Author: richardburbach

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Dare We Hope?

The biggest, boldest headline doesn’t always tell the most important story. That’s the case this week with Pope Francis’ much anticipated and highly publicized meeting with victims of clergy sex abuse. Though survivor advocate groups cited deficiencies and questioned the Church’s resolve, Francis gained generally high marks for personal empathy and promise to hold bishops accountable.

But as ordinary Catholics know and this blog has reiterated many times, the root cause of our sex abuse crisis is the culture of clericalism, hierarchical arrogance and preoccupation with protecting power in the Roman church. Though not as insidious as the sexual abuse of a child, recognition of the urgent need to reform the Vatican Curia is a subset of the same core malignancy.

A sliver of light shone through the long socked-in cloud cover yesterday.  It came in the form of a copyrighted [story] by Carol Glatz for the Catholic News Service — to their credit, this is an arm of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops.

Though it seems not to have even registered on mainline media it portends the level of awareness that must be in place for any meaningful change.  It suggests a few in church leadership are beginning to “get it” and we may have reason for hope beyond what the Pope promised.

“To some it might seem less than prudent to think that the church would go out of its way to seek out even more victims and survivors,” opening up further possibilities for lawsuits, anguish and “trouble,” Archbishop Diarmuid Martin of Dublin told representatives from bishops’ conferences from around the world.

However, when Jesus tells pastors to leave behind their flock to seek out the one who is lost, that mandate “is itself unreasonable and imprudent but, like it or not, that is precisely what Jesus asks us to do.”

Helping perpetrators, victims, parishes, communities and people who are distanced from the church out of “disgust at what has happened to children” won’t happen with “slick public relations gestures or even from repeated words of apology,” Martin said.

“Healing cannot be delegated,” the Archbishop emphasized. It requires every church member be humble and Christ-like in lovingly embracing “wounded men and women, with all the brutality and unattractiveness of wounds.”

It will come when the church recognizes “how compromise and insensitivity and wrong decisions have damaged the witness of the church,” he said, and when its members have their own personal healing, becoming more humble and journeying close to those who are lost and hurting.

“We are not there to tell the survivors what they have to do, but together to find new ways of interacting with respect and care,” and not hoping the problems go away, but seeking them out for reconciliation, he said.

Archbishop Martin was one of a number of speakers at an annual meeting of Conference on the Safeguarding of Children, Young People and Vulnerable Adults. The 2014 conference is being held this week in Rome.

In his address, the Archbishop said, “The greatest harm that we could do to the progress that has been made right across the church is to slip back into a false assurance that the crisis is a thing of the past.”

“What has happened has wounded the entire church,” he said, and “the entire church is called to put right what has happened.”

“We are not that kind of church yet: and by far,” he said.

With this awareness finally being expressed by church leadership there might finally be a toe-hold for hope in this tragic saga of clergy sexual abuse and a few cracks showing in a perverse culture of clericalism.

It’s a refreshing story and a welcome week when the most significant report coming out of Rome originates from someone other than the Pope.
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I have no intention to violate copyright laws and respect the restriction posted on the CNS story that is my source: Copyright (c) 2014 Catholic News Service/USCCB. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or otherwise distributed. But with good news like this, how could I not share it? I enthusiastically refer you to the full copyrighted story with the link provided above.

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Law-Giver Given Bum Rap!

We’d all at least scan a story carrying such a banner headline. But unlike some things you read on the Internet, this story is actually true!

Moses certainly does get a bum rap! Too many of us are stuck in the cosmic cinemagraphic effects of that righteous law-giver hoisting stone tablets overhead — all creation rumbles and every face turns askance when judged in the light of God’s “Thou Shalt Nots”!

I suppose this moralistic image fixed in childhood is perfectly understandable. As children our physical and emotional development takes time. Healthy maturation — personal, social and spiritual — depends heavily the security of clarity, rules and routine. Too often this is where we leave Moses — in a child’s collection of Bible Stories or Sunday school skits.

An image of God as cosmic meteorologist or grand regulator of minutia stunts mature faith development. It leaves us believing that the fans who pray the hardest will win the World Cup. It relegates God, whose self-revelation is Love itself, to one responsible for good weather on our wedding day. Sorry, but our well-being depends much more on sane gun regulation and the alcohol consumption of other drivers than it does on the policing of a law-enforcing deity.

Its time to grow-up! The God of Moses is indeed HOLY but perhaps not as we envision if we cling to the rules and images of Sunday School. The forty-year ordeal to which God subjected Moses and the Chosen People finally begins to make sense when we have ourselves wandered in search of life’s purpose for at least forty years!

Those who endure arrive at a place and time — and many of us need a great deal of remedial coursework — when what matters is not that we have broken God’s law. That’s now presumed.  Like the mature Moses, any who would climb the Mountain of The Lord encounter fearsome challenges and consistently ask whether is all worth it.  What really matters is whether we have broken faith with God!

After forty years of marriage one learns the relative unimportance of wedding day weather. The loss of one’s health, whether immediately life-threatening or not, puts the World Cup into perspective. Accompanying a loved one into Alzheimer’s rivals any Scriptural sojourn in the desert. Laws become no more than directional signals. What ultimately matters is “keeping faith” with God.

Scripture says Moses’ face shone when he descended Mt Sinai.  Are we not drawn to the incomparable wisdom of those who have scaled the cloudy heights and traversed life’s darkness? Taking refuge in the security of numbers, we may huddle below curious about the luminous faces of those who have persevered. We can hide for what seems like a lifetime, afraid of making the climb ourselves.

If we remain faithful to our sojourn there comes a time we will not be able to resist, avoid or postpone. “Life” will drag us — willingly or not — into Holy Mystery. In that place we will be invited to learn what Moses labored to pass on. We will be given, not the obligations of Law, but the embrace of Covenant.

We give Moses a bum rap if we persist in believing uninspired depictions of one wielding stone tablets. These are fine for the story books of childhood. More and more, life directs us to the truly inspired headlines that reveal how his face shone!

…enticing us to follow if we dare!

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The Difference a Change of Filter Makes

Time for a little honesty! Time for true confession…

The investigation of our archbishop, John Neinstedt, for alleged same-sex dalliances leaves me so disillusioned and angry that I really had no desire to go to church yesterday. I’m really pissed off by his self-righteous arrogance and homophobic pomposity. It’s not as if his reputation didn’t precede him to the Twin Cities — just like a long festering boil, the infection is finally being lanced!

Out of force of habit or blind stubbornness I walked to the 9:30 Mass despite myself. It’s only a short distance from our house to Christ the King, hardly more than two blocks. Sunday of Fourth of July weekend is always one of the lowest attended services. Minnesotans are notorious for being “up North.” Still, parking spaces en route were quickly filling with family SUVs and elders arrived in a procession of vehicles giving front-door service.

Viewing this gathering congregation from the sidewalk just as it begins a gradual decent to the 51st Street entrance, something washed over me. My crankiness receded. My fixation relaxed. My heart softened. Screw the Archbishop! With the hard-won determination all survivors of abuse need to reclaim – and all Minneapolis-St Paul Catholics are surely victims of hierarchical abuse regardless of whatever John Neinstedt has done in his past life – who is he to hold power or retain control over our emotional lives or the full, free and mature practice of our faith!

Approaching the entrance along with familiar neighbors, well-scrubbed families and friendly congregants I physically felt an angry, cynical “filter” being lifted from my eyes and heart. Going to church felt like coming home – here is the church! If the Eucharist we come to share means anything, we are Christ’s real presence. This is the People of God I know, love, wish to serve and in which I hold my birthright!

We garden-variety Catholics have a long history of disregarding pious platitudes from remote hierarchs.  Tending a fussing child or paying the mortgage insulates us from  pontificating so heavenly minded it’s no earthly good. With my fixation filter lifted, I recognized that I was not going to church out of habit or obligation. I was going to church because of simple, sophisticated, mature, faithful folks whose faith is not their profession but the incarnational mess of our ordinary lives.

Every family, each person entering the doors of CTK on any given Sunday would balk at being called “exemplary” – but they are! Anyone who has been a parent has probably heard more confessions and ministered reconciliation more often than the typical pastor. Gathering here are those whose Baptism and Confirmation have become engrained — yes, becoming second nature, a matter of rote habit even.  If there is obligation, it is an obligation they have to themselves or one they pay their children.

It’s long past time for more than a little honesty in our church. We are in urgent need of changing the sieve that keeps secret the tragic truth poisoning our church family. Honest confessions are long overdue — and here in Minneapolis-St Paul we need more than just a change of filters!

The rank and file Catholic in the pews understands this far better than those for whom “church” has become a career and those blind guides who  presume they hold control by divine right.

How can we not gather to give thanks to a God who consistently seems to act and speak this truth!

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A Story, a Sonnet, a Song

Our family’s deepest roots in America reach to May 7, 1842 with the arrival of Timothy Hannon at the Port of Boston. He was the son of Daniel and Mary Hannon born in Ballinadee, County Cork Ireland on August 10. Conflicting records indicate his year of birth as either 1818 or 1822.

Timothy married Julia Mahoney who had been born in Ireland in 1823. Their modest, unsung lives portend a quintessential American family story.

Timothy and Julia’s wedding was celebrated on February 18, 1849 at Sts. Peter and Paul Church in South Boston. They became American citizens on December 17, 1850 with the filing of Timothy’s naturalization papers.  The 1850 census states that neither Timothy nor Julia could read or write. Each would die of tuberculosis — he in 1860 and she in 1885.

Coincidentally, it was in 1885 that Hugh O’Brien was sworn in as Boston’s first Irish-born mayor. The city had long been controlled by native-born “Yankees”—most of whom had a stereotypical view of Irish immigrants as poor, ignorant, undisciplined, and under the thumb of the Catholic Church.

But the Irish-born population of Boston was exploding, growing from 2,000 in 1820 to 7,000 in 1830. By 1880, more than 70,000 Irish lived in Boston. The year Julia Mahoney Hannon died and Hugh O’Brien was elected mayor, the Irish were over 40% of the city’s population — the largest group of foreign-born residents and outnumbering the native-born Yankees.

The Statute of Liberty, iconic symbol of immigrant aspirations and America at our best, was dedicated in October, 1886. Even now, the sonnet by Emma Lazarus that graces the base of Lady Liberty expresses the sentiment of every family seeking a brighter future in America:

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

Finally, [here] is a link to the Cantus rendition of Oh God of All the Nations. Set to The Finlandia hymn by Jean Sibelius, the lyrics were written by American poet, Lloyd Stone. Sometime during this holiday weekend treat yourself to the two-minute You-Tube video link above.  It has become my favorite patriotic song and has been known to bring me to tears.

Happy Birthday, America!  May we be true to our story, our promise and our best selves.

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“Fondly Do We Hope”

I remember well the first time I ever saw my Dad cry — I had been pestering him with my childish naiveté to tell me about life during the Great Depression. Even up to her death just shy of 98, Mom would euphemistically recall those first years of their marriage as “Those Dirty Thirties.”  Our nation has faced tough times before.

Our nation has serious issues to address today. Our political process sputters just above dysfunctional.  The verb “to govern” seems to have disappeared from our lexicon, leaving us with politicians rather than leaders. Yet, we should worry about our rabidly anti-government rhetoric poisoning — perhaps precluding — the formation of a needed and healthy patriotism among our children.

How do we purge the nastiness that has taken hold of our national character? We retreat to isolated enclaves in defense of the solitary rights of private citizens, forsaking the solidarity of common citizenship. Like spoiled children we obsess about individual rights rather than accepting personal responsibility for self and others. With narcissism cloaked in the rhetoric of Ayn Rand we facilely assert “freedom from…” leaving “freedom for…” holed up in the National Archives.

Yes, our nation has faced tough times before. Abraham Lincoln was assassinated hardly more than a month after delivering his Second Inaugural Address. Perhaps his concluding words are as fitting for us on this Fourth of July as they were when he first spoke them to a war-weary nation:

Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”

With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.

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Gift Given

All is gift; all is given!

In my more naive youth we feigned appreciation as we teased the Jesuit elder with whom this phrase became synonymous.  Only now am I beginning to glean his profound wisdom. Now the chronological age of the one we would taunt, I yearn for a spirituality with a sharper edge, a keener sense of purpose.

The paradox is that so much of the spirituality we inherited from our elders — or what we thought they were passing on — just isn’t cutting it. We forage amid the fragments for something that asks more of us than to sit and listen quietly to someone else telling us how to live.

Yet… it’s all there! …its all gift! …it’s already been given! That’s the paradox of our faith.

Those who read here regularly will recognize the echo of Barbara Brown Taylor. Learning to Walk in the Dark continues to inspire and console me these days. Her profound knowledge ascends to the wisdom of that Jesuit elder from my early formation. Her deep love — perhaps, reverence — for the long tradition of forebears frees her from slipping into idolatry.

BBT presents Moses as one of contemporary significance and offers Gregory of Nyssa as someone relevant today.  In tapping the very sources of Judeo-Christian faith, she masterfully weaves these origins with the mature wisdom of a fourth century Cappadocian monk.  She brilliantly retrieves them for those of us searching for a sharper, keener edge that cuts to the depths of our spiritual yearning.

Apparently, Gregory was the first in the tradition to recognize the Great Lawgiver as the exemplar whose maturation over time came to enflesh that which he was transmitting.  In this Moses’ teaching transcends any literal application of the Law.

Moses’ vision began with light, progressed through clouds and culminated by recognizing God in darkness.  Gregory counsels those who wish to draw close to God to take Moses as our mentor and exemplar.  Don’t be surprised or even disturbed when our vision turns cloudy. Our impulse to take charge will be fearsome. Like our forebears we will be inclined to construct idols.  Our eyes will demand to see.  Our intellect will fight to contain and categorize. Yet, All is gift!

If we resist our impulse to settle-in, settle-down and settle-for-less — if we open ourselves to the gift inviting us to persevere — our wise forebears in faith assure us that all our deepest yearnings will be satiated in the Holy One’s luminous darkness.

Transcending promise, ALL becomes gift given!

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See p 48 of Learning to Walk in the Dark for BBT’s reference to Moses and Gregory of Nyssa.

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How Long Must We Endure?

Today is a really, really, really hard day to be Catholic in Minnesota! If you care to read the details that leave me somewhere between exasperated on the way to enraged you can find them [here].

Let me simply summarize by saying that I called for the resignation of John Neinstedt as Archbishop of St Paul & Minneapolis [here] one month ago today. Now I am confident that it will only be a matter of time!  But how long, oh Lord?  How long?

Perhaps this is perfect context in which to reaffirm that our Christian faith is grounded — not in humans, not in a church or any authority, not even in any human interpretation of Scripture — but ultimately and solely in God alone.

So today is a day in which I feel the cost, challenge and pain of loving a church that is corrupt, sinful and in desperate need of a thorough house-cleaning! All the more need to keep my eyes focused on God alone! All the more reason to stay with the very same theme I had planned for today — living in the dark!

Yesterday, before the bomb shell news report, I could never have anticipated how I would come to value Barbara Brown Taylor’s quote from the 14th century classic, The Cloud of Unknowing: “… darkness and cloud is always between you and God, no matter what you do.”

Let me be clear, the anonymous author of this Christian classic was speaking of “darkness” as that intriguing, beguiling, frustrating mystery of God that is as impenetrable as its opposite, trying to look directly into the sun. This darkness — only metaphorically apprehended in what mystics express as a “dark night of the soul” — is the direct polar opposite of the sin and corruption we so vividly see in the Church of St Paul and Minneapolis.

Keeping our sights singularly fixed on God alone, we acknowledge that some things we will simply never be able to see by the light of human understanding. At times — thankfully not most of the time — faith feels like a forced exile, if not a long captivity, the spiritual life weighs like an imposing burden.

The anonymous text from the 14th century remains a classic because of its incomparable ability to express our universal and perennial experience. Ultimately, like the penultimate lawgiver, Moses, we are able to encounter or “see” the Holy One — if at all — only from within a cloud of luminous darkness.

Moses never made it to the Promised Land, being given only the gift of seeing it beckoning on the horizon. Others lead the People’s crossing over from slavery into freedom.

How long, oh Lord? How long!!! Our trust rests in you alone.

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Barbara Brown Taylor’s reference on p 48 of Learning to Walk in the Dark is from The Cloud of Unknowing, ed. Emilie Griffin.  HarperSan-Francisco, 1981. p 15.

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Going Over to the Dark Side

A woman from Georgia has more to say to me about God than anyone else I know. With feet firmly planted in a working farm she tends with her husband, she simultaneously culls Moses, fourth century Cappadocian monk Gregory of Nyssa and the anonymous fourteenth century author of The Cloud of Unknowing for wisdom.

Please… before dismissing her as pious or preachy, you must know that she writes for those of us who are “in deep need of faith right now, but the kind you inherited from your parents is not cutting it. You want something that asks more of you than to sit and listen quietly while someone else tells you how to live.”

I eagerly await everything Barbara Brown Taylor writes. We are about the same age. She served a good part of her life as an Episcopal priest. Having left active ministry I resonate with her honesty: “I also discovered a number of things about my Christian tradition that had not been apparent to me while I was busy upholding it.”

In her most recent spiritual memoir, Learning to Walk in the Dark, Barbara Brown Taylor says chief among these is the way Christian teaching thrives on dividing reality into opposed pairs: good/evil, church/world, spirit/flesh, sacred/profane, light/dark. Keeps life simple… you don’t even have to be Christian to know who are the “winners” and the “losers.”

Separating the world into opposing camps makes it easy to know who is closer to God and who isn’t. This really simplifies life for those who don’t care to spend much time thinking about whether their categories hold (or are even Christian). Such clarity provides a strong sense of purpose by focusing daily battles they will take on as their moral duty. The more we beat back the powers of the flesh or of darkness the closer we get to God.

BBT brilliantly coins this as “a bad case of solar affective disorder” or “full solar spirituality. She suggests we can usually recognize a full solar church by its emphasis on the “perks” of faith — a sure sense of God’s presence, certainty of belief, divine guidance in all things, and reliable answers to prayer. Members strive to be positive in attitude, firm in conviction, helpful in relationship, and unwavering in faith.  She asks, who wouldn’t want to dwell in God’s light 24/7?

But then life happens — Christian life happens! You lose your job, maybe your house. Your marriage turns sour. A grandchild is born with a serious genetic disorder. Sure, the full-solar Christians will be there for you and express genuine care. But the shady side of life will soon exhaust their resources. Too many of us are woefully ill prepared to enter the dark-side of life without putting our own faith at risk. We are prepared to deliver a hot-dish casserole when human hungers are so much more insatiable!

The great thing about BBT is that her profound observations are never a self-righteous judgment or divisive condemnation. If it were she would be guilty of the very dualistic thinking and separating into “winners” or “losers” she bemoans. Rather, Learning to Walk in the Dark is a refreshing invitation to embrace “lunar spirituality,” a realistic true-to-life faith that recognizes that the divine light available at any given time waxes and wanes with the seasons of our lives.

It’s not whether we have enough faith to explore the darkness — life itself provides more than enough incentive — but whether we are willing to bump into the things that frighten us and ask the darkness to teach us what we need to know.

Christian faith professes that Jesus was crucified, died and was buried, descended into hell, on the third day rose from the dead and only then ascended into heaven. Sounds like pretty intense darkness to me! Does this not proclaim the way and the truth of our lives?  Should we really expect it to be any different?

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This reflection is largely based on the Introduction to Learning to Walk in the Dark by Barbara Brown Taylor. HarperOne, 2014.

 

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Love you, Bro!

My hero, my mentor, my big brother died one year ago today.  Yes, I miss him daily and would give anything for just one more “Villa Run.”  Yet, in stark contrast to other deaths I have grieved, I am consoled by Jerry’s enduring presence every day.  This presence transcends fond memories prompted by photos in the TV room.

Sixteen years my elder, I traversed that stage of rejecting whatever anyone tried to tell me about how to live my life.  Now, one year after Jerry’s death I spontaneously depend on his wisdom to show me what my life, what human growth and maturity — life fully lived — should look like.

Life on life’s terms!

Let go!

Thank you, thank you, thank you!

I could do no better than to put into practice what Jerry lived.  I can do no better than to again share the eulogy I offered one year ago…

My brother’s life can be explained in three words. …just three words: Jerry loved Marilyn! She was his best friend, trusted confidant, spiritual soulmate, …his beloved. I know, I was there at the beginning! Some of you knew Gert, our dear mother! She believed this too. More than once Gert is known to have said: “You know, Marilyn is the best thing that ever happened to Jerry!” And that’s a mother speaking!

Yes, my brother’s life can be explained in three words – and the mirror of these three words is the other side of the equation: Marilyn loved Jerry. Marilyn has a tremendous capacity for love! Yet everyone in this room who holds Marilyn so dear … in our many unique and special ways … knows without question that Marilyn’s love for Jerry was always first, singular and unqualified.

And I’m here to tell you that loving my brother like that is no easy feat. Burbachs come with a double dose of certain character defects – especially Burbach males. All of you know, probably better than we who are in it up to our eyeballs, that we tend to be hard-charging, opinionated, stubborn and can boast of a good dose of unbridled pride to bout. Jerry was no exception – yet we love him. We love him.

We have witnessed a remarkable transformation in Jerry over the years, especially over the last ten years. And it was not just – or even primarily – about Alzheimer’s! Hard-charging became more gentle. Opinionated softened into acceptance and inclusion. Stubbornness began to morph into patience. Pride began to show glimmers of genuine humility. Then there was gratitude – tremendous gratitude: “Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.” Yes, Jerry’s thirty years in AA working a 12 step program certainly contributed to his spiritual transformation in character defects. But that’s not the real explanation! Jerry loved Marilyn. And the other half of this truth is: Marilyn loved Jerry.

As spiritual soulmates, Jerry and Marilyn lived and experienced their very special love as deeply Sacramental – a living sign, a tangible expression – here and now – of how God loves… even unto death. We have experienced their love in hospitality, compassion; as generative, life-giving — most conspicuously we have them to thank for Matt and Chris! But, we are all richer because of the other-centeredness of Jerry and Marilyn’s love.

The explanation for my brother’s life, for his ability to let-go of all that ego-stuff with its bells and whistles, his ability to embrace life-on-life’s-terms, his willingness to step courageously, even if regrettably, into the mystery of Alzheimer’s; finds its source – and salvation – in the steadfast, singular love Jerry and Marilyn shared with each other. We are all witnesses to this truth. And, we are all the better for it!

Jerry you will always be my hero, my idol, my BIG brother! Thank you for teaching all of us how to live, how to love and how to die. We, all of us, “love you, bro!”

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Scripture Blesses Same-Sex Marriage

Twelve years ago I proudly marched in my first Gay Pride parade. Yes, I was afraid! A lifetime of being vilified within American culture and condemned as “inherently disordered” by the church I love and served would not easily loosen its harsh grip.

A few short months before that Sunday in June 2002 I had been the pastor of the Church of St. Luke – an iconic institution a block down Summit Avenue from the Governor’s Mansion. I had been a priest for thirteen years and a Jesuit for twenty-three. The stark contrast between preaching and presiding at Sunday liturgy and now marching in the Pride parade down Hennepin Avenue could not have been more acute.

I have come to believe what I only intuitively knew twelve years ago – the turmoil and debates in Christian churches are not ultimately about my sexual orientation or even sexuality in general. Our biggest fight is really about our understanding of Scripture and its use in exercising authority and maintaining order in our communities.

If it were really about sexual orientation and behaviors there would be more than enough “inherent disorder” among heterosexuals to keep the defenders of moral rectitude busy! As Luke Timothy Johnson – distinguished professor of New Testament at Emory University and father of four – incisively points out, a relatively small set of same-sex behaviors gets singled out for moral condemnation while a vast pandemic of sexual disorder goes ignored.

It’s a moral duplicity as old as the human race! The LGBT minority offers a convenient scapegoat onto which the cultural majority easily projects its own moral failings. Righteous indignation often compensates for the human state of powerlessness. Long ago I learned to be especially wary of any who would sit in moral judgment – what is so out of control in their own lives that they feel the need to control mine or the lives of others? From my way of reading the Gospels, this resonates with what Jesus preached. And for that, he was scapegoated by those who claimed seats of authority.

As Luke Timothy Johnson convincingly asserts is an essay cited below, a moral obligation confronts those of us who experience God at work among all persons and in all covenanted and life-enhancing forms of sexual love. Believe me, those who are gay understand fully that the authority of Scripture and of the church’s tradition is scarcely trivial to us.

At the same time, we must honestly ask when has Christianity ever been lived in precise accord with the Scriptures? Forget about reconciling war with Jesus’ Scriptural teachings of nonviolence, I am regularly exasperated with Catholic bishops who wantonly ignore its own Just War tradition while giving tacit approbation to whatever military action our government chooses to deploy.

Scripture and tradition are conveniently and regularly set aside by bishops no less those of us who populate the pews every weekend. What about divorce? Even under another name such as “annulment”, Jesus explicitly prohibits it! And where would we be if Christians ever faithfully observed the exhortation in Leviticus to put adulterers to death?    Must wives be submissive to their husbands to have a good Christian marriage?

Yes, something sacred is at stake. The authority of Scripture and of the church’s tradition is scarcely trivial. As Professor Johnson demands, our responsibility is to take our tradition and the Scripture with at least as much seriousness as those who use the Bible as a buttress for rejecting forms of sexual love they fear or cannot understand.

Again relying heavily on Johnson’s compelling insights, our situation vis-à-vis the authority of Scripture is not unlike that of abolitionists in nineteenth-century America. All abolitionists could point to was Galatians 3:28 and the Letter of Philemon, while slave owners had the rest of the Old and New Testaments which gave every indication that slaveholding was legitimate and necessary. Scripture explicitly sanctions slavery as a God-ordained social arrangement, one to which neither Moses nor Jesus nor Paul raised any fundamental objection.

So how is it that now, in the early twenty-first century, the authority of the scriptural texts on slavery and the arguments made on their basis appear to all of us, without exception, as completely beside the point and deeply wrong? The answer is that over time the human experience of slavery and its horror came home to the popular conscience.

Eventually, though begrudgingly, we came to recognize that every human being is created in God’s own image. Once that experience of their full humanity and the evil of their bondage reached a stage of critical consciousness, this nation and our churches could neither turn back to the practice of slavery nor ever read the Bible in the same way again.

Those of us who call for full recognition of gay and lesbian persons within the Christian communion find ourselves in a position similar to that of the early abolitionists. We are fully aware of the weight of scriptural evidence pointing away from our position.

To justify our resolve, we invoke the basic Pauline principle that the Spirit gives life but the letter kills (2 Corinthians 3:6). And if the letter of Scripture cannot find room for the activity of the living God in the transformation of human lives, then trust and obedience must be paid to the living God rather than to the words of Scripture.

Paul struggled mightily! Ultimately he recognized he could not force the God of Jesus Christ into the framework of his community’s previous understanding of what it means to be a people in covenant relationship with God. Instead, he called others to reread and reinterpret all of their Scripture with new eyes and a transformed heart. We too journey to Damascus and are at times startled to recognize Christ in those we previously rejected if not persecuted.

Quite simply, we would not revere the New Testament as sacred if the first believers had not been willing to obey the living God disclosed in their own stories and experiences more than the prescriptions contained in their sacred texts —writings we, as did they, cherish as holy and inspired by God.

It is extraordinarily important, as well, that we who assert convictions based on the graced experience of our lives not just accept “cheap” or “easy” grace – as if whatever feels good is morally acceptable. What grounds our Scriptural defense is our own lived experience of those profound stories of bondage and freedom, longing and love, shared by thousands of persons over many centuries and across many cultures, that help define us as human.

Our obligation, therefore, is to name what constitutes virtue and vice in sexual behavior. A good start would be applying the same criteria on both sides. If porneia among heterosexuals includes promiscuity, violence and exploitation, then the church must condemn similar forms of homosexual activity. Similarly, if holiness among heterosexuals includes fidelity, chastity, modesty, and fruitfulness, we should celebrate and praise the same virtues whenever and wherever present in same-sex love.

The creative, redemptive work of our living God never ceases. The Spirit blows as and where she will. As people and as the People of God, we continue to be shaped as imagio Dei every day of our lives in ways that can surprise and even shock us. This fact cuts to the deepest truth revealed by Scripture itself—namely, that God does create the world anew at every moment, does call into being that which is not, and does raise the dead to new and greater forms of life.

In this perennial struggle to come to the fullness of faith, brave witnesses like Paul refused to force their experience of the Risen One into the “old wineskins” of any dogmatic or literal understanding of Scripture. Instead, they followed the invitation to give witness to Christ alive among them. In the light of that experience, they began to reread and reinterpret all of their Scripture as prophecy that reveals God in ways they had not perceived before—and could not have perceived before.

In short, we would not have the New Testament as Scripture if the first believers had not been willing to obey the living God disclosed in their own bodies more than the precedents provided by their most cherished writings—writings we also, by the way, consider holy and inspired by God.

Jesus reserves his harshest judgment for the Pharisees’ willful narrowing of God’s initiative and intentions. They obstinately clung to their own sense of righteousness rather than acknowledging God’s prerogative and propensity to work in ways their moral categories could not contain. In this we see that human history truly does reveal salvation history!

Yes, much has changed in the last twelve years. Much more needs to change – and this by God’s design and initiative. This Sunday morning I don’t know if I will be at the parade or at church. It will come down to how the Spirit moves me!  My hunch is I will be in the pew at Christ the King Catholic Church.

In any case, let’s all celebrate where we’ve been, where we’ve come  and where we’re headed — with parades and in our churches. Happy Pride!
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This reflection is largely an edit and synopsis of Luke Timothy Johnson’s superb essay, “Homosexuality & The Church: Scripture and Experience” that first appeared in the June 11, 2007 issue of Commonweal magazine. In writing, I made the judgment that extensive citations and quotations would be distracting. Nevertheless, I must express my esteem for and indebtedness to Professor Johnson. I enthusiastically encourage you to read his more extensive and compelling essay [here].