A New Spiritual Practice
It is hard to believe it has been almost three months since I last wrote. So much has happened, but I logged on today to write about a new spiritual discipline I am beginning this morning.
Church started 15 minutes ago, and I am not there. I decided this weekend to leave the church, at least for now. The reasons are best explained in the letter I sent the open and affirming committee of the church, which I have included below this post.
It has been a wonderful couple months. My spiritual practices have begun to feel more natural. My depression has lifted. I have begun exploring adoption and will complete my 20 hours of training, which is the first step of the process, next weekend. But at church, things have gotten more challenging, and I began to realize it did not make much sense to continue to be an active part of the church.
Since making this decision, I meditated for awhile on a good spiritual practice I could use on Sunday mornings, not to replace church exactly, but to focus my morning meditation and expand it beyond the usual somewhat rushed 30 minutes-1 hour I usually have.
I am going to try to post a response each Sunday to the Bible readings of the week. If I were not a writer and a college instructor/program coordinator, I would be a minister for sure; I have always enjoyed writing sermons. This will be a good way to share my thoughts with whoever might be reading. Below is the letter I sent the open and affirming committee at the church, followed by a brief meditation on the readings for this week.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Dear Open and Affirming Committee Members,
I’m sorry that this note is somewhat impersonal, but I hope you will understand that although I’m writing to you as a group, each of you is important to me and each has blessed me in a unique way. On Thursday afternoon, I “hit a wall,” so to speak, and realized I needed to set aside some time for reflection beyond my usual one hour every morning. I spent about five hours in prayer/meditation, and I came out of that time having had a great many realizations. I want to share one important realization with all of you.
I have decided that at this time, at least, I need to withdraw from my involvement in Federated Church. I am writing this, believe me, with a lot of love in my heart and without any bitterness or anger, though it took some time to get to that place. My involvement at Federated has been very important for me. Spirituality was a very important part of my life growing up, and after coming out and being forced out of my original faith community, it took many years and much searching to come back to my Christian roots and to return to the stories that had meant so much to me. Federated Church has nurtured this journey, and I feel very blessed to have been a part of the community for almost seven years.
I am most grateful, in fact, for all of you. I cannot tell you what it has meant to me to see your commitment to the open and affirming process; I know it has not been easy. You are a strong, amazing group of people who recognized a need and had enough love and vision to see it through, even when doing so was not easy.
I realize, however, that at this time my own fear and pain are clouding my ability to be the kind of participant in the church that I would like to be. I feel like I have many gifts that I could share with the church, but that I have not done so because of my own fear of rejection, which is something I will need to contend with as my spiritual journey continues. Perhaps at some later time in my life I will have more strength and be able to overcome these fears and share these gifts even in a place that does not feel completely affirming, but at this time in my life, I simply don’t have the strength to do so. I realize that you are working toward creating a church community where everyone will feel welcomed to share their gifts without fear of rejection, and I very much appreciate that.
Another important part of my decision has to do with the fact that I am beginning the pre-adoption process in hopes of becoming a parent. I am grateful that, unlike my faith community of origin, the topic of sexual orientation has at least been discussed. Still, I ultimately came to the realization that I do not want my child to be in a church where everyone has not moved as lovingly and bravely as you have toward understanding the importance of the “extravagant welcome” the UCC preaches. In other words, while I don’t plan to try to protect my child from the world’s brokenness, I do want him or her to have some safe havens, particularly because there will likely be many ways s/he will be “different” from other kids in Morris. And despite your great love for me, Federated Church has not been such a safe haven for me. As an adult, I think this is fine; I want my faith journey to be challenging and realize it will at times be painful. However, I want my child to have a spiritual education that will clearly reflect the values of love, peace, and justice that are at the core of our spiritual tradition and will help the child find his or her role in healing the world’s brokenness. I also want the child to have one place in this town where he or she feels loved and safe among people who care about who s/he is and is becoming. I am not confident that my child would get that at Federated at this time, even though Federated includes loving, committed, justice-seeking people like you. For now, I plan to make my home that haven, both for myself and my child. Perhaps this means I don’t trust the church enough or even that I don’t trust God enough; I am still wrestling with this piece of the puzzle, but I know that at this time, withdrawing from the church and deciding to nurture my child spiritually in some other way is what is right for me.
I have been considering what to do about my financial commitment to the church as well as my involvement in the open and affirming process. My financial commitment has been meager because I am still paying off debts, but for me, it was an important way of showing my commitment to the church, especially because I did not offer much else. At this point, I am not sure how I will invest this money, but I will continue to pray about this question and promise to invest it in a positive way.
In terms of my involvement in the open and affirming process, I realize that the most recent e-mail exchange I saw was revisiting the idea of organizing a panel of GLBT Christians. While I need some distance from the process in order to save my emotional resources for the new steps I’m taking in my life right now, I would be happy to speak on such a panel and even to help organize it; and believe me, I make this offer only after some very intentional reflection about whether I can truly do so. At an earlier point in the process, I had spoken with several people who were willing to tell their stories, and some no doubt would still be willing. Please let me know when a date/time for such a panel is set and I’ll get people together and come myself if the committee decides to move forward with this plan.
I did not intend this letter to be so long, but if you are still reading at this point, I want to thank you for taking the time to read this and, again, for your dedication to the open and affirming process and to the church. My only hesitation in following through on this insight that I need to leave the church is realizing that I will not be surrounded in the same way by your strength, love, and vision—and I really mean that. I will miss seeing that strength and vision week after week, and I am deeply grateful for it. Thank you, again.
With love,
Argie
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Sunday, February 25, 2007: Jesus’ temptation in the desert
Readings:
Deuteronomy 26: 1-11
Psalm 91
Romans 10:8-13
Luke 4: 1-13
It is the first Sunday of Lent, a time of repentance and preparation for the joy and abundance that comes at Easter. As always, we are confronted on this Sunday with some challenging and even conflicting texts. This is a sign, perhaps, that the Lenten journey isn’t supposed to be easy.
In Deuteronomy, we are reminded of the importance of offering God the firstfruits of our labor to show our gratitude. What I love about this passage, actually, is how specifically the process for this offering is described. First, the offerer is to put the firstfruits in a basket. Then he (it was probably a he at that time) is to go to “the place the Lord your God will choose as a dwelling for his Name.” And then there is a script of what the offerer must say when he arrives: “I declare today to the Lord your God that I have come to the land the Lord swore to our forefathers to give us.” When the priest takes the basket and sets it in front of the altar, the offerer must recount the story of God’s rescue of his people. And finally, the writer explains the last step: “Place the basket before the Lord your God and bow down before him. And you and the Levites and the aliens among you shall rejoice in the good things the Lord your God has given to you and your household.”
Perhaps I’m drawn to these directives because I come from a liturgical tradition; every Sunday, the liturgy was mostly the same. Every Sunday, a gift was offered and prayed over and mystically became the body and blood of Christ. Or perhaps I like the idea of having a ritual for celebrating abundance, especially when we tend to think of Lent as a time of giving things up rather than noticing how much we have. In this passage, we’re taught we can give things up in order to see more clearly how much we have; we are taught that God wants us to rejoice in “all the good things the Lord [our] God has given [us] and [our] households.”
The readings from the psalms and from Romans continue in the spirit of the Old Testament reading. They remind us of God’s unwavering protection and love. They tell us that we are God’s people.
But when we finally get to Jesus’ temptation, the neat little narrative of the first three passages is blown to pieces. The devil, more or less, uses the exact messages of these other texts to tempt Jesus—and each time, Jesus turns the message around, refuses to do what the devil has asked of him.
Jesus has been in the desert for 40 days; he’s tired and hungry and hot and probably wondering, what the hell did I get myself into? But when the devil offers him bread, Jesus, the good Jew who understands about seasons of abundance, says only, “People do not live by bread alone.” Then, the devil tempts him with the very kingdom the prophets claimed he would inherit and rule—the kingdom that includes all of us who now consider ourselves God’s people. You can have this right now, the devil says, without doing any work, before you’ve even begun your ministry. All you have to do is worship me. But Jesus says calmly, no, actually, God alone is worthy of worship. And then the devil actually quotes from psalm 91. He says to Jesus, why not jump off this mountain? After all, the scripture says, “he will command his angles concerning you to guard you carefully; they will lift you up in their hands, so that you will not strike your foot against a stone.” And again, Jesus responds calmly, the scripture also says not to put God to the test.
So what do these temptations have to do with us Christians who are beginning our Lenten journey this week? It is tempting to read these temptations overly literally: we’re not supposed to live by bread alone, or to hunger for power, or to self-destruct and expect God to pick us up off the ground. But there is so much more to this scene than meets the eye. The devil is tempting Jesus by using the very stories, ideas, and texts that make up the fabric of Jesus’ life. And he’s doing it when Jesus is at his worst—probably unsure about what he’s meant to do, on retreat in the desert to figure that out, hungry, tired, thirsty.
In the first temptation, Jesus teaches us that, while God offers us amazing abundance, we are not supposed to take even the thing we need the most—in this case, nourishment—from the wrong hand. There has got to be a way to accept bread while still living in the light, but the devil’s offer is not that way. This is not, in other words, the way of gratitude spelled out Deuteronomy. There is no ritual here, no give and take, no celebration—just a loaf of bread offered to a hungry man. Later, we will see Jesus feeding 5,000 people with a couple loaves of bread; we know he is capable of blessing and gratitude, of fulfilling his own and others’ physical hunger; but this is not the time, or the way, or the place. The first Lenten practice we’re offered, then, is to live more consciously and gratefully each day, and to consider what we take and from whom, what we give back and how we do it.
The second temptation seems at first simply a rejection of power, but consider that the kingdom the devil offers to Jesus is already Jesus’. Even before he has begun his ministry, he knows this kingdom is his. He is not the king the Jews expected, but the world belongs to him; he loved it then and continues to love it now. So this second temptation is about a kind of easy salvation, a lack of responsibility. The devil is essentially saying to Jesus, why suffer and die at the hands of people who can’t understand or accept your message? Why wander the backstreets of a region preaching justice and love, counting on the generosity of strangers for your basic necessities? The kingdom is already yours. But Jesus says, worship the Lord your God and serve him only. In other words, it is wrong to love power if you are not going to use that power to serve God. It is about not turning away from our responsibility as people of God to do God’s work in the world. It’s also about not taking the first offer we get, about paying attention to both the message and the messenger.
The last temptation is perhaps the most puzzling. Why in the world would the devil expect Jesus to jump off a cliff? Perhaps he should have offered this temptation first—it is the most bizarre, the one Jesus is least likely to take. Then again, the devil is pretty convincing. He uses a text Jesus has heard read in the temple over and over and tries to interpret it to serve his own purposes. He wants Jesus to be destroyed by his own religious tradition. But Jesus, who will later submit to an act of martyrdom at the hands of people who can’t bear to hear his message of justice and love, can’t bear to realize that the message of their forefathers and mothers got off track, realizes this is not his moment. In a way, he chooses self-destruction later, but he does so because he knows it is the only way he can hold onto his integrity. This temptation is about rejecting acts of martyrdom if there is nothing at stake—or perhaps choosing the moments when living with danger is necessary if one is to live with integrity. We don’t have to prove ourselves. We shouldn’t do foolish things just because we’re tired and hungry and in a desert-place in our lives and want to figure out if God, or our friends, or our families, are really paying attention. God is paying attention, there’s no doubt about that. But God isn’t going to step in and pick us up off the ground if we’ve tried to destroy ourselves just to prove a point; God can’t do that without our help, without our desire to live intentionally and faithfully.
Live gratefully, intentionally, faithfully, lovingly. Live dangerously if doing so is necessary to serve God well. Pay attention to the message and the messenger. And remember that even the devil can quote scripture; even the devil can appeal to the words and ideas and stories and memories inscribed in our hearts. We need to live in the present, to understand the meaning and relevance of each passage, each memory, each story, in our lives today. Amen!
Church started 15 minutes ago, and I am not there. I decided this weekend to leave the church, at least for now. The reasons are best explained in the letter I sent the open and affirming committee of the church, which I have included below this post.
It has been a wonderful couple months. My spiritual practices have begun to feel more natural. My depression has lifted. I have begun exploring adoption and will complete my 20 hours of training, which is the first step of the process, next weekend. But at church, things have gotten more challenging, and I began to realize it did not make much sense to continue to be an active part of the church.
Since making this decision, I meditated for awhile on a good spiritual practice I could use on Sunday mornings, not to replace church exactly, but to focus my morning meditation and expand it beyond the usual somewhat rushed 30 minutes-1 hour I usually have.
I am going to try to post a response each Sunday to the Bible readings of the week. If I were not a writer and a college instructor/program coordinator, I would be a minister for sure; I have always enjoyed writing sermons. This will be a good way to share my thoughts with whoever might be reading. Below is the letter I sent the open and affirming committee at the church, followed by a brief meditation on the readings for this week.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Dear Open and Affirming Committee Members,
I’m sorry that this note is somewhat impersonal, but I hope you will understand that although I’m writing to you as a group, each of you is important to me and each has blessed me in a unique way. On Thursday afternoon, I “hit a wall,” so to speak, and realized I needed to set aside some time for reflection beyond my usual one hour every morning. I spent about five hours in prayer/meditation, and I came out of that time having had a great many realizations. I want to share one important realization with all of you.
I have decided that at this time, at least, I need to withdraw from my involvement in Federated Church. I am writing this, believe me, with a lot of love in my heart and without any bitterness or anger, though it took some time to get to that place. My involvement at Federated has been very important for me. Spirituality was a very important part of my life growing up, and after coming out and being forced out of my original faith community, it took many years and much searching to come back to my Christian roots and to return to the stories that had meant so much to me. Federated Church has nurtured this journey, and I feel very blessed to have been a part of the community for almost seven years.
I am most grateful, in fact, for all of you. I cannot tell you what it has meant to me to see your commitment to the open and affirming process; I know it has not been easy. You are a strong, amazing group of people who recognized a need and had enough love and vision to see it through, even when doing so was not easy.
I realize, however, that at this time my own fear and pain are clouding my ability to be the kind of participant in the church that I would like to be. I feel like I have many gifts that I could share with the church, but that I have not done so because of my own fear of rejection, which is something I will need to contend with as my spiritual journey continues. Perhaps at some later time in my life I will have more strength and be able to overcome these fears and share these gifts even in a place that does not feel completely affirming, but at this time in my life, I simply don’t have the strength to do so. I realize that you are working toward creating a church community where everyone will feel welcomed to share their gifts without fear of rejection, and I very much appreciate that.
Another important part of my decision has to do with the fact that I am beginning the pre-adoption process in hopes of becoming a parent. I am grateful that, unlike my faith community of origin, the topic of sexual orientation has at least been discussed. Still, I ultimately came to the realization that I do not want my child to be in a church where everyone has not moved as lovingly and bravely as you have toward understanding the importance of the “extravagant welcome” the UCC preaches. In other words, while I don’t plan to try to protect my child from the world’s brokenness, I do want him or her to have some safe havens, particularly because there will likely be many ways s/he will be “different” from other kids in Morris. And despite your great love for me, Federated Church has not been such a safe haven for me. As an adult, I think this is fine; I want my faith journey to be challenging and realize it will at times be painful. However, I want my child to have a spiritual education that will clearly reflect the values of love, peace, and justice that are at the core of our spiritual tradition and will help the child find his or her role in healing the world’s brokenness. I also want the child to have one place in this town where he or she feels loved and safe among people who care about who s/he is and is becoming. I am not confident that my child would get that at Federated at this time, even though Federated includes loving, committed, justice-seeking people like you. For now, I plan to make my home that haven, both for myself and my child. Perhaps this means I don’t trust the church enough or even that I don’t trust God enough; I am still wrestling with this piece of the puzzle, but I know that at this time, withdrawing from the church and deciding to nurture my child spiritually in some other way is what is right for me.
I have been considering what to do about my financial commitment to the church as well as my involvement in the open and affirming process. My financial commitment has been meager because I am still paying off debts, but for me, it was an important way of showing my commitment to the church, especially because I did not offer much else. At this point, I am not sure how I will invest this money, but I will continue to pray about this question and promise to invest it in a positive way.
In terms of my involvement in the open and affirming process, I realize that the most recent e-mail exchange I saw was revisiting the idea of organizing a panel of GLBT Christians. While I need some distance from the process in order to save my emotional resources for the new steps I’m taking in my life right now, I would be happy to speak on such a panel and even to help organize it; and believe me, I make this offer only after some very intentional reflection about whether I can truly do so. At an earlier point in the process, I had spoken with several people who were willing to tell their stories, and some no doubt would still be willing. Please let me know when a date/time for such a panel is set and I’ll get people together and come myself if the committee decides to move forward with this plan.
I did not intend this letter to be so long, but if you are still reading at this point, I want to thank you for taking the time to read this and, again, for your dedication to the open and affirming process and to the church. My only hesitation in following through on this insight that I need to leave the church is realizing that I will not be surrounded in the same way by your strength, love, and vision—and I really mean that. I will miss seeing that strength and vision week after week, and I am deeply grateful for it. Thank you, again.
With love,
Argie
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Sunday, February 25, 2007: Jesus’ temptation in the desert
Readings:
Deuteronomy 26: 1-11
Psalm 91
Romans 10:8-13
Luke 4: 1-13
It is the first Sunday of Lent, a time of repentance and preparation for the joy and abundance that comes at Easter. As always, we are confronted on this Sunday with some challenging and even conflicting texts. This is a sign, perhaps, that the Lenten journey isn’t supposed to be easy.
In Deuteronomy, we are reminded of the importance of offering God the firstfruits of our labor to show our gratitude. What I love about this passage, actually, is how specifically the process for this offering is described. First, the offerer is to put the firstfruits in a basket. Then he (it was probably a he at that time) is to go to “the place the Lord your God will choose as a dwelling for his Name.” And then there is a script of what the offerer must say when he arrives: “I declare today to the Lord your God that I have come to the land the Lord swore to our forefathers to give us.” When the priest takes the basket and sets it in front of the altar, the offerer must recount the story of God’s rescue of his people. And finally, the writer explains the last step: “Place the basket before the Lord your God and bow down before him. And you and the Levites and the aliens among you shall rejoice in the good things the Lord your God has given to you and your household.”
Perhaps I’m drawn to these directives because I come from a liturgical tradition; every Sunday, the liturgy was mostly the same. Every Sunday, a gift was offered and prayed over and mystically became the body and blood of Christ. Or perhaps I like the idea of having a ritual for celebrating abundance, especially when we tend to think of Lent as a time of giving things up rather than noticing how much we have. In this passage, we’re taught we can give things up in order to see more clearly how much we have; we are taught that God wants us to rejoice in “all the good things the Lord [our] God has given [us] and [our] households.”
The readings from the psalms and from Romans continue in the spirit of the Old Testament reading. They remind us of God’s unwavering protection and love. They tell us that we are God’s people.
But when we finally get to Jesus’ temptation, the neat little narrative of the first three passages is blown to pieces. The devil, more or less, uses the exact messages of these other texts to tempt Jesus—and each time, Jesus turns the message around, refuses to do what the devil has asked of him.
Jesus has been in the desert for 40 days; he’s tired and hungry and hot and probably wondering, what the hell did I get myself into? But when the devil offers him bread, Jesus, the good Jew who understands about seasons of abundance, says only, “People do not live by bread alone.” Then, the devil tempts him with the very kingdom the prophets claimed he would inherit and rule—the kingdom that includes all of us who now consider ourselves God’s people. You can have this right now, the devil says, without doing any work, before you’ve even begun your ministry. All you have to do is worship me. But Jesus says calmly, no, actually, God alone is worthy of worship. And then the devil actually quotes from psalm 91. He says to Jesus, why not jump off this mountain? After all, the scripture says, “he will command his angles concerning you to guard you carefully; they will lift you up in their hands, so that you will not strike your foot against a stone.” And again, Jesus responds calmly, the scripture also says not to put God to the test.
So what do these temptations have to do with us Christians who are beginning our Lenten journey this week? It is tempting to read these temptations overly literally: we’re not supposed to live by bread alone, or to hunger for power, or to self-destruct and expect God to pick us up off the ground. But there is so much more to this scene than meets the eye. The devil is tempting Jesus by using the very stories, ideas, and texts that make up the fabric of Jesus’ life. And he’s doing it when Jesus is at his worst—probably unsure about what he’s meant to do, on retreat in the desert to figure that out, hungry, tired, thirsty.
In the first temptation, Jesus teaches us that, while God offers us amazing abundance, we are not supposed to take even the thing we need the most—in this case, nourishment—from the wrong hand. There has got to be a way to accept bread while still living in the light, but the devil’s offer is not that way. This is not, in other words, the way of gratitude spelled out Deuteronomy. There is no ritual here, no give and take, no celebration—just a loaf of bread offered to a hungry man. Later, we will see Jesus feeding 5,000 people with a couple loaves of bread; we know he is capable of blessing and gratitude, of fulfilling his own and others’ physical hunger; but this is not the time, or the way, or the place. The first Lenten practice we’re offered, then, is to live more consciously and gratefully each day, and to consider what we take and from whom, what we give back and how we do it.
The second temptation seems at first simply a rejection of power, but consider that the kingdom the devil offers to Jesus is already Jesus’. Even before he has begun his ministry, he knows this kingdom is his. He is not the king the Jews expected, but the world belongs to him; he loved it then and continues to love it now. So this second temptation is about a kind of easy salvation, a lack of responsibility. The devil is essentially saying to Jesus, why suffer and die at the hands of people who can’t understand or accept your message? Why wander the backstreets of a region preaching justice and love, counting on the generosity of strangers for your basic necessities? The kingdom is already yours. But Jesus says, worship the Lord your God and serve him only. In other words, it is wrong to love power if you are not going to use that power to serve God. It is about not turning away from our responsibility as people of God to do God’s work in the world. It’s also about not taking the first offer we get, about paying attention to both the message and the messenger.
The last temptation is perhaps the most puzzling. Why in the world would the devil expect Jesus to jump off a cliff? Perhaps he should have offered this temptation first—it is the most bizarre, the one Jesus is least likely to take. Then again, the devil is pretty convincing. He uses a text Jesus has heard read in the temple over and over and tries to interpret it to serve his own purposes. He wants Jesus to be destroyed by his own religious tradition. But Jesus, who will later submit to an act of martyrdom at the hands of people who can’t bear to hear his message of justice and love, can’t bear to realize that the message of their forefathers and mothers got off track, realizes this is not his moment. In a way, he chooses self-destruction later, but he does so because he knows it is the only way he can hold onto his integrity. This temptation is about rejecting acts of martyrdom if there is nothing at stake—or perhaps choosing the moments when living with danger is necessary if one is to live with integrity. We don’t have to prove ourselves. We shouldn’t do foolish things just because we’re tired and hungry and in a desert-place in our lives and want to figure out if God, or our friends, or our families, are really paying attention. God is paying attention, there’s no doubt about that. But God isn’t going to step in and pick us up off the ground if we’ve tried to destroy ourselves just to prove a point; God can’t do that without our help, without our desire to live intentionally and faithfully.
Live gratefully, intentionally, faithfully, lovingly. Live dangerously if doing so is necessary to serve God well. Pay attention to the message and the messenger. And remember that even the devil can quote scripture; even the devil can appeal to the words and ideas and stories and memories inscribed in our hearts. We need to live in the present, to understand the meaning and relevance of each passage, each memory, each story, in our lives today. Amen!
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