Get Her Words Out

On Being Other

For Family Of Christ PC(USA), Greeley, CO.

August 14, 2011

Isaiah 56:1-8

Matthew 15:21-28

 

It's interesting that these two texts came up in the lectionary on a Sunday that I was going to preach.  I've spent a good bit of time with both of them, although I have studied them for different reasons.

One, the Isaiah text, is a text that I have loved for very personal reasons.  Its oracle of radical inclusion, particularly of the inclusion of eunuchs is very important to me.

The time I spent with the Matthew text was less voluntary and personal. Part of the process of becoming a minister in the PC(USA) is a series of Ordination Exams.  The standard path through the exams starts in your first year of seminary with the multiple choice Bible Content Exam, the most straight forward of the exams.  In your third year you dig into the other four exams.  There are three sit-down, limited time exams, Worship and Sacraments, Theology, and Presbyterian Polity.  Each exam consists of three essay questions that you have three hours to answer.  On the exam weekend, you take them on Friday morning, Friday afternoon and Saturday morning.

Then at noon Saturday comes the beginning of the last of the exams, the Biblical Exegesis Exam. This is a take home, open book exam that you have until 10:00am Thursday morning to finish.  During those five days you do very little but study the text that has been assigned for the exam.

And guess what, this morning's Gospel text is the New Testament text that my Exegesis Ord was focused on.  I have a 16 page scholarly paper already written about the story of the Canaanite woman, so I'm good to go on the sermon, right? Well, let's take a look at a section on the use of the verb Apoluson, shall we?

Church Shopping

In all honesty, after the last post, I have to admit that I have been church shopping lately.   As I sat, more or less unhappily, in church this last Sunday, I realized that the problem really was not about any of the churches I've been attending (although I have to say, coming into the narthex five minutes before the published start time to find the ushers busily closing all the doors to the sanctuary was not very welcoming.);  The problem is that I am tired of just going to church, after three years of seminary, two years as a Lay Pastor and two years of training before that, I am ready to be doing something.   (If it's not too much to ask, I would like to be payed for it, too.)

The Kind of Church You Want

Adam at Pomomusings has written a nice article for Relevant Magazine about church shopping and how we will never find the exact church that we are looking for, but “[i]nstead we need to find a church and commit to it."

The idea of church shopping and moving around to find the church you want always make me think of this poem.  Its author is unknown, and the book I have it in (The Best Loved Poems of the American People) was published in 1936, so it is at least 70 years old.  Because of its age, the language is not very inclusive, but I like it nonetheless.

IT ISN’T THE CHURCH – IT’S YOU

If you want to have the kind of church
Like the kind of a church you like,
You needn’t slip your clothes in a grip
And start on a long, long hike.
You’ll only find what you left behind,
For there’s nothing really new.
It’s a knock at yourself when you knock your church;
It isn’t the church – it’s you.

When everything seems to be going wrong,
And trouble seems everywhere brewing;
When prayer meeting, Young People’s meeting, and all,
Seem simmering slowly – stewing,
Just take a look at yourself and say,
“What’s the use of being blue?”
Are you doing you “bit” to make things “hit”?
It isn’t the church – it’s you.

It’s really strange sometimes, don’t you know,
That things go as well as they do,
When we think of the little – the small mite –
We add to the work of the few.
We sit, and stand round, and complain of what’s done,
And do very little but fuss.
Are we bearing our share of the burdens to bear?
It isn’t the church – it’s us.

So, if you want to have the kind of a church
Like the kind of a church you like,
Put off your guile, and put on your best smile,
And hike, my brother, just hike,
To the work in hand that has to be done –
The work of saving a few.
It isn’t the church that is wrong, my boy;
It isn’t the church – it’s you.

A couple of years ago somebody from the PC(USA)’s New Church Development division preached in chapel at Columbia.  Somewhere he had found a statistic that showed that more than forty percent of the unchurched people out there would go to church if they could just find a church that they liked.

His point was that we should be working hard to become that church; the one that all those people would like, that was the key to growing our denomination.

I couldn’t help but wonder how many of those people defined “a church that I like” as a church that never asked anything of them, that never challenged them, wanted to them do any work, or to spend any time at the church beyond 11-12 Sunday morning.

In an environment of church shopping, the danger is not only that the consumers will set unreachable standards, but also that the church itself will try to give up too much of itself to meet those standards.

A Prayer for My Journey

On reading the last post, one of my professors sent me this prayer by Thomas Merton:

My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going.  I do not see the road ahead of me.  I cannot know for certain where it will end.  Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so.  But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you.  And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing.  I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire.  And I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road though I may know nothing about it.  Therefore will I trust you always though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death.  I will not fear, for you are ever with me, and you will never leave me to face my perils alone.

Examination. Not. Sustained.

Secret ballot:  51-62

Oh, well.  I mean, who really wants to be a Candidate anyway?

They asked me about half a dozen questions, then sent me out of the room while they debated for what seemed like more than half an hour, then they voted.

Everyone there who spoke to me was very nice, and very supportive.  And the people who came to support me from my home church and from Columbia were wonderful, I feel so blessed to have people like that caring for me.   As we were standing at the front of the sanctuary, waiting for the votes to be counted, they started to sing:  “Amazing Grace,” “Guide My Feet,” and “We Are One in the Spirit.”

It was a beautiful thing, full of the Spirit, of love and of grace.

I can take some comfort, I think, that I did everything I could.  The things I wrote and the answers that I gave during the Examination were well received and, I’m told, very good.  I don’t think I shot myself in the foot with any of them.

It seems that for a large number of the people at the Presbytery meeting what I had to say didn’t matter.  They were going to vote against my candidacy no matter what.  I think this is my first experience of being an issue more than being a person.

In the grand scheme of things I don’t know how much difference this really makes.  I have tried to look at this not as an end to the road but as a turn. 

It is frustrating though.  I feel like I have been following this call since I started Commissioned Lay Pastor training in 1999, and I know that I have learned an incredible amount and developed many gifts in that time.  But it is hard to have been on a journey for this long and not only to not know when the end is going to come but to not even know what that end is going to be.

Too much Heaven on my mind

I have been having a conversation about the nature of Heaven with a couple of friends recently.

The question comes down to:  is Heaven the place where we get what we wanted, or is it that when we get there our desires will be aligned with God to the extent that we don't want the things we can't have.

I have spent a great amount of time in this life wanting things that are impossible for me to have in this world.  Sometimes, when the pain of "I can never have that" is too much, I have taken comfort in the idea that maybe it's not never, it's just not here.  I have leaned heavily on the idea that if I wait, if I make it to the end of this race, part of the reward will be that I will be able to experience those things that I can't here.

The other idea is that in the completion of our justification and sanctification we are freed from our earthly desires and our desires become one with the desires of God and that is the ultimate reward.

Another way to ask this is, in the day of the resurrection when we rise with our spiritual bodies, as Paul tells us, will my body be male or female?  Will I be female and be happy because I have received the thing that I have wanted so desperately, or will I be male and be happy because I no longer want to be female?

I don't think it makes any difference here and now, but I have a hard time finding comfort in the second idea, primarily because I don't understand what it means to talk about me without these desires.  To a great extent the desire to be a woman defines who I am, if I don't have that, am I still me?

The Final Version...

...of my letter to the Presbytery is up in "Other Writings" in the sidebar.

The Second Question

And here's what I have for question number 2:

The second question that I hear is, “by doing this, aren’t you going against God’s will or plan for you?”  Or, “isn’t what your doing unnatural?”

Yes it is true that I was born in a man’s body and not in a woman’s.  It is also true that I was born with poor eyesight and high blood pressure.  If working to make the first one more bearable is unnatural or against God’s plan for me, how can we say that the things I do to deal with the others are not?

   

Psalm 139:1  O LORD, you have searched me and known me. 2 You know when I sit down and when I rise up; you discern my thoughts from far away. 3 You search out my path and my lying down, and are acquainted with all my ways.

Who I am is no surprise to God.  As the Psalmist says God is acquainted with all our ways, and just as I said earlier that God has the power to bring good out of bad, I also have faith that God plans for us as we are.

God’s plan for me includes that I am who I am.  Getting stuck in wishing that things could be other than what they are is a human failing.  God is a realist.  God works with what God has.

This is a hard path, but God does not call us to always follow the easy path, nor has God ever promised us responding to God’s call will be easy. 

We see time and again through out the biblical witness that Israel being God’s chosen people did not mean that they would never see hardship, that their path would always be easy.

As the great theologian, my mother, has asked, if being a Christian meant that bad things would never happen to us, how could we ever relate to the people we are supposed to carry the Good News to?  How could we relate to them, how could we help them in their pain if we never know any pain ourselves?

We speak of there being two components to a call, a personal, inner sense of call that drives a person forward through this process, and a communal, external understanding that pushes that person along.  Before I started dealing honestly and faithfully with who I am, my self-esteem and self-understanding were so low that I was relying almost exclusively on the second component.  People I knew, people I trusted kept telling me that I was called to this work, and pushed me to come to seminary.

An amazing thing has happened since I living into my true identity: I have grown in confidence and have learned to see myself in a positive light, to believe that I can do this work and that I am called to it.  I believe that this growth has been reflected in a great improvement in the quality of my sermons and in my ability to provide pastoral care.  Until I could see myself as a person of value, I could never really treat others as valuable.  What convinces me that I am following the right path is that the farther I have gone down this path the more sure I have become of my call.

I know that God knows me and has always known who I really am, even when I didn’t.  Through both external and internal evidence I have come to believe that I have been called by God to the work of ministry.  Those two things together say to me that there are people that God needs me to serve, as the person that God truly knows me to be.

The First Question

What I have so far:

The first question that people raise is “do you think that God made a mistake?”  In other words, do I blame God for this circumstance?

It would be very easy for me to beat my breast, tear at my hair and wail about how I have been cursed by God with this affliction.  Not only would it be easy, there would be a certain comfort and freedom there.  If this is God’s fault, if this is something God has done to me, then I am freed from struggling to get beyond assigning blame and I can settle into a warm and comfortable place of feeling sorry for myself.

But, as tempting as it may be to play Job, I don’t think that’s a place where we are supposed to stay.  Self-pity and blaming our problems on God are not what we are created for.

God looked at creation and called it good, Paul tells us that “all things work together for good,” but he also tells us that creation is groaning in labor pains waiting for the coming times.

We know that through the redeeming death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, God has done what needs to be done to redeem us and all of creation.  But, we don’t take that knowledge to mean that every thing should always go the way that we want it to go.  The processes of nature are complex and we don’t expect God to interfere with them simply we want them to be different.  We don’t expect God to stop the rain just because we want to go golfing, and we don’t blame God when the bread falls butter side down.

No, where we meet the power of God is not in God’s preventing bad things from happening to us, but in God’s ability to bring good out of worst that happens to us.  My comfort is not that God will wrap me in cotton wool and keep anything from happening to me, my comfort, my only comfort is that in life and in death, and through everything that happens to me is that:

I belong—body and soul, in life and in death—not to myself but to my faithful Savior, Jesus Christ, who at the cost of his own blood has fully paid for all my sins and has completely freed me from the dominion of the devil; that he protects me so well that without the will of my Father in heaven not a hair can fall from my head; indeed, that everything must fit his purpose for my salvation. Therefore, by his Holy Spirit, he also assures me of eternal life, and makes me wholeheartedly willing and ready from now on to live for him.

Do I think God made a mistake?  No.  I trust that the sovereign Lord of all creation doesn’t make mistakes.  Do I blame God for my being Transgendered?  No.  I believe that whether society or I decide that being Transgendered is a blessing or a curse, God has the power to use me and my condition for good, if I but trust in God to guide me.

For the non-Presbyterians reading this, the quote is the answer to the first question of the Heidelberg Catechism, "What is your only comfort, in life and in death?"

Two Questions

I've made it back to Atlanta, and it's time to go back to school.

In the next couple of weeks, I also have to write a scriptural and theological defense of transgender.  I go up in front of my Presbytery to become a candidate in February and my CPM has asked me to have this written by the 17th of January.

Right now, I think I'll go at it through addressing two questions that are asked of me, over and over.

The first is "do you think that God made a mistake?" The second is, "by living into this transgendered identity, are you going against God's plan for you?"

Needless to say, I have some pretty strong opinions on both those questions.  I just need to work out how to frame those opinions in a biblical and doctrinal framework.

I'll post what I come up with here and, if there is anybody out there, I would love to get some feedback on what works and what doesn't.