Bible Highlighter
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As much as the episcopal hierarchy wants those of us remaining in the UMC to move on, put the schism in the rearview mirror, and forget about the immediate past; trauma doesn’t disappear overnight. Our leaders encourage clergy mental health, but this desire to quickly turn the page on disaffiliation feels like it might leave those of us still living with the pain caught in the middle. This emotional and theological trainwreck has occupied my days and nights for years, and I don’t expect it to go away because someone at the top says we are moving on. The nightmares are real. I have bad dreams about going to church. Saturday nights are the worst. So for me, each Sunday is a delicately managed exercise in uncertainty as I wait for the clicking timebomb of disaffiliation to implode.
If moving past disaffiliation-fueled PTSD was as simple as the messages I’m receiving this annual conference season, there would also be no mental illness, school shootings, domestic violence, addiction, or grief, in our society. Unfortunately, this is not how reality works. We know this, yet we foster the illusion that we can do the impossible; we can grieve and move on because, for some reason, we are above it all. We are the Christians, super people. Despite Paul’s proclamations that we can do all things through Christ, has that myth not been finally pierced once and for all? We have divided ourselves because we cannot stand to love and be in one another’s presence in Christ’s name. If we were trying through Christ, which I don’t believe we ever were, we’ve failed on so many levels that one doesn’t know where to start counting. Honestly, has COVID taught us nothing? Where is our humility? We are above nothing. We are still humans, subject to the laws of gravity, grief, ugliness, and mortality. Mourning, loss, and death touch us all, no matter how fast we want to move on.
The “wave the magic wand theory” helped split the denomination, and now we’re waving it again in hopes of putting the church back together. We’ve learned nothing. Despite our new platitudes and hope, confidence in a 1st-century Galilean carpenter, and energetic calls to pick up the pieces, this is not how the formerly united Methodist Church will find its place in an America where autocracy and fascism are vying with democracy for the very soul of the nation. Moving on will be hard work, informed by our trauma, and if it’s superficial (pretends were still in the 1990s or, God forbid, earlier) and ignores the grief of having failed at our primary task of being the church we’re only setting ourselves up for more failure and disappointment.
Even if the UMC makes substantial positive changes concerning its positions on LGBTQIA+ issues, we’re still a church that needs to reckon with the issues of scriptural authority over and above those that have anything to do with human sexuality. We will still (and currently do) preach a gospel of selective literalism. For instance, the passages in Leviticus cited by immigration advocates about loving our neighbors and welcoming the immigrant and orphans are separated by a few verses by passages condemning homosexuals. How can we read one literally and ask it to be the basis for shaping public policy and the other a prime example of bronze age bigotry and brutality? It makes us look ridiculous. This doesn’t include our tacit endorsement of texts like the Ascension, zombies marching through Jerusalem on Good Friday, a man walking on water, and four versions of the resurrection that it takes a superhuman level of cognitive dissonance to accept. Simply because we may, at some point, change our position on homosexuality doesn’t mean we’re any better off at reaching a modern world hurdling off an autocratic/fundamentalist cliff. It’s time to raise the scriptural maturity ceiling.