Sunday, June 20, 2010

Happy Father's Day to all the fathers out there! If you are a father, have a father, or know a father, then here's to celebrating your special day!

Today was a great day at church. Worship service is always what you make it, and I enjoy bopping around the pulpit, singing with the choirs, playing on my congas when the spirit strikes me, and generally trying to bring a bit of life to the worship experience. I was feeling energetic this morning (there were lots of visitors, and the service was so dead that I felt sorry for them), so I was tapping out a beat, which I just played louder as the visitors announced themselves. A young man in the back stood up and was speaking, and I heard the Pastor say North Carolina. Long story short, HE WAS FROM ST. JOSEPH CME CHURCH, My Home Church!!!! I got a big kick out of that -- I always get a kick out of it when people from home visit. And he brought his dad with him. His Dad is a Baptist, and from Winston-Salem, but the young man,Rob, is a member of the CME Church, is Ms. Marion Jackson's godson, and actually works in the Marion Jackson Center in St. Joseph (for context here, Ms. Marion Jackson is one of the people listed in my baby book as giving me gifts when I was born. She gave me a dress). Rob is part of my connectional family, but he's also part of my home church family. I texted Rev. Harrison so he could tell the St. Joseph family. Rev. Harrison called me back later, and invited me to preach when I come to St. Joseph in August.

And while it has nothing to do with my joy, I will mention that Rob is a white guy, and ours is a traditionally African-American church. I look at him in the church (which, traditionally, epitomizes and perpetuates entrenched and lingering American segregationist tendencies) -- I look at this young white man in a traditionally African-American denomination, and it's like things have come full circle from when I was a little kid who was always one of only two or three black kids in a white environment.

So that was cool. Then I went back down to the Korean chicken place and got enough chicken to last all week.

I want to say a bit here about one of our CME bishops. I posted before about how people are so condemning of him. While I don't believe people are justified in condemning the guy, I do think that, as a leader in the church, he would at some point examine himself and acknowledge the impact of his actions. My issue is not with him having sex with a man, but with him having sex outside his marriage. It's not our place to judge or condemn him, but I think we have a reasonable expectation that our leaders will, at the very least, uphold the rules they put forth for the rest of us, and I think that, as leaders, they should be held accountable for their actions. My thought would be that the College of Bishops would hold each other accountable. He's about to be elected Chair of the College of Bishops. While I think it's a good thing the Church is sending a gay-affirming message (although I'm fairly sure that's not their intent), I don't think it's a good thing that the Church is sending a message that it's ok to trash the vows you take as part of your covenant with God, and never acknowledge that you've trashed those vows.

I think that by not addressing the issue, our College of Bishops sends the message that our relationship with God is not important, or is only ritually important, but its importance does not treanslate into the rest of our lives. In general, I think that's the problem with our church -- there appears to be a good deal of disconnect between what we say and what we do. We abstractly preach "Christ and Him Crucified," we have ecstatic experiences for the 90 or 120 minutes that we're inside the four walls of the church, but we are not transformed. Generally speaking, our preachers don't give us any evidence that they've spoken with God and don't relay God's prophetic message for our lives. Our preachers simply holler and shout about how good God is. Duh, we know that already. Tell us something new. We don't go away from these supposed encounters with God any different than we came into them. I say "supposed" encounters with God, because I believe that if we had true encounters with God, there would be some transformation. In general, what I see in our denomination is a desire to perpetuate the status quo -- we want to keep doing things as usual without questioning what we're doing or understanding why we're doing it. We want some abstract concept of change, but we also want to keep doing things the same way we've always done them. There's an old saying that "if you do what you've always done, you'll get what you always got." There's another saying that defines insanity as "repeating the same behavior and expecting different results." IMHO, either adage would apply to our church.

I don't for a moment think this peculiarity is limited to our denomination; I actually think it's the result of people not understanding what they believe or why they believe it. I think it's the result of people clinging to tradition rather than delving into a relationship with God, plumbing the heights and depths of that relationship, and actively exploring God's word with an open heart and mind.

That's not what I intended to write when I started, but i think this is enough for one night.