One in the Spirit

One in the Spirit

One of my favorite songs on the guitar (that I could play as a teenager) was “We are One in the Spirit, We are One in the Lord”. repeat twice then, “And we pray that all unity will someday be restored”, Closing with, “And they’ll know we are Christians by our love, by our love, and they’ll know we are Christians by our love…”

“We will walk with each other, we will walk hand in hand” twice, “And we’ll spread the news that God is in our land”, “And they’ll know we are Christians by our love, by our love, and they’ll know we are Christians by our love…”
“We will work with each other, we will work side by side” twice, “”And together we’ll spend the news that God is on our side” (?) “And they’ll know we are Christians by our love, by our love, and they’ll know we are Christians by our love…”
“All praise to the Father from whom all things come, and all praise to Christ Jesus his only son and all praise to the Spirit that makes us one, and they’ll know we are Christians by our love, by our love, and they’ll know we are Christians by our love…”

Not sure I remembered it all correctly, but you get the drift. I sang that with great fervor and I played it proudly (and it was only 3 chords C,F,G so I could play it with confidence.)
Oh, how I believed that. I was on the edge of a new beginning in the world, our country, our Church. We were even trying out various Book(s) of Common Prayer and some more contemporary translations of the Bible were being published. We had celebrated our country’s bicentennial. US citizens were feeling pretty proud of ourselves. It felt like the dawn of a new age.

I had a copy of “The Living Bible”, it was green and I think I even had my name on it in gold, but I discovered a verse in 1 Timothy (Chapter 1, verses 10-11) that in reading now (probably close to 40 years later) (OMG) it does not say what I thought it said, but the opposite. Of course, I was reading it in a paraphrase, as I came to understand it, it was not a translation. I also had taken the verse out of context, much like my fundamentalist friends. What I read was: “Yes, these laws are made to identify as sinners all who are immoral and impure: homosexuals, kidnappers, liars, and all others who do things that contradict the glorious Good News of our blessed God, whose messenger I am.”
I have to stop here and admit my immaturity at the time. First I understood word association. I saw these words: laws, identify sinners, immoral, homosexuals with kidnappers, liars and from the previous verse, hate God, attack their fathers and mothers and murder.
I was reading the Bible in a few verses, and on those verses in the Living Bible, I took a ball point pen and marked out the “sins” listed there and I swore that 1 Timothy was the worst book of the Bible and I slammed shut an inner door that has never been really walked through until now.
What I saw in those verses was, it turns out, the opposite of the truth. Paul was writing that the Good News was not for the holy and sinless, it was for those who thought they weren’t good enough or even those who OTHER people deemed were not good enough. A complete turnaround from what I thought I saw that day in my bedroom.
My grandparents had given each of us Bibles one year for Christmas with our names put on them and they were, of course, King James Version and they had some sort of sword and shield (although that could have been a harp) on the front cover. I understood very little of what was actually IN the Bible, but I knew it was “Holy” and I knew I’d better respect it. To have taken a ball point pen and scratched through those verses, even though I completely misunderstood, and even though it was in The Living Bible, not the “real” Bible, the King James, well, I knew I had done something that was bold; something that I could never have been able to answer for, if my grandparents, or the church, or God HIMself found out that I had rejected something in scripture. Rejected something I wouldn’t dare admit to, and ironically believed it said the very opposite of what I thought.
I am also unsure if I knew what it was to be homosexual. I damn sure didn’t understand sodomy. And fornication, I KNOW for damn sure that I didn’t understand that; because, as I understood my role as a female, the word “no” was not a word I was allowed to express when something serious was asked of me. That explains much more of my history and I will return to in a later blog. Not tonight.
Coming back around to this whole unity business… The United Methodist Church rolled out a great slogan, possible created by incredibly expensive marketing agents who had completed test groups: “Open Hearts, Open Minds, Open Doors”. Well, la-dee-freaki-da; (I mean no referential harm to my drag queen sister by a similar name.)
The UMC rolled out their great new slogan, at the very least, at the time when ordinands were to have “celibacy in singleness and fidelity in marriage” and somewhat after to the other statement about “homosexuality is incompatible with Christianity”. These denominational decisions were not congruent with other traditional mainline Protestant Churches in the US.  Open (hearts, minds, doors) became a legal reality when the Supreme Court upheld gay marraige. I watched other mainline churches stop prosecuting (and persecuting?), defrocking or flogging, their own Christian clergy, who happened to be gay yet were also BAPTIZED, as well as ORDAINED.

The UMC elected and consecrated our first openly gay bishop whose downfall was begun before the sun rose the next day.  The divide deepened and the chasm imploded across the US with the recent decision of our Judicial Council.

Is it so wrong to draw parallels between the Department of Justice finding police officers not guilty of violating civil rights and our Judicial Council seeing with eyes that miss the point – focusing on the letter and tittle (as Jesus said) of the law and not the heart of it? How is the hatred and fear of young American Black men and the fear of a gay married member of the clergy all that different? Not to dismiss either case but in one the law fails to protect them and takes a physical life of young Black men and in the other, a religious Council takes the religious life from a openly gay woman. Both occur against the words and actions of Jesus Christ, who loved all the Black men with guns, or without, and all women at the altar, gay or straight?

How are we acting as the “Christian nation”? This election cycle brought up, again, the belief of some that our country was founded in the Christian faith. While I can argue that at another time, for now I want to share that I believe neither of these issues are in any way Christian. A gunshot to the chest, or the unprecedented shot in the back and the dismissal of a life of faith and dedication are very similar symptoms of a failing civil and spiritual society.
One in the Spirit? Holy Spirit, yes because she sees no difference between the straight or gay folks, the married or single folks, the black or white or brown folks. But to dare to claim “open hearts, open mind, and open doors” is just load of crap, “United” Methodists.

Here I Stand.