David's blog: Christianity

Sunday, May 23rd, 2010

Amidst our festively decorated sanctuary Ruth read the Scripture.	This Sunday at my church, Cross Creek Community Church, United Church of Christ, we celebrated Pentecost Sunday. Our worship space was festively decorated in Pentecost Red with balloons everywhere lifted by the Spirit! Click any photo to embiggen it. Of course, I brought one of the balloons home myself to enjoy on my balcony:	After worship some people released their balloons into the wild.
Mike Castle preached about Pentecost and said next year perhaps we should add a goose to the decor as an additional symbol of how the Spirit works.		Watching balloons everywhere after worship
Being mainline Protestants we don’t normally do Communion except for the first weekend of each month, but for Pentecost we made an exception.		Dan Carl, the pastor’s wife, snagged a couple balloons.
Happy anniversary to Ken and Richard!		Sue tries to get her balloons into her van.

Friday, April 2nd, 2010

As I’ve done for a few years now (the first time was in 2006), I participated again today in the annual Good Friday Walk for Peace and Justice, combining the Stations of the Cross with social justice issues ranging from immigration to health care to homophobia to hunger, issues whose continued existence is why Jesus is still suffering metaphorically on the Cross. Whatever you believe about why Jesus was crucified—whether you believe it was the only way Jesus could save us from the horrible eternal damnation an omnipotent God would otherwise have had to subject us to, or whether you believe Jesus was a radical communitiy organizer who ran afoul of the Romans—you can probably agree that Jesus (the historical one or the arisen one) would be aghast that the issues raised each year during this walk are still unresolved.
	Here is the Rev. Ruth Brandon, Cross Creek member and also Association Minister of the Southwest Ohio Northern Kentucky Association of the United Church of Christ, on Courthouse Square at the start of the Walk with the cross she selected. Later as we were walking, Ruth told me that fear is what keeps Jesus on the cross.	On Third Street in front of the old front entrance to the downtown Dayton Metro Library (the side that still bears its old name, Dayton and Montgomery County Public Library)
	Other Cross Creekers who participated are Nancy and Dan Tepfer (left and right) and Nikki Hammes (middle with her kids).	Marching through Cooper Park behind the library
	Looking back at marchers along Third Street	The Rev. Darryl Fairchild, community organizer for Vote Dayton (soon to become a reorganized Dayton chapter of the IAF), with Beth
	Every Good Friday we always seem to end up in front of at least one pawn shop (this time we spoke before two of them).	We marched past the Citizens Federal Centre, which seems to have resumed its maiden name after being abandoned by Fifth Third Bank, so I had to take a photo.
	Although you can’t tell it from the outside (ironicially?), this is where the Greater Dayton LGBT Center has office space adjacent to the MJ’s Cafe gay bar. Cross Creek hosted Station 4 on the walk, Jesus Meets His Mother, addressing how violence against LGBT people affects our families. Nancy and I were the readers.	What was the topic for the station across the street from the CareSource building? Equitable health care for all, of course.
	The Rev. Beth Holten, interim executive director of Greater Dayton Christian Connections, didn’t start the walk with a cross but ended up with one nonetheless.	Although our march this year took us east of Main Street, rather than west, our last station was still at our traditional stopping point, First Baptist Church of Dayton.

Friday, December 13th, 2009

Tonight I saw the Dayton Playhouse’s production of Terrence McNally’s Corpus Christi, a play that reimagines the myth of Jesus. Corpus Christi first premiered eleven years ago, in 1998, and I first saw it six years ago in Cincinnati. That 2003 production was by Know Theatre Tribe (see archive.org’s copy of their Corpus Christi page) in an unconventional theatre space called Gabriel’s Corner housed in a church building. I enjoyed the play six years ago, but I enjoyed it even more tonight.

Corpus Christi has driven conservative Christians crazy since before its premiere, and tonight’s production in Dayton was no exception. The sidewalk into the Dayton Playhouse’s theatre was lined with protestors, quiet and polite but bearing signs complaining about the blasphemy of the play and promising to pray for all involved in it (I told the bearers of one prayer sign that I’d pray for them too).

I’m sure that these protestors, if at some point they google Corpus Christi and run across my little review here, will think my reference to Jesus’s story as “myth” just to be more blasphemy along the lines of McNally’s play. Yet I mean no disrespect to the historical Jesus (if there was one, and I’m inclined to think there probably was) nor to the idea of Jesus, nor do I think that Jesus, at least not the Jesus in whom I believe, would be offended by my talking about his story as myth. I don’t choose the word “myth” because I think the story of Jesus is made up or not real; instead “myth” comes to my mind in reference to Corpus Christi because of truth.

The truth I mean is not literal truth. Obviously Jesus was not born of a Brooklyn Jewish Mary in a sleazy pay-by-the-hour motel in Corpus Christi, Texas, to the sounds of johns fucking prostitutes. Bishop Forsyth of South Sydney needn’t point out that Corpus Christi is “unhistorical and untrue” — McNally isn’t asking anyone to believe that Texas was ever under Roman rule. McNally isn’t even asking people to believe that the historical Jesus was in fact gay (for someone who is asking people to believe that, read a post I wrote in 2004 about the book The Man Jesus Loved).

Bishop Forsyth and others outraged by Corpus Christi are quite right that the play is “unhistorical” but they’re quite wrong about its being untrue. The bishop and his fellow protestors need to read some Joseph Campbell and learn about the power of myths. For anyone who has ears to hear there is indeed truth to be found in Corpus Christi.

That truth is not primarily that Jesus was gay, although Sean Frost’s portrayal tonight of a 17-year-old Texan Joshua going to prom with a girl and then not wanting to do what was coming naturally to all his straight classmates that night certainly rang true to me — in high school I went through the motions of dating and even kissing girls and went to prom with a girl, but like Joshua, I never sealed the deal. I also spent too much time staring at boys on whom I had crushes, enough to attract the wrong kind of attention, just as Joshua does in Corpus Christi. And let me mention here that I found Mark Diffenderfer, who played the masculinely and aggressively gay Judas, to be quite hot.

No, the primary truth to be learnt from Corpus Christi is something one might expect even those protesting the play to agree with, for despite the liberties McNally takes, he remains faithful to the most important lessons taught by the Jesus of the Gospels. Love your neighbor, and realize that your neighbor isn’t just the person who shares your demographics and lives right next door to you but that the people who make you most uncomfortable, the lepers, the homeless, the faggots, the tall-haired Pentecostals, whoever, are also your neighbors.

People who focus on Corpus Christi’s literal untruths and protest the play miss this most important truth. What Jesus would want isn’t protection from blasphemy — as depicted both in Corpus Christi and in the Book of Matthew, if Jesus wanted protection from blasphemers, “Do you think [he] cannot call on [his] Father and … [have] at once … twelve legions of angels” to provide such protection? No, instead what Jesus wants is for us to recognize the divinity in each of us (shown beautifully in the introduction/baptism of each of the actors/disciples at the beginning of the play).

However, Corpus Christi focuses not only on Jesus’s message of love but also on the hatred his fellow men show to one another and to him, culminating in the play’s portrayal of the Passion and crucifixion of Jesus. Here I find Corpus Christi to be very true towards traditional Christian understanding — Jesus’s betrayal by Judas and his suffering and death were preordained by God — but I disagree (ironically, probably as opposed to the play’s protestors) with that traditional understanding and its depiction in this play. I do not believe that the only way an omnipotent God could forgive humanity was by sending a Son to Earth to be sacrificed to atone for our sins. Hello, omnipotent means all-powerful and an all-powerful God could damned well decide just to forgive us, couldn’t he? No, instead I think that the historical Jesus with his radical message of defying social conventions and loving everyone ran afoul of religious and secular authorities and got himself killed.

Yet despite my disagreement with the historical accuracy of the crucifixion in Corpus Christi, I think director Michael Boyd did manage to bring truth to its depiction nonetheless. The projection of photos of protestors from Westboro Baptist Church, of defaced pro-gay Christian billboards and of Matthew Shepard and the site of his death rammed home the point that just as the historical Jesus faced hatred from his fellow humans so too are we today endangered by such hatred, especially if we try to be true to Jesus’s message. Unconditional love of all God’s children is radical and dangerous and difficult and scary.

Corpus Christi at the Dayton Playhouse runs through November 22, so if you’re reading this post shortly after I’ve written it you still have time to see it. Unlike other productions Boyd’s includes no intermission but runs straight through, but I found it very powerful and thought the time passed quickly. You might not think you could find such good theatre in Dayton, but you can.

Saturday, September 26th, 2009

Candace Chellew-Hodge, Jason & deMarco, and the Holy Cow

Candace Chellew-Hodge provided the message part of Holy C.O.W., and Jason & deMarco provided the music part.

This morning I attended a workshop at my church by the Rev. Candace Chellew-Hodge (the first part of whose last name rhymes with “shoe,” not “chew”), author of Bulletproof Faith: A Spiritual Survival Guide for Gay and Lesbian Christians. Frankly I’d been a bit reluctant to go. I’m quite secure in my faith and don’t need what I thought Chellew-Hodge would have to offer, but because I chair my church’s Justice & Witness ministry, whose Equality Cross Creek team arranged the big Holy C.O.W. (Celebrate Our Welcome) Weekend of which this workshop was a part, I felt obligated to go. However, having gone, I can say that I did enjoy hearing Chellew-Hodge speak (if she ever wanted to give up preaching, she could take up a career in stand up comedy) and learned a thing or two.

What I’d thought Chellew-Hodge would have to offer (and my thinking this probably shows that I did not read her book) was a bunch of refutations to the various Bible verses so often trotted out by people who believe homosexuality is a sin, but that’s not what Chellew-Hodge’s talk was mainly about. She did offer one fun refutation, however. If someone cites Romans chapter 1 to show that God disapproves of homosexuality, you can ask whether that person has read Romans chapter 2, which talks about no one’s having any excuse to pass judgement on anyone else.

Yet proof text fighting, countering one Bible verse with another, was not the point of Chellew-Hodge’s talk. Instead, her main idea is that people who use the Bible or other arguments to condemn homosexuality are trying to offer a gift and just because one is offered a gift does not mean that one has to accept it. In other words, for those of us who are secure in our faith, for those of us who have come to an understanding that we too are made in God’s image, for those of us who find value in trying to live as Jesus taught and are comfortable doing so without having to try to change our sexual identities, (and, I imagine, also for those who are comfortable not being Christian) there shouldn’t be anything anyone can say that will bother us. I pretty much knew that already because the example she gave was already true for me — if someone tells me I’m going to hell, it doesn’t bother me. I know, for a lot of reasons, that I’m not going to hell. What I also know, but more often need to put into practice, is that I can’t change the minds of most people who do think I’m going to hell and thus usually shouldn’t bother to try to do so.

Chellew-Hodge also pointed out that if we are bothered by something that someone else says about our faith, that we are bothered is not about the person who said something but rather is about ourselves and is something we need to work on for ourselves. She told us about having been motivated to go to seminary in order to learn how to refute the various things fundamentalist Christians say about homosexuality, to be able to change their minds and convince them they were wrong, but she finished her studies, having gotten weapons that might come in handy for proof text battles, with the conclusion that she didn’t need to engage in battles to defend her faith, in part because such battles usually cannot be won but also because there are better things she can be doing with her time, better ways she can serve God.

Thus, often, Chellew-Hodge said, when she gets hate mail explaining she’s going to hell for her “lifestyle,” she just uses the DELETE button. Sometimes she uses gentle humor—tell her she’s going to hell, and she’ll tell you she’ll save you a seat.

Chellew Hodge also realizes that, just as our being bothered by something someone else says is more about us than it is about them, so too is what someone else says more about them than it is about us. So sometimes when she’s challenged by someone about homosexuality, she really disarms her opponent by using Dale Carnegie’s magic phrase and saying, “I don’t blame you one iota for feeling as you do. If I were you I would undoubtedly feel just as you do.” People who feel compelled to speak out against homosexuality often are looking to do spiritual battle and are surprised when instead their words are simply acknowledged as having been heard.

That’s not to say that Chellew-Hodge never engages in debates with those who disagree with her theology. She warns against doing so in anger and with the intention of coming away right because that leads to frustration and unhappiness. A debate is less about changing one’s opponent’s mind than about quietly influencing bystanders, some of whom might also think as one’s opponent does and others of whom might be, for example, closeted young queers. Gentle and respectful disagreement can open minds.

An example Chellew-Hodge gave is one I too recently found myself using, though perhaps not as gently and respectfully as she. In 2006 Chellew-Hodge spoke on panels in South Carolina against the proposed state constitutional amendment banning gay marriage. Once an African American man spoke up to urge that gay men and lesbians wait until public opinion had changed in our favor before pressing for our rights. Chellew-Hodge told him that after the 1967 Supreme Court decision striking down bans on interracial marriage, polls still showed over 70% of Americans disapproving of such marriages; she pointed out that civil rights shouldn’t be subject to the will of the majority. As Chellew-Hodge pointed out to us at Cross Creek this morning, one can still refute nonsense but should do so gently and respectfully.

Another thing Chellew-Hodge said that stuck with me was that people shouldn’t have to say, “I’m a Christian.” If you have to say it, you might not be acting in the most Christ-like manner. I think that this goes along with the rest of her message, that by striving to live one’s beliefs one can change more minds than by talking about one’s beliefs. It goes along with the best way to get people to be in favor of equal rights for all people including queers—the more queers non-gay people see going out our lives gently, respectfully, trying to work for justice, the less a big deal equal rights for queers will be. It’s probably also the only way to convince people that one can be gay and Christian.

Monday, March 16th, 2009

What a shame…

that homosexual men and women such as Wesley Hill and Bekah Mason continue, so many years after Stonewall, decades since it's been possible to grow up thinking you're "the only one" around, to buy into the bullshit that the only way to be Christian and gay is to consider a large part of who one is to be temptation towards sin placed in one's mind by Satan, something one must resist lest one imperil one's eternal soul.

There's no point in my trying to refute all the arguments that people such as Wesley and Bekah make. Obviously they have access to the Internet and obviously if they'd wanted to, they could have read all sorts of material refuting the worldview to which they're bound. Both of them, should they ever happen across this post, will probably pray to their Lord and Savior Jesus Christ that I come to my senses, see the Light and mend my wicked ways.

Here's hoping that Wesley and Bekah don't waste too much more of their lives trying to suppress who they really are and that sooner rather than later they realize that their gayness is in fact a manifestation of the Divine within all of us.

Sunday, December 3rd, 2006

Real Christians only, please

If you read my blog last month, you know already what ChMS stands for and that some ChMS companies don't care for churches who cater to alternative lifestyles. Despite a few setbacks my church's search for the right web-enabled ChMS has been continuing, with the latest possible candidate being Ekklesia 360, a system that does everything from managing web content to attracting online traffic to involving your community in the ministry to spreading the gospel.

Yes, gospel is spelled with a lower-case "g" on Ekklesia's website, although as it turns out, I'm thinking they should be capitalizing it, because The Gospel's pretty important to them. You see, after we contacted Ekklesia, they took a look at our website and told us they didn't want to do business with us, though not for the reason you might expect, that we're soft on homosexuality. No, it's because of the shocking news, featured on the front page of our website, that a Jew was coming to Cross Creek to preach, and not to preach the Good News that Jesus is Christ.

Rabbi Judy Chessin

Our Jewish guest this weekend was none other than Temple Beth Or's founding rabbi, Rabbi Judy Chessin, an interesting choice for the first weekend of Advent, the season during which we anticipate Christ's birth.

Rabbi Chessin did not come to proclaim that she was a Jew for Jesus but rather explained that she does not believe Jesus was the Messiah. She was quite tactful about it, explaining the criteria outlined in Jewish tradition for what it takes to be the Messiah. A person must fulfill every one of these criteria to be the Messiah, and at least one of them, worldwide peace, is a humdinger. Logically, Rabbi Chessin said, we wouldn't expect there ever to be someone who could qualify. Even Christians don't believe Jesus achieved world peace during his time on Earth, hence the need for a Second Coming.

However, it was our similarities, not our differences, that Rabbi Chessin wanted to stress. We all are waiting for the Messianic age, whether it is marked by the Messiah's return or by his (or her, Rabbi Chessin said) initial arrival. We all need to work together to bring about this time when there'll be no more injustice or ignorance or disease or poverty.

Ekklesia's not having any of this ecumenism (it can't be a coincidence that ecumenism about rhymes with secular humanism, can it?) though. If we're willing to have a rabbi, and a woman nonetheless, stand up in our church and say that Jesus isn't Christ, no matter what she might say about peace on Earth and goodwill toward men, then we're not Ekklesia's type of Christians, and God knows, if they took just any type of Christians, they might as well rename their software Ecumenia 360.

Friday, April 14th, 2006

This year was the first year that my church, Cross Creek Community Church, participated in the annual Good Friday Stations of the Cross walk for justice and peace, along with people from College Hill Presbyterian Church, our partner church. The walk combines the traditional stations with important social justice issues of today and relevant contemporary quotes about each issue. Our church's Justice and Witness committee thought it would be good for us to participate; we got to sponsor station 8, where we talked about discrimination.

So many people think that this week is all about Jesus' having died as part of some convoluted way through which his father could forgive us all for our sins (God couldn't just choose to extend grace to all of us?). Whether or not that is true, I do think that the historical Jesus was a witness for peace and justice, and by calling attention to issues he would have cared about, we take a step towards following his example.

You can see more pictures from the walk in the galleries.

Saturday, May 22nd, 2004

If you've browsed the books I've gotten lately, you might have noticed The Man Jesus Loved: Homoerotic Narratives from the New Testament. I haven't gotten too far in it since I only read it in bed. I usually read for pleasure just before going to sleep, but not for the reason you may be thinking (the book's not about gay erotic stories, although I do have a book or two of those).

Theodore Jennings' argument is that Jesus' beloved disciple, mentioned thusly only in the Gospel of John, was not only a man but Jesus' gay lover. I've never really considered this before, nor, I'd bet, have most people. Certainly people have considered that Jesus might not have been celibate, but perhaps the best known candidate as a mate for Jesus would be Mary Magdalene, especially given the popularity (notoriety?) of works such as The Last Temptation of Christ and The Da Vinci Code.

I wouldn't be upset if the people who think Mary Magdalene was Jesus' lover or wife are right, but they have some explaining to do about the disciple whom Jesus loved. Jesus did have more disciples than the 12 apostles, and some of those disciples were women, but Mary Magdalene was not the disciple whom Jesus loved. During the crucifixion (see John 19:25-27), Mary Magdalene stood at the cross with, among others, the disciple whom Jesus loved. Jesus then presented his mother Mary and that disciple to each other as son and mother, and Jesus' beloved took Mary into his home. So if Mary Magdalene were Jesus' lover and especially if she were the mother of his children (the Merovingian dynasty?!), why is Jesus sending Mary his mother to live with some man instead of with her daughter-in-law and grandchildren?

Of course there are many theories about Jesus' life, the predominant one being that he was celibate, sinless and divine (How can I consider myself Christian if I consider that just a theory? That'd be a whole other blog entry, if not a book). From what I've read so far Jennings does a pretty convincing job of dealing with these other theories, although he acknowledges that gay people may be predisposed to accepting that Jesus was gay (just as homophobes might be predisposed to reject such an argument).

In the chapter I'm reading now (5, "The Hidden Tradition"), Jennings reveals something that is not only surprising to me but that was also surprising to him, namely that this idea that Jesus and the disciple he loved were gay lovers is not new. For example, at the inquest of the death of Christopher Marlowe, one of the men accused of murdering him tried to justify it by complaining that Marlowe had said that "St. John [who many people, but not Jennings, think was the disciple Jesus loved] was bedfellow to Christ." That's just one example Jennings found. Accuse him of being a revisionist homosexual activist if you want, but he's not the only one.

Sunday, April 18th

Today was the last day of the Alliance of Baptists convocation held here in Dayton. I went to the worship service last night, at which the main speaker was Charles Kimball of Wake Forest University, to a dialogue this morning with James Fowler of the Emory University Center for Ethics and Public Policy Research, and to the worship service this morning, at which the main speaker was Karen Thomas Smith of Al Akhawayn University in Morocco.

Jeremiah Wright on Friday night was a very dynamic speaker, and I really enjoyed Karen Thomas Smith today.

The daughter of a Baptist preacher, she became one herself and now serves as ecumenical chaplain at Al Akhawayn, a university founded by the King of Morocco in part to promote dialogue and work among people of different faith backgrounds. Part of what she stressed was that Christians who try to convert people of other faiths not only cause others to question Christians' motives but also lose an opportunity to learn what other faiths have to teach. She's definitely a woman who believes that Jesus had some important things to teach us but that Jesus is not the sole path to a relationship with God and God's creation.

If that's not enough to make you realize that the Alliance of Baptists are different from their more fundamental brethren, two books I bought today at the convocation's bookstore might be. Queer Commentary and the Hebrew Bible on its own might be enough to rile some Southern Baptists, but The Man Jesus Loved: Homoerotic Narratives from the New Testament would certainly make them indignant.

Friday, April 16th, 2004

You may know that I'm a member of Cross Creek Community Church, and you may know that Cross Creek is part of the United Church of Christ, but did you know that Cross Creek is also affiliated with the Alliance of Baptists? Just as some people make certain assumptions when they hear the word Christian so too do they make similar assumptions when they hear Baptist. There are of course Baptists and Christians who are pretty vocal about their beliefs, thus fostering those assumptions, but

there are other Baptists and Christians who put a different emphasis on their beliefs. Southern Baptists might be representative of the former group; the Alliance of Baptists is representative of the latter.

Cross Creek's pastor, Mike Castle, comes from a Southern Baptist background, and after leaving the Southern Baptists and coming to the UCC (with a brief visit to the United Methodists), he wanted Cross Creek to have a connection to the Baptist tradition, at least the parts of that tradition that Cross Creek could affirm. So Cross Creek has been affiliated with the Alliance of Baptists since Cross Creek's founding.

Last year the UCC as a denomination decided to partner with the Alliance of Baptists along with the Christian Church, Disciples of Christ (with whom the UCC already partnered for foreign missions).

The theme for the convocation is "Lifting Our Lights Together: Celebrating Our Ecumenical and Interfaith Relations"

So to make a long story at least somewhat short, this year the 18th annual convocation of the Alliance of Baptists is being held here in Dayton, and Cross Creek is the host church, providing volunteers to staff tables, cook and serve food, house participants and other tasks. Since our building is too small for all the participants, the event is being held downtown at First Baptist Church, an American Baptist church that's also part of the Alliance of Baptists.

I chose an easy task for my volunteer duties, namely providing housing to a participant. My guest this weekend is David Reese, a religion major at Oberlin College. He's got an interesting web site, and apparently he's a comedian who's part of the group Piscapo's Arm.

I'm not participating in the workshops at the convocation, but I am going to the worship services. Tonight's started off fairly slow with all the officials of the hosting congregations and the three denominations taking a long time to say how glad they were that they, each other, and all of us were there. The pace picked up when Timothy Tutt, pastor of United Christian Church in Austin, Texas, explained ecumenism by comparing it to jazz, with some musical help from Winton Reynolds, Phil Borrero and Brad Taylor's jazz trio.

The highlight of the service was a sermon by the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah H. Wright, pastor of Trinity United Church of Christ. This man has a style that's decidedly "African American Baptist preacher," which had me wondering where he was going (was he heading to Biblical literalism? Jesus as Christ is the only path to God?), but by the middle of his sermon he was saying some things I could definitely agree with. I'd be very surprised if any members of his congregation were ardent Bush supporters or strident believers that homosexuality is a sin.

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