A MONTH OF SUNDAYS...

14 June 99
Dear Rev. T_____,
I was distressed by the tenor of the debate, if it can be called that, over the Open &Affirming resolution at the Annual Meeting. Up until that evening, I would probably have pronounced myself an opponent of the resolution with the Rev. A_____, or insisted with the Rev. O_____ that we were discussing orientation, not behavior. I think we are past that; I know I am.
I am no longer ready to declare my own truth the sole truth. While I am one of the "formerly gay" people Rev. Anderson asked to be included in the discussion [or in Rev. deB_____’s dreadful phrase, a "historical bisexual"] and my life was in fact fundamentally changed by encountering Christ in my humiliation, I am not ready to have my own choices used to persecute others who have made other choices and have perhaps received another grace. I am ready to go anywhere and speak to anyone in favor of the Conference and its congregations declaring themselves "open and affirming".
Until we expel all those who have called their brother "fool", we are in no position to declare ourselves gatekeepers. Everyone one of us has, in breaking the least letter of the law, broken all of it. If there were ever a mote and beam issue, this is it.
Yours in Christ,

11 August 99
Dear Rev. T_____,
thank you for your memo; I am a little surprised to find myself on an O&A committee, partly because I am not a committee person by nature and partly because it is a committee I could have better imagined myself jeering at than joining just a short time ago. Is this what happens when you write letters? If so, it serves me right.
I will not be able to make the meeting on the 21st, and I hope you will not nominate me as chair as a result. In fact, I am quite willing to give you this opportunity of easing me out altogether; in retrospect I feel a bit sheepish about having deleted the bit of my letter which made clear that I hold views which are bound to be unwelcome, if not positively offensive, to both ideological parties in the "debate".
I believe homosexuality as currently lived out in our society involves both choice and sin; that is sure to be an unwelcome point of view to my liberal friends. I also believe, as I said in my letter, that this is the quintessential mote and beam issue, as we have all sinned; putting this sin in the balance with the sin of exclusion of other sinners is bound to anger people who I might until recently have considered my allies. [How much easier the temperance debate was! N_____’s by_laws specifically prohibited membership to anyone who produced or sold spiritous liquors; I guess every generation gets the divisive issue it deserves...] As to your questions:
* I am extremely wary of what are politely termed "educational materials" and are in fact propaganda; what I offered, and what I would prefer to see the conference offer its congregations, is scripture and witness. Congregations that have already been through the debate would be the best placed to nominate materials. While I readily admit that I am by no means thoroughly acquainted with the pro-O&A literature, most of what I have seen tends to start from the premise that there is something wrong with scripture itself, rather than how we read it, or what we stress in it [Bishop Spong is a perfect example of this sort of thing]. An attempt to explain away scripture is doomed if we are attempting to persuade anyone who takes his stand based on his own reading of scripture. Would it be too painful for a liberal denomination to start from the premise that we are all sinners? I think a serious discussion of what sin is and what sinners we ourselves are would remove most of the wind from the windbags on both sides. I think that personal witness, in printed or filmed form if not available in the flesh, is the crucial element. In fact, the personal experience of congregations that have already made the decision for O&A would be most helpful; the testimony of those who have suffered from the hostility of society and the churches is crucial. Without the living witness of those who have suffered from the churches' stance on this issue, what we are contemplating is an exercise in self-righteous justification. I think it cannot be stressed enough that anyone in the "gay community" who makes a serious commitment to Christ is in a minority within a minority, and needs all the friends he or she can get.
* I am not sure what an O&A conference is, as opposed to a conference that merely starts from the premise that we are all in sin and that therefore none of us is in the position to cast the first stone -- I think that the significance of the label would depend entirely on how the decision is reached. I am in any case deeply troubled by the self-proclamations our denomination tends to make; I can’t help feeling that the right to name us belongs to others who have seen our fruits and know us by them. Surely part of the discussion has to be that our denomination is the only one I know of in the United States, and perhaps the world, which has voted to permit the ordination of "active homosexuals" to the ministry [the terms used in discussion of this question are one less appealing than the other]. That entails a certain reflection on what all the noise is about, doesn’t it? Are we straining at a gnat after swallowing the camel?
Or are we dealing at least in part with the gap between the denomination and its organs on the one hand and the people in the pews on the other? I would hate to be a party to an attempt to shove anything else down the throats of congregations who have been made to swallow rather a lot in the last ten years as it is. To hold up a mirror to their shortcomings without admitting our own would hardly be helpful, which is why I believe that we must enter this discussion in a penitential rather than a crusading spirit. If we are not careful to approach each other in a loving attempt at understanding, there is bound to be posturing and proclamation, ending in division. Where one side refuses to let go of its formulaic questions, the other will no choice but to retreat to its formulaic answers, and the chance for reconciliation is lost. I have seen all too much of this in my life as it is.
* As to my reasons for becoming a member of the task force, I believe that is better left to you to explain, but you may certainly feel free to "share" this as well as my first letter to you. I believe I have made my feelings about the important questions clear — perhaps too clear.
Yours in Christ,

[The O&A members of the task force refused to serve on a single committee with those who opposed the O&A resolution, who declared themselves "welcoming and transforming", so there were two committees. The W&T folks, on the other hand, did invite a number of "ex-gays" to the following Annual Meeting, and I could have sworn that one of them cruised me, or maybe it was just his gaydar jolting into gear...]


30 September 99
Dear Rev. A_____,
I am writing with a few things to say quickly, and a few things that take longer. If this is a bad time to add to the distractions crossing your desk, please feel free to leave the rest of this missive for a better day.
First and foremost, I want to say how deeply sorry I am to hear of your family’s recent troubles; you and yours are in my prayers. Secondly, I want to express my thanks, however belatedly, for your congregation’s and your heart-warming generosity to my family at the time of my father’s funeral. [We met briefly then over the question of keys.] Thirdly, I want to thank you for the courage and forbearance you showed in your printed response to Walter Wink’s pamphlet on Homosexuality and the Bible. [I was the one who approached you after the "debate" on the O&A issue at Annual Meeting and asked you for a copy of your response; I meant to make myself known to you then, but the experience had left me rather riled up, and we just left.] And lastly and least: for the last several years I have read the gospels in their entirety aloud in church as a Lenten offering. If you and your congregation would ever like to have a whole gospel read at a sitting, I would be glad to oblige. I have gone on record as being willing to go anywhere anytime to read the Gospel of John, but I’m quite willing to do any or all of them in J_____. As you may know, I have reasons to be there often and a very nice place to stay.
From here on in it gets more complicated, so if this is a bad time, lay this letter aside and come back to it at a better...

I found the tenor of the "debate" on the O&A resolution at Annual Conference deeply distressing. I was deeply moved by your call for the inclusion of other viewpoints, including those [to paraphrase] of formerly gay people whose lives had been touched by the saving grace of Jesus Christ. I have long felt that the O&A agenda tended to gloss over the true difficulties of the situation you reminded us of in your response. [Almost anyone would vote to be "O", but many people have grave questions as to what "A" actually entails.]
One small part of the general disorganization of Annual Meeting was that I had not in fact received a copy of your response in my packet, and so had not had an opportunity to read it. I read it on my return home, and found in it a reasoned, scripture-based position on a difficult issue. That is probably due to the fact that I agreed with it almost word for word. But then I also agreed with Jim O_____, who rose to point out that we were speaking about orientation only and not behavior. [I have tried arguing that one with my more "liberal" friends for several years now.]
I responded to your position, Jim O_____’s statement, and your quotes from John Stott because they articulated what my own experience had engraved in my flesh. I am myself one of the "formerly gay" people you asked to be included in the discussion; I had indeed founded my new life on Jesus’ saving grace, some 25 years ago, and believed with Jim O_____ that orientation, however derived, was something God granted, while behavior was a choice for which we ourselves needed to take responsibility. That, and the redeeming power of love, is my story. Your call was the first I had ever heard to give my experience a voice, and I felt vindicated by that call.
But, as I pondered and reflected on what had happened at Annual Meeting, and upon the possibility that I might not only be recognized as having a right to speak, but might even be asked to speak, I had to ask myself what I might say. And a very peculiar thing happened. The more I thought about speaking to the necessity of carefully distinguishing between "O" and "A", the more clearly I saw that while I was being offered a chance to validate my own choices and speak my own truth, that chance coincided, not entirely coincidentally, with what began to look like an invitation to condemn others’ choices. I reflected that I might easily have made another choice in that literal "winter of our discontent" and bitter humiliation so long ago, when I met Christ; I might well have decided to pursue another kind of life. Would God then not have loved me? It is only through his grace that I have come to where I am and what I say is who am I to cast the first stone? And I did feel that I was being asked to cast the first stone. After wrestling with this dilemma, I decided that I had to admit that my own truth could not be the whole truth. I decided that I couldn’t cast the first stone or any other nor could I even let the witnesses leave their cloaks at my feet. If I was to take part in the stoning, it had to be with the men taken in sin. This was an about-face of literally staggering impact.
And this letter is in essence an attempt to explain why I can no longer be your ally in what promises to be a drawn-out, painful experience for many; I fear that you in particular will attract all sorts of small- and evil-minded rewards for your willingness to defend what you see as the clear message of the gospel. Stand fast; the gospel is our rock. It is just that for me, it is the gospel that has led me away from the desire to validate my own truth and towards something new.
I can’t tell you how painful it was, back in my ill-spent youth, to see that I had been led astray by a belief in the supreme importance of my "self", and to lay aside [or rather, vow to lay aside] that belief along with my willingness to act on it at the expense of others. For years I have mentally associated that belief and that willingness with my [bashful and limited] sexual contact with men. At the same time, when I fell hopelessly in love and wished to marry, the impediments I felt on my side were not my past loves of other men, but my past loves of other women, even where they were more than botched attempts to bolster my manhood.
And looking back, I have begun to see that most of my encounters with men had been based on mutual attraction and some degree of agape as well as the adolescent confusion of philia and eros, and in fact strongly resembled nothing so much as my relationships with women. If anything, the subjection of others to my own search for pleasure was far more a characteristic of my relationships with women than those with men. When I look back, while the latter may cause me embarrassment, the ones that cause me pain and regret are the former, in which a loving generosity was more often abused. Because in almost every case, I had entered a level of sexual intimacy on the supposed premise of another intimacy, and in one case at least I had destroyed a real love by allowing my own unripe love to seek a physical expression. That was sin.
All this has led me from one set of Bible verses to another. And where I used to carry the tale of the woman taken in adultery on my lips because she was told to "go and sin no more" and I was ready to tell others the same, I now find in it quite a different moral, and myself in quite a different role. The admonition to "judge not", echoed by the clear intent of the parables that we shall ourselves receive whatever measure we have given out to others, seems to me paramount. While my left-wing friends line up with Mr. Wink [whose championship of William Stringfellow earns him my affection in spite of everything] in subjecting the gospel to their better knowledge, I find myself neither fish nor fowl, for I can neither lay aside scripture with them nor any longer draw the conclusions from it that I have so long shared with you.
The ground has shifted under my feet. In this no-man’s-land, I still hold that the gospel witness condemns what we are asked to affirm, but am unable to pick up that first stone and unwilling as well to have my testimony used so that others may cast it. While I cannot agree with Mr. Wink that we should welcome "active homosexuals" into the ranks of the righteous, I am ready to humbly welcome them into the company of sinners that is the church.
The love of men for men is indeed explicitly condemned in the gospel, condemned with the horrible and doubtless accurate verdict that they receive "in their own persons the due penalty of their error". The love which once dared not speak its name [and now famously will not shut up] is specifically bracketed with usury, adultery, drunkenness, theft, blasphemy, and idolatry, which most of us could agree were sinful. But...
Members of my church have committed adultery, some even repeatedly, and no one bars the doors to them; bankers who routinely charge credit card interest which any other age would consider usurious seem to be always welcome. Our churches are filled with people who continue to make sacrifices to Mammon, or to the idols they have made of their own children, that they would never consider laying at the feet of the cross. And they are welcome. Even I am welcome. I do not "believe" in divorce any more than I "believe" in abortion, and yet so much of what I value in my life... has come to me from my mother’s second marriage; others I hold dear have decided to abort a severely malformed child rather than let it come to term and die in agony. Was my mother an adulteress for 39 years? Are those I love murderers? By one reading of the gospel, they are. Shall they be deprived of membership in the body of Christ? Shall I set what may be an expression of love higher on the list of sins than adultery and idolatry, let alone murder? I am myself more particularly a murderer because I have spent many a day in anger at my brothers and have called several of them fools. In breaking one iota of the law, we have all offended against the whole of the law.
Who among us has not called his brother a fool? Especially in this so-called "debate"? And yet we are all welcomed in the conference. Is not the message of the "iota of the law" that all we may do is gather as sinners in hope of grace, not judging our brothers’ and sisters’ sins more harshly than our own? Can I say that another’s sin is greater than mine because it is different? Can I say that another’s sin is greater than mine because I can say "I did that once, but I would never do it again"? Can I say that another’s sin is greater than mine because his heart led him one way, and mine led me another?
I can’t. And the reason I can’t is my own experience of the redeeming power of love, which is the only reason I am who and where I am today. Who can say where love has led our brothers, and who they have become in the process? Surely we must "love, and do what love leads us to do".
It is with a heavy heart that I have to tell you that while I agree with much of your argument, I have found myself at an almost opposite conclusion; I have in fact written Rev. T_____ to say that I am ready to go to any church in the state and argue, on the above grounds, that we vote to become an O&A conference. It was a letter that I could no more have written before Annual Meeting than I could have flapped my arms and flown to the moon. And this seismic shift is the direct result of your call for me to be given at last a chance to plead my own former position. I can only beg you to try to understand what I am not sure I really understand myself, and hope that you can find it in your heart to forgive me my desertion. The spirit blows where it listeth.
I continue to respect and admire you for your courage in presenting and defending "our" argument. I hope someday to earn your respect in turn.
Indeed, to God be the glory.
Faithfully his, and yours,