Tree of Life

Sunday morning, I read of Western science and Eastern spirituality agreeing that everything, every thing is interrelated, and dynamic, in ceaseless change, and that anything that seems unchanging is illusory.

Sitting on our deck, I look up from my book and experience this truth firsthand: leaves drop one by one from the tree in our backyard against the backdrop of a vibrant blue sky and an intensely green lawn on this crisply cool fall day that has followed the weekend rain. The azaleas are in lively red bloom as the dead brown leaves collect.

Last week I witnessed an old friend dying in a hospital bed. The next day around 3 a.m., I awoke in my own bed thinking of him, unconscious, mouth agape, yet breathing on his own, and I felt for him. And I also thought, this could be me or Wade or my sister or brother. Later I would learn he died within the hour I unknowingly sat vigil.

That had been a hard week, nation-wise. Probably world-wise too, if we Americans could look beyond our own troubles to see others’ suffering as well. It was a week that started with the federal government planning an attack on the rights of transgender and intersex people, continued with pipe bombs mailed to progressive leaders from a right wing fanatic, included another hate crime against blacks, the disenfranchisement of voters in advance of the midterm elections, troops being sent to intercept those on a pilgrimage for asylum, and a week that ended with a massacre of Jews worshiping in their Pittsburgh synagogue, Tree of Life.

As I read the news story of the Tree of Life, I could not stop crying. It may have been grief accumulated over that week, but I think also it is the grief that accumulates over generations of virulent anti-Semitism, unintelligible to me. Several of those who died there were survivors of the Holocaust.

My LGBT community and its allies have often gladly utilized the work of the late Yale medieval historian John Boswell, documenting the treatment of Queer people in Europe and the church through the Middle Ages. But many miss the overall theme of his short life’s work, which was the treatment of minorities at the hands of majority cultures. Maybe his work was inspired by horrific scenes he witnessed as a youth as an “army brat,” like the heads of a hated group stuck on spikes along a road in the Middle East. Undoubtedly it was also inspired by his own experience as a gay man.

On one of his several trips to give the Lazarus lectures in Los Angeles that I organized, we arranged a lecture at UCLA that I took him to. He began the talk by announcing he would be describing the treatment of a minority in medieval Europe. He wanted the audience to discern if he was talking about the mistreatment and prejudices of Jews or of gay people. His ironic conclusion was that his description covered both groups!

When asked about gay rights in another context, he said it would be better if the LGBT community fought for rights across the board rather than for just ourselves, because it was too easy for a dominant culture to pick off one group at a time, as is happening now in the U.S. with transgender and intersex people, as well as current immigrants.

Boswell’s most memorable story came during that same series in a lecture entitled, “Why Bicycle Riders?” Just before WW II, A British gentleman and a German Nazi were forced to share a room. The German went on and on about all the troubles the Jews were causing. As he listed each false “truth,” the British gentlemen egged him on as if he were agreeing with him. Finally, at the end of the German’s diatribe, the Britisher adamantly agreed, “Yes, all the troubles of the world are caused by Jews and bicycle riders!”

The German looked surprised and confused, and asked, “Why bicycle riders?” To which the British man simply said, “Why Jews?”

Yesterday I eulogized my friend, Thom Hayes, as “good, civil and kind.” I said that if all people were like him, the midterm elections wouldn’t be such a worry for us. I said that if our national leaders were like him, they would talk out their differences over coffee or drinks. I said that if world leaders were like him, they would go to lunch rather than to war.

Thom was unassuming, I said, but he did assume everyone just needs somebody to see them as a person with their own story and a desire for human connection. A mutual friend had told the story of him and Thom getting stuck somewhere, and decided to enter a biker bar, in which the gaily dapper Thom proceeded to meet everyone in the place before they left.

Everything is interrelated, and dynamic, in ceaseless change, and anything that seems unchanging is illusory. Those of us who are “good, civil and kind” must lean in to change history’s trajectory. God’s kingdom come!

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Copyright © 2018 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved. 

If the Church Had Been There, Matthew Shepard Would Not Have Died

This past Friday, October 12, was the 20^th anniversary of Matthew Shepard’s death. I realized that as I read the good news that his ashes will be interred in the Washington National Cathedral alongside other national figures who helped transform our consciences for the better.

I was about to preach at Oaklands Presbyterian Church in Laurel, Maryland, when someone handed me a newspaper article about a young gay man who was hanging on to life by a thread after being beaten and hung coyote style on a fence in the prairies of Wyoming. Another gay-bashing, I thought, and I doubted any more would come of it than the gay-bashings friends and others had endured. Thank God, I was wrong about its impact.

Weeks later I paralleled Matthew’s life with the Presbyterian Church’s history on LGBT concerns during a “Moment for Mission” for Rutgers Presbyterian Church in New York City on December 6, 1998. It was printed in the March/April 1999 issue of the More Light Update, and then in a Church & Society issue on “Hate,” September/October 1999.

In memory of Matthew Shepard and the many other lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, and transgender people (the latter of whom bear a disproportionate brunt of our hate crimes) similarly attacked, I’ve decided to offer this as my post this week.

When Mary came where Jesus was and saw him, she knelt at his feet and said to him what Martha had said to him, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother Matthew Shepard would not have died.”

When Jesus saw her weeping, and those who came with her also weeping, he was greatly disturbed in spirit and deeply moved. He said, “Where have you laid him?” They said to him, “Come and see.” Jesus began to weep. So everyone said, “See how he loved Matthew Shepard!”

But some of them said, “Could not one who gave vision to the visionless have kept Matthew from dying?”

The gay University of Wyoming student who was brutally killed in October 1998 was born in 1976, the year that the United Presbyterian Church set up the Task Force to Study Homosexuality. As we held our meetings and regional hearings to determine whether homosexuality was a sin and a bar to ordination, Matthew Shepard’s mother was changing his diapers and dreaming who he might become.

Matthew Shepard was just learning to walk when the 1978 General Assembly of the United Presbyterian Church gathered in San Diego and rejected the recommended policy of the majority report of our task force that homosexuality was neither sin nor a bar to ordination.

Although we were devastated by this outcome, at least the General Assembly had not changed the Book of Order, had not set its recommended policy to presbyteries and congregations in stone. But, as Matthew Shepard was learning to talk, the denomination’s Stated Clerk muted our hopes by declaring that the Assembly had interpreted the church Constitution in a way that made its recommendation binding on presbyteries and congregations.

Many congregations balked and, as friends and family told Matthew Shepard’s parents what a sweet little boy they had, a handful of Presbyterian churches began passing statements saying they would welcome people into their churches and into church leadership without regard to sexual orientation. Thus began the More Light church movement, which gave rise to similar movements in other denominations.

Matthew Shepard entered school as denominations across the United States resisted being schooled in matters related to sexuality. Churches kept an arm’s length from homosexuality and human sexuality by commissioning church committees to study these issues, only to dismiss and even condemn their conclusions and recommendations.

So, as Matthew Shepard was becoming aware of his own sexuality, our church and almost every church was announcing in the media that it was sinful, not God’s wish for humanity, evil, sick. Matthew would have had an easier time of it had he grown up in the 1950s when few people talked about homosexuality.

In Matthew’s final years of high school, as he was developing the normal crushes and contemplating what he would do with his life, the Presbyterian Church was busy codifying its anti-gay position by an amendment to our Book of Order.

As Matthew began a college career focused on political science and international relations and hoped someday to serve the United States government in a foreign embassy, that same government passed legislation that prevented recognizing the same-gender marriage he might have had.

And the night of Matthew’s death, the Presbyterian church was sleeping on its ecclesiastical sofa, having declared a moratorium on decisions regarding homosexuality.

Russell Arthur Henderson and Aaron James McKinney were coming of age at the same time, exposed to the same anti-gay messages that the church was sending to Matthew Shepard. If the church calls gay life sick and depraved, why shouldn’t they? If Christians angrily attack the so-called homosexual agenda, why shouldn’t they attack homosexuals? If Christians rob gays and lesbians of their spiritual inheritance and vocations, why shouldn’t they rob Matthew?

If the church excommunicates gays and lesbians, why shouldn’t they cast Matthew out? Excommunication means to send out of community, away from the resources needed for survival, to die of exposure in the wilderness. And in the wilderness of Wyoming, Russell and Aaron executed that sentence upon Matthew Shepard.

If the body of Christ—the church—had been there, Matthew Shepard would not have died.

If the body of Christ had been there, Russell and Aaron would not have brutalized him simply for who he was.

Unlike Jesus, the body of Christ doesn’t have a second chance with Matthew. The church cannot resurrect people. So it needs to get there sooner if it is to bring life to the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender community. It cannot dawdle, lest its only service to gay people be to bury its failures at rescuing the spiritually abused.

“Lord, if you had been there, our brother Matthew Shepard would not have died. But even now I know that God will give you whatever you ask.”

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Copyright © 1998 and 2018 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved. 

The Racial-Ethnic Oscar

In celebration of this month’s fifth anniversary of my blog, last week and the Wednesdays of February I’m providing a link to the most visited post of each year. For 2012, that would be: The Magic Kingdom (also the most visited post of all five years), with A Pragmatic Guide to Prayer coming in second.

In the controversy over the lack of black nominees for Oscars, one Academy member facetiously asked if we were now to have an ethnic category “for your consideration.” I doubt very much that the man who asked the question is racist; after all, he has a black adopted daughter and black grandchildren.

But what he missed entirely is that there is already a racial-ethnic category at play in the making of films, let alone the Academy Awards: Caucasians are favored in every category, from audiences to those who get to do the films, which to me is the crux of the problem, not just that other racial-ethnic groups are thereby excluded from consideration for awards.

Affirmative action has often been misunderstood to mean that unqualified people should get a job over qualified people. Affirmative action, rather, is better understood as providing opportunities for equally qualified applicants who are underrepresented in the industry they wish to enter.

Equal rights have also been twisted by dominant cultures to mean “special rights.” How many times have I had to argue with even the most open churchgoers that LGBT people, in seeking equal rights, were not requesting “special rights,” but the rights afforded every other citizen of our country, including the right to marry. That so many legislators and judges are now trying to curtail that right under the guise of defending religious freedom is reminiscent of the many ways the dominant white culture has tried to undermine civil rights and voting rights of African Americans.

I’m also surprised that many people have difficulty with stronger sentences for hate crimes. A crime is a crime is a crime, they think, when refusing to consider how a hate crime is a crime intended to harm and intimidate a whole segment of our citizenry, not to mention that hate crimes are characteristically far more brutal and wounding.

LGBT people have made tremendous strides in a historically relative short period because we had the advantage of being part of every family, neighborhood, congregation, congressional district, and political party. While African-Americans are yet to be fully integrated (i.e., welcomed), LGBT people began “integrated” even when not always welcomed. Knowing LGBT people personally as well as seeing us in film and on television helped our culture understand who we are.

When my mother visited me in Philadelphia in 1976, I took her to several plays, including one at the historic Academy of Music that featured Billy Dee Williams as a fiery Martin Luther King Jr. I was stunned to discover we were among a handful of white people in the packed theater. Why weren’t more white people interested?

Better was seeing The Color Purple at Grauman’s Chinese Theater in Hollywood years later. For the first time, I saw a theater filled with black people and mostly white gay people, given the black and lesbian themes of the film.

Not just in the South where I live now, but in every city I’ve lived or travelled, it’s still true that 11 a.m. Sunday morning is the most segregated hour of the week, so Christians can’t really get on our high horse—even progressive Christians—and preach what we don’t practice.

And Washington and Wall Street and corporate offices, whose whitewashed tombs house overwhelmingly white and male power structures, cannot effectively legislate, invest in, or inspire a diversity they do not represent.

So I welcome Hollywood’s agonizing over what it can do to remind us “black lives matter.” This is a step toward recognizing the diversity that makes a country great.

Blog readings for Black History month in the U.S. (February):

 “Colored on TV”

Keep the Dream Alive!

Bayard Rustin Speaks

Knowing Your Place

Where Have All the Black Men Gone?

Black Lives Matter

Other relevant posts:

Redeemed from the Pit

Love Force

The Scariest Book I’ve Read

Please support this blog ministry by clicking here and scrolling down to the donate link below its description or by mailing to MCC, P.O. Box 50488, Sarasota FL 34232 USA, designating “Progressive Christian Reflections” in the memo area of your check or money order. Thank you!

Copyright © 2016 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved. 

"Faggot" Jesus

Copyright © 2011 by Chris R. Glaser. Painting Copyright © by Becki Jayne Harrelson. All rights reserved. 

When Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ first appeared in movie theaters, a Jewish friend of ours asked if my partner and I would go with her to see it. She wanted to view it with Christians, she said, to get our perspective.

The severity of Gibson’s religion, combined with the film’s alleged anti-Semitism and blood-soaked violence, had kept it from my Top Ten list of films to see. Drawn partly from the visions of mystics of the 17th and 18th centuries, the film also carried for me a misogynistic and transphobic feeling, as evil was incarnate in an effeminate, androgynous figure.

I flinched and squirmed watching the film’s gore. Yet all I could think of is that people in this country and around the world are still enduring such vile and extreme suffering at the hands of others.

Long ago I wrote that, though a Protestant, I think we may have overstepped by taking Jesus off the crucifix. As much as I don’t wallow in bloody atonement scenarios, a body on a cross should awaken our repulsion at violence and our compassion for those who suffer it, what the 12th century teacher Peter Abelard considered the true basis of our at-one-ment with God.

The epithet “King of the Jews” at the top of Jesus’ cross was the Roman Empire's way of mocking anyone who claimed their people’s dignity in the face of oppression. It was an insult not only to Jesus but to his people; thus the chief priests are portrayed in John's Gospel as unsuccessfully petitioning to have the epithet changed.

My friend and web-designer, the artist Becki Jayne Harrelson, has captured the concept of the crucifixion as a hate crime in an outstanding painting depicting Jesus on the cross with the epithet “FAGGOT” above his head. [See painting below.] You could imagine any slur against a group of people in that slot, and understand the blood-curdling intimidation intended by those who perpetrate hate crimes, whether through physical violence or through religious or political violence.

The message for me in the story of Christ’s Passion is God’s identification with all who suffer violence. Despite our bloody church history, I do not believe that God consecrates violence. As I’ve written elsewhere, the crucifixion was our idea; the resurrection was God’s.



The Crucifixion of Christ by Becki Jayne Harrelson - http://beckijayne.com/