Like many of my friends and colleagues in ministry today, I am somewhat at a loss for words.
It was a hard, hard weekend at the Covenant Annual Meeting. In what is becoming something of a pattern, heartbreakingly so, the gathered assembly voted this weekend to expel another church for its policies of inclusion toward the LGBTQ community.
That alone is plenty.
But on top of it, the Supreme Court also handed down their slate of decisions for this session before going onto summer recess, among them the repeal of affirmative action policies, or “race-conscious admissions” for institutions of higher education, and another allowing a web designer to refuse services to LGBTQ couples.
Oh, and if that weren’t enough, we’re heading into the July 4th holiday. A time that, historically, I could jump into with full abandon: fireworks! Hamburgers and hot dogs! Strawberry shortcake and flag t-shirts! But now I’m left a little lukewarm, recognizing that the America which has treated me so, so well as an upper-middle class, heterosexual, Christian, white woman, does not exist for many others.
So I’m sitting on my porch, enjoying the first really beautiful (smoke-free, blue-sky, not-terribly-humid) morning we’ve had in days near Chicago, and ruminating.
I’m thinking about institutions, which as someone pointed out this weekend, were never meant to love us. And yet I have – we have – looked to them for so much: for reflecting our values, for implementing policies that reflect them, and that pursue justice and wholeness. We have trusted in them. We have supported them. Some of them, even, (like the church), we have loved.
But they have failed us, in ways. They have broken some of our hearts.
Perhaps because we know and recognize what they could be. What they have been. What they are capable of.
Like watching a loved one squander their talents or go down an unhealthy path, it pains us to see these institutions do the same.
It was reported this weekend that, after the vote to expel Awaken Church from the Covenant, a member of the denominational executive board called it “a victory for Jesus.”
I cannot think of any words less true.
Instead, the words that I keep returning to this morning are those of Father Gregory Boyle, who said, “You know you’ve created God in your own image when you discover God hates all the same people that you do.”
Boyle talks and writes extensively about this, about our human propensity to draw lines and circles and decide who is in and who out. And he is abundantly clear on this: that is not the way of Jesus. In an interview given to The Work of the People, Boyle said, “Our God is so huge and so welcoming, and Jesus was only about dismantling the barriers that excluded, he was only about expanding the circle of compassion, hopeful that no one would stand outside of it.”
Hopeful that no one would stand outside of it.
I wish I had a solution for us this morning. I wish I knew the exact way forward. Or could offer words of certainty and hope.
But perhaps these thoughts of Father Boyle are enough, for now.
The reminder that God is always bigger, and greater, than us and our ideas.
The encouragement not to fall into the trap of making God in our image.
And the call to find ways of expanding the circle of compassion ever wider. Hopefully, some of that work can take place within the institutions we support. But it must never be limited to those, either.
That’s all for now. But just for now.
-Pastor Jen
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