Created in the image of God

If I am totally honest, part of the reason that I went to seminary was to learn enough about the Bible so that I could feel like I could defend myself, my sexuality, to those people who were telling me that I was an abomination in the eyes of God. I spent most of my life feeling like there was the word of God, which I was told was extremely clear on issues of homosexuality, and then there was me.

I was a Christian, but I just did not feel like I belonged in the body of Christ.  I always felt like the promises of God’s grace and love were for other people.  Those people who were straight. As a teenager, and young adult, I had a ravenous appetite for devouring scripture. I read the Bible with desperation of someone starving for acceptance. When reading the Bible did not yield the answer that I so deeply wanted, that I was loved by God despite my sexuality, I pursued graduate theological studies.

I read every book that I could find that talked about sex and marriage and love in the Bible.  I learned Greek and Hebrew, so that I could read scripture in its original language, hoping against hope that I would find what I was looking for. I engaged professors and fellow students in energetic discussions, arguing with every person throughout my life who told me that I did not belong. I joined progressive Christian communities, and I even preached the radical love and acceptance of God, but I struggled to believe it could be true for me.

Around this same time, I met the love of my life, my partner Katrina. Our love is a glorious thing and it is through this beautiful relationship, that I have come to know God’s love for me as a queer woman. As I wept bitterly that I was graduating with my Master’s of Divinity degree and still did not have definitive proof that I was loved by God, she simply said, “God has created us and our love for one another, and it is good.  Because how can something so beautiful as our love be anything but from God?”

I am created in God’s image, including my orientation towards intimate partnership with another woman, and it is good. I have read the Bible cover to cover multiple times, I know the history of sexuality in the Bible and in the ancient near east and the Greco-Roman world, and yet, I never dared to believe I was loved by God until I dared to be loved by a woman.

I could argue all day about why homosexuality as we know it now, as a consensual, loving relationship between two adults simply did not exist in the past. I could argue that the Bible contradicts itself and that at the center is love and acceptance. But that will never be enough, because “knowledge puffs up, but love builds up.” (1 Corinthians 8:1) It is love that changes everything.

To those of you who are wondering if God loves you because you are gay or trans or genderqueer, the answer is yes!  To those of you who have never heard that you are loved by God’s people and that you belong in the body of Christ, you do! If you will let me, this queer Lutheran pastor will never stop telling you that you are made in God’s image and that you are loved by God and by me and by so many others who follow Jesus. Because how can anything so beautiful as you be anything but from God? 

Towards a new ethic of sexuality in the Church

I have been spending a fair amount of time lately thinking about human sexuality. It’s funny that this would be a topic about which I feel compelled to speak, because I was socialized in a way that it was extremely unacceptable to talk about sex. I am not alone in this situation either. My family did not give any particular guidance about sexuality, nor did my church. I received a really comprehensive sex education in my high school health classes, and for that I am thankful.  They didn’t skimp on the biology or the methodology of birth control. What was missing was any sort of education pertaining to LGBTQ concerns or implications of being in a relationship with another person or how sexual activity can change a relationship. I don’t fault my health class in any way, because most of these things are learned over the course of a lifetime of trial and error.

What I find particularly problematic is the church, in my case, the ELCA, isn’t entirely sure how to handle matters of sex. The most that the church generally offers is something along the lines of “don’t have sex outside of marriage.”  Except that marriage as a cultural institution has shifted so dramatically, and over the last few decades, the age of first marriage has gradually increased.  And sex has become more and more a topic for public discussion and more acceptable.

So you combine changing norms around marriage (more and more people never marrying at all, same gender marriage becoming a legal reality, etc) with a dramatic increase in the age of first marriage (according to US Census information, this is now 29 for men and 27 for women) and the church’s rhetoric of “no sex before you get married” is just not that realistic anymore. What would it take for Christians to reimagine our view of sex?

Premarital sex has been cast in the light of “sin”.  Sex as a part of intimate relationships has been unfortunately commingled with a historical understanding of women as property to be “married off” and heteronormativity.  Virginity before marriage is bound up in notions of women needing to be pure as they are “given away” to their husbands in marriage.  This purity culture implies that sex before marriage makes a woman “used goods.”  The inherent patriarchy in this understanding does not hold men to the same standards. What is most problematic in this discourse is that it is so stuck in the idea of one man + one woman =marriage understanding that it completely ignores other expressions of public commitments of love.

When we make sex before marriage something that is tied to shame, it takes on a life of its own.  It becomes something that we keep hidden.  This creates all sorts of issues.  We don’t offer space for two adults in a committed relationship to consent to sexual relations with one another. There is no magic permission giving that happens before the signing of a marriage certificate and after.  We have created a sexual ethic of shame, which causes real issues and real pain.  

When we limit the definition of marriage to one man + one woman, we implicitly buy into a history of patriarchy and oppression. There is a raging and vitriolic debate going on about what constitutes marriage. The term “Biblical marriage” has been flung around, when in actuality, there is no one definition of what this means.  My next blog post will explore this idea.

What would it take for the church to explore a new ethic of human sexuality?  To recognize that shame need not be the driving force?  That rather, an open and mutually respectful and loving ethic of human sexuality be what drives us?  That God delights in our physical expressions of love for one another because that is what we were created to do? 

What would it take for the church to recognize that marriage is a public commitment of love and fidelity between two adults, whatever their genders? That marriage equality is not a slippery slope of “anything goes” but rather a recognition that love has many faces. What would it look like if the church honored and supported all marriages?

You already belong…a sermon on John 10:1-10

A. Hanson, Ameugney.
This is the closest thing to a gate I have.

Grace, peace, and mercy are yours from our resurrected and living God.  Amen. 

Jesus as the Gate.  Among biblical metaphors, this is one of the stranger ones. We call this particular Sunday in the church year, the fourth Sunday of Easter and halfway to Pentecost, “Good Shepherd Sunday”, but our Gospel text from John is not actually about Jesus as a shepherd, it is about Jesus as a gate.  And this image of Jesus is far from the bucolic and soothing idea of a good shepherd leading a flock of sheep through green pastures and beside still waters. We are generally uncomfortable with the idea of a gate, because in our understanding, it brings to mind something that separates those on the inside from those on the outside.  Gates keep people out, gates keep people in. Gates can serve as protection, such as when we fence our yards to provide a safe place for children to play, or gates can be a sort of privilege, such as with gated housing communities where a cushion of wealth can keep out those who are undesirable. Gates can be opened for us or slammed in our faces.

At first glance, this metaphor of Jesus as a gate seems more problematic than it does promising, particularly when looked at in the context of the body of Christ.  To proclaim Jesus as a gate seems that there might be an insider community and also a community that is outside the gate.  And because it is our human nature, we want to do everything possible to make sure that we are part of that insider group.  This is rooted in our need for security.  We look for ways to make sure that we can be included in this select group.  Whether that is by believing the “right” things (whatever those might be) or making sure that we are “good” enough through our own actions. Or perhaps we despair of ever really belonging to the body of Christ and we drown in our own shame and regret. Maybe we feel too young or too old or too poor or we feel depressed when everyone else around us seems to be filled with joy.

The church has in many ways contributed to creating this sense of who is in and who is out. This text has been preached as a sort of guide to salvation.  That Jesus is a shepherd and opens the gate to abundant and eternal life, and all we have to do is just follow him through that narrow gate and then stay the course with him. Also, the church has at some times and places decided who is good enough to be a follower of Jesus based on one’s actions, identity, or some other measure. It’s like the church itself, or the people that compose the institution, have decided to be the gatekeepers that open the doors to let the sheep pass through unimpeded…or not pass through. This does not sound much like the good news of the Gospel to me, and it makes it extremely difficult to see Jesus as the gate promising abundant life. 

I spent most of this last week at a retreat in Northern Wisconsin.  This retreat was for publically identified gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender ELCA clergy and seminarians and hosted by an organization called Proclaim.  While the theme of the continuing education retreat was faith-based community organizing, for me, the greatest gift in learning was to feel a part of a community that knows how it feels to have gates slammed shut in front of them and knows what it is like to have their lives controlled by gatekeepers.  But this retreat was not a time of lament, nor was it a time of fostering solidarity in the face of oppression, it was a time of abundant life and joy and belonging as beautiful people that compose the body of Christ.  This past week was my first experience meeting other gay and lesbian clergy and I felt the deep joy of belonging. And I read this text in an entirely different way because of my experience on this retreat.

How might our experience of Jesus as a gate change when we realize that we already belong to the body of Christ?  In this text, Jesus is not the gatekeeper.  Jesus is not the one who decides who is in or who is out.  Jesus knows his sheep, he “calls his own sheep by name” and “the sheep follow him because they know his voice.”  We are known to Christ and we are saved. But this is not just the eschatological, life after death, kind of salvation.  This is at an earthier level. We are given abundant life now.

We miss something if we do not look at this text in the greater context of John’s Gospel.  The story immediately preceding this text is that of the man born blind, which we read on the fourth Sunday in Lent. Yes, it is a story of healing.  Jesus restored the man’s sight.  But also, he is restored to beloved community.  The man born blind had been alienated and marginalized.  He did not belong. The gatekeepers of his community had shut him out.  But Jesus restored this man’s sight, and in doing so, also restored his place in the community.  In the story of the man born blind, abundant life is not just a metaphorical nice idea.  It is given flesh and blood. We need to hear this story of abundant life being given in order to emphasize the promises that we hear in the Gospel today. If we merely see Jesus as a good shepherd leading the simple sheep into a serene pasture, we miss the flesh and blood, incarnational, aspect of it all.

 The abundant life that is promised to us through Jesus comes not as some far-off promise to be realized in the future, but rather, comes right now in our midst. Just as Jesus calls the sheep by name and leads them, we too are called by name and led. We belong to a community called the body of Christ and we are known intimately by God. And in a world where our human institutions seem hell bent on division, on determining who is in and who is out, we need this promise more than ever. 

And we need one another to realize this promise.  Just as I learned the joy of being known in a community this past week on retreat in Wisconsin, just as the man born blind was restored to belonging in community, we all have a need to be known and to belong.  As we go out from this place, I ask you to consider:

To what communities do you belong? 

Are there communities in which you feel like an outsider?

How can you help to create a sense of belonging for others in your communities?

Let us pray:

Gracious God, you have called us by name and you know us.  We belong to you.  Help us to live out our calling as members of your body, that we might ever be reminding one another of that belonging. Amen.

Liturgy Series Part VIII: The Offering

Denver,  2012.  A. Hanson. 

My congregation here in St Paul, Humble Walk Lutheran Church, has a really healthy attitude towards the offering.  In our worship bulletin it simply states, "We were created with a need to give."  There are no apologies about asking for money.  We are simply provided with the opportunity to give.  And we do.

The offering is one of the most awkward parts of the liturgy for many people.  As a culture, we are afraid to talk about money.  To ask for money.  Especially in church.  Because if we do, we are afraid that we are going to alienate someone.  So much of our attitude around stewardship (financial giving that provides for ministry) in the church is fear based.  Fear that we will not have enough.  Fear that if we ask we are going to offend someone.  Fear that if we ask and don't receive we are going to look foolish.  Fear, fear, fear.

In my previous career, in non-profit organizations, we talked a lot about giving.  There are a few basic premises surrounding healthy giving attitudes.  First, people give because they are asked.  They very rarely intuit what you want from them.  Next, people want to give  out of abundance towards something that is abundant.  People do not give out of desperation or to a "sinking ship."  They want to know that their contributions are going to towards something that makes an impact.  They aren't necessarily giving to keep the organization from going under.  Third, giving is not all about money.  Time is just as valuable if not more valuable than money.  Finally, people give to causes and people they care about.  Very few people will give to a church or organization just because of some intrinsic, altruistic responsibility to do so.  They will give because they are about what your church or organization is doing. So tell them about it.

Giving out of a sense of abundance is what inspired the photo above.  An overflowing sense of gratitude for the blessings that one has received.  Many people in the church tithe for their offerings.  Tithing is a biblical concept in which you give 10% of your income to the church.  My pastor in Denver describes tithing as, "I give 10% of what wasn't mine to start with back.  It's a great deal, because I get to keep 90%!"  Getting into a giving routine is a bit scary.  What if I don't have enough?  What if I can't buy that thing that I want when I want it?  I am on a fixed income? Or worse yet, I am on an UNFIXED income and have no idea what I can afford.  I think starting somewhere with giving, any kind of giving at all, is the place to start.  Because when you start giving away money, it feels good.  You get to support people and organizations and ministries and causes that you care about. And when you start giving, you are swept up in it like a stream of water and you are buoyed along.

What if we stopped being apologetic about asking for money and started thinking about it as a way of providing an opportunity for people to do what is important to them?  What if we stopped operating out of fear and operated out of abundance instead?  What if we stopped worrying about what we CANNOT give and focused instead on what we CAN?  And we all said thank you and celebrated how good it feels to give.

Part IX: The Eucharist (otherwise known as communion)

Liturgy series part V: Sermon

Preaching on Epiphany at HFASS,
January 2013.  With the Abelkis clan.

Apologies that I am a day late with this post.  I have been working on producing a sermon for tonight at my congregation, Humble Walk Lutheran Church.

Preaching is one of the most misrepresented parts of the liturgy.  I think we often view it merely as a preacher standing behind a massive stone pulpit and issuing pedantic edicts to us in some sort of holier-than-thou persona.  If that is all that preaching is all about, why wouldn't we have a huge distaste for it?!

Preachers are portrayed in popular culture as buttoned up men who preach fire and brimstone judgment of others.  This rests on at least two problematic assumptions.  First, there are many different types of people who are called to be ministers of Word and Sacrament (in other words, pastors).  My denomination ordains women, LGBTQ persons, and so on.  Next, that it is the preacher's role to be above judgment and to tell others what God thinks of them.  This could also not be further from the truth.

My own understanding of what it means to be a preacher has been profoundly shaped by Gordon Lathrop's book, The Pastor: a Spirituality.  In this book, Lathrop discusses the pastor as being a broken symbol that points ever more closely to God as seen in Christ on the Cross.  The pastor is just as broken as all others.  Another formative piece for me is the Lutheran understanding of the priesthood of all believers.  This underscores that as a result of our baptism, we are all charged with preaching and carrying out the Gospel.  Some of us are set aside to preach and preside, but never set above.

The sermon is the point in the liturgy where the scriptures interact with the world.  Today as I prepare to preach on the Good Samaritan text, I am finding myself being ripped apart by the news of the Zimmerman verdict.  "Who is our neighbor?"  Stay tuned, there will be a blog post about this.

There are all sorts of methods for producing a sermon. Probably as many different methods as there are preachers.  I thought I would share my method.

1. Determine what text I will be preaching on (sometimes determined by the lectionary, sometimes selected based on a theme, sometimes picked for me by the pulpit supply congregation, etc.)

2. Read that text in a couple different translations and in my Greek-English interlinear Bible.

3. Begin mulling over the text.  I ask questions of it.  Pray about it.  Talk about it with a ton of people. Sometimes I crowd source my sermon questions on social media.

4. Go to text study.  A text study is a group of pastors, church leaders or other interested folks who study the texts with the intent of preaching them.  We talk about the implications of the text for our contexts and I draw on the wisdom of others.

5. Sometimes I consult commentaries and other resources.  Sometimes I don't.  One of my favorites is The Hardest Question, which reflects on the most difficult parts of the text.  I sometimes consult Working Preacher and usually look over The Text This Week.  I sometimes will do a google image search for images to pique my thought process.  I participate in the blogging discussion at RevGalBlogPals to engage with others about the sermonating process.

6. I usually begin my sermon with my own description of the text.  I refer to this as "opening up the text."  As I do this, I find that there are different things that stick out to me and I see things in a new way.

7. I sit quietly and wait for words to come.  Sometimes they do and I start writing.  Sometimes they don't, so instead I go for a walk or do some chores around the house to make space to hear what the Holy Spirit is saying.

8. I generally end up writing two or three drafts of a sermon.  It always feel inadequate. But I choose to trust that the Holy Spirit will make something out of my words.

9. I pray a silent prayer that God would have my words be what they would be.  Then I preach.

10. I set aside all of my feelings about the way I preached the sermon and let it be.


Here are a few things that I hold true about preaching:

a. Preaching is a dynamic art.  A sermon is something that occurs for a specific community at a specific time.  Those same circumstances will never be replicated again.  This is why I do not believe in recycling sermons in their entirety.

b. Preaching is not a one-way communication, from preacher to congregation. Rather it is a continuation of a conversation that has occurred all week about the text.  The preacher is speaking to a specific community, and they should see themselves in the sermon.  The essence of the Gospel is "for you."

c. Sermons tie together the text with the times.  You cannot ignore what is going on in yourself, your community, and the world.  Keep one eye on the scriptures and one eye on the newspapers, as the old quote goes.  Or more accurately in my case, one eye on the twitter feed.

d. There are many ways to preach. It is not just someone standing behind a pulpit.  You can engage in conversational small groups, you can act out the scriptures, you can do a literal crowd sourcing sermon during the service.  The possibilities are endless.

Jesus watching over my Greek translations

Up next:
Part VI: Prayers of the People

Prayer Vigil for the Freedom to Marry in Minnesota

start of a prayer vigil at Christ Lutheran on Capital Hill St Paul, MN
Credit C. Scharen for picture

 On Wednesday evening I was part of a prayer vigil held at Christ Lutheran on Capital Hill in support of the freedom to marry in Minnesota in advance of House of Representatives vote on Thursday afternoon.

Credit A. Hanson

We wrote names onto paper hearts of those who we wished would have the freedom to marry or who have inspired us.  Then the group (many hundreds of people) filed over to the steps of the capital to lay our hearts down on the stone steps so that they would be waiting for legislators when they arrived on Thursday morning.

Credit S. Suemnig

Being Church

Amy Hanson, Denver, CO 2012

For my Holy Spirit, Church, and the Triune God class we read a book entitled, Liquid Church by Pete Ward.  This text affirmed some of my convictions about my sense of call, but more than any other text for the class so far, made me vehemently angry.  The idea of "liquid church"comes from the idea that the church needs to respond to the demands of post-modernity in a way that differs from its previously "solid" state.  The solid church operates out of the convictions that church is a destination (a building) and success is measured by budget and congregation size, and faithfulness is equated with attendance.  Ward argues that this "solid church" is no longer relevant and has mutated into new forms that are not helpful.  He states that the church must embrace consumer culture in order to attract people to it.  It is important to note that this text was published in 2001, at a time in which prosperity was relatively intact, the tech bubble existed and the war on terror had not yet started.  I would argue that in the twelve years since its publication, much has changed.  Below are some of my reflections on this text:

Where his argument breaks down for me is where he attempts to put all of his theoretical knowledge into a practical model for what it means to be church in the world.  Ward writes, “Liquid church involves a radical change in attitude for the church.  Church leaders will need a fundamental change of heart if they are to start to take consumer culture seriously.  Instead of opposing materialism and treating consumer culture as evil, we need to embrace the sensibilities of consumption” (Ward 72).  Ward seems to take for granted that consumer culture is something that should be embraced by the church without critically examining these base assumptions.  He plays right into the mindset of so many Americans, that church exists to meet their very specific needs.  It is from this paradigm that we get such ideas as “church shopping,” “seeker-sensitive churches,” and an epidemic of blasé emergent congregations with pseudo-hipster pastors wearing flannel shirts and scruffy facial hair, spouting bad theology, and waving a latte they bought from the coffee cart in the church narthex.  What if the church exists not to meet MY needs, but OUR needs?  What if the church exists as a way for us to be in communion with one another?  What would it mean for the church to be in the world, a part of the world, but also an alternative to the world?  

My own sense of call is deeply rooted in the theology of the cross. I believe that there is a deep and painful yearning “to call a thing what it is” and a deep need among all people to be in real community with one another, to be broken, but also to be swallowed up by grace and to be born again and again each day.   The church is a broken institution composed of broken people and I think my issues with Ward’s perspective are that this can somehow be overcome with enough awareness and enough planning.  It does not matter how aware you might be of post-modernity or social trends, when people get together in community, the best and worst of humanity will emerge.  

My convictions regarding what it means to be church are forever evolving.  I do not think that Ward is doing anything revolutionary, and in fact, I think that he is still operating out of the same assumptions that have shaped the church in modernity.  Along with my congregation here in MSP, I spoke to a group of Lutherans gathered at a St Paul area Synod conference back in February about what it means to do church differently.  The comment that I made was, "Having a coffee bar in your church is not going to bring people to you, but actually going out into a coffee shop just might."  And I stand by that conviction.  People do not need church to be the same as everywhere else in the world, they need it to be a place that is real.