Anger Management

I've had a bit of an angry week and I've been trying not to post while in that state. I had a pretty good day today, so I think it's safe to post without getting vitriolic (which, I'm told is not as vitriolic as some people's vitriol, but I don't like it all the same).

My church is doing a version of the Book of Faith initiative, which (for the non-ELCAers) is a national push to get everyone reading and studying the Bible. There isn't a national program per se, and each congregation is free to work out how they're going to do it (if they do it) and at my church, we have a retired engineer who along with a committee, has set up a daily reading schedule for us, with very short readings so as to not be overwhelming. It's not like those "read the Bible in one year" programs, where if your miss a day, you have enormous reading to do to catch up again. This is manageable, even if you have to catch up a couple of days at once. Then we have several different groups meeting throughout the week that members can attend to discuss what they're reading. We're about halfway through Luke right now.

The readings this week include the "lilies of the field" section, among other teachings on money and "security." I found myself getting worked up over how easily we read these sections and say, "well, Jesus didn't mean this literally," or "that's just impractical, you have to plan for your retirement" or other such comments.

And it seems just very unbalanced that we are able to do this with quite a few teachings from the Bible, most of them having to do with money or the poor, and yet we hold inviolable the handful of verses that refer to homosexuality, even if none of them address a committed, faithful relationship much less a scientific understanding of sexuality. We can make excuses for storing up goods, and even for other things like really strong teachings about divorce, but we can't quite bring ourselves (speaking for the whole institutional church) to make excuses for a sexual attraction that occurs naturally, has nothing to do with choice, and could be lived according to all the other rules of the Bible. This makes me angry.

Then yesterday, I heard a coworker, a young woman, a lesbian, talk about how she grew up in a church, and is feeling like God is calling her back to church, but she keeps hearing the condemnations of the church. She told the story without anger or bitterness, but a matter-of-factness that was even more heartbreaking than if she'd been fuming mad. Every church appears to her as if she'll be condemned if she enters the door. Or if she enters the door, she has to keep a big part of herself "private" or, rather, secret. It wasn't a situation where a long conversation was possible and the company wasn't really conducive to a serious conversation. So I wrote down my church's website and gave it to her, told her where we were located, and said to give us a try sometime. And maybe I'll follow up with her in the coming days.

But her story is just so common and so . . . well, heartbreaking is the best word I have for it. She feels like she's done nothing wrong, that she can't help but be attracted to women, but she still feels condemned by the church. And how much does my voice weigh against the weight of all the voices she's heard from the churches she's known? I don't know, but I told her how I'd been there and found some level of peace, if not with the church, then with God, and services are at 8 and 11 every Sunday morning. Come as you are.