I’ve been on the road most of the past two weeks. The final
weekend of June we spent at the Wild Goose Festival in Hot Springs, N.C. If
you’re a progressive Christian who doesn’t mind mud and heat you ought to
experience Wild Goose at least once. For us, once may well turn out to be
enough, but I’m glad I went.
The Goose provides its own interesting lens through which to
see the bending of the rainbow arc. Though the festival is a youngster (born in
2011), it has clearly seen its own evolution. When Religion Dispatches covered the inaugural festival its article was
headlined “Wild
Goose Festival’s (Mostly) Welcoming Spirit for LGBT Christians.”
No qualifier would be necessary in writing about the fifth
Goose. Though the event attracted at least one lonesome “ex-gay” evangelical
demonstrator who stood outside the gate to the festival grounds using a
bullhorn to denounce us, inside the festival felt broadly inclusive, safe and
at least a little bit queer.
I don’t know where the few long-time progressive
evangelicals are in their personal journeys on GLBT concerns, but they seem
publically to have moved. For example, Jim Wallis, Sojourners editor, who spoke Sunday morning about racism, seems to
have come a ways since I first met him a decade ago. I spoke at Sojourners’ offices several times years
ago when they held a monthly worship, and I recall more than one person
thanking me for saying what I said about GLBT justice because they felt Jim
needed to hear it.
His wife told me once that he still had an evangelical’s
perspective on biblical authority. That comment underscores for me why this
struggle has been the central one of my years in ministry, the central one of
our time in history. Over the years I’ve heard lots of folks, from across the
range of the church, bemoan the amount of time and energy spent on ordination
and now on marriage. “We have so many more important issues that we could be
working on,” they’ll say.
I’m sympathetic to that statement, though I think it misses
the point. Certainly, global climate change, persistent poverty, violence and
war are social issues about which Christian faith and the church should and does
have important things to say and do. But all of our actions, as people of faith
and as the community of followers of Jesus, must be grounded in an
understanding of our sacred story, of the person of Jesus, of the nature of
truth and of Biblical authority. All of that is what’s truly at stake in this
long struggle for GLBT justice.
While it is first and foremost about real people and their
lives, it is also about the way we understand the faith, truth, scripture, and
what it means to follow Jesus in the 21st century. It is what we
have been called to grapple with in our time.
The first same-sex union service over which I presided, back
in about 2004, included one young man who had grown up in a conservative, evangelical
household. I clearly recall his tears as he asked me if I thought he was going
to go to hell. He eventually left our church because he was looking for a place
that proclaimed the old-time evangelical faith but somehow made room for him
within it. I said to him more than once, “you can’t get here from there.” In
other words, we have to think anew about the whole of the faith to understand
how it can and does continue to speak its truth through our lives in our time.
That makes of church a community of the questions more than
one of the answer. Was it Rilke who said we must “try to love the questions
themselves”? Living into the answers is the work of more than a lifetime, and
dwelling lovingly, joyously, compassionately in a community of the questions
seems like faith to me.
When we learn how to do that well then we may have something
important to offer the world on all of the urgent issues we face. I see some
signs, in the actions of the just-concluded general assembly, that we may be
learning it.
