Dear queer Mennonites at the Kansas City Convention, and those watching from home, This week your church failed you.  Your people, your denomination, your faith community opted to build unity for itself at your expense.  Officially, we reaffirmed that pastors may not perform same sex covenant ceremonies and that doing so is grounds for a review of their credentials.  Unofficially, implicitly, we declared that you are not worthy of the same degree of blessing and respect as are we, your straight sisters and brothers.  You just aren’t.  We did so not in conversation with you, but in conversation about you, acting on our own anxiety in a space in which we never asked you to utter a single word on your own behalf.  When you disrupted our orderly gathering to remind us that you exist as real people with real bodies, we responded with anger and disdain.  How dare you

“The stone the builders rejected has become the cornerstone.  This is the Lord’s doing, and it is marvelous in our eyes.”  Psalm 118:22-23 My dear, dear, Mennonite brothers and sisters, my people, my tribe.  All week long at this Convention we’ve been hearing about the Emmaus road story.  How the risen Jesus appeared to two distraught travelers, and “interpreted to them the things about himself in all the scriptures.”  The passage from Psalm 118:22 appears no less than six times in the New Testament and served as one of the central scriptures through which the early church, and perhaps Jesus himself, interpreted the meaning of Christ. “The stone the builders rejected has become the cornerstone.”  The builders carefully select the rocks they will use for the structure they are building, choosing the ones that fit just right row on row, stones with a similar shape and size to fit the

Last Thursday I was rather thrilled with the release of Pope Francis’ encyclical “Laudato Si,” which speaks an eloquent and urgent pastoral word regarding climate change.  Rather than addressing just his fellow Catholics, or even fellow Christians, the document opens by saying, “Now, faced as we are with global environmental deterioration, I wish to address every person living on this planet.”  Early on the Pope cites his namesake, Francis of Assisi, who taught that “Rather than a problem to be solved, the world is a joyful mystery to be contemplated with gladness and praise.” I was only able to read the first number of pages before learning of the news from Charleston, South Carolina regarding the murder of nine churchgoers at the Emanuel AME Church.  Such hopeful and brave words from one corner of the religious word, accompanied with such painful and destructive actions in another. One could argue that

Keeping on the theme of wider church gatherings this summer (Central District, Mennonite Church USA, Mennonite World Conference) … My favorite book to read devotionally these days is The Experience of God: Icons of the Mystery by Raimon Panikkar.  Panikkar was the son of a Spanish Roman Catholic mother and Indian Hindu father, and became one of the world’s leading voices in interreligious dialogue, active up to his death in 2010 at age 91. I usually read about a page or two a day (it’s dense) and Monday morning came across this lovely paragraph, about the nature of institutions: We ought to recognize institutionalization as a constantly open process.  Only the conservative fossilization of established experiences ends in becoming an obstacle; of itself, institutionalization is a necessary human process.  We must see this sociological dimension as the crystallization or manifestation of an experience, that the experience is not exhausted or

It is church conference/convention season.  Tomorrow through Saturday is the Central District Conference Annual Meeting, this year in Elkhart, Indiana on the campus of Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary – my old stomping/studying grounds.  Six of us from Columbus Mennonite will be attending.  This gathering is mostly focused on relationship building and worship, and is always full of laughter.  Delegate sessions this year include discussion and a vote on a resolution called “A call to greater faithfulness in our witness for peace.”  We will also be receiving a copy of a ten page study document produced by a task group which, in the words of one of its writers, “is the first statement I know of commended for consideration by a Mennonite conference that articulates a biblical basis for the full inclusion of LGBTIQ persons, including same-sex marriages.” Central District is one of 21 area conferences of Mennonite Church USA, and