Finding Home Away from Home

“Not much of my life makes any sense outside of God.”  Fr. Greg Boyle, S.J.

There are three moments in my life of which I can distinctively point to and say, “God did that.”

Celebrating my transfer into the UMC with
my friend,colleague, and fellow clergy
 Laura Markle Downton

The first was my adoption as an infant in Seoul, South Korea. After my birth mother left me in a hospital, I spent three months in foster care before a couple in Oklahoma City welcomed me into their home. God provided me with the family I needed even though they were on the other side of the world.

The second moment was my acceptance into Duke Divinity School. The richness of the theological imagination I developed there coupled with the meaningful connections and relationships I built in Durham have sustained my ministry thus far and shaped me in ways I am still working to understand.

The third moment occurred last Thursday at a church in Towson, MD where I was transferred into the Baltimore Washington Conference of the United Methodist Church as a full elder. After 31 years of being first a member and then an ordained minister in the Wesleyan Church, I said goodbye to a place I have long called home and entered into a new family and a future shaped by the loving hand of Christ.

It is not an easy task to leave a church that has raised you and formed some of the most intimate parts of your life. The Wesleyan Church helped me first perceive of the triune God and introduced me to countless women and men into my life who would serve as mentors, confidants, and friends. My undergraduate education was at a Wesleyan institution of higher education and over the years I have attended more Wesleyan conferences, summer camps, and youth conventions than can be recalled. If I have ever ministered, served, or cared for others with any note of distinction it is because I was raised and reared in a church that instilled within me a deep love for Jesus and the desire to exude holiness in my every day existence.

Now I find myself in a new denomination that feels strangely familiar and yet noticeably different. The attentiveness to John Wesley’s theological framework remains, and in some ways presents itself in even more ways than what I am used to experiencing. We read many of the same books, study similar theologians, and sing songs already drilled into my consciousness.

Yes, there are differences and those differences made the case for why I feel more at home being a United Methodist than a Wesleyan. But even as I settle into my new digs and begin getting used to having a bishop to report to, I’m reminded of a passage from Paul Ellie’s The Life You Save May be Your Own in which he recalls an interaction between Thomas Merton and Dorothy Day. Ellie writes,

“He (Merton) asked for her (Day) prayers and for those of the poor. She assured him that he had them. ‘Every night,’ she told him, ‘we say the rosary and compline in our little chapel over the barn, heavy with the smell of cow downstairs, and we have a bulletin board there with the names of those who ask our prayers. Yours is there.”

Over the years, I have asked countless people in the Wesleyan Church to pray for me. I am convinced that I am where I am today because these faithful individuals lovingly placed my name on the bulletin board of their hearts and remembered my request during their faithful deliberations with God.

Like Fr. Boyle, my life makes little sense outside of God and in some significant way, is similarly incoherent without the Wesleyan Church. For this I give thanks to God.  Amen.

Bringing Jesus Back

I’ve been thinking about Mary Magdalene’s words in John 20:13 where she says, “They have taken my Lord away and I do not know where they have laid him.”

The curse and blessing of living in a city is that you are constantly around people. It is a challenge to find a corner of the city in which you will not see someone you know, hear a horn honk or a plane flying overhead, or accidentally bump into someone on a crowded sidewalk. It is hard to be alone. It is easy to be lonely.

But as I’m around other people, I hear them say things that betray how they feel about God and the church and faith. Last night I listened to the story of a young gay man whose church left him in a place of profound pain and rejection. I wish that these were isolated incidents but we’re wise enough to know that this is not the case. And if it’s not a member of the LGBTQ community then it’s a person of color who discovered that while in Christ there may not be Greek nor Jew, slave nor free, there is among Christ’s followers a clear distinction between black and white. We subjugate women and tell them that because they do not have a penis they cannot stand behind a pulpit. We tell the poor that even though Jesus loves them, they need to stop being lazy and get a job like everyone else.

A charitable read of the situation might suggest that people do these things with good intentions. We’re just trying to read the Bible faithfully word for word, letter by letter. We’re just trying to listen to the Spirit. We’re just trying not to judge anyone, because that’s God’s job. We’re just trying to hate the sin and love the sinner.

Yet while all of our “just trying” might make us sincere, Stanley Hauerwas reminds us that sometimes this just shows how little sincerity has to do with Christianity.

Ann Lamott has said, “You can be sure that you’ve created God in your own image when God starts hating all of the people you do.”

And oh the people we've tried to make God hate.

Of course, we would never admit this because we don’t consider it to be hateful at all. This is just who God is and who God has called us to be. It’s not our fault if Paul said that he wouldn’t allow a woman to hold authority over him. We didn’t have anything to do with God creating Adam and Eve and not Adam and Steve. Who can hold us responsible for 2 Thessalonians saying that he who does not work should not eat? “Surely, not I, Lord?” we say without realizing who it is we’re starting to sound like.

In our zeal we have taken Jesus to a place where he does not want to go and my fear is that when we stop to drop him off, we will find ourselves standing there alone.

But God’s good news never fails. Whether we are weeping in front of the garden tomb on Easter morning or militantly marching towards Damascus to carry out what we perceive to be the “work of the Lord,” Jesus can meet us in that place. Jesus can gently call us by name, knock us off the donkey, blaze and banish our blindness and let us know that even though we may not know where to find him, he knows where to find us. For both the directionless and those who are all too confident in the directions they give, God’s grace covers all.

If the tomb cannot hold Jesus, then surely no invention of ours will be able to contain God’s wonderful work of resurrection.

Do not cry, Mary. We could not take your Lord away even if we tried.