Crossposted from the Ecumenicals: "What is the role of LGBTQ+ individuals within the church?"

I write one or twice a month for a group called The Ecumenicals, a loosely affiliated bunch of young adults from various Christian (and non-Christian) faith walks who explore a particular topic around Christian faith and life each week.

This week's was:

What is the role of LGBTQ+ individuals within the church?

And this was my reply.

I cannot claim a special role in the church for myself or for my LGBTQ+ brothers and sisters.  We’ve had one for long enough.

We have been isolated.  We have been rejected.  After we finally came to terms with the searing truth of ourselves, hard-wrought and heart-breaking, the truth we couldn’t stop facing after years of begging prayers and desperate hopes that it wasn’t true -- after we finally spoke the words, “I am gay,” “I am queer,” “I wasn’t born in the right body,” we have been told that our soul-shattering and world-opening truth was offensive to God.  That we, laid bare before the Lord and before our brothers and sisters in Christ, were an abomination, and our best hope to escape eternal damnation was only if we locked up the truth about ourselves and lived a solitary half-life of self-hatred and pain.

We have been tortured, spiritually and psychologically and emotionally and physically.  We have been subjected to psychologically traumatizing and medically disproven practices.  We have been hung out on a fence in the middle of Wyoming and beaten to death with the butt of a gun.  We wear bulletproof vests to our ordinations.  We retire from our bishopric early after death threats dog us and our partners for years.  “Good Christians” and their churches come forward at every turn to kill us.  And so we leave the church, a mass exodus into a wilderness where the name of Jesus is a neon beacon of condemnation and terror.

So when you ask me, “What is the role of LGBTQ+ individuals within the church?”, I want to reply, “What more do you want from us?”

How many more times do you need us to tell our stories?  How many more books and blogs and documentaries and It Gets Better videos do you require before you will listen?  How much more ministry done, how many more food shelves and homeless shelters and compassionate care, how much more beautiful music and hand-crafted art, how many more volunteer hours and weekly tithes, all poured into an institution that gladly takes our time and money but still treats us as second-class?

How many more broken teens and young adults, and mid-life crises, and couples together for fifty years who only now can legally marry in a handful of states, do you require of us?

There are days when I would gladly offer that we might be like the Gentiles of the early church.  That the role of LGBTQ+ individuals is to take up the wide-eyed exclamations of the Ethiopian eunuch in Acts 8, “How can I understand, unless someone guides me?”  “Does the prophet say this about himself or about someone else?”  “Look!  Here is water!  What is to prevent me from being baptized?”  There are days when I have likened me and my queer brothers and sisters to Cornelius in Acts 10, dedicating years to almsgiving and constant prayer, anxiously awaiting the arrival of Simon Peter and his declaration that “God has shown me that I should not call anyone profane or unclean.”  There are days when I have found our role in those early outcasts, the foreigners who were not welcome in the temple, the God-fearers who prayed fervently to the Lord.

But I am tired.  I am tired of justifying my place in God’s tent.  I am tired of dressing up the lives of LGBTQ+ people in biblical allegories in the desperate hope that the church will stop killing us.

I want to know what role the church is going to play in our lives.  I want to know if the church is willing to put aside its selective biblical literalism.  I want to know if the church is ready to see the visions and hear the voice of God, who sent Philip to the chariot and Peter to Cornelius’ house.  I want to know if you are going to make a safe space for me and my people to speak our truth.  Because I am tired of watching my queer brothers and sisters die while the church waits to decide what our “role” is.

The only role I’m willing to accept for LGBTQ+ people is “beloved children of God.”

Ecumenicals post 18: on the Eucharist

My submission to the Ecumenicals for a collection of posts on the Eucharist.


What is your view of the Eucharist/The Lord's Supper?  Given the differing views (transubstantiation / consubstantiation or sacramental union / symbolic presence) why do you hold to yours?

I belong to the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, which means that confessionally I believe in consubstantiation, or the “sacramental union” of bread / body and wine / blood.  What Luther believed and taught, and what the Lutheran church has confessed, is that Christ is fully present in the bread and wine.  The elements do not change physically or substantially (as in transubstantiation.)  But Christ has promised to be with us in the breaking of the bread.

I believe this.  And because I believe that Christ is fully present, I believe also this:  that anyone can receive, anyone can distribute, and anyone can consecrate.

The last point might seem the most heretical, but it’s actually the most confessionally sound!  Martin Luther affirmed early in his reform works that all baptized Christians are, through Christ, “priests and kings” (On the Freedom of A Christian).  This Lutheran belief in “universal priesthood” continues to the present day.  All baptized Christians are called to preach the Word, and all are capable of officiating the sacraments (baptism and communion).  Luther also cautioned (and we continue this, as well) that “for good order,” we should prefer that those who are called and ordained to the specific office of priesthood are the ones to offer the sacraments.  But any baptized Christian is capable of offering them “in an emergency.”

Following in the belief of a “universal priesthood,” Lutherans may allow any baptized Christian to distribute the consecrated sacraments.  Certain denominations and congregations take different definitions of “for good order,” here, and some have requirements as far as who may serve:  only adults, only the confirmed, only pastors or deacons, and so on.  The congregation I presently serve allows anyone to serve communion -- including children.  Last Sunday one of our beloved six-year-olds, Annie, served alongside her father.  I stopped singing the communion hymn to watch her wide eyes and careful hands, and to hear her joyous chirp of “Jesus’ blood, shed for you”.

Growing up in the Episcopal church, I knew at an early age that I wanted to become a priest -- to preach and to preside over communion.  But there were rules in my congregation (and perhaps in the whole denomination).  Only adults could serve, and only adults that had been to a weekend training and received certification.  By the time I was “of age,” I was off at college.

Six weeks into my life at Saint Olaf, I was attending the on-campus Lutheran service.  It was homecoming weekend and the chapel was packed.  A friend who served in the sacristy came and grabbed me during the Peace, explaining that they didn’t have enough servers and would I help?  I followed her, thinking perhaps I could help distributing empty cups.  Instead, the campus pastor (who was over six feet tall, thin as a rail, and had a beard and voice like a movie Moses) tried to put the plate of bread in my hands.

“I can’t serve,” I told him.  “I haven’t been trained.”

“Do you know what to say?” he asked.

“I … ‘The body of Christ, given for you.’”

He let go of the plate and I felt its full weight in my hands.  “There.  You’ve been trained.”

And I served communion that day.

You see, Luther’s argument that Christ is fully present in the bread and wine does not just have philosophical ramifications.  For me and for the churches I have served, it is a full embodiment of the Lutheran belief that the Lord’s Supper is a gift.  It is not the ordained priest, nor the right words spoken, or the proper training, that turns the bread and wine into body and blood.  It is only and totally Christ’s promise at the Last Supper, the promise that “This is my body; this is my blood.”  When we eat the bread and drink of the cup, we confess that Christ is present with us, in the eating and drinking, just as much as he was with the disciples on that Passover night.

God is the one who does the work in the Eucharist; we only receive.  It is Christ’s words, not ours, which bear the mystery of bread turned to body and wine to blood.  It is unimportant, then, who is serving, because it is Christ who truly serves.  This is (for me) the meaning of Christ’s full presence, the “sacramental union.”

My first point, that anyone can receive, is the one most likely to cause scandal.  This is not a consistent practice in the Lutheran church.  There are Lutheran denominations which limit communion only to those in that specific denomination, or members of that specific congregation.  There are ELCA churches that limit communion to the confirmed, or to those who have been through a First Communion class.  But the churches I have served in the past five years serve all.  Everyone who comes forward and puts out a hand receives communion.  Every toddler, who clings with one arm to Mom’s waist and with the other reaches for the bread, is fed.  All that is required is an open palm.

What we recognize and teach is that Christ is fully present, and that Christ was given for all.  Not only those of a certain age.  Not only those of a certain congregation or denomination.  Not even only those who are baptized.  Christ was given for the world.  If we believe that Jesus is fully present in the bread and wine, as a gift of grace from God for the work of salvation, then we have no power to limit it.  It is God’s work, not ours -- Christ’s body and blood.