On the Eve of a New Year

As we stand poised in this liminal space between 2024 and 2025, I have been thinking about how January gets its name from the Roman god Janus, the god of beginnings, gates, transitions, and doorways. I stand in the doorway, reflecting back on all that 2024 held and looking forward to the possibilities of the new year.

For me, “weary” sums up 2024. The year included retirement, an international move, and the end of the anti-LGBTQ+ language in The United Methodist Book of Discipline. Any one of these would be momentous and exhausting. Together, they cast a surreal light that made me often stop and wonder, “Can this really be happening?”

When Robin and I decided to move to Nova Scotia in retirement, we chose to replace our little cottage in Pugwash, NS with a larger home. We do not recommend building a new home a whole country away! Not being physically present meant that miscommunication was easy and meeting deadlines was not! The promised finish date of May turned to June, turned to July, turned to August, turned to September. Anticipating moving issues related to customs, we shipped our belongings up in May. After eight years of serving an area of 430,000 square miles, living out of a suitcase for a couple of months was nothing new!

I never could imagine myself retired. Despite the ups and downs of ministry, I have loved every second of service. Every appointment has blessed me in countless ways and I am so incredibly grateful for all the people I have encountered, who hold a precious place in my heart.

The hard part of being a United Methodist pastor is saying goodbye to the people you have served and come to love. Having to say goodbye to the people of the Mountain Sky Conference pained me deeply. We had weathered so much together—my election and consecration, attacks and undermining by the Right, the creation of a new conference, COVID, and disaffiliations. Yet, we also dreamed big and found joy together grounded in our deep commitment to mission and ministry.

The biggest impact on my life and ministry was the tectonic plate shift The United Methodist Church experienced at General Conference, where the delegates removed all the anti-LGBTQ+ language from our Book of Discipline. I had my call to ministry before that language entered our shared United Methodist lexicon. Even when it changed and I came out, I knew deep within me that I was called specifically to ordained ministry within The United Methodist Church. Boards of Ordained Ministries, District Superintendents, Bishops, and the churches I served affirmed that call over and over again. However, for more than forty years, I woke up each morning worried and wondering if this would be the day I would lose my ordination. That stress, experienced on a daily basis, was exhausting and stressful, impacting my spiritual, emotional, and physical well-being.

I find myself wondering: what was lost due to the church’s stance and what could have been if it hadn’t been there. What would I have done differently in my ministry? How might my life have turned out?

But living with “what ifs” dilutes reality and clouds the eyes of being able to see the gifts of what has been. So now I find myself looking forward to a new year, a new community, and new season of life.

Standing at the threshold of 2025, I recommit to living into a prayer I prayed in the parking lot of every church I visited in the Mountain Sky Conference: 

“Give me an undefended heart, and may I be generous in love.” 

I will continue to listen to the Spirit’s still, small voice that has always nudged me forward when the path wasn’t clear. I will invest in community in ways I couldn’t as an itinerant United Methodist preacher. I will be present to family. I will be a better friend.

As 2024 concludes, I carry a weariness deep within my bones. But through that weariness is a stubborn seed of joy that is bursting forth even now.

Thank you for being part of my journey in 2024. Holding you and all of us in prayer as we cross into 2025.

A LOVE GREATER THAN LAW

On Monday, May 6, 2013, a New York Times article reported on the complaint against Dr. Tom Ogletree for performing his son's wedding. What should be reserved as a day of celebration has turned into a charge of disobedience because Dr. Ogletree's son is gay: The United Methodist Church forbids pastors from performing "ceremonies that celebrate homosexual unions."

The United Methodist Church is conflicted when it comes to the rights of glbt persons. At first glance, one might conclude that the UMC supports legal marriage for gay and lesbian couples, since the church believes that equal rights for same-sex couples is "a clear issue of simple justice in protecting the rightful claims where people have shared material resources,pensions, guardian relationships, mutual powers of attorney, and other such lawful claims typically attendant to contractual relationships that involve shared contributions, responsibilities, and liabilities, and equal protection before the law."

 However, the church also supports “laws in civil society that define marriage as the union of one man and one woman.”  The church believes that gay men and lesbians have a right to serve openly in the military, but forces glbt pastors deep into a closet of "don't ask, don't tell."  We believe sexuality is a good gift from God, but refuse the use of General and Annual Conference funds to encourage thoughtful conversation and study around sexual orientation, because it might "promote the acceptance of homosexuality."
 

A "clear issue of simple justice" has become convoluted double-speak for the church, The church cannot call for lgbt equality and justice in the world and give the same group of people second class status in the church. But that is exactly what the church has done. And as lgbt equality is fast becoming the law of the land, the church is growing increasingly out of step with a world that values dignity, diversity, and right action.

As I write this, Delaware has become the 11th state to legalize marriage between same sex couples, and Minnesota is poised to be number 12. Currently, 48% of Americans live in states that offer legal rights/protections for gay and lesbian couples.  As more politicians come out in favor of marriage equality and more than 50% of Americans support this movement, it is clear that the tide has turned in the US, and marriage equality will eventually be the law of the land.

It doesn't take a statistician to predict that this will result in more gay and lesbian United Methodists asking their pastors to officiate at their wedding and that more and more pastors will say "I will".  No church law can stop love. There will be more and more Tom Ogletrees, clergy of glbt children who will turn their back on the church's injustice and without hesitation will officiate at their child's wedding. And there will be more and more United Methodist pastors who will consider it yet one more vocational honor, to bless the union of two committed people, regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity.



The Wedding of Dan & Bill 2004
Bethany UMC San Francisco

The crisis in the church is not that people are breaking the "law". Jesus models to us that laws that cause harm to God's people are to be disregarded.  The crisis is that the church is failing to understand how it has perpetuated harm against God's glbt children. Bullying, physical violence, emotional violence, spiritual violence, murder, and suicide are all related to the church's inability to embrace fully lgbt persons.  As long as The United Methodist Church has "laws" on the books proclaiming lgbt persons "incompatible with Christian teaching" it will continue to have blood on its hands.

The deeper crisis is the church's failure to recognize God in the midst of love. Scripture tells us that God is love. When marriages were legal in San Francisco in 2004, God was EVERYWHERE! I, who have been trained as a United Methodist elder, had never before encountered God so fully as those beautiful weeks when love was celebrated, covenanted, blessed and licensed! The City was brought to a whole new level of joy, as complete strangers stopped to give flowers to newlyweds, as offices shut down to throw wedding showers, as parents dropped everything to fly into SF to be at their children's sides for the most important day of their lives.


If the church can't recognize this as something holy and true, one has to wonder: what in God's name is wrong with the church?

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