Sunday, June 23, 2019
Sunday Reflection: Blowback and Harry Potter
Since the publication of my op-ed in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune that defended First Covenant Church-Minneapolis's choice to treat LGBT people as fully human, I have (predictably) gotten a lot of feedback. The emails, posts, and letters pretty much fall into three categories.
First, there has been a significant number of supportive messages, which I really appreciate. Many of those include a story about the writer, usually about themselves or a loved one being pushed out of a family or a faith because of bias against gay men and lesbians or those who support them. They are heartbreaking even as they are encouraging.
The second group contains the angry missives of those who think I have done something terrible. They often (and this is very odd) say I should be thrown into a lake of burning sulfur. It's really hard to believe these people are reading the same gospels I do.
Finally, there is a third group that consistently asks the same question-- it is remarkable how this same view comes up again and again. They pose this dilemma: "Didn't Jesus tell sinners to go and sin no more?"
It's not a bad question, and I will answer here. Jesus did say that, to both the woman at the well and the woman about to be stoned for adultery. But I don't think that means we are to go around doing that.
Most importantly, we are not Jesus. We are the person in sin. How people look at the John 8 story and cast themselves as Jesus-- every time!-- is beyond me. There are all these other characters in the story: the woman about to be executed, the Pharisees, the people with the stones. Clearly, we are those people, not the incarnation of God on Earth! What arrogance to always cast ourselves as the savior-- and yes, I have done that, too.
One problem with making yourself Jesus is that we lack Jesus's ability to identify sin. He knew the true nature of it, and often surprised people with his mercy (he even tells the woman in John 8, "neither do I condemn you"). Our lack of such an ability makes it especially dangerous to go around pointing fingers. Moreover, Jesus never reproves someone for being gay. It it really was so important, you think that would have been a significant part of his life.
Perhaps most clearly, what Jesus teaches over and over ("the log in your own eye," "judge not, lest ye be judged," etc.) is that we are not supposed to go around judging one another. Isn't that what's most important? What Jesus actually teaches us mortals?
But, I suppose, we all want to be God, not the sinner. And thus, the sin compounds.
In the larger scope of the church world, the restrictionists-- those who define themselves by who they exclude, who squander their religious freedom on judgment of others-- are going to lose the same way that segregationists always do in the long run.
And Harry Potter plays into this.
When the Harry Potter books were coming out, I lived in Waco. Many people there tried (mostly unsuccessfully) to bar their children from reading the books, believing that they were Satanic or at least somewhat witchcraft-y. And, of course, there is a lot of witchcraft in a series of books about witchcraft. These people are the same ones who recoil at the thought of gay parishioners in their church.
At some level, those people were scared that Harry Potter taught a set of values other than their own. They were right, too, but not in the way they thought.
The core moral value in the Potter books was inclusion. Harry and his friends were good, because they fought for inclusion of people outside the wizarding mainstream (the "mud bloods"). The bad guys-- Voldemort et al-- were exclusionists. They wanted purity. It was the love of others that saves Harry from danger, again and again.
Love and inclusion are, of course, also core values that Jesus taught. The only people he cast away and vilified were the judgmental and exclusionary Pharisees.
The Harry Potter generation is going to take over your church. It is inevitable, a function of time. They will bring with them values that overlap between the gospels and the Potter books. In the end, love wins. That is how this story ends. And that's ok.
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At age 72, I can remember situations in my life that taught me to be inclusive rather than exclusive. At age 10, on paternal grandmother's porch: my sister, age 5, was trying to get the logging trucks to blow their air horns. A few did, some didn't. When a black driver did not, my paternal aunt said to her "Honey, he's not going to blow his horn, he's just a n*****!" My grandmother backed my aunt. My mother said, "You are not going to teach my children that garbage. If you persist you will not see them again." My parents, in 1946, had moved north, and had joined a Swedish baptist church that taught and preached against racism; my parents came to the conviction that racism was sin. They dealt the rest of their lives with having been raised in the South and being taught racism, but chose to fight against that influence in their lives. After the incident, my mother, sister and I had a two day drive home with much discussion about the lesson she wanted us to learn.
I also became an egalitarian on gender issues, at about 15 years old, as my mother traveled and spoke to women's church groups throughout our state and into adjacent states. They weren't called sermons, but they were!
And on same sex gender matters, in my 30th year, a very good friend, married to a really cute woman, in the military as a doctor, was in town where I lived and sought me out to inquire as to whether I would join him in a homosexual relationship. I told him that was not for me. But the situation caused me to rethink my biases, not for my own choices but for how I would think about the choices of others. And so, I came to accept others' choices of partners as their right.
I also became an egalitarian on gender issues, at about 15 years old, as my mother traveled and spoke to women's church groups throughout our state and into adjacent states. They weren't called sermons, but they were!
And on same sex gender matters, in my 30th year, a very good friend, married to a really cute woman, in the military as a doctor, was in town where I lived and sought me out to inquire as to whether I would join him in a homosexual relationship. I told him that was not for me. But the situation caused me to rethink my biases, not for my own choices but for how I would think about the choices of others. And so, I came to accept others' choices of partners as their right.
# posted by 
: 4:46 PM
: 4:46 PM
When they say that Jesus tells the women to go and sin no more, it sounds to me as if the people saying that are saying the being gay or other alternative sexual type is sin. It is the idea that gay, etc is a choice and hence a sin. What if gay is not a choice, but in the person's DNA and that is is how God created some people? I have been on a long thoughtful, prayerful journey coming to a conclusion that gay, etc is not a choice. Therefore they are God's created children and should be included in our worship and fellowship.
This weekend I happened to overhear a discussion among a group of teenagers who were trying to explain the entire Harry Potter sage to a 14-year-old who had never read the books, never seen the movies, knew next to nothing. They were approaching what you've said here so, so well. You've captured why these books are so important: love. And if we're talking about love, we're talking about Jesus.
Beautiful, brilliantly reasoned piece, Mar. This should be required reading for Sunday school . . .
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# posted by : 9:48 AM
: 9:48 AM << Home
