A Response to Columbia Theological Seminary's Housing Policy

I am taking a detour from the road normally taken on this blog. Below you will find a letter I just sent to President Steve Hayner and the administration at Columbia Theological Seminary.

The seminary recently announced its decision to continue denying campus housing to same-sex couples-- a decision that I find to be inconsistent with the Gospel of Jesus Christ and the school’s spirit of hospitality that I was blessed to experience as a student.

This Sunday’s lectionary text from 1 John is particularly poignant as Columbia’s community—past, present, and future—reflects on its communal life and it’s calling to behave in ways that are consistent with biblical witness and the movement of the Holy Spirit. In 3:18, the writer of the epistle implores: “Little children, let us love, not in word or speech, but in truth and action.”

As the dialogue following the school’s decision unfolds, students and alumni alike will be bombarded by polite phrases and innocuous “church talk” that seeks to dissuade rightfully infuriated and hurt people from expressing their pain and demanding their equal treatment. There will be a lot of “unity” and “harmony” talk, usually coupled with a closing statement that kindly reminds the people denied full access to fellowship that they are still “invited to the Table” at the end of the day.

Although I do not have time to give a full exegesis of the text right now, having the Evangelist’s question in mind will be a helpful one for the CTS community as they move through this next week, which is sure to be tense. Briefly, I would only suggest that loving “in truth and action” and not simply “in words or speech,” is a lot harder; It requires courage and perseverance, and the willingness to make one’s self vulnerable. The decision made, and the way it was expressed, does not reveal a people committed to loving the hard way, but rather a people quick to wax eloquently about God’s justice and human dignity but unwilling to practice it.

Without further ado, here is a copy of the letter I sent to President Hayner:

Dear President Hayner,

I write with a heavy heart in regards to Columbia Theological Seminary’s recent decision to continue a discriminatory housing policy. As a proud alumna of the fine institution you are privileged to lead, it disappoints me that the administration has chosen to maintain a position that insults the dignity of many current students and countless prospective students.

Undoubtedly, in the next days and weeks, those who support the current housing policy will make statements that call for unity, suggesting that those who openly question the administration’s decision are sowing discord and division within the community. If you are inclined to agree with them, I implore you to consider this: What kind of unity exists when a significant portion of a community is denied the right to be fully present in that community?

In your memorandum you state: “As we seek to make a broader place at our educational table, our first priority is to assure that these issues can be discussed openly, carefully, faithfully and humbly. We will continue to move in this direction.”      

While this is an admirable goal, its stated intent is futile as long as LGBTQ students and their families are denied the right to share in community life. Community discussions that are “open, careful, faithful, and humble” cannot be had when certain participants are aware that full expression of their personhood is not only unwelcome but systematically denied. Christian Marriage and responsibilities to a Covenant Community are indeed issues that the seminary should be discussing openly, but this should be the second priority. The first should be ensuring the equal treatment of those engaging in the discussion.

Frankly, I am surprised by the administration’s decision. When the SCC brought this issue to the school’s attention two years ago (while I was still a student), I was sure justice would be served once the formal process of discernment ended. Columbia Theological Seminary is a school that blessed and molded me in countless ways; the decision made does not reflect the faith and commitment of the people who were so instrumental in grooming my relationship with God and my ministerial gifts.

Until this decision is reversed and every student is affirmed as a full member of the CTS community not only in words but in practice, I regret to say that I will not be supporting CTS through monetary gifts, nor will I be recommending the school to prospective students without reservation. I do not intend my expression of this decision to be taken as a threat, only to make it clear that I cannot, in good conscience, support a Christian institution that chooses superficial peace over equal treatment of its students.

I will continue to hold you and CTS in prayer, and I hope that in the coming days the community will be attuned to the Holy Spirit’s guidance and healing.

Your Sister in Christ,

Sara B. Dorrien, M.Div., 2011

Anxiety and Church.

Scripture: Psalm 84

Article: "An Appointment With Dread," by Alissa Nutting. 

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/28/an-appointment-with-dread/

A few days ago, Alissa Nutting (Assisant Professor of Creative Writing at John Carroll University) wrote a brilliant and bitingly sarcastic piece that describes her own battle with chronic anxiety; It is a “Day in the Life of…” story, taking readers through ordinary motions and scenarios that, thankfully, don’t cause most of us to break out in a sweat and set in motion a series of morbid, spiraling thoughts. To give a quick example (if you don’t have time to read the article yourself), the writer describes waking up in the morning to her dog licking her face: “My first thought of the day: I love my dog. My second: His death is inevitable.”  

Almost as interesting as the article itself were the comments readers posted at the end. They ranged from praise of her wit and creativity, to accusations that she was a self-absorbed spoil brat, to serious concern about her mental health, often coupled with free advice about which psychological method (behavior, cognitive, psychoanalysis, etc.) she should try. Most of the comments (at least the last time I checked) fell into this last category. Apparently we like “funny” and self-deprecating humor, but only to a certain extent. Although I found her humor mostly delightful (if a little sad), I think the genuine concern of the readers’ reveals that anxiety (if not chronic anxiety) is something that touches many of us. As someone who struggles with Generalized Anxiety, I can attest to the wildly unwelcome storm that it is, and I understand the sentiment that it’s nothing to joke about.

Last week I attended the first of four Adult Forums at a local Presbyterian Church, where we are discussing (of all books) Gary Dorrien’s “Economy. Difference. Empire: Social Ethics for Social Justice.” The conversation easily moved around the table, focusing mostly on the subject matter of the day: The Social Gospel. Church members lifted up mostly affirmations and a few critiques, offered personal stories to further illustrate some of the theory or theological claims described, and devoted considerable time to figuring out how Social Gospel ideas could better influence how the Church lives out its mission today. Hanging over this rich discussion, however, was the (slightly dreaded) anticipation of the Annual Congregational Meeting, which was to take place later that morning. Apparently the folks in this room were already bracing themselves for an onslaught of anti-social justice sentiment from a handful of long-time church members who, even after years of belonging to a self-described “Inclusive, Justice and Peace seeking” congregation, were still planning on making their dissatisfaction with all this peace and justice stuff known. The impression of those at the Forum was that these folks simply wanted church to be a place they came to be fed, comforted, and affirmed. Being challenged or called to question socio-economic structures and engage in prophetic witness was definitely not something they wanted. Life was hard enough to handle already, thank you very much.

Of course, there is nothing new about this particular dynamic within churches, and I don’t foresee the “just feed me” attitude going away anytime soon. On the one hand, this attitude admittedly reflects poor Christian leadership and/or shallow understanding of what discipleship entails, but on the other, it points to the reality that we are people under a great deal of stress. Our days are packed full of going to appointments, meeting deadlines, running errands, nurturing relationships, cooking meals, cleaning up after meals, scheduling play dates, updating facebook statuses, and making lists for the next day. We may not experience the chronic anxiety described in Nutting’s article, but based on the comments following her article, I would venture to say that most of us do at least partially understand the prison that it can be; Most of us have experienced anxiety that seems to take on a life and a will of its own, and most of us can recall moments of desperately wanting to break free from its grasp and rejoicing when that happens. Given the reality that anxiety has and will continue to be a nemesis in our day-to-day lives, it’s no wonder we long for just one hour on Saturday or Sunday where we can simply “be” and where we can bask in the goodness that is God’s mercy and grace without feeling coerced into adding one more item to our “To-Do Lists.” (Yeah, OK, preacher lady, let me just find my pen and I’ll add that to the calendar this week: Challenge American Oligarchy; Seek new socio-economic system ASAP.)

In Psalm 84, we are immersed in the inner-world of a man who is tickled-pink to be worshipping in the Temple. He probably had to journey there from far away, so his anticipation and excitement are especially heightened. He speaks of longing for the courts of the Lord, where even the sparrow finds a home and the swallow a nest for herself. These are images of comfort and security in a world that can be exceedingly harsh.

It’s not surprising that the biblical Psalms have been at the center of devotional worship for centuries. They speak to all of the existential questions and crises that inevitably arise during the course of a lifetime. We draw nourishment from the ancient words, letting them remind us that imperfect people, like ourselves, have walked this road of faith before us. Their words remind us that God seeks an intimate relationship with us, allowing and even encouraging not only our expressions of praise and gratitude (as in Psalm 84), but also our lament and doubt.

However, this comforting parallel between the Hebrew poet’s words and our own often gets stuck in the realm of personal piety. Although I’ve recently been encouraged by the growing and intentional presence of the Psalms in corporate worship (often through congregational song), I still think it’s fair to say that the Psalms can and often do contribute to a sense of “It’s all about God and me” among those who find themselves frequently drawn to them. I know that when I’ve had a hard day (or week) and am looking for scriptural sustenance, my first instinct is not to flip the pages to Numbers (I’m in that freakin’ wilderness, thank you, and I am going to complain about it…) or to the Gospels (where I’ll feel guilty about not leaving my boat and fish to follow Jesus), but to the Psalms, where I can read and pray the words that almost perfectly gather and name all of the toxic, spiraling thoughts in my head, for a moment blocking out the hostility of the world and allowing God’s grace to wash over even the rawest and most unattractive parts of me. And this is good, no doubt. The problem arises when we lean too heavily on the personal piety inspired by the Psalms, forgetting that they, like the rest of scripture, are the product of a community; They were created by poets who never saw their relationship with God as a simple, vertical, two-way street. Instead, they were created by people who understood their faith in God as inseparable from the idea of covenant. They were a covenant people, called out by God not primarily as individuals but as a people, accountable to God, to one another, and to the world. (When the Poet in Psalm 84 sings out to the God of Jacob, he is naming this reality: This is not a solo but rather the poet is singing in chorus of witnesses. His God is the God of Jacob and Rachel, Rebecca and Isaac, Abraham and Sarah, a people with a history and a calling to bless all of the families on earth.)

The “benefits” of being called out like this are obvious enough: The knowledge of God’s abiding presence and guidance in the midst of day-to-day stresses (much more so for those living in Exile than for most of us living today in North America!), the experience of The Holy in regular worship, and the support of a real community in times of both joy and grief.  The “just feed me” folks who sit in the pews these days, burdened by their own anxiety and life’s comparably mild beatings “get” this aspect of faith, and they are thankful for it. But we do a disservice to them (and ourselves) and dishonor God when, out of fear of reproach, we let this misunderstanding slide. God deeply cares about our pain and anxiety, and God seeks to comfort us by meeting us in worship, the sacraments, and in the privacy of our bedrooms where we read the Psalms in silence, but this is the just the beginning of our faith. And yes, we get many beginnings. 

Every week, we are invited to take our shoes off and stand on holy ground, drawing support from those gathered around us and absorbing God’s Word; We are indeed fed by sharing the Lord’s Supper and remembering God’s claim on our lives when we witness a baptism, but these acts of worship are not ends in themselves. Rather, they are the means by which we are transformed, able to open unto a world and a greater purpose that slowly but surely casts our attention away from the obsessions that imprison us in our own bodies and toward our calling to be servants of God and witnesses to God’s justice and peace. This doesn’t contain the answer to anxiety in its entirety, but it’s the most effective treatment I’ve come across…

What have you to do with THIS?

Scripture: Mark 1:21-28

Article: "Self Immolation is on the Rise in the Arab World"

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/21/world/africa/self-immolation-on-the-rise-in-the-arab-world.html

I’ve been struggling with this story in the Gospel according to Mark. There is, of course, the obvious problem: The man that the storyteller Mark describes as “one with an unclean spirit” would probably be described as someone with mental illness by many of us today, not necessarily possessed by an unclean spirit, or demon. Beyond this tension between the world and cultural understanding of ancient Palestine and that of ours, however, I think there remains an even larger problem: It’s stories like these, stories about dramatic healings of the most unlikely people, that make the Christian faith sound too romantic and naïve at best and harmful at worst. They are stories whose endings elicit responses such as: “REALLY?! Please tell me you are joking. Seriously. How ridiculous. You truly BELIEVE this nonsense?”

The above response is, ironically, quite similar to the question the man with the unclean spirit poses to Jesus in this story: “What have you TO DO WITH US, Jesus of Nazareth?” His question is the question of a world captured by demons of many stripes….Demons in the form of greed, demons in the form of anxiety and depression, demons in the form of mean spiritedness and ill will, demons in the form of apathy and hopelessness. These unclean spirits say: What have YOU to do with US? Do you actually have anything to say to us? Please, show us how you are going to change anything.

While reading this passage I found myself envisioning the various people I’ve worked with (mostly through my internship at a Poverty Rights center in Atlanta) who live with schizophrenia. They are arguably some of most tortured people on earth. Have you ever seen someone running down the street, hands clasping the ears, screaming for no apparent reason? This is probably a person suffering from schizophrenia. Schizophrenics live their lives in a kind of altered reality, haunted by very real voices that command them to do things as simple as brushing their teeth to violent acts against themselves and others. Many of the people we encounter in scripture (and especially in the Gospel stories) that are possessed by unclean spirits or demons would probably be diagnosed as Paranoid Schizophrenics today. I find it of no coincidence that the first recorded “healing” or “miracle” proclaimed in Mark’s Gospel describes Jesus casting out a spirit responsible for making one man’s life a kind of living hell. In casting out the unclean spirit, Jesus not only delivers the man from the prison that exists in his own mind and body, but he also delivers those around the man—those in his family and community—from the constant fear that he may lash out uncontrollably and perhaps violently. In casting out the unclean spirit, Jesus is delivering both an individual and a community from fear and pain. And like I hinted at above, he is also beginning his ministry by healing a man whose pain and feeling of enslavement is arguably much more acute than those around him. The gospel writer’s choice to place this story at the beginning of Jesus’ ministry not only testifies to Jesus’ special “preference” for those who suffer most and are shunned by others, but it also serves as a magnifying glass for humanity: If Jesus, and the way of Jesus, can deliver people suffering from the most visible and seemingly endless torture, surely he can deliver the rest of us from the “milder” forces that keep us from living abundant lives: anxiety, depression, pride, low self-esteem, anger.

Last Sunday, Nada Bakri reported on a disturbing trend in the Arab World: Well over a year has passed since Mohamad Bouazizi set himself on fire and sparked the revolutions in Tunisia and across the region, but despite the relative success of the movements, self-immolation is on the rise.

It’s hard for most of us to even imagine feeling so trapped and hopeless that we set ourselves on fire as an act of painful self-destruction and/or protest. It may be just as hard for a theologian to insist that God is truly at work delivering people from the spiritual and mental torture that causes something as awful as self-immolation, especially when the statistics point to the contrary. And yet this is the truth that Christians believe has been revealed. When Jesus stood up in the synagogue to teach, the people were “astonished” because he was not only teaching something new but he was also an unlikely teacher; His teaching and his action on behalf of the suffering man flew in the face of the man’s question: “What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth?”

The same teaching and action continues to confront that agonized question today: “What have you do with us, Jesus of Nazareth?” And although most of us who try to follow Jesus don’t consider “casting out unclean spirits” part of our skill set (at least in the literal sense!), we are called to proclaim hope in even the most desperate places and situations, because that’s where Jesus started and that’s where he ended and continues to work. Resting in that knowledge, we should be emboldened to compassionately follow Jesus, casting out the unclean spirits that live in all of us, and casting out the “societal” unclean spirits that lead to tragedies like Self-Immolation. This is what Jesus has to do with us.

Instruments

Scripture: Mark 1:14-20

Article: "Where are the Liberals?" http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/10/opinion/brooks-where-are-the-liberals.html?scp=5&sq=david%20brooks&st=cse

Last week, the New York Times published an OP-ED by columnist David Brooks entitled “Where Are the Liberals?” Brooks claims that “given the circumstances, this should be a golden age of liberalism,” arguing that the reason it’s not lies in the fact that Americans ultimately don’t trust the government. He calls this the “Instrument Problem,” explaining that while “Americans may agree with liberal diagnoses, they don’t trust the instrument Democrats use to solve problems.” Fair enough.

However, this prognosis begs other questions: Doesn’t commitment to a larger cause or ideology demand a certain amount of patience? And is the Democratic leadership entirely to blame for this ailment? (Brooks says yes, claiming that liberals have more or less shot themselves in the foot by criticizing government as much as conservatives do.) However, it seems to me that folks espousing the liberal diagnosis but refusing to “carry the card” carry just as much blame for the trouble Liberalism is in as does the Democratic leadership; Often, these leaders are simply stating facts: Yes, the government has problems. Yes, there are corrupting forces in the government. Yes, we need to continually analyze what is working and what is not and negotiate how to be more effective. What’s sad is how folks take these statements and use them as evidence that “the government” really is Lucifer. Are we that naïve? Is it so hard for us to take a step back and seriously contemplate how many millions of schoolchildren would be starving or elderly people living on the streets (especially in the current economic climate) if the government didn’t provide school lunches and social security? Yes, the government certainly has its fair share of problems, but I’m not so comfortable with the alternative.

In Sunday’s gospel reading, Jesus is just beginning his ministry in Galilee. The Gospel according to Mark, chapter 1, verses 14-15 reads: “Now after John was arrested, Jesus came to Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God, and saying ‘The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.’”

The time is fulfilled. The Kingdom of God has come near.

In an age where eschatology has almost unequivocally come to be understood as something (terrifying, perhaps) that happens in the future or at the ‘end of time’ in the popular psyche (thanks in large part to literature like The Left Behind Series), the gospel writer records Jesus saying that “The Time” is both now (it is fulfilled) and it is near: It is both present and future, but not distant. God has done something that both fulfills the here-and-now and sets in motion an unstoppable coming and indwelling of the divine Kingdom. This “something” is God’s movement from utter transcendence and invisibility to physical, earthy, ordinary presence. Jesus’ very existence marks the presence of God with us, and his invitation to turn away (repent!) from brokenness to harmony with God and one another marks the nearness of God’s reign on earth. Jesus is, in effect, an instrument. He brings what feels so distant and wholly untouchable and unattainable into our realm, blessing our world in all its messiness and imperfection.

In many ways, it’s a lot easier to focus on the “big picture” than on the various colors and utensils used to create that picture, whether the big picture is ideology or the Kingdom of God. (And I’m not suggesting they are the same! Relax.) Both allow us to lay back a little, confident that our vision of perfection (or almost-perfection) is the right one, while not getting too tied-up in the details or having to defend the processes or behaviors we’ve adopted to realize those visions.  We do this because we know that our instruments suck. They have to be tuned and practiced until we scream, dusted and tuned again. Some even require us to dump the spit out during rehearsal. This may explain why many Americans ultimately trust the liberal diagnosis and vision of a more equitable society but find themselves ashamed or unwilling to defend the instrument that’s been doing the heaviest lifting in this department for over 70 years.

But the Gospel tells us that God blesses our instruments. This was revealed when God came to us as an instrument in Jesus Christ and beckoned us to use our instruments—our bodies, our tools, our minds, and our hearts—to not only name the hurt in our world but to work towards its demise, building and healing, feeding and transforming. God knows our instruments are imperfect. In the Presbyterian, Reformed tradition we even assert that Jesus himself was conditioned (and limited) by the socio-cultural presumptions of his time—Limited by his humanness! But God chose to be fully present in and through him anyway, revealing that wherever individuals and entire societies seriously seek to provide for the most vulnerable people and accept their lives as intricately woven in others, God is in the midst of them. Even in our dusty, out-of-tune instruments.