God's Love is Big Tent for Gay Rights

I remember only bits and pieces from my college education and I’m not sure why certain things have stuck. I can still recite the definition of “paradox” learned in an upper level lit class. And I remember vividly one thing I picked up in my Biblical Interpretation class at Concordia Lutheran College in Ann Arbor: The first principle is “Let scripture interpret scripture.”
This is as much a warning as a principle: Don’t go pulling out little bits of scripture to use as building blocks until you’ve studied the entire blueprint. It’s good advice for our politicians as well as our religious leaders. Unfortunately, our high-profile preachers, with help from the media, have made it difficult.
Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, now a candidate for his party’s presidential nomination, seemed to understand this in 1994 when he was running for the U.S. Senate. Writing from a perspective that saw our great democracy as inclusive, he said, “If we are to achieve the goals we share, we must make equality for gays and lesbians a mainstream concern.” He knew then, his oldest son Tagg Romney said in a recent New York Times article, “… it was very wrong to discriminate.
But now, in the heat of a tough primary campaign and dogged by conservative religious leaders and their media publicists, Gov. Romney has been forced to wear the approved mask when facing the gay rights issue. And he doesn’t stand alone. His dilemma is no different than that of others running for public office. The conservative branch of Christianity is very adept at making the media believe their view is God’s view.
I don’t expect the media to know that first principle of Biblical Interpretation, but you’d think these theologians, many of them proudly sporting the title “Reverend Doctor” before their names, would have this basic knowledge. Jesus, for example, once told a Canaanite woman he “was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel,” but today’s Christian leaders don’t run around saying, “Well, golly, I guess we shouldn’t be Christians after all.” They understand in the larger context of scripture that Jesus came to make God’s presence real for all people. That larger context, put simply, is God’s Love. It’s a big tent, a universal tent, with room for all God’s children, and certainly not limited by sexual orientation.

Real Heroes are Never Part of the Status Quo

Adventurer Steve Fossett seems like a decent man. He has a winning smile and eyes that sparkle with possibility. I’m sure he’s a hoot to party with. For the sake of his circle of friends and family, let’s pray he comes out of the desert alive. But for all his records in the air and on the sea, his heroism is of the petite variety.
Real heroes are never conventional. Conventional heroes may show bravery in the face of danger, as Fossett surely has, but true courage is always in opposition to the status quo. Someday we may have a culture so fine that this will cease to be true. But for now it’s as much a fact as in the days of Jesus, Moses, Elijah and Jeremiah. True heroes stand up for what could be, what should be, against what is. For true heroes it’s not about the self—as it clearly is for Fossett—it’s about putting one’s self at risk to serve God’s good intentions. Simply putting one's self at risk is not enough to make a hero.
Those who followed Jesus could plainly hear that he spoke with authority not present in the words of their established religious leaders—mirroring God and not simply mimicking God as the scribes and Pharisees. The kings of Israel and Judah tried desperately to exclude their true prophets, instead assembling a cadre of counterfeit prophets who would tell them what they wanted to hear. So it remains. If you doubt it, turn on any news network and hear the prophets of the status quo—each well compensated for their effort—struggling mightily to make things seem right when we as a people know in our hearts they are not.
Finding truth was never meant to be as easy as lying back on the couch and turning on the TV. Prophets in general are not found in comfortable places. Jesus’ followers walked great distances to isolated places to hear the truth. And that brings us back to Mr. Fossett: Let’s pray he comes out alive. Maybe, like Jesus, he will have had a desert epiphany.

Celebrity Fixation Blocks View of Who We Are

Whatever happened to the poor? Syndicated columnist E.J. Dionne asked that question last week knowing full well that our nation’s poor hadn’t magically disappeared. Dionne was commenting on a recent study by Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, a liberal media watch group that studied 38 months of nightly news broadcasts on ABC, NBC and CBS.
“With rare exceptions,” the study said, “… poverty and the poor seldom even appear on the evening news—and when they do, they are relegated mostly to … platitudes about their hardships.”
Dionne sees the poor and struggling middle class as “barricaded behind our fixation on celebrity, our titillation over personal sin and public shame …” Using figures from the FAIR report, Dionne says that in the period studied between September 2003 and October 2006 the three networks combined for 58 stories about poverty. In that same period they broadcast 69 stories on the legal woes of Michael Jackson. Enough said.
News programs aren’t the only place on television missing the real lives of people other than the comfortable. And even when TV people seem to be like you and me, they don’t share our problems: they go anywhere they want, do whatever and buy whatever they want. I guess that makes sense. Especially on a sitcom, you don’t want unfunny, unhappy people. And in our consumption culture, you can’t be happy unless you’re getting things and doing things. So they do, and the bill never comes around.
I’m not asking to trip back to shows of the 60s and 70s where people struggled weekly—like Good Times or All in the Family. But hiding working class life also risks hiding much of our culture’s spiritual reserves. As a social worker with the elderly in Florida I saw time and again how people who had faced financial challenges all their lives met aging with greater courage that those who had achieved material security but were now rendered poor by circumstances beyond their control.
We’re missing that courage and so much more: the strength of family ties, church as a center of life, a more physical way of being--closer to the basics we're born with. This is not to say the poor haven’t been victimized by our mania for things, or our national trend to obesity. Of course they have. Everyone who has raised children in this culture knows it’s nothing short of war to teach children to value themselves on virtues beyond material accumulation. In part, we fail because as Christians we have for too long acted unsure about the pursuit of pleasure. In our bodies, in our minds, in our gift for sensing a spiritual reality that transcends all limitations, God has wonderfully made us to feel joy and pleasure. But we, as Paul writes, have preferred the works of the creature over those of the creator, adoring our things while treating pleasure as “personal sin and public shame.”