Boy Scouts and Bad Arguments

I was not going to say much about the decision to allow gay youth to participate in the Boy Scouts.  I was never a scout.  I have no connection with the organization other than knowing a few people who have participated.  My attention has been elsewhere, even as I was glad others were putting in the time to keep gay youth from being barred from the organization.

However, this past week I’ve seen two articles about some of the backlash the Boy Scouts have received.  For instance, churches are deciding not to host/sponsor the scouts, and parents are pulling their sons out of the organization for religious reasons.  While the scouts are outside of my experience, the Church, Christianity, and religion are not.  I will pull a few things from these articles that I find to be problematic: the winning-out of what I call “fear, caste, and cooties” and the matter of for what—and for whom—the Church exists. 

[I will not address homosexuality and Christianity directly here.  Time and space make such a detailed argument unwieldy for a blog post.  But through the study of scripture, theology, and history, as well as my experience of Christianity with LGBT brothers and sisters in Christ, I find the categorical condemnation of homosexuality as sin to be deeply flawed.  This is not to say that there is no such thing as sin in relationships or the use of sex.  I simply locate the moral locus in what people believe and do (or leave undone) instead of who they are as a person created in the image of God, and so possessing an essential dignity worthy to be recognized.]

First, some general observations from the first article.  One pastor defended his decision, saying "we don’t hate anybody...we’re not doing it out of hatred. The teachings of the scripture are very clear on this. We’re doing it because it violates the clear teaching of scripture."

There is a fascinating paragraph in which the pastor of one of the churches says 

"The Boy Scout Leadership has handed down a decision that none of the children in Helena or elsewhere associate with why they are Boy Scouts. This is a decision that was made by adults that may or may not reflect the opinions of any Boy Scout in the troop that we host. I hold the Helena Boy Scout troop with no fault whatsoever."

This is an odd sort of Christian love.  The first pastor is saying that they are not motivated by hate, but near-apathy and unequivocal separation are necessary and acceptable. The second pastor is guaranteeing that all scouts are all equally ostracized from his church for a decision he acknowledges they had no control over and may not agree with.  Personally, I find this to be closer to "fear, caste, and cooties" than Christianity.

The concern I want to explore in some depth is the matter of for what and for whom the Church exists.  Such questions about gate-keeping help to clarify when Christians step into the role of 'judge' that is supposed to be left to God.  A rather telling exchange occurs between a father and son in the second of the above articles:         

Mike A. Miller, a union electrician in Mount Holly, N.C., who said he was pulling his 9-year-old son, Cody, out of the Cub Scouts and would step down as assistant den leader of Pack 45. Monday will be his son's advancement ceremony to Webelos – as far as he will go with the organization

“It was hard to explain to a 9-year-old the complexities of why I was telling him that we had to quit,” Miller said. “He told me, 'Daddy, it should be like church. Everybody should be welcome.'”

Miller said he then told Cody that the point of going to church is to seek forgiveness — not for being all-inclusive.

“I said, 'These people aren’t asking for your forgiveness,'” Miller, 51, told NBC News in a telephone interview. “What they're doing is saying, 'this is what I am and you have to accept me like I am. I'm not coming to try to change.'

It should be mentioned that this story is told by the father, mediated by the reporter.  Let us however take it at face value--that we have an accurate account of the father's conversation with his son. The father and the son are talking about two different things.  The son makes the claim that everyone should be welcome at church.  That is a statement about who the Church is for.  The father countered with the claim that the point of going to church is to seek forgiveness.  That is a statement of what people do at church.

The father conflates these two issues--of what the Church is for and who is invited--and so creates a false dichotomy.  For ease, let's call the issue of who is invited to the Church "welcome" and the issue of what the Church is for--forgiveness, according to the father-- "sanctification."  Sanctification means "to sanctify" or "make holy."  It is a term that can cover a range of moral and religious concepts that include recognizing sin, asking forgiveness, repentance, and seeking greater holiness. These two issues that the father conflates, when separated, should read like this:

1. Either the Church welcomes everyone or the Church sets barriers on who may participate.
2. Either the Church accepts everything about a person and makes no moral claims on a person or the Church recommends the seeking of forgiveness for sin.

The father is assuming that mere welcome implies that no claims are made upon those who are welcomed.   He instead begins his reasoning by arguing about what people do at Church and arrives at the conclusion that the Church cannot welcome all. 

The child's assertion comes closer to good theology than the father's.  This is partly because the son avoids the conflation.  And I should be clear that I am not arguing for a morally nihilistic community with no sense of critical engagement with the lives of members, nonmembers, and the larger world.  What I mean to say is that the child is more correct about for whom the Church exists, and the father displays a presumptuous right to judge others.

Let's look at the son's statement.  There is plenty of scriptural evidence that the Church exists to welcome all.  The arc of Luke-Acts (and the other Gospels) is the opening of God's redemption to all.  Paul argues throughout his letters that through the work of Christ, redemption is open to all across boundaries that formerly divided people (including race, gender, and economic status (see Galatians 3, Colossians 3, Romans 3 and 10)).  And contrary to the father's assertion, the mission of the Church is to be inclusive, so that all things are brought to God's loving rule (1Cor 15:28).  In this way, his son is correct.  For the father to deny this would set the father outside of the bounds of orthodox scriptural interpretation on questions as basic as "for whom did Christ die and rise, and who may be saved?"

Now, the father would probably agree with the assertion of universal redemption in the abstract. He seems like he might take the Bible seriously.  But the way the father sets up his false dichotomy seems to say that there are people who are not welcome in the Church.  He conflates unconditional "welcome" into the Body of Christ through which salvation is granted with rejecting the work of recognizing sin, asking forgiveness, and seeking greater moral perfection.  (Also, the father's assertion that "the point of going to church is to seek forgiveness" is too small of a vision for the Church.  There is much more to the Church than that.)

It is at this point where an inappropriate judgment comes into action.  The father is so convinced that LGBT folks are resistant to change that he sees it as better to bar them from participating in the church.  [I should note that the change I think the father would want is for LGBT people to conform to hetero-normative standards of behavior.  When I speak of change, I mean the processes of sanctification that help one seek the holy in all relationships, gay or straight, romantic and otherwise.]  This position the father takes, which assumes some are resisitant to--or beyond all--redemption, goes beyond the moral critique that Christians are (necessarily) called to do, and enters the territory of judgment.  'Judgment,' that action Christians are to forgo because it is the purview of God,  is "not an injunction to spineless acceptance but a caution against peremptory legalisms that leave no space for acts of compassion and witness (see Mt 7:1, Jn 7:53-8:11).”  The father's willingness to speak with finality about the moral status of anyone--and so preemptively bar them from the community of God--is then an inappropriate judgment, motivated by fear and stereotype. 

It is also a judgment God has the power to thwart.  I believe that we will be surprised to see how God continues to work at extending love into places where we lesser beings thought we would never find such grace.  My hope is that Christians continue to seek that love wherever it shows itself.

Mary and Martha

Sermon--Pentecost, Proper 11, Year C

Amos 8:1-12
Psalm 52
Colossians 1:15-28
Luke 10:38-42

Mary and Martha, Mary and Martha.

The story seems so familiar.

Mary: the quiet dutiful disciple at the foot of Jesus soaking everything in.

Sometimes Mary comes to stand as the example of the contemplative life, where all one needs to do is lead a quiet life of prayer in order to have chosen the better part.

Then you have Martha: the distracted busybody who invites Jesus over only to become annoyed when she is the only one doing anything.

Sometimes Martha comes to stand as the example of what happens when Christians or churches try to do too much, try to be too active, and so miss out on what is really important. In some very extreme forms, the perceived danger of being a “Martha” leads to people finding hospitality and social outreach —which are concrete ways of showing concern for one’s neighbor— to be secondary, and concerns more-easily dismissed.

Too often, when one hears this story from the Gospel, one hears more of “Mary or Martha” as though one must choose to follow the example of only one of these women, or as though these two women represent ideas that are always opposed. Some care needs to be taken before this brief exchange between Martha, Mary, and Jesus leads us into forcing ourselves and others into a false choice between what seems to be two opposed patterns of life.

To do this, we’ll need to look at what went right —and wrong —with Martha, what Mary understood from the beginning, and what we might learn from both about the nature of hospitality.

Let’s start with Martha. What was going right here? First of all, she was showing hospitality to Jesus. Hospitality is incredibly important in the whole of the Bible. If we were to just stay in the book of Luke, recall that Jesus sent first the twelve disciples, and then the seventy, to the surrounding towns to preach.[1] He sent his disciples with nothing —not even an extra shirt or sandals— making them totally dependent on those whom they would meet. In short, the disciples were given the responsibility to proclaim the news of the Kingdom of God, and they were expected to live on the hospitality others provided. Jesus says they were being sent out like lambs among wolves because they had nothing about themselves on which to rely. The hospitality they were shown—or not shown— was in effect a test of the town. To turn away a stranger in need —particularly one who was proclaiming the good news of the kingdom of God—reflected poorly on the town.

Jesus, being the wandering preacher that he was, also had to rely on the hospitality of strangers and friends. Martha did right by inviting Jesus in, and taking on all of the responsibilities that doing so entails. This includes food, comfort, protection.

And if you have invited someone to your home, for a night or for an extended stay, you know how busy you can be. You have to buy extra food, wash more towels, maybe give up the exclusive claim to your own bathroom...

This busy-ness was not the problem, since we see that Jesus relied on hospitality for himself and his disciples [further, in Acts 6, we see the disciples assign folks to serve in hospitality so that neither preaching or service  to others are neglected].

So what was the problem for Martha?  Well, the problem was not that she set herself to complete many tasks, the problem was that she was eventually consumed by them.  The problem was not that she was trying to be hospitable, and so wasn’t also sitting at Jesus’ feet; for Martha’s hospitality and Mary’s attention are both ways of showing devotion. Instead Jesus names the problems as worry and distractibility.

Does that sound familiar to anyone?
Prone to worry? Easy to distract? Anybody?

The problem was that in the midst of her tasks, Martha’s “practices of hospitality were eclipsing their purpose. Hospitality that is anxious and troubled loses its focus, which is Jesus, who is Lord and guest.”[2]

Understanding the focus of our hospitality as having something to do with the Christ we proclaim goes to the heart of what hospitality is, and why Christians are called to practice hospitality with such care. We learn in the Gospel of Matthew that what we do for even the least of those whom we meet is also done for Christ.[3] We learn in the Book of Genesis that all are made in the very image of God, and so are worthy of respect and dignity by virtue of sharing something so central to our own humanity. An act of hospitality on our part is an act of love for another who bears the image of God in Christ. It is an enactment of the ethic of the Kingdom of God in which all people have a worth intrinsic to themselves.  Our practices should call into serious question worldly ways of determining the worth of individuals, ways which all too often will not look past the surface layers of wealth, race, or gender...to name a few examples.

Martha, in her effort to call her sister and her guest to task for not cooperating in her own vision of what the visit should have looked like, lost sight of why she invited Jesus in the first place.

As for Mary, it was this single-minded focus on Jesus as the guest, and not simply her presence at his feet, which made Mary the clearer example of discipleship in that very moment. In this exchange between Mary, Martha, and Jesus, it is that matter of focus on God in Christ to which Christians need to attend, not a false choice between more prayerful or more active manners of devotion.

So. Okay. Mary and Martha were lucky enough to have Jesus in the flesh in their very home. How do we, today, find that focus? There are ways, both prayerful and active, which have been passed down through the generations. Reading and praying with scripture is a direct encounter with others’ experiences of God. Through the scriptures, encounters with God are still possible As we immerse ourselves in a story we continue to tell and take part in. Prayer in which we leave room for God to speak into our silences remind us that we are in conversation with God, not possessors of a one-way wish-granting hotline. Serving others with hospitality, here at church and elsewhere throughout the week, attune our eyes to finding God in unexpected places. Even starting a conversation with someone you do not know can become an avenue to give or receive God’s grace —and coffee hour is a good place to practice doing this.

These practices: encounter with scripture, prayer, and practicing hospitality, can help us keep a focus on God as we seek to serve our neighbors.

In the Christian tradition, we also have examples of holy people trying to maintain a balance between contemplation and hospitality. In Benedictine monasteries from the 12th century to today, the arrival of guests was seen as an opportunity to serve Christ in the visitor, rich and poor alike. And monks [well, at least the priors] would suspend their own fasts—their own self-imposed spiritual disciplines— in order to eat with their guests.[4] This is an example worthy of the attention of all Christians.

Now focus is one thing. I want to end by talking briefly about distraction, and leave you with a few questions. It is easy to lose sight of God in the bustle of our lives. After all, Martha managed to get distracted while Jesus was sitting right there.

What are the things in our own lives that lead to distraction? What keeps us from being attuned to the murmurings and messages of God?

For Martha, it was the demands of the household that blinded her to the memory of why she was showing hospitality in the first place.

What about us, as individuals or as a community?
What holds our attention?
Where might God be calling us to make a change, so that we may hear more clearly that which God is calling us to do?

May your listening be fruitful.

Amen.



__________
[1] Lk 9:1-7, 10:1-16.
[2] Matthew L.Skinner, Feasting on the Word, Year C, Volume 3, p. 267.
[3] Mt 25:31-46.
[4] The Rule of Benedict, Chapter 53.