Today the United Methodist Church stepped away from unity.
There’s still a tiny chance for things to change, but this certainly isn’t a step toward unity. In fact, the only path toward unity was on the table and a simple majority rejected it.
[I usually refrain from commenting on the polity of other churches. But friends are in pain and many of us in neighboring churches are confused. In light of that, I do have something to offer.]
Unity or Uniformity
The Methodists are meeting in St. Louis for a special session of the General Conference with the expressed purpose of coming to agreement on the matters of human sexuality. They, like the rest of the church, have had an ongoing division around the full inclusion of LGBTQ persons in the life of the church, including with regards to holy matrimony and ordination.
The very unity of the United Methodist Church was clearly on the table.
Of course the difference between unity and uniformity is vast. So to alleviate the pain of the latter, they’re destroying the former.
The Two Proposals
The two main proposals on the table represent these two different priorities.
The One Church Plan, endorsed by most of the bishops of the church, sought to preserve the unity of the United Methodist Church by giving local authority. While not an easy choice, and one many in The Episcopal Church know all too well, the One Church Plan sought to keep the dialogue and diversity present under a big tent.
The other, the Traditional Plan, focuses on adhering to the UMC’s existing rules excluding LGBTQ persons from full sacramental participation.
The One Church Plan encourages unity and the Traditional Plan uniformity. It would be easy to chalk this all up to the typical left/right sorting we’re all too familiar with. However, what separates these plans isn’t just ideology. It’s also theology and experience.
The One Church Plan is, at its heart, the most radically centrist plan. It preserves local authority, eschews the winners and losers of uniformity, and preserves the opportunity for the broadest interpretation of what it means to be a Methodist.
Next to this proposal, the Traditional Plan seems like a far more radical response for the church to make. This plan puts its thumb on the scale in two particular ways.
- It endorses both conservative theology and politics as the precondition of unity.
- It chooses to place the doctrine and discipline of the church above the variety of expressed values of its people.
Notice what’s glaringly missing: an actual liberal proposal. There isn’t one. What the majority (neither “slim” nor “large”) voted against was a moderate proposal. This leaves the consideration of the unabashedly conservative one.
How easy it is to hate those who are different.
It is particularly galling that the day after we read Luke 6 in church, a majority of Methodists voted to not love their neighbors when it got difficult. They voted against dealing with diversity and adversity together, leaving only a demand for uniformity.
The gospel reading from the Revised Common Lectionary, Luke 6:27-38 continues the Sermon on the Plain; when Jesus was telling his followers about blessings and woes. Saying we’re blessed today when we feel each other’s pain.
So yesterday they heard Jesus proclaim
“Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you.”
Then they heard
“If anyone strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also; and from anyone who takes away your coat do not withhold even your shirt.”
These are striking words because they are not about suffering for the good, but standing up to injustice, and revealing the shame of those who seek to hurt you. These acts reveal injustice by the powerful to the powerless.
This is Jesus at his most important. Are we listening?
“Do to others as you would have them do to you.”
But it gets even better.
“If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners love those who love them. If you do good to those who do good to you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners do the same. If you lend to those from whom you hope to receive, what credit is that to you? Even sinners lend to sinners, to receive as much again. But love your enemies, do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return.”
So, at what point did they stop listening? Right about there? Because today’s vote reads like a literal rejection of Jesus’s words from the Sermon on the Plain.
It is almost as if Jesus was speaking right to them and they kept walking right on by.
A Lost Cause
While the reality of church divorce is painful and occasionally beneficial, the true tragedy here will not likely be appreciated. Too often, the abused are asked to keep quiet for the sake of unity while abusers claim victimhood and hold unity hostage. It is neither honest nor functional. Like an anti-LGBTQ Lost Cause.
And like the ghosts of the confederacy, the voices of the dead slave owners, the klansman, the powerful men holding tight the reigns of power see the growing equality, and justice groaning for freedom as a threat to their way of life. The whip traded in for control of the ballot box. Forging the rules until they fit.
Yet again the pain of schism and broken relationships will be born, not by the powerful in their comfort, but on the backs of the weak and the abused. The ones left out of the assembly and labeled sinners. Again watching the perpetual pearl clutching, they receive the snarled epithets spat and the cruel theology preached as enemies.
The ones whose humanity is rejected and whose place in the church has long been put up for debate tried to reach out in love. To overlook their difference in love.
And this is what they get.
“Do not judge, and you will not be judged; do not condemn, and you will not be condemned. Forgive, and you will be forgiven; give, and it will be given to you.”
That’s what Jesus preached on Sunday. What the United Methodist Church chose on Monday was to judge their neighbors anyway.