Recently in Course Reflections Category

Today was the last day of our course. This is going to be a brief reflection, not because the content wasn't stimulating and thought provoking, but because it's late on Friday night and I need to finish this off before getting to bed so I can catch my flight home in the morning!

We discussed the difference between beliefs, morals/values and ethics. In my view each informs the other, moving from the abstraction of beliefs through specific moral or cultural values through to specific actions as they occur in community. For instance:

BELIEF: God requires that all men obey His will

MORAL: Homosexuality should not be tolerated by society, as it against the will of God

ETHIC: Actively working to deny equal rights to my homosexual neighbor

Although it was agreed that there is generally a lot of confusion between the three in social discourse.

A few key points Penny wanted us to take away, with regard to what might constitute the kernel of a queer ethic:

1. If anything is sacred, the human body is sacred (Whitman)
2. The ethical battleground is the human body
3. All bodies matter (this is the meaning of the incarnation)
4. We need to make sex (not just sexuality, but sex) sacred again
5. Ethics need to deal with the essence of relationships, not with their form
6. Ethics must involve truth-telling about our lives and our bodies

Now, to get home and put all of this into practice.

The assigned reading for today's class was from Eric Rofes' Reviving The Tribe: Regenerating Gay Men's Sexuality and Culture in the Ongoing Epidemic. What I really took away from this book was an understanding of some of the ways in which queer activism was coopted by the dominant discourse as a result of AIDS. After the gay liberation of the seventies, there has been a repathologization of queer sex under the guise of medical expertise and safe-sex education.

One example is the way safe-sex education and HIV prevention campaigns often prresent gay male sexuality as a force that needs to be brought under control (for our own good and for that of society). We are "transgressive bad boys." Heterosexual resistance to and ignorance of safer sex practices are winked at (after all, unprotected vaginal sex is only natural, and necessary to the reproduction of the species), while unprotected anal sex (between men) is treated with moral opprobrium.

Tied up in all of this is the fact that even queer men, especially younger men who never experienced the political activism of the sixties and seventies, have a tendency to substitute "love" for sex in their political discourse. Queer rights and queer marriage are not about the right to love one another — we have been loving one another for centuries and no system of powers can stop that. They are about our right to fuck, about the unchaining of our erotic power. Endless prattle about equal love (of which I am myself guilty) obscures what it is we are really fighting for, and what it is that heteronormative discourse so virulently seeks to suppress.

We began the class itself, however, on an entirely different note. Jim Mitulski and Penny Nixon shared stories concerning their recent visit to the Mother of Peace AIDS orphanage in rural Zimbabwe. An interesting and powerful juxtaposition of issues and images... The cultural apartheid brought about by AIDS in post-Reagan America, contrasted with the physical apartheid of gender and poverty in post-revolutionary Zimbabwe.

Today we looked at HIV/AIDS as an ethical issue. My reflection today, however, is on the significance of the "AIDS years" both for MCC and for me personally.

The "AIDS years" in the US queer community and MCC were those years when the pandemic raged unchecked by life-extending treatments — that period of fifteen years from the beginning of the pandemic in 1981 to the advent of protease inhibitor treatments in 1996. One of the cities worst affected was San Francisco.

Rev. Jim Mitulski was pastor of MCC San Francisco from 1986 to 2001, during which time he officiated at over 500 funerals for those who died from AIDS-related illness. One part of Jim's story that struck me was his sense that God gathered MCC together in the 60s and 70s so that there would be a church for such a time as this. MCC (especially MCC-SF) became known both within the queer community and in ecumenical circles as the Church with AIDS.

Jim talked about the authenticity of worship and community experienced during those years. The church with AIDS was not an unjoyous place. It was "a community where it didn't matter what you looked like, in the midst of a community where appearance was everything."

In both The Samaritan's Imperative and The Church With AIDS, we read about the joyful and spirit-filled AIDS healing services, and how experiencing these moved ecumenical leaders to reflect on the meaning of the marks of the "true church" in a time of AIDS. What does it mean to be "one, holy, catholic and apostolic"? MCC embodied, and continues to embody, these marks in its witness, worship and community.

The readings for today were about heroic myth and transformed consciousness. Dying and rising gods, ritual shamanism, and all that. It was all a bit dry and academic for my liking (perhaps it reminded me too much of those know-it-all anthropologists I had to read for my honors class in religious studies all those years back in university).

In class we devoted far too much time to two exercises that annoyed the hell out of me (way more than they should have). These revolved around identifying the queer stories in scripture and in the queer/postmodern 'canon' (you know, the kind of pop culture analysis that is grist for the mill in any number of college cultural studies courses). Here again I could feel the gravitational pull of so many heads about to disappear up their own asses.

Sometimes I want to shout, "hey, that cigar really is just a cigar, nothing more!" The Samaritan woman just had a bad life, she ain't no lesbian! But on reflection I realized it is very easy for someone with my healthy level of self-acceptance (and relative privilege) to be critical of the need for validation. It is important that people find their stories in scripture, even if I don't agree with their reading of it. Give me Queer Eye for the Good Book over Left Behind theology any day!

During one discussion I was misunderstood as defending a primitive resuscitation theory of Christ's resurrection (as opposed to the classic liberal view of it as symbolic or mythical). I need to state that I do not believe in the literal resuscitation of dead bodies (any more than I believe in snakes and asses that strike up casual conversations).

There are many different views of the resurrection of Christ. Some take resurrection quite seriously as a real event in cosmic time, without relying on the concept of the resuscitation or revival of corpses. You can be liberal/progessive and even queer in your theology without having to compare the resurrection of Christ to the memory of Judy Garland. Resurrection is one of the great mysteries of faith; it doesn't have to be explained away or downgraded to a 'living memory'.

Today we talked about MCC being a queer church movement rather than merely welcoming or open and affirming (ONA).

This is a controversial topic and may rouse some suspicion within even some MCC congregations, who probably do see themselves as welcoming and not necessarily queer.

However, it seems to me that there are at least two key differentiators:

1. Individual local congregations (and in some denominations, conferences) may choose to become open and affirming. Which means of course that this is a choice that at some time in the future may be reversed. It is not an essential part of their church polity and is not universally recognized or supported at a denominational level.
   
2. Open and affirming congregations welcome, invite, accept or tolerate queer people in their midst and may even (in some polities) ordain them as clergy. This is not the same as understanding and practising church, doing theology and living Christian ministry from a distinctly queer perspective.
   

MCC is the only church movement that speaks consistently and always from and for the margins of heteronormative society. We are no more likely to fade away with the slow dawn of mainstream tolerance than are the black churches going to close any time soon.

There was also discussion about queering liturgy and preaching. As an exercise we broke into small groups to conceive of specifically queer rites of confirmation, laying on of hands and blessing. My group developed a laying on of hands liturgy specifically designed to invoke God's Spirit in the recongition of someone's coming out process.

With a minimum of time and resources, it was amazing to witness the liturgies that each group was able to devise. Each rite spoke powerfully to the experience of queer folk in their relationship with God and the community. This reinforced for me the power and importance of imagining and developing new transformative rites in and for the queer community.

The open communion practised in MCC is one such example of a transformative rite or sacrament. The occasional voluntary practice of rebaptism after coming out (as undergone by me at the age of 21) may be another. But we have only begun to touch the surface of how we might use liturgy in new transformative ways.

It seems that I managed to piss off the editor of Purple Pew today, as a result of my recent journal entry on queering sacred texts.

VL Carey took umbrage at my reference to Take Back The Word as groundbreaking, retorting that "scholarship such as this pollutes the already dung-filled cesspool of Biblical Interpretation".

The problem with the “queer” (re)interpretation is that is sets the mind up to allow the possibility of any interpretation to enter in. In other words, when we give any credence to these reinterpretations, we leave the mind’s door ajar, allowing for the possibility of any interpretation to come in; thus, we invite deception, and not just any deception, but Scriptural deception, which is nothing more than the work of the enemy. Because it’s precisely this kind of deception that will cause us to unwittingly walk away from God. This is why the Bible tells us to be of sound and sober mind, and to question all doctrines and biblical interpretation to see if they are truly of God.

In Carey's eyes, queer scholars are (literally) shitting on the Word of God. None of this contextual social-location crap for her; true Christian salvation is available only by casting off queer theories and submitting ourselves to the (male) God revealed in the scriptures.

Now if we believe that God is Truth, and therefore can neither contradict Himself nor oppose Himself, that is, He cannot lie, then we have validation in the Word of God that we too, we queer Christians, are saved and receive eternal salvation by the grace of God when we trust in His Word and believe that Jesus is the Son of God. We need not the validation of men, or their unscriptural and deceptive “queer theories” to know that we too are of the children of God.

Today's session was on sexual transgression as a path to spiritual insight, to "redemption, revelation and/or a deeper relationship with ourselves and the Divine."

We looked at this primarily in the context of expressions of BDSM within the queer community. The discussion was rich and provocative on many levels, although I don't plan to detail everything we discussed.

First of all, BDSM is not evil, bad or sick. Most important are the concepts of mutual consent and mutual enjoyment. If these characteristics are missing we are talking about sexual abuse, not BDSM. BDSM can also be understood as play, and as sexual roleplaying involving consensual power exchange.

Where is the spiritual insight in this? We discussed how BDSM can provide a structure for negotiating and talking about sexual desire. Many people find liberation from sexual guilt and shame as a result of their involvement. Naming and owning our desires, we can reclaim and celebrate the power of our bodies. As feminist Susie Bright says in one of the readings, "sex doesn't lie."

Pastorally, we in queer ministry need to recognize the prevalence and significance of BDSM practices within relationships and within our communities. We don't need to practice or promote it (unless we're inclined that way) but we need to be able to relate authentically in our ministry to those who do. By opening our minds to the possibility of sexual transgression as spiritual insight, we might even learn some things ourselves.

There is also the need to be senstive to those experiencing or recovering from real abuse, sexual or otherwise, and to be able to minister appropriately in that context. There was a very helpful handout highlighting the differences between BDSM and abuse.

This morning we reflected on the emergence of postcolonial queer theology. Last night's reading was on the theology of sexual stories, from Marcella Althaus-Reid's Indecent Theology: Theological Perversions in Sex, Gender and Politics.

Althaus-Reid asserts that theology, especially liberation theology, "is a passionate and dangerous business," akin perhaps to sticking your tongue in a wall socket. She compares the passionate commitment to justice and solidarity with the poor to sexual passion, where "desire is intense, and carries that of life in itself."

She talks about how "abnormal" stories (those of women and sexual minorities) may be ignored or suppressed in liberation theologies. There is the story of Father Mario, a young gay Roman Catholic priest working in a Christian base community. Mario is murdered by a rent boy, the police allude to him being a faggot, and the church covers things up as usual. But the local community have embraced Fr. Mario as one of their own. They care not whether he was gay, only that he had to suffer alone. They speak to the TV media of his love and generosity of spirit, and how they wish they had been able to help him in his loneliness. Althaus-Reid approvingly refers to this resistant telling of his story as "indecent theological thinking."

Elsewhere in the reading she talks of the sexual pyramid, the invisible hierarchical privileging of some people's sexual stories over others. The class broke into groups to draw up our own sexual pyramid based on our perception of privileged story-telling in our own society.

The obvious truisms emerge: rich, white, powerful, heterosexual males sit at the apex of the pyramid; poor, disenfrachised women, queers and people of color near the base. But it is difficult to draw such a pyramid on paper, since there are so many different intersecting axes of privilege. At a minimum these might include: race, assigned gender, sexuality, adulthood, class, wealth, beauty, health.

Today's class started with a discussion of the Queer Commentary on the Bible, to be published in the fall (Mona West and Bob Goss, editors). Several of our readings for today were from this new commentary. I look forward to obtaining the entire volume, I'm sure it will be a very useful resource.

Bob made a statement to the effect that queer commentators are exegetical activists. He quoted from Foucault, who spoke of the insurrection of subjugated knowledges. This places queer theory and queer theology within the context of action, of praxis. Arguably, exegesis that is not activist, that is static, is blasphemy, for the Spirit blows wherever it wants to.

There was discussion of erotophobia as the root of misogyny, and both as the root of homophobia. Bob sees homophobia as based on a fear of women and of women's sexuality. To be queer in heteronormative society is to usurp the proper socially assigned roles of male and female. A man who is willingly penetrated by another man is "as a woman" and has turned the "natural" order on its head.

It was good to be reminded that, while we may see others "like ourselves" everywhere and throughout history, homosexuality and heterosexuality as binary modes of sexuality are relatively recent social constructs. When these concepts were first developed in Germany in the late nineteenth century, they were both labels for pathological sexual behavior (i.e. sexual intercourse with the same or opposite sex for the sole purpose of pleasure).

Somehow, heterosexuality was depathologized and granted normativity, while homosexuality was extended to apply all kinds of same-sex attraction and behavior (and still remains pathologized to an extent within modern society).

Today we had a whirlwind introduction to queer theology and queer biblical hermeneutics by Rev. Dr. Mona West. Dr. West is co-editor with Rev. Dr. Bob Goss of a ground-breaking work of queer biblical scholarship, Take Back The Word: A Queer Reading of The Bible.

I have to say that reading this book was a very worthwhile experience. A detailed chapter by chapter review can be found here. There are so many diverse ways to read the Bible, all of them according great respect to the sacred text while at the same time queering, or subverting, the heteronormative interpretation.

One of the most interesting and inspiring chapters for me was Rev. Michael Piazza's "Nehemiah as a Queer Model for Servant Leadership." It pictures Nehemiah as a privileged queer man risking imperial privilege in order in order to carry out God's work in rebuilding Jerusalem. I also enjoyed reading Victoria Kolakowski's "Throwing a Party: Patriarchy, Gender, and the Death of Jezebel" and her discussion of court eunuchs as transgendered women. This contrasts with Nancy Wilson's view of enuchs as representative of all queer folk.

There are different ways of understanding the eunuch historically, socially and theologically — I believe we can embrace various understandings without silencing one or the other viewpoint. A lot of queer theologians focus (appropriately in my view) on the social role of eunuchs and how this allowed them to move fluidly across gender, sexual and social boundaries — just as many queers (in all our variation) are able to do today.

In today's class we discussed what it means to queer the sacred text.

Queering <=> Querying <=> Questioning
[Resisting convention]

For our polity class we had to prepare a brief history of landmarks and milestones in the development of MCC.

The following chronology is by no means authoritative. It speaks only of dates and milestones, not of the spirit that animated and propelled our movement forward. It only touches on the deep suffering and loss that lies at the heart of our experience of grace as a community. And even in queer history, the story is often written by the "winners". This means that important minority stories may be undervalued or even forgotten. So I ask for forgiveness in advance...

• July 27, 1940 — Birth of Troy Perry in Tallahassee, FL. As a young man, Troy was a pastor in the (pentecostal) Church of God of Prophecy. After Troy was excommunicated by the church for being gay, he separated from his wife and moved to Los Angeles in 1963, where he came out as a gay man.
• October 6, 1968 — First MCC worship service held in Troy Perry’s living room in Huntington Park, CA, attended by 12 people. Rev. Perry’s sermon was entitled “Be True to You.” This took place one year prior to the NY Stonewall riots.
• 1968 to 1970 — MCC congregations started in nine US cities, leading to the convening in late 1970 of the first General Conference and the establishment of the Universal Fellowship of Metropolitan Community Churches (UFMCC).
• July 1970 — 12 people established an MCC in Dallas, TX, which later became the Cathedral of Hope. Growing to a membership in 2006 of 3,500, the Cathedral of Hope (no longer part of MCC) is the world’s largest GLBTQ church.
  

Another thing that occurred to me in reflecting on today's class was how MCC has played a part in the development of other streams in the LGBTQ social movement.

• Several other church groups and denominations found their roots in MCC, including Unity Fellowship Church (a predominantly black GLBT liberation-theology centered church with 14 congregations, started in 1985 by Carl Bean, an MCC-trained minister), International Christian Community Churches (an association of 13 evangelical churches started in 2002) and Cathedral of Hope in Dallas (the world's largest LGBT congregation, with 3,500 members, currently pursuing affiliation with the UCC).
  
• Beth Chayim Chadashim, the world's first LGBT Jewish congregation, was founded in LA in 1972 with support from Troy Perry and MCC.
• Many of the reconciling, affirming, welcoming etc groups within or aligned with traditional denominational movements have received inspiration, training, support or leadership at one time or another from MCC.
• Numerous AIDS and community service oriented organizations internationally were started as local MCC initiatives.
  

I think it is fair to say that the spiritual and social influence of MCC as a movement has touched hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of lives in one way or another. Often these connections are not acknowledged in the official and popular histories.

Another note — Wikipedia contains some brief, but excellent, articles on MCC and various MCC clergy and theologians. I was talking with another student in the class about the need to better document our history and theology. What better way to do this than in Wikipedia? I am considering getting involved as a contributor and doing some research to update existing articles and add more.

We began the course with a presentation today by Rev. Elder Nancy Wilson, MCC's new Moderator since Troy Perry's retirement last year. Nancy shared some of her story and discussed the history of MCC, touching on various subjects covered in more depth in her 1995 book, Our Tribe: Queer Folks, God, Jesus & the Bible.

Nancy credited Troy Perry's pentecostal roots, personal openness and early life experiences for much of the charismatic energy and positive buoyancy of the early MCC movement.

Because Troy and many of MCC's prominent leaders have hailed from evangelical or fundamentalist backgrounds, many not so well informed outsiders (including those within the LGBT movement) often mistakenly assume that MCC is a fundamentalist or evangelical church. Nothing could be further from the truth really.

Troy, from the very first church service, embodied and practiced an openness to the Spirit that transcended denominational, theological and liturgical categories. This openness has permeated the MCC movement in profound ways. For many of us, God's radical, inclusive love shattered the rigid categories we had built up in and around our lives. Yes, some of us are or were pentecostal, but not everybody who raises their hands in an MCC service is pentecostal. MCC has taught me and many others to respect and embrace diversity, not only in sexuality and gender expression but also around liturgy, theology, race, cultural background, ability, age, economic status, and so on.

Things are not always as they seem on the surface in MCC; we are truly a melting pot. It's kind of weird to hear the world's most liberal/progressive and theologically diverse Christian denomination referred to as "evangelical."

On this same point, Nancy repeated what I have heard Troy Perry also say — our movement is like a new book of Acts, a new Pentecost. As I reflect on this, it seems that this is true not just from the perspective of the excitement and energy and marginality of our movement. It's also true because there has been a great movement of Spirit (beginning in October 1968) that has made it possible for all of us to hear of the wondrous works of God in our own "language", in our own "various mother tongues" (Acts 2:8).

As part of the requirements for my Queer Explorations course, I need to keep a daily journal of reflections on the readings, class discussions and assignments. It occurred to me that one way to do this is to enter these reflections into my blog, so that is what I’ll do. At the end of the course I can package them up for submission.

I met another student today and we had dinner together. It was really interesting to hear the story of their journey to MCC and what brought them to EDS to complete their MCC ordination requirements at this time. I look forward to getting to know this student better over the next few weeks and perhaps having the opportunity to share and learn together.

I discovered that my co-student is taking both the Queer Explorations course and the MCC Polity class. MCC Polity covers the governance, structures and unique mission and theology of Metropolitan Community Churches and is another of the requirements for ordination in MCC (in addition to an M. Div. and ordination candidacy).

The polity course is in the afternoons and is only two hours a day for a week, so it is possible to take both programs at the same time, which I didn’t realize when I enrolled a few months back. I decided to make the most of my time here and enroll in that course as well. From what I’m told there may be quite a few students in both classes. Although I expect that most of them, unlike me, have completed their seminary training rather than just being at the start of the process.

I have to admit to a small amount of concern that I might find myself out of my depth here. Will people think of me as an intruder or dilettante? I don't even have a complete baccalaureate degree, let alone a masters degree in Divinity.

But my experience in MCC so far tells me that this type of fear is unwarranted. We are all at different places on our journey with God and the church, but what unites us is our passion for God and for social justice. I have been doing theology in one way or another for twenty years, and keeping this blog the past year or so has helped me sharpen my instincts just a little in this area. I'm going to repent of my feelings of uselessness and unworthiness, trust God and just plunge in. Once you convince yourself, it doesn't matter what other people think.