Kristin Stoneking

Boston and Cambridge are known for their historic churches, and I hope to visit several while we’re here.  But when we were choosing a church for worship this last Sunday, we chose the closest United Methodist church, Harvard-Epworth UMC, not because it’s historic, but because we don’t have a car this summer, and I craved  the familiarity of the Wesleyan ummah.  Harvard-Epworth actually is historic in its own way, sitting at the edge of the Harvard campus.   The traditional architecture, the wooden floors and pews, reveal its origins in the late 1800s. We sat near the back, at the end of the pew.  I miss pews.  Our church in Davis has chairs, and there’s something about the communal aspect of the pew, and the hardness of the wood, that connects me to others and reminds me of the comfort of discipline. 

John and Paloma in many ways are typical p.k.s (pastor’s kids).  In worship, they are restless, and often noisy, forgetting or ignoring the propriety required of church goers, talkative during the children’s sermon, sometimes waving at me or even coming to visit as I sit behind the pulpit.  They are forgiven these things in Davis, but I wondered if this congregation would be so accommodating.  It is Cambridge after all, and I presume a formality here that contrasts with our very informal northern California college town. 

I was especially worried about the trio of older women in front of us, and thought that we were undoubtedly disturbing their worship experience.  But as they turned to pass the peace near the end of the service, they smiled warmly at the children and told them how proud they were of them for their answers in the children’s sermon.  Their welcome was genuine, and I was grateful once again to be a part of this communion.  It was clear that they saw these children not as nuisance but as promise and hope:  cherished baton receivers in the generational relay of faith.

My grandmother, a deaconness in the Methodist church (because that’s what women who were called to ministry did before 1956 when ordination became possible) made a deal with God.  Like Hannah, the mother of the great Biblical prophet Samuel, she wanted a child, but after a serious miscarriage, was not sure she would be able to carry a pregnancy to term.  And like Hannah, we think she may have offered the consecration of her first born to a life of service as a bargain for the privilege of motherhood.

My father has no other way to explain the fact that he always wanted to be a minister.  Though church and faith were an ever-present part of his family’s life, he was, in many ways, an unlikely candidate for the ministry.  I’ve heard him talk about the roll of pennies that he wrapped around his hand with masking tape to make his own version of brass knuckles for the fights he got into in high school.   His winsomeness insured that he was rarely without a girlfriend and he’s always had a group of friends ready to engage in carousing and other adventures.

Now he has been in the hospital for two weeks, unable to communicate and very weak.  He will recover, but to what extent we are not sure.  Even in his weakened state, his strength and capacity are apparent.  He lies in a bed only a few miles from a piece of land he rescured from becoming a toxic waste dump after the school that stood there was condemned.  The site sits across from the church where he was a pastor and the Kansas City, Kansas school board needed the money the oil company was promising them to provide a place where they could bury their sludge and wasted oil drums.  My father fought them, and was able to use the political animosity between the city council and the school board to his advantage, winning support for a park, the only one for miles in this neighborhood with very few resources and even less power.  The park stands to this day, cared for by the church and well used by the children who live around it, holding complete blight at bay for the last 35 years.

I grew up with a sense of my dad as a fighter and aware of the respect people had for him.  But he was not in the ministry to be liked or affirmed.  I remember when one of the lunch ladies at my elementary school told me she’d seen my father on tv, and it was a few minutes before I realized that a pastor speaking on behalf of Planned Parenthood wasn’t what she wanted or expected to see.  And I was an adult starting my own ministry before I realized that the reason I seemd to be forever running laps alone in basketball practice was that the coach, a former member of our church, had mounted a campaign against my dad and his political theology and lost, grudgingly moving his family from the church where he had worshipped for over 20 years.

My dad has always been a skinny man; the black clergy shirts that he wore as a six foot, 120 pound man and passed on to me have never fit.  And so when he was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis in 1984 when I was 16 there wasn’t much the disease could do to diminish his stature.  But it robbed him of his energy and took away his quickness and forced him to measure all his outputs where once what he was able to offer seemed boundless.  Still, he pressed on, and continued as senior pastor of a church of over 2000 members, the largest United Methodist church in Kansas.  Every day, with incredible determination, he took himself up the steepest flight of stairs to his office which for some reason sat like an oversized crow’s nest above the sanctuary of this huge church built in the 1800s.  And from that position, he went on to the bishop’s cabinet, a pastor of pastors and an unwavering advocate for a church with integrity, alive, active and seeking justice.  He held the liberal line as Christianity in this country became more and more socially conservative, and more concerned with controlling people’s lives than with the liberation inherent in the gospel.

I was lucky enough to get to start my professional ministry in a church just 30 minutes from where he was appointed, and able to call him with my neophyte’s questions, see him at meetings and often meet for lunch.  One time when I was particularly discouraged with the work load and attacks I felt, I asked my dad how he could have possibly stood to be a pastor for such a long time, why he didn’t leave and go do something else that would have been less taxing, and probably more lucrative.  He nodded, and clearly understood, and then said, “I decided a long time ago that I wasn’t going to let the bastards have it.”  His ministry was not only about righting the injustices in the places he found himself, but struggling for the soul of the church, making sure we did right and broke down divisions between people instead of claiming that we were right causing more barriers to be erected.  He was elected to general conference many times casting minority votes to change the church’s discriminatory stances on the inclusion of gay and lesbian persons.  A tireless advocate for racial justice, he made sure that persons of color were never limited in their appointments.  As a trustee of Baker University, the United Methodist college that awarded him an honorary doctorate, he organized to insure that sexual orientation was in the university’s non-discrimination policy.  He was the first person to suggest to me and my teenage friends that God could be bigger than the male gender.

Multiple Sclerosis means, literally, “many scars,” and I often wonder about the scars my father has internalized in fighting the good fight.  Did my grandmother know what toll her bargain with God would take on her unborn son?  My guess is, in some sense, she did.  A life of service always costs, and if there’s one thing I think my family knows, it’s that it’s a privilege to pay it.  But it seems to me that the price my father has had to pay is too high.  His legacy is legion, and his spirit and work live on in the lives of the countless persons he’s affected, either directly or indirectly, through going to work, day after day, and just doing his job.  I’m grateful that we will have him with us for more time, to love him and experience the immense love that comes from him.  Though he’s struggling now to say people’s names or explain what he wants, he almost never fails to respond to us when we tell him we love him and say, “I love you, too.”

This morning after dropping off my daughter at pre-school, I heard President Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech replayed from yesterday on the radio.  As always when I hear him speak, I was filled with pride and hope that we have elected such a man as our leader.  Obama has been under much criticism lately, even from the left, with charges ranging from that he has not done enough, that his promises are unfulfilled, that he is weak.  His approval rating sits today at 47%, low for a president at this point in his first term. 

But his speech reminded me why I fell in love with him:  he is never willing to retreat to cliches, he is strong but humble, he believes with his heart and soul in his vision of a better world.   Though he has been accused of being nothing but rhetoric, the opposite is true as he showed again in this speech his willingness to take on complexity and ambiguity in talking about non-violence, what constitutes a just war, and the irony of receiving the highest honor for peace while being commander in chief of a nation at war.  Too often we resort to facile explanations or solutions, contributing to our collective dumbing down and abdication of thoughtful engagement.  Obama leads us away from that.

Perhaps more than any other reason, I love Obama because he is willing to be not just our president but our moral conscience, always facing head on the issues that needle our desire for simplicity and easy answers.  I do not believe that when he talks about movements for freedom and peace and says things like, “it is the responsibility of all free people and free nations to make clear to these movements that hope and history are on their side” and “yet, I do not believe that we will have the will, or the staying power, to complete this work without something more – and that is the continued expansion of our moral imagination; an insistence that there is something irreducible that we all share” that he is merely being eloquent or exercising a gift of putting words together in a way that moves people, like a hallmark card on a world stage.  He is calling us to be something more than we are, to create a new reality, while being honest about what that will take.

Because the truth is real change can seem to progress glacially, and the work to bring it about can be very tedious.  The work of change is daily; it is not always measurable, it is not always visible.  It’s not even forward sometimes.  Any expectation that Obama could change the world in his first year did not take seriously the complexity of the challenges we face. 

Pastors are, or at least should be, about the work of change.  Changing communities to be more compassionate, changing hearts to open and seek peace, changing our worlds to be places of justice and love.  But, often, we see no change and sense that our accomplishments are few.  I am grateful for Barak Obama because he reminds us all to move out of our own egos and remember that the future we seek is more complicated than any one of us can construct on our own.  But at the same time, each person’s contributions are essential, and in time, with diligence and hope, will bring peace. 

This is what I hope for the Multifaith Living Community, and finally all the work that we do at CA House:  that it would ultimately be a step toward peace and a living out of Obama’s words at the conclusion of his speech: “no Holy War can ever be a just war…Such a warped view of religion is not just incompatible with the concept of peace, but the purpose of faith – for the one rule that lies at the heart of every major religion is that we do unto others as we would have them do unto us…For if we lose that faith – if we dismiss it as silly or naïve; if we divorce it from the decisions that we make on issues of war and peace – then we lose what is best about humanity. We lose our sense of possibility. We lose our moral compass…So let us reach for the world that ought to be – that spark of the divine that still stirs within each of our souls.”

Maybe it’s because, in academic communities, by the time we get to this point, the quarter or semester has worn on so long, and our cumulative weariness is compounded by the fact that the hardest part, finals and endings, is yet to come.  Or maybe it’s because, for many of us, the coming Thanksgiving holiday means going home to whatever demons or skeletons we’ve conveniently forgotten while constructing our own lives for ourselves.  Or maybe it’s just because it gets dark and cold outside, signaling to us that it’s time to go internal.  Whatever the reason, Thanksgiving seems to bring with it a swirling of the unresolved, a crashing in of fear and pain and despair, as arms held out straight buckle against the force of brokenness on the other side of the wall.

There is no liturgical reason why Thanksgiving is (almost) always followed by the first Sunday in Advent.  Thanksgiving, a secular holiday, is tied to the end of harvest and celebrated on the fourth Thursday of November, while Advent, the season that prepares Christians for the birth of Jesus, begins four Sundays out from Christmas Day.  But Advent begins in chaos, and Thanksgiving forever to me seems the true inauguration day to that season of madness.  The scriptures we read as the season begins put this squarely in front of us:  “In those days, after that suffering, the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light, and the stars will be falling from heaven, and the powers in the heavens will be shaken” and “There will be signs in the sun, the moon, and the stars, and on earth distress among nations confused by the roaring of the sea and the waves.  People will faint for fear and foreboding of what is coming upon the world.”

When Dylan Thomas said, “Do not go gentle into that good night.  Rage, rage against the dying of the light” he was talking about his father’s impending death, knowing that while his father was yet old, more life was worth the struggle.  And struggle it is, so much so that we can sometimes scarcely perceive what future or life might mean.  But, what we learn each year in Advent is that the struggle is the generative time, the time when we can do nothing else but embrace the work of grief and hope.  It is not gentle work.  There is so much in our lives that, in order to survive, we must suppress and wait for a more convenient time to deal with, or deny that there is any dealing to do.  But loss and brokenness always demand our willingness to feel , to rage, to confront, to weep, and only then to move on.

What is hope when there has been no despair?  When we finally get to Christmas Eve, the scriptures give us, “The people who have walked in darkness have seen a great light; those who lived in a land of deep darkness—on them light has shined.”  There is no way around suffering, only a way through.  On the way through, we are changed:  strengthened to accept paradox, able to live with open hearts, changed to allow the messiness of honesty and disorder to be a part of life.  Our salvation is in the chaos, which leads us into light and life and birth.

Elizabeth’s mother, Dot, turned 80 Sunday, and though we celebrated with the broader Campi clan on Long Island this summer, we flew to Phoenix last week to engage in part two of this milestone on the actual day.  As always, Dot wanted us to attend church with her and to sit on the front row, making sure the pastor knew that she wanted time to introduce us to the congregation.  Though I’ve tried to explain the risk she’s taking with this, basically outing me in a United Methodist Church where anyone who felt the need to uphold the UMC’s prohibition against ordaining gay and lesbian persons could push the issue and send me to trial, I’m not sure she really gets it.  When she introduces us, we all smile graciously, but I also harbor a mix of pride and bemusement.  This time, I asked her again if she cared what people thought, and the octogenarian adamantly replied, “I don’t give a shit.  Excuse my French.”  But caring what people think and understanding the risk are two different things.

I have no issue with the risk she’s taking; I’m out by my own hand in publication (this blog post being just another example.)  But I do think that many of our allies have a tendency to overlook, or just not be aware, of what it means to be gay clergy in the United Methodist Church.  Still, I think this is the only way forward.  Acknowledging the risk, even in a small way, only gives this unjust rule power, and I would hope we would all choose not to bow to it.  And gently educating our congregations about this injustice within our denomination is also incumbent on all of us.  I’m reminded of two quotes:  one by Ghandi, “Be the change you want to see in the world,” and the other the title of one of my favorite books, “This bridge called my back.”

Dot’s church is a relatively new church, started to be a United Methodist presence north of Phoenix, basically out in the country but where population expansion looked immanent.  After eight or so years, the church is still struggling, and that very afternoon the congregation was voting on whether or not the church would close.  In the children’s sermon, the pastor named veterans as heroes and suggested that the children might one day also have a chance to serve in the armed forces and be a hero, (Dot, herself as patriotic as they come, a member of the GI generation and the mother of a Navy vet, whispered, “I hope not!”) and then the leader of the group of recovering drug addicts who were present in worship to give testimony said, in explaining his program, “We teach Jesus Christ above all others, not Buddha, not Mohammed, not Allah, or whatever they say” and I put my head in my hands and almost left. 

But then the young men who were there sang, and shared their stories of recovery, and I was moved, and inspired, and humbled.  When I talked to one of the guests after the service, I cried, at his strength, his perserverance, his faith, his embrace of life after death.

And this is how it is with the church.  So broken, yet so full of promise.  So human, yet our chance to see God.  So ailing, yet a path to true healing.  I do not know the outcome of the vote later that afternoon, but I do know that God will continue to move in our midst, finding ways, as we risk and as we fall, to help us soar and heal.

The twenty-four hour period peaking at midnight on October 31 is a time when some believe that the line between the living and the dead becomes thin, and we can touch our departed loved ones in ways that we can’t the day before or the day after.  In the Christian church, we celebrate All Saints Day on November 1, honoring and remembering all in our community who have gone on to the church triumphant.  For the last several years, Davis UMC has sung a requiem on this day, or the closest Sunday to it, connecting us to that part of our Christian tradition, modeled after a Latin high mass, where we can find comfort through the sublime in music and poetry.

I got to hear the requiem twice yesterday, once as a parent to hear the small part of the children in the larger piece (to my delight, John actually seemed to know some of the Latin) and once in my role as pastor, as we officiated a virtually silent communion while the choir sang, “May the angels lead you into paradise; may the martyrs welcome you upon your arrival, and lead you into the holy city of Jerusalem. May a choir of angels welcome you and, with poor Lazarus of old, may you have eternal rest.”  All of this took place while the names of the dead flashed on the screen overhead—mostly names of persons who I knew that conjured memories and scenes, smiles and stories as I thought of them.

This summer my family and I saw the King Tut exhibit at the de Young along with thousands of others.  The Pharaohs believed in an afterlife even more amazing than their lives on earth wherein they essentially became gods.  Their elaborate mummification rituals, burial chambers and included riches were all part of this belief, as they thought their bodies needed to be fully preserved, and their possessions would all be necessary in the next life.  And while we may consider this belief merely interesting and historical, it seems to me that the Pharaohs were right:  their faces and their stories are being read by hundreds of thousands as these exhibits travel the world and people line up around the museum to get in.  In their commitment to their beliefs, the Pharaohs have made those beliefs true; however powerful and influential they were in life, they are much larger in death.  Their lives, their movements, their actions, their stories are known among the generations.  What do any of us really have, in life or death, but our stories?

Which brings me back to the requiem and the remembering of our own dead.  Our communities hold who we are, in life and in death, by knowing us well enough to know our stories, to hear our stories, and sometimes even to add their own mythologies to what we have done and been, as these stories are told among the generations in our communities of faith.  We live on because we have been known, and because our spirits and stories now exist in the faith of those we have touched.  What a blessing.

While the rest of the country may know Nashville as Music City, for the 10 million of us descended spiritually from John Wesley, Nashville is Methodist City. HQ. The center of the Methodist universe. And though there are other cities (New York, Evanston) that have pieces of our national machine, the heart of it all lies in Nashville, and the struggle for the soul and future of Methodism is played out here every day, if only bureaucratically.

I’m here as one of six presenting a working paper on the theology and promise of campus ministry. We’ve been meeting here since last October, this small working group from around the country, give or take one or two each time. And now it’s time to pay the bills. Produce something of substance. No more sitting around the table delighting ourselves with our insights and cleverness. We’ll listen to each other’s comments, go back and revise our essays, and then submit them again in some more polished form. We’ll come up with something useful about new ways of understanding the church and engaging young adults (I’m especially sure of it now that Russell Richey is in our group). I’ve written my ideas passionately, as have my colleagues, and I pray that what we recommend could be a way forward.

There’s much at stake. If we believe that the message of Jesus has anything in it to give life to the world, we must find a way to share this message compellingly, breaking down the negative connotations that Christianity has picked up for many in the last four decades.We have a unique opportunity, situated as we are at the center of a pluralistic frontier, to assist the church in recovering what is core about Christianity, and then to share this vision of hospitality, forgiveness and a God who more than anything desires relationship with humanity and all of creation.

I didn’t immediately notice the blue diamond nose ring, but it confirmed my first impression of the mother carrying a baby in a pack on her front, while she wheeled two suitcases with a cloth bag over her shoulder. Her hair was dark, graying, and wavy, her glasses and clothes hip. I sat down across from her on the economy shuttle bus and wondered if she had had this baby, well, really more of a young toddler, by herself. No one else was around to help them lug all their stuff onto the bus, but she seemed used to handling it all. The baby was clearly attached to her, holding on to her sweater, and content, a product of Dr. Sears and attachment parenting. The mother pointed out the shapes in the seats’ upholstery and named the colors for her child as we drove.

I assumed a host of progressive political and social beliefs were at play. This child would be raised with organic, local food and award winning educational products in an environment that hopefully wasn’t off-gassing anything. A variety of religious beliefs and practices would be introduced, with meditation and yoga definitely on the menu. There were probably still Obama signs in the yard. And then I saw it. My Little Pony. The baby was holding a My Little Pony. And that’s just it. Regardless of our best attempts to instill our children with our liberal orthodoxy, the My Little Ponies creep in. And we let them. And not just because we don’t want to fight. In spite of the glossy white mane and the big blue eye-lashed eyes, My Little Pony reminds us that, as Gibran said, our children come through us, but they are not us. We can try to give them our ideas, but they have their own ideas. And finally, they will grow up in a world over which we will have precious little influence.

Having children has been, perhaps, the biggest humility lesson of my life. For a person who has been always engaged in deep thought about the value of each step in life’s journey, who has enjoyed the freedom and autonomy to chart a course, the unmalleable aspects of parenting are constantly hitting me in the face. Why won’t they wear what I want them to wear? Why does it always have to be such a battle to comb Paloma’s hair? Why doesn’t John have a killer instinct and natural game sense in sports like I did? Why do I have to say things eleven times with escalating volume before they hear me? Am I really here? But then My Little Pony shows up and basically says, while batting those ridiculous eyelashes, “Give up. This isn’t your fight.” And I realize that my fight is only to love them with the courage and abandon that would allow them to be whoever they were created to be. I don’t know that person yet, the person each one is becoming. I can only wonder, and listen, and laugh with them. And make sure their teeth get brushed most of the time.

Flowerbelle