About the result of the ELCA Churchwide Assembly with respect to gay clergy. I come to this from a place a little closer to the ELCA than the typical Episcopalian in the CCM era. For twelve years of my life, I lived across from one of the ELCA's great seminaries in the city that was the birthplace of Lutheranism in America. While I never haunted the library there (despite the suggestion of one of my Rectors), I did learn to ride a bike on its grounds. When I was a teenager, I traveled to South Dakota and helped out with a joint Lutheran-Episcopal ministry in Pine Ridge, South Dakota, capital of the reservation of my ancestral tribe and the seat of the U.S.'s poorest county. I'll never forget Pastor Larry Petersen, the ebullient Minnesotan, who had been willing to minister to most non-Lutheran ethnic group in South Dakota. Pastor Petersen apparently reconciled with one of the Episcopal suffragan bishops of North Dakota some years ago after learning that one of the bishops' ancestors had killed the first family of one of Petersen's ancestors during the War of the Nakota against the Corruption of Sibley (usually called the Santee Uprising).
One of the Lutheran seminary students interned at my parish for a while, and he and I served together in a variety of capacities. I'll never forget his first time as subdeacon when I must have had a look of abject horror when he made no use of the water cruet during the Preparation of the Table. He was good-natured enough to accept the gentle correction of a fifteen year old boy. I imagine he's a great pastor now.
In college, a few of our peer ministers were Lutheran, including one who is now in a Ph.D. program at an institution a reader or two of this blog will know as their own. One so clearly called to the Ministry of Word and Table, he waits for the opportunity for a Synod of the ELCA to look past his sexual orientation to his call or more properly, he waits for some Synod of the ELCA to look at the love he has for another man and see the love he has for Christ and His Church.
And a few years ago, I found myself in a suburb of Houston, Texas for a summer and found a Lutheran church within walking distance. For ten Sundays, I worshipped happily and took Communion with them, even on the one Sunday of the month given over to the praise band. What surprised me was that even in a much more conservative part of the world, an old German-American pastor slipped quite liberal sentiments on the belovedness of gays and lesbians by God in his sermons.
Reading the resolution, I have to like part of it. I like that it refers to same-sex relationships as chaste. I like that it privileges the kind of same-sex relationships that I believe are appropriate for the Christian life and indeed best suited for civil peace. What I don't like is the limitation in it, a limitation that may be inherent in the Churchwide Assembly. It prays that the law not be enforced. It doesn't try to change the law. Maybe that's a victory. Maybe, the Churchwide Assembly is saying that these particular conduct standards for rostered ministers are a matter of positive law not divine law. But I warn my Lutheran brethren that the "no enforcement" bandwagon has wobbly wheels. The Episcopal Church has been in this situation for some years. What's good for Frisco isn't good for Fresno. I guess there was no way to say, "Well, we're going to pray and study for a decade but for that time, no one is to enforce this so we can have genuine discernment." That's too bad. All we are going to see is that the synods who had sort of openly gay clergy will have really openly gay clergy, and the synods who didn't will have some scared and closeted pastors.
2 comments:
The last sexuality study indeed called for the type of Gamaliel situation you describe at the end of your post. It was rejected. I think this is a potential first step in that direction. What is missing is a process of discernment.
I as you see the potential geographical problems. After all, I would love if we could eventually live in a small town with access to a college or university. Fortunately, in ELCA polity, congregations do have a bit more authority than in TEC, so a congregation (and some have) in rural Kansas or Minnesota can call an openly gay pastor even if the bishop prosecutes.
Nothing like sleepy college towns. Northfield, MN, for instance, would be interesting.
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