A Holy Saturday Plea

When I was a kid, I thought that today, Holy Saturday, the day between Good Friday and Easter Sunday, was the absolute worst day on the calendar.

It was the only day the disciples were completely and totally without Jesus.

Even on Good Friday, in the midst of His Passion, Jesus found the strength and energy to exhort the women of Jerusalem to not weep for Him (Luke 23:28).  Even though His words are scary in an entirely other sense because He tells us to weep for ourselves, He is still very much among the living, even if all He has left to do is die.  He is still teaching, even if all He has left to do is to be made silent.

In other words, Christ is still present on Good Friday.  And, as we all know, He returns to us anew on Easter Sunday.

But Holy Saturday?  That day sucks.  No Christ at all, but the disciples are expected to celebrate both the next day of Passover and the Sabbath as proscribed by their religious tradition.  If we worship God out of celebration (and many of us do, even if not every Sunday), imagine thinking why on earth you should be celebratory when the entire spiritual foundation of your life has just been ripped out from under you like the road underneath Wile E. Coyote.

So yeah, Holy Saturday can bite me.  But I'm supposed to endure it as a Christian.  I am supposed to endure it because I am supposed to walk alongside Christ, and this was something that was done to Him at our hands.

Much as we may think God wanted this to happen, God did not kill Jesus.  We did.

So I get today to stew in my own culpability, my own sinfulness in how I continue to crucify Christ by not caring enough for others or for God's creation, by not standing up and speaking out when I felt more comfortable remaining silent, and then resenting my own inability to make a bigger difference on behalf of the Christ who was crucified yesterday and who is risen tomorrow.

So, here's my first plea: please, please do not make these same mistakes, as much as you are able to.

And here's my second: don't let others make these same mistakes.

It is the lack of caring that so pains and harms God's children, of this I am certain.  Despite his protestations, Pilate could not have cared less about what ultimately happened to Jesus; if he did, he would have ordered Jesus freed and Barabbas crucified.

And then cruelly, Pilate washes his hands of that decision.

How many times do we reach for Pilate's washbasin to wash our hands of our treatment of others?

How often to we try to cleanse our hands of the stain of the blood of gay and lesbian neighbors, or persons of color, or people crushed under the satanic (yes, satanic) yokes of poverty, homelessness, or malnutrition?

And how often do we then lament the state of the world, and focus on putting blame on anyone but ourselves?

Guess what: that is what the temple authorities have just finished doing: lamenting the state of the world and focusing on putting the blame on Jesus rather than where it belonged...on their own shoulders.

Please, remember how great your responsibility is in a Holy Saturday world.  Remember that your call to holiness extends far beyond the mere coils of your personal beliefs and thoughts.  After all, Pilate thought Jesus innocent, but it did not stop him from handing Jesus over to be crucified.

This Holy Saturday, we need fewer Pilates, and more Mary Magdalenes, and Salomes, the women who hurried as soon as they were able with the Sabbath ended to return to Christ's side, even if they thought Him to be dead.

They had not washed their hands of what had happened.  They remembered.

So too, then, must we.  And then do it differently the second time around.

Yours in the crucified, now dead, but soon to rise, Christ,
Eric

If The Writing's On The Wall, It's Because You Have Been Found Wanting

I'm taking a short break out of my preparations for Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Easter Sunday (collectively known in the clergy world as the "Triduum") to write about a couple of things regarding this whole RFRA kerkuffle that I have already been blogging about incessantly (see my last few entries here and here).

First, earlier this week, the General Board of my denomination, the Disciples of Christ, voted unanimously to authorize the removal of our 2017 General Assembly from its original host city of Indianapolis in protest of Indiana's new RFRA.  Several of my colleagues have even privately said that the would be willing to make individual financial donations to the denomination to mitigate any cancellation fees this move would incur, and I will be one of them who does donate if need be.  A certain saying about putting one's money where one's mouth is comes to mind, quite literally.

Second, though, is that I feel the need to refute this narrative that somehow the defense of the RFRA has religious tradition on its side, a narrative like in this piece from Rod Dreher for TIME Magazine (which, amazingly, somehow still exists).

There are several serious theological and exegetical errors in Dreher's analysis, and while I am normally not one to nitpick, when we are talking about the turning away of my gay and lesbian brothers and sisters in Christ, I will nitpick until they are free to patronize any pizza shop in Indiana they please.

First, the title of Dreher's piece.  Rod, you know where the "writing on the wall" idiom comes from, right?  In Daniel 5, the Babylonian monarch, King Belshazzar, sees a hand writing a mysterious writing on the wall of a banquet in which the king is eating and drinking from dishes looted from the Jerusalem temple.  None of Belshazzar's magicians can decipher the handwriting, so the king sends for Daniel, who translates it thusly:

Mene: God has numbered the days of Belshazzar's reign
Tekel: God has weighed and measured Belshazzar and found him wanting
Parsin: Belshazzar's kingdom will be divided between the Medes and the Persians

So from my perspective, actually, the title fits.  God is weighing and measuring us, and if we are going to turn away our neighbors on the basis of their sexual orientation, we will be found wanting, and our kingdom (the influence we hold over the populace) could well fall and be divided.

But I have a hunch that isn't what Dreher was going for.  Even if our turning away of gay and lesbian couples would make us to be found wanting in God's eyes, which I have to imagine it would.

Second is this line:

"I understand that most liberals view homosexuality as entirely analogous to race. Abrahamic religion does not see it that way. Sexual expression has moral meaning that race does not."

Good gravy, where do I even begin with that?  Abrahamic religion places moral meaning on race all. the. effing. time throughout the Old Testament.

In the Hebrew Bible, God is the God of the Hebrews and not much else.  In Deuteronomy 20:17, God, through Moses, issues the Israelites a laundry list of differing peoples they are to exterminate in their entirety, lest they teach the Israelites detestable things (God also promises to send a pestilence upon these peoples in Exodus 23:23 & 28).  This command is also repeated in another form (Deuteronomy 7:1-2).

In Exodus 21:1-6, slaves must be set free on the seventh year of their enslavement, but this law only applies to Hebrew slaves.  Non-Hebrew slaves can be enslaved indefinitely (Deuteronomy 20;11).

And in Deuteronomy 23:3-6, Ammonites and Moabites are permanently banned from converting to Judaism and consigned to second-class citizen status.

In fact, all of these sorts of verses were in part why there was such debate over whether to evangelize to Gentiles to begin with as what would become Christianity began splintering away from its Jewish tradition.

And right after that comes this:

You don’t have to agree with Orthodox Jews, Muslims, and traditional Christians, but this goes down to the foundational beliefs of our religions.

Maybe it does, but Biblically speaking, it shouldn't.  When asked in Matthew 22 what the most important commandment is, Jesus proffers two: love the Lord with all your heart, soul, and mind (Deuteronomy 6:5), and love your neighbor as yourself (Leviticus 19:18).  On these, Jesus says, hangs the entirety of the law and the prophets (22:34-40).  Meaning that as Christians, these two laws are the foundational beliefs of our religion.  And dismissing a customer on the basis of a same-sex wedding doesn't count as love of neighbor.

Moving right along:

An America where the majority casts aside religious liberty, and treats orthodox Christians as outcasts as gays were once wrongly treated, is an America in which it is hard to have faith. (emphasis Dreher's)

The false equivalency here is so stark, it's painful.  Are Christians being killed for being Christian, like Matthew Shepard, Richie Phillips, Jason Gage, and so many other gay, lesbian and trans people?  Is there a lengthy and historically documented tradition of discrimination against Christians in America?  Did Christians have to face ballot measure after ballot measure banning their right to marry?  No, no, and no.

And by the by, since when did being against same-sex marriage become a part of Christian orthodoxy?  My theology is about as orthodox as it gets, but under Dreher's definition of the term, I would count as neither a traditional or an orthodox Christian.  And really, considering the serious errors in Biblical exegesis I detail above, it's pretty rich for Dreher to act as though he has religion on his side with this argument.

Which is sort of--and has been--my point all along.  Religion isn't, or shouldn't be, on the side of defending Indiana's RFRA.  The Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment that protects your religious expression protects mine as well, and the American judicial system has a long history of protecting the religious expression of views that are certainly in the minority in the American populace, such as the right of Jehovah's Witnesses to not be required to recite the Pledge of Allegiance (West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette) or the right of Amish students to not attend public high schools (Wisconsin v. Yoder).  In fact, the "compelling governmental interest" litmus test in regulating religious expression has been on the books since 1963 in Sherbert v. Warner, with the majority opinion being penned by one of the great liberals of the Supreme Court, Justice William Brennan.

As a self-professed "liberal" "orthodox" "traditional" Christian, I consider religious expression to be beyond value.  The only way I know that I can teach and preach what I feel called without government interference is if the pastor down the street from me can preach and teach what s/he feels called without government interference.

But turning away a gay couple on the basis of that preaching and teaching isn't free expression any more than turning away an African-American couple or a Jewish couple is.  It's discrimination.  And it is an affront to God.

That, for whatever it is worth, I learned from Jesus Christ: in Luke 9, a Samaritan village turns away Jesus and His disciples when they seek lodging on the road, "because His face was set toward Jerusalem" (Samaritans resented Jerusalem as the center of the Jewish tradition--essentially, they turned Jesus away because He was not a Samaritan).  His disciples wanted to call down fire from the heavens to consume the town, but Jesus rebuked them for wanting to.

It was only later on down the road, a few verses later, that Jesus lamented that the Son of Man had no place to rest His head.

What a terrible lament to have to admit.  At our hands.

The entire point of protesting the RFRA is to end the need for that lament.

I hope Rod Dreher can recognize that, and repent of his defense of it.

Yours in Christ,
Eric

As I write this, I saw the updated body count of the al-Qaeda attack in Kenya: 147.   147 souls.  Please pray for all those affected; I had the immense privilege of visiting Kenya on my mission trip to Africa in 2006 and came away humbled and genuinely moved by the beauty and culture of generosity that is firmly at root there.  This attack is an affront on that culture and beauty.  ~E.A.

Holy Week Book Review: Everyone Belongs to God

“Your being a pastor will gradually become more and more irrelevant.”

Somebody, please, give me a hug.  I don’t know if I can handle this.

And yet, words like these are exactly what I need.  Maybe even more so than the hug.  Sorry.

With this and many other such broadsides, the 19^th and 20^th century German pastor Christoph Friedrich Blumhardt demands that you question exactly what your role should be in bringing about the kingdom of God—and how closely you are adhering to that ideal—in the new book Everyone Belongs to God: Discovering the Hidden Christ, which should hit the shelves from Plough Publishing in a month or so (the e-book for your Kindle costs eight bucks on Amazon, the paperback costs ten).

Because this book is curated from a series of letters from Blumhardt to his missionary son-in-law (at times, it has the feel of C.S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters, which isn’t a bad thing), there is a familial, almost paternal, bond that comes through in the book’s words, and as such, Blumhardt comes across far less as a raging, finger-pointing, pulpit-pounding preacher and far more as the conscience in your ear that refuses to back down from exhorting you to do what is best, not merely what is good.  And because this is a collection of letters rather than, say, a collection of lectures, Blumhardt’s prose is both readable and accessible, even as the ideas he tries to convey are of the highest and loftiest of orders.

Blumhardt shines brightest in his continued reminders to his son-in-law to respect people of other faiths and cultures as people whom God is also still working through, while balancing that with his firm belief that a relationship with God is most clear through Jesus Christ.  At a time when we make it altogether too tempting to see other religions as enemies, with their violent extremists like ISIS and Boko Haram, Blumhardt offers us an example of great respect for cultures and religions outside of Western European tradition in a way that really is because of, rather than in spite of, his passion for Jesus’s message.

In this way, he says, and, indeed, the title of this collection says, everyone belongs to God, whether you or I like it or not.

But far be it for any reader to expect anything in the way of the fuzzy-wuzzy we’re-all-special-snowflakes/unicorns sentiment that might follow up a statement like “everyone belongs to God.”  In case I have not made it abundantly clear enough, Blumhardt sees that singular truth not as a feel-good placebo, but as a truly radical mindset that is meant to shake and quake everything in our comfortable, me-first bubbles that somehow pass as worldviews these days.

If you’re terrified of having that bubble pierced by such heartfelt truths about the nature of God’s kingdom, stay far, far away from this book.

Otherwise, pick it up.  You’ll be glad you did.

Disclaimer: My copy of Everyone Belongs to God came at no charge from the publisher; however, all opinions expressed here are entirely my own.

Letters from the Soul: This Month's Newsletter Column + New Sermon Series

April 2015: "Easter Clothes"

Dear Church,

I didn't always like Easter as a little kid.

No, not the candy-from-the-Easter-Bunny part; I LOVED that bit. It was like Halloween, only six months later and with a side of Jesus. And no, not the hunting-for-eggs part; while I detested getting myself dirty, I always made an exception for chocolates in bright, plastic eggs.

No, I disliked what came after all of those festivities: the foisting of myself into really nice Easter clothes before being taken off to church and various Easter brunches. Okay, it was mostly the having-to-wear-really-nice-clothes part. I may have been born and raised in Kansas, but I was a West Coaster at heart even as a whippersnapper. Give me a reason to celebrate Jesus's resurrection in pajamas and sandals, and I was on board like Noah and his menagerie.

I tell myself now that this was in fact really quite holy of me as a kid, because considering the disciples are summoned to the empty tomb at sunrise after the Sabbath, they may well have been wearing their pajamas and sandals too! (Like I know what ancient Israelites slept in...)

I think we want to look our best on Easter because it is so important a day for us, but also because in our minds, the resurrection was instantaneous; things were at their best now that Christ has risen, and so too, then, must we be and look at our best.

Except the resurrection took time--not the resurrection of Christ, maybe, but the resurrection of His disciples' faith, especially that of Thomas. The resurrection of their courage, and their willingness to speak out publicly again on behalf of their Lord, all of that took time.

Which means that is okay for our own resurrections to take time as well, for them to not always happen overnight. Sometimes we are born again in an instant, but sometimes, we are born again over a span of weeks, months, even years.

Think about that. We may still be--and really likely are--years away from looking our best as Christians. But if the post-Easter stories about the faith and redemption of Jesus's disciples are any indication to us, that's okay. No matter what it is we are wearing!

He is Risen,
Pastor Eric

New Easter Sermon Series!

Easter is technically not just a single day--it is in fact fifty days, lasting from Easter Sunday to Pentecost Sunday, which commemorates the coming of the Holy Spirit as documented in Acts 2), we will begin a new five-week sermon series for the season. Khalil Gibran was an early 20th century Lebanese poet and writer, and one of his works, "Jesus: Son of Man," consists of a series of vignettes and poems told from the perspectives of all manner of people Jesus came into contact with, friend and foe alike--although he reserves his best poetry for Christ's followers. Each Sunday, we'll be taking an excerpt from one of Gibran's poems, reading its parallel in the Gospels, and seeing how the spirit of Christ can inspire such amazing and profound words of wisdom and love from each of us, not just the poets!

Easter 2015: “The Son of Man: When Poetry Testifies to Christ”

April 12: “Words Wrought as Iron,” Matthew 6:5-15
April 19: Off
April 26: “To Forgive the Thirst,” John 8:1-11 
May 3: “A Tempest in Their Sky,” Matthew 23:29-39
May 10: "But I Shall Be Crucified," Matthew 27:15-23
May 17: "The Wings Wherewith to Fly High," Luke 24:28-35
May 24 (Pentecost Sunday): "Nine-In-The-Morning Holiness," Acts 2:1-13

This Week's Sermon: "Palm Sunday"

Mark 11:1-10

When Jesus and his followers approached Jerusalem, they came to Bethphage and Bethany at the Mount of Olives. Jesus gave two disciples a task, 2 saying to them, “Go into the village over there. As soon as you enter it, you will find tied up there a colt that no one has ridden. Untie it and bring it here. 3 If anyone says to you, ‘Why are you doing this?’ say, ‘Its master needs it, and he will send it back right away.’” 4 They went and found a colt tied to a gate outside on the street, and they untied it. 5 Some people standing around said to them, “What are you doing, untying the colt?” 6 They told them just what Jesus said, and they left them alone. 7 They brought the colt to Jesus and threw their clothes upon it, and he sat on it. 8 Many people spread out their clothes on the road while others spread branches cut from the fields. 9 Those in front of him and those following were shouting, “Hosanna! Blessings on the one who comes in the name of the Lord! 10 Blessings on the coming kingdom of our ancestor David! Hosanna in the highest!” (Common English Bible)

“The Last Week: Mark’s Retelling of the Passion,” Week Six

The pitch black t shirts, when put in context, looked horrifying: they had the skull and crossbones with the caption “Hardcore Rebels,” which by itself, maybe wasn’t such a big deal, something your goofy teenage son wears to show the world how badass he is.

Except that these shirts were distributed hundreds of attendees at a white power concert in Germany, where the neo Nazi movement is abysmally enough very much alive and well, especially in the former East Germany.

But a funny thing happened to the shirts after their first washing: the “Hardcore Rebels” caption faded to reveal a new one: “We can help you break with right wing extremism.”  It was revealed that the shirts were the work of a group called Exit Deutschland, whose purpose was to help neo Nazis who wanted to exit their life of Nazism: not an easy or safe task when you consider that those who defect from skinhead gangs are often at risk of being killed in reprisal for defecting.

But the t shirts at least put forward a choice, in a rather poignant way: you could continue to rebel against that which is good and just for humanity: equality and justice, or, you could leave that destructive past behind to follow a new way forward into a new future.

It is the choice that the citizenry of Jerusalem were proffered with on Palm Sunday.  And, as all four of the Gospels are unanimous on, a great many of them chose the way of Jesus.

Now that Lent, that 40-day fast in the wilderness alongside Jesus as He is tempted by the devil, is rapidly approaching the climactic scenes of the arrest and the trials and, ultimately, the cross, so too do we hurry down that road.  But that road goes through the gates of Jerusalem first, and so we too will walk alongside Christ for His triumphal entry into the holy city on the day that we call Palm Sunday.  For this sermon series, I am using as a template the book “The Last Week,” a commentary on the Gospel of Mark’s telling of Holy Week, co-written by Bible scholars John Dominic Crossan and Marcus Borg.  Professor Borg just passed away a couple of months ago, plus this book is one of a precious few on my list of “it truly changed my life” books, so this series has a lot of added meaning for me as well as, I hope, eventually for you too.  We have gone through Monday to Good Friday of Holy Week, but now we rewind back to Palm Sunday, since today is, well, Palm Sunday on the liturgical calendar.

From Borg and Crossan, in their chapter on Palm Sunday:

Two processions entered Jerusalem on a spring day in the year 30…One was a peasant procession, the other an imperial procession.  From the east, Jesus rode a donkey down the Mount of Olives, cheered by His followers.  Jesus was from the peasant village of Nazareth, His message was about the kingdom of God, and His followers came from the peasant class.  They had journeyed to Jerusalem from Galilee, about a hundred miles to the north, a journey that is the central section and central dynamic of Mark’s Gospel.  Mark’s story of Jesus and the kingdom of God has been aiming for Jerusalem, pointing toward Jerusalem.  It has now arrived.

On the opposite side of the city, from the west, Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor of Idumea, Judea, and Samaria, entered Jerusalem at the head of a column of imperial cavalry and soldiers.  Jesus’s procession proclaimed the kingdom of God; Pilate’s proclaimed the power of empire.  The two processions embody the central conflict of the week that led to Jesus’s crucifixion (for) Pilate’s military procession was a demonstration of both Roman imperial power and Roman imperial theology.

This triumphal entry of a hero into a city that Pilate is executing on the same day as Jesus would have been nothing new to Jerusalem at the time—Alexander the Great held one such entry when he conquered Babylon, for instance, 300-some years before Jesus.  But such spectacles were reserved for kings, rulers, emperors, or their proxies—the people who represented imperial power to the masses—and certainly not reserved for a humble Jewish carpenter.  But those emperors, governors, and soldiers, they would have entered the city on their finest horse, not a donkey or a poor little colt that was boosted from its rightful owner in what might be the most holy instance of grand theft donkey, replete with the classic excuse—the Lord needs it!  And for a scene so comical that it would be like if the president were to show up in a motorcade of clown cars…which, depending on your political allegiance and whichever party is in  charge at any given time, may or may not be an appealing anaogy.

And so while scholars agree that Jesus riding in on the animal that He did was meant to fulfill Scripture and to fulfill prophesy (Zechariah 9:9), many will also say that there is a certain amount of theatrics that Jesus is employing here.  It is a spoof of the Roman power-that-be whom Jesus, or the Jewish rank-and-file population of Judea, probably didn’t much care for.  If Jon Stewart (or Stephen Colbert, or John Oliver, or Larry Wilmore…wow, satire news has taken off) were around back then, this entry by Jesus might have been something that they would have concocted!

In other words, Jesus is satirizing His earthly overlords, the Roman Empire.  He’s discrediting them publicly, something He has been so very good at doing time and again with the Roman Empire’s local puppets, the Pharisees and the scribes.

And on the other side of this, you have the Jerusalem people themselves.  And I’m not sure that they got the memo that this might have been a satirical stunt.  Notably, there are no palms in Mark’s version—seriously, go back and read it if you don’t believe me.  There are no palms.

Why is this important?  Because olive palms in particular are a symbol associated with victory, the exact same way a gold medal is today.  In the ancient Greek Olympics, victors would be awarded with, among other things, a wreath of olive laurels that they’d wear around their head.  You’ve probably seen pictures of that.  And that tradition carried over, in a manner, to Roman tradition in that victorious rulers or generals might also have palms to greet them, either as a wreath or to wave at him, when he entered a newly-conquered city as part of a victory parade.

Instead, people sacrifice their clothing for Jesus’ mount to have something to trod on, and they shout praises to His name.  In other words, this is the real deal for them.  Even if for Jesus this is a farcical poke-in-the-eye to the powers-that-be, for the people, this is real.  So you see…they are speaking two different languages, Jesus and the people.  Jesus is making a mockery of the imperial rulers who have taken the Israelites’ freedom, but to those colonized Israelites, Jesus is Himself real, and worthy of their sacrifice of their clothing in order to pay heed to His honor.

Think about the use of clothing today, with Exit Deutschland in its attempts to change neo Nazis.

Sacrificing clothing in order to send a profoundly important message about a profoundly important choice that each of us have to make: we can choose to join the procession of Christ, or we can choose to join the procession of Pilate.  Exit Deutschland sacrificed clothing to call people away from hatred and towards love, love that ultimately came from Christ and from God.

We can choose to follow Pilate and the source of his power: the imperial cavalry and legionnaires, the might of sword and spear to keep an oppressed people oppressed and a downtrodden nation downtrodden.  We can choose to embrace all manner of earthly power and anger in an ultimately vain attempt to assert our superiority over others, but they are exactly that: vanity.  Vanity, as Solomon says.  All is vanity.

Except that the nails are real.  The wooden crossbeam is real.  The crown of thorns is real, and the crucifixion is real, because that is the only way the resurrection too one day will be real!

So, we can choose to embrace the surrender of all earthly power, status, fame, and glory, and follow this comical donkey all the way to its ultimate and final destination: the cross high atop Calvary.

The choice is yours, and ours, to make, and to make alone (I really want to make a Legends of the Hidden Temple joke, but that’d be just a tad irreverent, and I’m not sure anyone outside the ages of 25-35 would get it.  Oh well.  Olmec, you were the best).

So the onus is upon each of us to make that choice wisely, with care and with deliberation, with compassion and with love.

Fortunately, Jesus is about to give us a pretty big clue as to which way to go one week from now, when the news arrives that the tomb is empty, that the stone has been turned aside, and that life reigns over death once more.

Such is the power of God.  And such is the power of the choice we are offered to make

Hosanna, hosanna in the highest.  Amen.

Eric Atcheson

Longview, Washington

March 29, 2015

A Letter from Disciples Clergy in the Northwest

(Despite an exhortation from my denominational leaders--as well as prominent voices in a variety of fields--Governor Pence quietly signed SB 101 (the "Religious Freedom Restoration Act") into law in a private ceremony in his office yesterday.  In response to this, I circulated the following letter among Disciples clergy in my region to send on to our General Minister and President, Rev. Dr. Sharon E. Watkins.  That letter was sent to her electronically this morning.  It is also not too late to add your voice to it--please feel free to do so in the comments section of this post if you are so moved--please include your name, job title, and town/city and state.  God is forever on the side of the persecuted.  ~E.A.)

To Rev. Dr. Sharon Watkins, Rev. Todd Adams, and All Whom It May Concern:

Dear Colleagues:

We, like you, have been following the passage and signature of SB 101 (the “Religious Freedom Restoration Act”) in Indiana with both great attention and great concern.

We were all extremely heartened and encouraged to read your open letter to Governor Pence on the denomination’s disciples.org website, urging a veto of SB 101 on threat of considering moving the 2017 General Assembly out of Indianapolis.  Thank you from all of us for writing it.

Now that SB 101 has been signed, we, the undersigned pastors serving and/or residing in the Northwest Region of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) offer you our spiritual and moral support to make good on that ultimatum.

Some of us identify as gay or lesbian, and all of us minister to—and serve alongside—gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender brothers and sisters in Christ, and we feel we could not in good Christian conscience ask them to attend a General Assembly at a venue where they could be legally discriminated against in such a manner.

Please move the 2017 General Assembly away from Indianapolis to an alternate host city. Thank you.

Blessings,

Eric Atcheson

Senior Pastor, First Christian Church

Longview, WA

Robert Brooks

Senior Pastor, First Christian Church
Kent, WA

Joan Dennehy

Retired

Seattle, WA

Marvin Eckfeldt
Retired
Kent, WA

Liv Gibbons

Senior Pastor, Northwest United Protestant Church

Richland, WA

Nancy Gowler Johnson

Senior Pastor, First Christian Church

Puyallup, WA

Adam Harmon
Senior Pastor, University Christian Church
Seattle, WA

Sandy Messick
Regional Minister and President, Northwest Region, Christian Church (Disciples of Christ)

Federal Way, WA

J.C. Mitchell

Senior Pastor, Open Gathering

Bellevue, WA

Monica Myers Greenberg

Senior Pastor, Northwest Christian Church

Seattle, WA

Rochelle Richards

Senior Pastor, First Christian Church

Sumner, WA

Laurie Rudel

Senior Pastor, Queen Anne Christian Church

Seattle, WA

Gary Shoemaker

Senior Pastor, First Christian Church

Bellingham, WA

Luke & Rebecca Sumner

Pastors, Everett Christian Church

Everett, WA

Kate Sweet

Chaplain, UW Medicine

Seattle, WA

Amy Walters

Senior Pastor, First Christian Church

Olympia, WA

To Reject Them is to Reject Me

I am a Christian.

I am an ordained pastor.

I believe in the sufficiency and inspiration of Scripture, salvation through following Jesus Christ, and the eternal life promised to all of God's children.

By those standards, my own beliefs about God are really very orthodox by just about any reasonable standard for, I imagine, most American Christians, mainline and evangelical alike.

Until this: I also believe in equality in all rights, including marriage, for gay, lesbian, bisexual, transsexual, and transgendered people.

I was raised this way since I was a little kid.  The worship pastor in the church plant I grew up in was (is) openly gay.  His lifelong partner was a member of the church and attended frequently.  I went to a historically Presbyterian college with a strong reputation of inclusion for gay and lesbian students.

I then went to a seminary with a huge gay and lesbian demographic, many of whom came to God in spite of the church, not because of it.  Because the church would lead them to doing things like trying to exorcise their homosexuality like a demon.

These are men and women of God and of Christ I served alongside and studied alongside during my formation as a minister.  And their wholeness as believers matters a hell of a lot more to me than your complaining about potentially one day having to make them a floral arrangement or bake them a cake.

Because you have no idea what they have gone through at your hands.  Worse, I'm not even sure you care what they have gone through at your hands.

But it can be accurately and truthfully labeled as persecution.

Real persecution, mind you, not the persecution of not being able to turn away a gay couple because your religious freedom lives and dies by your ability to do that.

And Jesus is pretty clear in Matthew and in Luke about the persecuted being blessed, because your ancestors did the exact same things to the prophets who called them away from their petty greed and selfishness and back to God...and, like our gay and lesbian neighbors, got persecuted for it.

So I'll say this once, and I'll say this plainly: to reject my gay and lesbian friends will be to reject me.  If you turn them away, you turn me, the straight, married, Bible toting man you hold up as your ideal for what stock a pastor should come from, away as well.

I will not cross your threshold, I will not spend my money on your products or services, and I will do everything in my power to encourage others to do likewise.  Because if they aren't welcome, I'm not welcome.

Already, the leadership of my denomination, the Disciples of Christ, has issued an open letter to Governor Pence, urging him to veto SB 101 and notifying him that the church could consider relocating its 2017 General Assembly, which draws thousands of attendees, dozens of vendors, and fills up all of the convention center hotels, from Indianapolis.

And it is, in my sight, godly that they have done this.

Because my relationships with the extraordinary gay and lesbian men and women I have had the blessing to know in this life far exceeds in importance and value your own petty and selfish demands to have your prejudices taken seriously simply because you say they are based on Scripture.

Christianity isn't merely Scriptural, though.  It is relational.  It can be no other way.  Truth means nothing without the people to follow it.

You may think me a heretic, a blasphemer, one of those wolves in sheep's clothing who does not preach the Bible.

And that's fine.  Because, to bastardize Winston Churchill, sometime in heaven, after I am dead and buried, my beliefs about God will be made perfect in God's presence.

But you will still be the jerks who legalized discriminating against your brothers and sisters.

Enjoy the dustbin of history, my brethren.

Yours in Christ,
Eric