“Together we Serve”

Posted by Sarah in Christian practice, Current Events, Prayer, Television and tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , ,

In the United Methodist hymn supplement The Faith We Sing, Hymn 2175 is “Together We Serve” by Daniel Charles Damon:

Together we serve, united by love,
inviting God’s world to the glorious feast.
We work and we pray through sorrow and joy,
extending your love to the last and the least.

We seek to become a beacon of hope,
a lamp for the heart and a light for the feet.
We learn, year by year, to let love shine through
until we see Christ in each person we meet.

We welcome the scarred, the wealthy the poor,
the busy, the lonely, and all who need care.
We offer a home to those who will come,
our hands quick to help, our hearts ready to dare.

Together, by grace, we witness and work,
remembering Jesus, in whom we grow strong.
Together we serve in Spirit and truth,
remembering love is the strength of our song.

Just yesterday, in a cranky mood, I told my husband that I needed to stop spending any time on Facebook or Twitter.  It just seemed like I received a barrage of one thing wrong with the world after the other – things that I was powerless to change.  It was not a lot different from watching television news, and I have given up on the news — the very goal of television news seems to be to desensitize me and overwhelm me at the same time, because it is impossible to process the magnitude of any one news story when there is no pause between one injustice and the next and the next and the next – for 24 hours now, if you watch cable.  (I think this is why I like Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert – because they are not news anchors, they can express their emotions about a piece – genuinely or ironically – before moving on to the next piece.  For me, that moment of reacting to the news item is cathartic.  Also, they tend to report on stuff that is off the “approved television news topics” list.)

But today, I am noticing the difference between the Twitter barrage and the nightly news barrage: community.  A story develops in the reactions that people have to a story, so that the different angles of the story are examined, and articles and other pieces of evidence are proffered, until a thesis in 140 character chunks is laid out.  It was on my Twitter feed that I discovered that I was not alone in being offended by the proposed “Fitch the Homeless” campaign, which was reassuring.  (And probably excessively re-tweeted related stories – apologies to all who follow my feed.) As I followed the story on Twitter, I learned something new, too:  that there is an excess of cast-off clothing in this country – that textile waste is a growing problem.

I started to think about the recent death of more than a thousand garment workers in Bangladesh. Interesting that people seemed to be getting much more worked up over a CEO saying sociopathic things about what body types could belong to “cool kids” than over a number of CEOs sociopathically profiting from unsafe overseas labor.  Why were we singling out one person as a jerk instead of getting angry at the whole system of textile manufacturing: from pesticide runoff and waterway habitat destruction resulting from cotton farming, to the toxic manufacture of synthetic fibers, to the closing of U.S. factories and destruction of local economies, to the opening of factories in countries with little environmental or labor (or building and fire safety!) oversight, to child labor, to the high environmental cost of trans-Pacific shipping, to union busting… how could anyone simply hand an Abercrombie and Fitch t-shirt to an impoverished person and feel like they had done their part?

And as I was thinking about all of that, I found an editorial by Stephen Thomgate on the Christian Century blog talking about the Bangladeshi factory disaster (again via Twitter!!), in which he draws on an idea of Justo Gonzalez about powerlessness.  Thomgate writes:

…the key element is naming not our relative power—the instinctual move for us western liberals—but our relative lack of it. The world’s evil is not something we could stop if only we cared enough to; we are captive to it—and the path from impotent guilt to true solidarity requires naming this powerlessness we have in common with those who have far less power still.

He goes on to write about the need for collective action, because we are indeed powerless on our own.  We can choose to shop in thrift stores, for example, but that does not necessarily change very much about the global economic system.

We do not like feeling powerless.  So we get depressed, or we tune out the world’s problems.  Or we pray, which is much more functional than hiding in our blanket cave – because as we pray, we are acting out of the reality that we are powerless – each one of us alone is, to a greater or lesser extent, powerless.  No wonder the larger, thorny issue of the global economy (particularly as it relates to our clothing) was not getting attention – it is so big, we feel powerless to comprehend its scope, much less do anything about it.

If we think in terms of being members of the Body of Christ, we remember that rather than being called to be functional on our own, we function as parts of a Body in concert with one another.  As thankful as I am for Twitter tonight, I am even more thankful for Church – for the Body of believers that, in their best and truest moments, acts out of love instead of out of fear.  ”Together we serve… our hands quick to help, our hands ready to dare.”

So friends – what will you dare to do as a small part of the solution to a very big problem – the global textiles industry?  In solidarity with all the others powerless before this big big problem – from cotton farmers to Bangladeshi garment workers to the displaced former textile factory workers who have left North Carolina trying to find work elsewhere… to the countless Americans, yourself included, who are considered important only as buying units – as “consumers” – what collective action shall we take?

Even as my weight fluctuates, I am going to attempt to buy no newly manufactured clothes for a year.  Second-hand clothes only between now and May 15, 2014.  Will you join me?  And if not, what action will you take? Working together in opposing injustice, we strengthen one another. “Remembering love is the strength of our song.”

Unity and Schism

Posted by Sarah in Christian practice, Current Events, Pastoral ministry and tagged with , , , , , , ,

I am posting this as part of a synchro-blog on the topic of schism in the UMC. This synchro-blog was organized in honor of the first anniversary of Dream UMC.

For my friends who are not United Methodist, I apologize. I am keeping the tone of this piece “inside baseball,” because I didn’t allow enough time today to revise this for a wider audience.

I remember about five years ago, talking with a friend about how frustrated I was with the failure of the UMC to make any forward progress on inclusivity at General Conference. She pointed out the problems that the Episcopal church was having within the Anglican communion because of choosing to ordain gay priests, and said to me, “Doesn’t it pose an ecumenical problem? Because there is so much disagreement about this issue across denominations?”
She and I were both on track to be ordained, each in different denominations. I replied, “Ordaining women is an ecumenical problem, by those standards. Do you think that we shouldn’t be ordained?”

The dilemma in debates about what makes schism worthwhile and what does not is that it so often neglects the reality that the church is already in schism. Many times over the past centuries, Christians have decided that they could not in good conscience continue under what they saw as a corrupt, or unfaithful, or simply ineffectual system. It happened over indulgences, over communion, over pastoral authority… In the U.S., nearly every Protestant denomination split over slavery, including the Methodists – who splintered into not two, but at least five different denominations over the slavery issue.
The Church is already a fractured family. There are those who say that we should always try and stick it out, but given our history, this seems arbitrary. Why is this iteration of our church more sacrosanct than others? For others who vaguely assert that of course there is a line that they are not willing to cross, I would like to know: where is that line, exactly? And how did the failure of General Conference to even name that we disagree not cross it?

I have to admit, I have been hoping for a split. I see the seeds of a split in the actions of the Northeastern and Western jurisdictional conferences – if the jurisdiction can vote to ignore actions of the General Conference, then it is only a short step to having a whole jurisdiction brought up on charges for failing to uphold the Discipline. Which might be the best kind of split, because then churches don’t have to decide where they stand, initially. Instead, the church would split along geographic lines initially, but individual congregations could hash out different positions over time.
I like the idea of a split because I think that we could all benefit from having scaled down operations – from not being such a major player in everything from lobbying to relief to publishing. Yes, we do great stuff with the money and members we have. But we have turned our denomination into an idol, so conferences and bishops and publications all put too much energy into increasing everyone’s anxiety about how many people we have as compared to fifty years ago, and how relevant we are, and what is our brand, etc. Which leads to some truly awful ad campaigns (Remember the one with the dandelion? “If you wish you can pray.” Um, no. Way to trivialize church, guys!), and worse – to pastors whose ministries are driven more by fear than by love.
I like the idea of a split because it lets so many pastors off the hook. By and large, pastors in the U.S. are opposed to the restrictions on ministry by and to gays and lesbians, but leaving the church (or even putting themselves in a position to be kicked out) means losing a job with health benefits in a bad economy – usually a job that is the only one the pastor has any interest in having. And let’s not forget how many pastors marry young – which means that they have families to support. Splitting would allow pastors who oppose the restrictions to stay pastors and live into their convictions about gay marriage.
And I like the idea of a split because it would show gay and lesbian United Methodists that they have not been forgotten or abandoned – that they are as important to the church as the bullies are.

But admittedly, I have a much more selfish reason to like the idea of a split: I have already split. No longer clergy, I don’t have a voice at annual conference or the ability to get kicked out for defying the rules that bind clergy only. And after more than 20 years of following these issues, I am tired of waiting for things to change at General Conference. Or, more accurately, I have stopped believing that things ever will change at General Conference. So I find myself in an Episcopalian congregation, but every time I come close to joining, I come up against a reservation that is strong enough to keep me on the margins. I am realizing that I still want to be a Methodist – I am a Methodist without a Methodist congregation, until my gay friends can be Methodist pastors, until they can be married in a Methodist church. Until there is a Methodist option for them, there is no Methodist option for me, either.

Maybe you feel that by leaving, I have forfeited my place at the table. I get that – you are sticking it out, and that is not easy. But the voices of the Methodist diaspora need to be heard. There are many pastors and would-be pastors who were driven out of the church because of who they love. There are many laypeople who cannot be a part of a church that half-heartedly welcomes them. In this sense, the question of whether or not the United Methodist Church should split is moot – the church is already split. There are many Methodists who are sitting in UCC, Episcopalian, Lutheran, and Presbyterian churches – or even not in church at all – who would happily return to a Methodist church that truly welcomes them.

Or, you know, keep trying to win over the people with the loud and angry voices, if you think it might make a difference. Give the whole Central Conference strategy a try, if you think they won’t see through it. I’ve shaken the dust of that town off of my feet, and walked on.

Talking Taboo

Posted by Sarah in Books, Christian practice, Writing and tagged with , , , , , ,

In our culture of talk shows and late night Facebook posts, there are many occassions for covering our ears and protesting, “TMI!” [Too Much Information] But in the church, too often we suffer from Too Little Information. In a community that claims to be formed in response to God’s grace – God’s free gift of love for all people – shame keeps our mouths shut. We are afraid of being judged – of being injured in the name of God – and this not an unreasonable fear, but one rooted in hard experience. And so we sit in a pew (or flee from it), holding back our unique history which, if we found the right persons to share it with, would prove to be not so unique after all.

For years I avoided sharing that I had married and divorced in college. And for good reason – I had learned from an early age that silence and shame were the expected responses to a divorce within the Christian community.  But when I began to write about divorce, I found that many pastors and other Christian friends had divorced and remarried, too – and they thanked me for talking about it. This encouraged to share more deeply about the ongoing spiritual and emotional impact of losing my first marriage, including in an essay, “Leaving a Marriage, Finding Jesus,” which will be published in an upcoming book!

Today, I am excited to announce the Indiegogo campaign for that book - Talking Taboo: American Christian Women Get Frank About Faith (coming from White Cloud Press in October.) I am one of 40 women who contributed essays to this book, edited by Enuma Okoro and Erin Lane. Each one of us is committed to starting a conversation and keeping it going.  The radical hospitality of extending Christian love to all people begins with telling our own stories and listening to each other’s stories with grace and humility.  When you pre-order your copy of Talking Taboo through the Indiegogo site, that gives us the resources we need to publicize the book – and to get conversations started in our churches.  Once you have read the book, I am sure you will agree that we have a lot to talk about.

Learn more, and Preorder Talking Taboo via Indiegogo

Read what co-editors Erin Lane and Enuma Okoro have to say about Talking Taboo

Read what Rachel Held Evans, Brian McLaren, and Rosemary Radford Ruether have to say about Talking Taboo