Changing Our Minds, While Keeping the Faith St. Olaf Chapel Talk for Monday, November 5, 2012 Bruce Nordstrom-Loeb (Department of Sociology & Anthropology) Opening hymn: #641 All Are Welcome (verses 1-3) Closing Hymn: #523 Let Us Go Now to the Banquet Scripture reading (I Corinthians 13: 8-13): For we know in part, and we prophesy in part. But when that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be done away. When I was a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things. For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known. Now abideth faith, hope and love. These three; but the greatest of these is love. Introduction How do we know how to live? Many of us find some of the answers in faith. We read the Bible or the Qur an, and seek guidance from our pastor or rabbi about the meaning of our scriptures. We pray, or find inspiration from the Holy Spirit--what the United Church of Christ to which I belong refers to as God is still speaking We are challenged by our prophets, who brought (and still bring) God s people the message: Hey You re still not getting it Shape up and live as God created you to live In my wife s Jewish tradition, we actively seek answers as we study the written Torah, but also the oral Torah and Talmud, the wisdom accumulated by wrestling with God and each other over what Torah means. Scripture turns out not only to be what God said, but our unfolding understanding of what our sacred stories mean. Often we are challenged to find new understandings of the social customs and inequalities we ve inherited including those of race, gender, and sexuality. I want to talk today about how I have seen changes unfold in these three areas over more than 60 years. In the words of the hymn Amazing Grace, we were too often blind, and could not to see the differences between our usual social practices and God s hopes. I: Race
2 I was born in 1945, a baby whose arrival brought hope to my parents at the end of a long world war. Nuclear weapons had just been used on civilian populations for the first time. Europe lay in ruins, and the Holocaust was teaching us that even civilized Christian countries could engage in and accept the genocide of whole peoples. My parents had grown up in Seattle, and their few Japanese-American friends (and other West Coast Japanese) were sent to internment camps after Pearl Harbor, their homes and businesses forever lost. Some prisoners the age of my father, himself in the army, were released to serve in the all-japanese 442 nd regiment, risking their lives on behalf of imprisoned families and hoping to secure some measure of redemption from the shame their imprisonment had brought. For this was a time when America had still not come to terms with race, our society s original sin. We fought Hitler with a segregated army, with all- Black units. In the Deep South, Jim Crow segregation meant that the races, Black and white, were still legally separate, far beyond what personal prejudice might have supported. African Americans could not vote nor serve on juries, in spite of being citizens. Neighborhoods were segregated, and Black children went to separate and unequal schools, not allowed to attend white state universities their parents taxes supported. When I participated in a civil rights project in Alabama after graduation, I found that the paved streets simply stopped at the edge of the Black neighborhood in which we lived, that the courthouse still had separate water fountains for each race, and that Black women could shop for a new dress in the white department stores but not try it on, as it would then be unsuitable for a white customer to wear. And I would learn that a white pastor, Rev. James Reeb, a graduate of a college I d not yet heard of (St. Olaf), working nearby for racial justice, had been beaten so badly by a white mob that he had died. We Americans were already beginning to change our beliefs and practices about race after the war. The U.S. Supreme Court struck down school segregation in 1954, though the integrated schools implied by its unanimous decision would not be available to most Black children before they became too old to attend them.
3 In 1955 a young Black preacher named Martin Luther King, Jr. became widely known when called to lead a boycott of the segregated public bus system in Montgomery, Alabama. The Civil Rights movement would grow, rooted in and led by the Black church. The Supreme Court would overturn our laws against interracial marriage the year I graduated from college. And in a local footnote, my dad, a social worker, integrated the Methodist children home he directed in Detroit, hiring and serving Black people as well as white something that took more courage than I understood at the time. Where were we white Christians in all this? Historically, we had adopted a constitution in which Black people were considered worth only 3/5 of a white person, and people whom we whites could legally enslave. As the Civil War approached, many Protestant denominations split over the issue of slavery; Christian belief was often cited to justify slavery as well as to abolish it, and continued to be key in the defense of racial segregation well into the 1960 s. The largest Protestant denomination in the U.S., the Southern Baptists (founded in defense of slavery), denounced the modern civil rights movement, and only issued an apology for its support of slavery and segregation in 1995 (they elected their first African American president earlier this year). It was only in 1978 that Mormon elders received a new revelation allowing men of African descent to be eligible for the priesthood, opening up full membership in the church to Black men. The gift of the Black civil rights movement to white Christian America was that, rather than being only a political movement for equal rights, it was also a prophetic religious movement which challenged us white Christians who had too long accepted our racial privileges. We were asked to think anew about what it means to be people of God. Today we still too often fall short of real racial justice, but few of us can still pretend that racism is part of God s plan, or is commanded in scripture. II: Women I went to the University of Michigan in the 1960 s, one of the better public universities in the country. But I only had one woman professor in four years, an older lady who taught German poetry reflecting the near absence of women in academe, medicine, law, the clergy, and business at that time. The women s movement had been largely dormant after women got the vote
4 in 1920, but ferment was stirring again in the late 1950 s, even among women who evidently had it all. The women s movement opened up graduate and professional training to women in large numbers, to financial credit in their own name, and to protection from rape by their husbands (still legal until the late 1970 s). But it also challenged many faith communities to reconsider the role of women. Gender, as well as race, turned out to be a religious issue. Shouldn t women, finally, be able to become pastors or rabbis? In most Christian traditions, our understanding of scripture seemed to exclude women from those roles. Churches might rely on women to staff Christian education programs, and all the volunteer efforts on which churches depend. But only men were authorized by God to preach. Some Jewish movements and Christian denominations began to change. Reconstructionist Judaism began allowing young women to have a bat mitzvah, parallel to the bar mitzvah for boys; non-orthodox congregations (Reform and Conservative) began to include Jewish women in the minimum ten adults (a minyan) needed for a prayer service (women finally counted, literally)--and to allow women to read Torah from the bimah (or pulpit) during a service. All of this was a huge challenge for many faith communities Could we change the way things have always been? Were we crossing lines we should not cross? Could we let go of old understandings of who women and men are? Or would rules about gender, once challenged, prove to be the most important issues in our faith communities? Were the differences between women and men even more fundamental than ones about race both of which we had long clung to and justified by scripture, but which at least about race--we were finally letting go of? Some Lutheran bodies began ordaining women. It would be hard for me to imagine not having had Jennifer Koenig as our Associate College Pastor these many years, or Ann Svennungsen last year now a bishop. In my early years here, I would sometimes return to campus late Wednesday evening for the student service, and was strangely moved to receive communion from some of my women students it felt like, yes, God was doing a new thing, and not just because Lutherans used real wine. Yet today, by contrast, when I occasionally attend Twin Cities mega churches in connection with my current sabbatical research, I see churches with an all-male ordained clergy (in one
5 case 14 male pastors) even if there s now a nice sprinkling of Black and Latino faces in the pews. In other words, we are still in the middle of our struggle to understand what gender means in our faith communities. Some communities still feel that gender traditions are near the core of who they are as God s people. They may be quite multicultural and multiethnic (the Catholic Church is now 1/3 Hispanic), but they can t agree how to make big changes about gender without yielding something essential about who they have believed themselves to be. Yet still other faith communities, often after some struggle, have taken a leap of faith, and found (rather than lost) something deep, by including women in new ways. At best it has been transformational, and not only for the women who were marginalized, but also for us men who can now see ourselves with new eyes. III. Lesbians, Gays, Bisexuals and Transgender People And now, here we are wrestling again as people of faith with what seems like a new challenge: lesbians, gays, bisexuals, and transgender people. When I was growing up in the 1950 s, these folks were invisible to me. Most stayed in the closet, out of sight, for reasons of safety and sometimes of shame visible to each other in the social institutions of gay and lesbian subculture, but rarely to those of us so unconsciously straight we were not even aware of it. The gay movement became more visible with the Stonewall Rebellion in 1969, and in graduate school at Berkeley I got to know some gay men in my men s group. But my deepest appreciation for the lives of LGBT people has grown here, at St. Olaf. I m thinking of a student who had to drop out of St. Olaf after she came out to her parents and they refused to pay for more of her education but whose wedding to another woman I attended several years later--and one of whose children is now here, in a sense completing the St. Olaf education her mom could not. I m thinking of students with a call to ministry whose gifts to us were lost, not so long ago, because they were gay or lesbian, who can now consider a call. I m thinking of transgender students who have recently made at least part of their physical transition while still here on campus, what I imagine to be
6 even more brave than coming out itself. I m thinking of students proud of their two moms, or two dads. I m thinking of the growing number of students of color who are out, who are activists, who refuse to be bound by either/or labels of race or gender or sexuality and are making new paths rather than walking the old ones. And, of course, once again, all of this is deeply challenging to the understandings of many faith communities about what kinds of sexuality can be allowed. And what kinds of families we can even imagine. Does scripture really forbid lasting, loving relationships between two people of the same sex or are the verses and stories by which same-sex relationships have been condemned about something else power, or prostitution, or abuse, or rape, or lack of hospitality? Have we somehow misunderstood sexuality in ways similar to how we have misunderstood race, or women and men? The issue of same-sex marriage has perhaps become the defining, watershed issue for many conservative Christians. Marriage and ordination for lesbians and gays has threatened to split several denominations. And 41 states have passed either a law or a constitutional amendment against same-sex marriage, with strong support from conservative faith communities. Minnesota, of course, has a constitutional amendment on its ballot in tomorrow s election to limit marriage to one man and one woman, reinforcing our already-existing law against same-sex marriage. Does same-sex marriage threaten traditional family values? Or, at a time when the institution of marriage for heterosexuals is weakening, should we welcome same-sex couples who wish to marry and raise children for all the same reasons my wife and I got married? My heart could not fail to glow this summer when our neighbor girl, now all grown up and ordained as clergy, legally married her love, another woman, in New York something her own two moms could not do in Minnesota. I m thinking about two women students from the 1980 s, who ve now been married for over 20 years, and who have two delightful teenage sons. I m inspired by their love for each other, their care and responsibility for their children, their dedication to build a family in a society that does not yet offer them the legal protections or cultural legitimacy or economic security which a heterosexual family would automatically have. I know how painful it is when others who claim to defend family values say their family is not a real one.
7 I know that for many these issues about sexuality and family, about women, and still about race are difficult ones. But let us keep trying to discover what kind of people we are created to be. If we re blind, let us see. Perhaps it s true that, at the deepest level to which we are called, there really is neither Jew nor Greek, male nor female, slave nor free [Galatians 3:28]. And that the table is set for us all, and we are all invited to the banquet.