How a House Divided Tortures its Pastors

"So Jesus called them together and began to speak to them in parables: “How can Satan drive out Satan? If a kingdom is divided against itself, it cannot stand. If a house is divided against itself, it cannot stand." - Mark 3: 23 - 25

Since I was ordained as a United Methodist pastor twenty-five years ago, the culture here in Southern California has been fundamentally transformed. While it has not been eradicated, the ancient stigma attached to homosexuality has been dramatically eroded. Discrimination against people whose gender identity is not rigidly male or female is trailing behind, but is headed in the same direction.

As a consequence, people who identify as LGBTQI have experienced a growing range of freedom to live openly and honestly in more and more dimensions of their lives. This growing sense of freedom is on display in almost every United Methodist congregation in Southern California. In the churches I know and love, gay and lesbian people have served openly and with distinction in the following positions:

• Sunday School Superintendent 
• Director of Music
• Choir section leader
• Camp Director
• Trustee
• Church Council Chair
• Chair, Staff-Parish Relations (Personnel)
• Chair, Missions Committee
• Youth Counselor 
• ... the list goes on.

And yet the United Methodist Church holds firm to its ban on the marriage or ordination of what it calls "self-avowed practicing homosexuals."

In effect, this is what my denomination is saying to its pastors in cultural contexts like that of Southern California:

"If a gay or lesbian or trans-gendered person seeks to join your congregation, we instruct you to rejoice in their desire to share their gifts of leadership, creativity, dedication and compassion with the United Methodist Church. You are to tell them that the congregation will welcome them and their partners and spouses into our Sanctuary pews and our Bible Study classrooms and our fellowship circles. Tell them we will honor them at our annual meetings and list their names among our other most respected lay leaders. Tell them we will baptize their children when they are born, and memorialize their loved ones when they die, and we will do so with the same grace we extend to any others. Please tell them to join us as members in the body of Christ."

But then the Church continues:

"But if they ask to get married in one of our sanctuaries, we expect you to sit them down, no matter how much you love and respect them, and tell them our denominational code and the old guard of your church will not allow it.

And if they swallow their pride, and instead ask you to preside at their wedding on the beach, we expect you, no matter how much it pains you, to deny their request.

And if one of them dares to share with you that they feel called by God to ordained ministry, we expect you to explain that our church will ordain them only if they swear unwavering loyalty to a code of silence that every other institution in our society has abandoned as obsolete ..."

But this is not all, for the Church continues:

"And if they ask the reasons why, we expect you to refer to a few select scriptures, to ancient custom, and to our Book of Discipline, ignoring the fact that we routinely abandon other practices prohibited by scripture and custom.*** For we have concluded that the public acknowledgment of a homosexual orientation is uniquely disqualifying from both the sacred rite of marriage and from our most honored position of pastoral leadership."

Of course the United Methodist Church does not instruct its pastors so straightforwardly, because to do so would make transparent a number of harsh and inconvenient truths:

• On matters of human sexuality, the United Methodist Church has adopted a practical theological position of extreme and inescapable self-contradiction. There is no ground beyond prejudice and convenience for celebrating the full inclusion of gay and lesbian persons in the lay ministry of the church, while denying them marriage and ordination. 
• The ban on the marriage and ordination of "self-avowed practicing homosexuals" is cruel - especially, of course, to these persons themselves, but also to the pastors who are expected to violate their consciences and callings to enforce the bans. 
• Having twisted thousands of our own leaders into distressing theological and pastoral contortions, we now represent for all to see a "house divided," a distorted and distasteful representation of the gospel of Jesus Christ. 

This is the crisis confronting the United Methodist Church, at least in Southern California and other cultural contexts like it. We continue to declare ourselves a welcoming people, custodians of a gospel rooted in grace. At the same time, we continue to prohibit our gay and lesbian children from celebrating their most cherished dreams in our congregations. And we continue to torture our pastors, directing them to bar from full participation in the church people they believe God knit together in their mothers' wombs along a spectrum of sexual orientations and gender identities.

*** Paul wrote to Timothy, 'I permit no woman to teach or to have authority over a man;' (1 Timothy 2:12); and Jesus told his disciples that 'whoever divorces his wife, except for unchastity, and marries another commits adultery.' (Matthew 19:9)* By the logic of the UMC, both the female gender and the status of re-marriage should disqualify people from ordination. Thanks to my colleague Rick Uhls for reminding me of these contradictions.