of rubies and gates made of precious stone.  We are being made a city shining for all to see.  We are a promise:  we are God’s yes, yes, yes to hope and work and resurrection.  That which seemed impossible is possible.  That which seemed far off is near.

This is the day the prophet Isaiah had promised.  This is the day when the Lord cried out, Have you no money?  Come, buy, eat.  I want to feed you far better than hatred and fear ever can.

Let us learn from the stones that built this foundation.  Let us remember the lessons we learned as we fought for marriage equality state by state; as we had the hard conversations with friends and family when we declared our own unalienable rights; as we saw the tide begin to turn, the low roll of waves of acceptance.  We can bring these lessons to greater work.  We can take what has built the foundation of this house -- dedication, hope, a powerful belief in justice -- and continue the fight for our brothers and sisters.  We can reduce homelessness among LGBT youth.  We can see trans health care covered by insurers and doctors.  We can examine our own relationships and root out abuse, addiction, codependency, and all other toxicity that has crept in from the hatred we lived in each day.

And if we are people of faith, let us too learn from the stones that built this foundation.  Let us remember that the lies we are told by family and society and supposedly loving Christians do not tame the God who is pursuing us in madly irrational hope.  Let us hear the voice of God who says I gather the outcasts, even more than you can count.  We can find our home in the house of God again.  We can believe that there is a place for us, that a loving God is beating down each door and wall in the passionate hope that there will be space for all.  We can raise up the voices of faithful LGBT Christians, hearing the voices of the prophets in our midst, calling us home.

We can do this.  Whether we were brought here today by the spirit of a just and loving God or the hard work of thousands of LGBT people who believed in a better future or (as I suspect) a gracious overflowing of both, we have come this far by a powerful faith.  We have all believed in something, together.  We have more work to do, but look at how far we have come; we already know we can do more.

Where is God calling us now?  To build on the foundation; to rebuild the house of God, a house of prayer for all people.  There will be peace, and food, and joy enough for all.  And the house of God, which once was a boundary between, will be a home for everyone.

Finally, our work is done.

Finally, our work can begin.

---------------------------------

This summer I've joined up with Voices in the Wilderness, a blogging collective empowering Christian writers to impact the world.  You can find more posts like this at http://www.viwcollective.com/ .

CrowdRise Fundraiser: Queer Grace Website

I realized I was gay when I was fourteen years old. I had the massive fortune to be born into a family and a congregation that loved me, but even in that safety net I could not miss the vitriol and violence committed against LGBTQ people by supposed "Christians."  Trying to find my identity and my faith in the midst of a religion that continually fought over my worth wore on my soul, and there were times I thought about leaving the church.

Sixteen years later, the crisis of faith and identity among lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and other sexual and gender minority people continues. Progress has been made, and the internet abounds with theology, interpretation, compassion, and compelling personal stories. But much of the information available is scattershot, sown throughout the web and often lost in google searches.

I have been dreaming for a few years of creating a web community where resources could be housed and shared to help LGBTQ people navigate the waters of faith and identity. Can one be Christian and gay, and what does that look like? What about transgender? What about bisexual or pansexual (and also, what do those terms mean)? Why would we say "queer" when for so many years it's been a violent slur? What does the church have to say about asexuality, or polyamory? How does Christian faith intersect not only with gender identity and sexuality, but also with sexism, racism, classism, and other systems of abuse?

There are incredible answers to these questions by authors and prophets far better equipped than me. What I am hungry to do is to create an encyclopedia of ideas, collecting the best the internet has to offer on the topic of Christian faith and LGBTQ identities. I've come to recognize that I can't do this alone -- nor can I hammer it out in a free weekend. This is going to take a lot of work.

So, on my 30th birthday, I'm asking: will you help? Will you chip in $5 or $10 to buy me a few hours worth of caffeine- and sugar-fueled website building?

I'm setting the insane goal of $1000 because I think it could happen. $200 would cover really really nice webhosting through SquareSpace for the next two years.  Some of the rest could fund ads on Facebook and elsewhere to boost visibility, or pay artists and photographers, or donate to already-existing organizations when I link to their material.  And, the rest would also create a stipend for me to work with.  Maybe it won't happen.  But maybe it could, and it's my 30th birthday; wanna make it the best one yet? :)

Queer Grace website fundraiser

The Advocacy Spectrum

While I was at the Gay Christian Network conference, I got the chance to meet with Jake, one of the coordinators of the @FaithinFerguson / Theology of Ferguson twitter feed.  Jake called me today to chat, and we got to talking about advocacy and activism and the difficulty of figuring out where people "are".

In any social justice issue -- #BlackLivesMatter, LGBTQ welcome in churches, anything in between -- there is a spectrum of advocacy.  Some people are just beginning to learn about the issue and how it relates to who they are.  Some people are ready to storm the gates of political and religious oppressive systems.  And there are a whole host of people in between.  It's hard sometimes, especially when you are trying to get Very Big Things Done, that there are people just at the beginning of understanding.

As Jake and I chatted, I sketched and doodled, and then after the phone call I tweeted a first draft to him -- the Advocacy Spectrum.

I focused on advocacy/activism around LGBTQ issues (because sometimes being more specific makes a metaphor easier to manage), and here is what I drew:

The PEDESTRIAN:  Just beginning to come out.  Not ready to ride.  Still a lot to discover!

The CYCLIST:  Coming out to safe people, beginning relationships and advocacy.  Not safe yet to be "out in traffic" for emotional, financial, etc reasons.

CAR:  Autonomous!  Safe to be out.  Self-supported.  Out in all or most areas of life.

BUS:  Advocates & allies working together in the same direction.  "Riders" are out in most/all situations.

SEMI:  A smaller group of advocates and activists moving big ideas forward.

MOTORCYCLES:  Nimble and fast.  Cutting edge ideas and hopes.  Intimidating in groups!

Some additional commentary:

- Everyone is going at their own pace, but all are moving in the same direction.

- Not everyone starts as a Pedestrian.  I was extremely lucky and grew up in a family & a church that supported me in my sexuality and faith, so I would say I came out right onto a bus.  That gives me incredible advantage and privilege over those who had to start with walking, and work through the very difficult process of getting to a safe enough point to come out.

- Once you're "on the road", there's no objective benefit to a Car or a Bus or a Semi or a Motorcycle.  Some people like the speed of Harleys.  Some people wanna work together on public transit.  None of these are "better" than another -- they're all different ways, with different benefits and drawbacks, of getting to the same place.

I tweeted this image out earlier and got some fantastic feedback.  So far:

Your turn.  What would you add?