Cynical Sunday........."Who is Welcome Here...??"

'Everyone needs a table to sit at, to have their voices heard and to be healed.'

—Dr. David Otto, Centenary College, Shreveport, La.

It has been told over time that a great teacher and man once said,

"Let the children come.....".   Somewhere along the way,

it appears that this is an illusional lie that faithful people try to live into..... they..those inside the boundary think they are saying come......but really they are saying...come if you look and think and act like me.   I have seen it, I've experienced it and my heart continues to be saddened by the fact that many of my brothers and sisters are still not able to sit at the table in the building constructed for faithful teaching and there are many voices who have tried to speak up, speak out, scream out for their proper place in the spiritual world who continue to be silenced.   This experiment called the church seems to have gone awry, consumed by the business world and turned into a place where prayer is often put on the burner and decisions are made as money decisions and power decisions instead of faithful, hard core decisions.

I suppose I'm sounding cynical.  I suppose many will not agree with me.  I suppose my truth telling has never made me popular and probably never will. 

Growing up in a small rural area, the church was and is the center of the social world.  It is here that I was taught about unconditional love, about God who created me and called me to love others in the same capacity.   These experiences of hugs and fellowship dinners and wonderful church school teachers colored my illusional glasses giving me the ideology that the church was a place where anyone might come to sit, eat, be loved, learn and grow. 

In the same manner that these small country churches taught me and filled me with a zest and wonder and love for the church and this thing we call God, it also was a place that taught me that my gender was subservient in the eyes of the Divine.  It taught me that men were superior, the head of the house, and that women might teach small children, but forget about a place in leadership and lord knows it would have been heresy for me to have actually admitted to anyone that God was calling me into pastoral ministry.  I guess if truth be told this is why it took me thirty years to say, YES, Here I am.....and go to seminary.

After my marriage and during my first pregnancy, Big Daddy and I began looking for a community of faith in which to grow our family some roots.  We found our way to a progressive, service oriented, college campus, inner city church, PC USA.  It was there that I experienced a woman preaching and it was in this place that my call to ministry began to surface in overwhelming strong urges once again.  Someday, i will share this story of my call with you, but this post is already getting long so that will have to be saved for another day.

I entered seminary with my blinders still on believing that I'd found a place where I could be birthed into all that God was calling me to be.  I spent six years working on my Masters all the while raising two small children ages 2 and 3, working in the church and studying way too much.  It was during this time that I once again began began to feel the confinements of the "church".  I have never been afraid to ask the hard question.  This coupled with my edgy liberal and accepting belief system often challenged others in my class to think more than they wanted to do.  While some of my professors allowed this free thinking, there were others who found me to be a challenge and did not embrace my way of stretching the box they considered the boundaries.  

In my church work, I worked with the down-town homeless. Most were mentally ill, caught in a cycle of hopelessness or bound by the chains of addiction.  It was during this time I made the discovery that upper-middle class people are quite willing to "help" the unfortunate.  It makes them "feel' better about being educated, well paid and privileged.  I remember clearly once during my internship, I ran into a couple that I'd seen several time at the feeding ministry.  I stopped and talked to them and invited them to church.

Much to my surprise, they came. 

They arrived, sat in the back.  The older gentleman kept his hat on and unfortunately they "sat" in "someones" regular seat.  They were asked to move.  Someone else told the man he had to take his hat off.  They left and to my knowledge they never entered again into the sanctuary that "welcomed" everyone.

I experienced this same boundary setting when we tried to just discuss the issue of gay and lesbians in the church (though in the end this church made a different call and now there are ordained gay and lesbian elders and deacons.)  Just talking about this was one of the most volatile times I have experienced in the church.  I suppose talking about anything about sex can be an issue.

The the issue of what to do about Latino/a's who found their way to another church I attended.  How can they come if they don't understand?  Isn't the language of God's Love capable of crossing boundaries?, I asked myself.   These folks came a few Sunday's and then felt the stares, the uncomfortable glares, the silence. 

Another issue, children in the church....keep them in or throw them out......they are noisy, they distract...they .....

Then my experience as a liberal edgy spiritual woman seeking a call in the South.  I found places who had often utilized me as their supply minister quite affirming when I preached time and time again on the days they needed someone or emergently couldn't find a minister.  But yet, when I would send them my PIF (resume in the PCUSA) to them, silence would begin.  I would never hear from them again until their newly hired man preacher needed a Sunday off.   After two years of this rejection, my spirit began to break.  I resigned from my part-time associate position and went back to work in the secular world.  I turned down a call in anther state when on my second visit, the committee said, "well nobody gets along with the head of staff but we feel like you would be able to handle him."  I informed them they were calling me for the wrong reason and turned down a position that would have allowed me to be ordained.

I don't mean to sound harsh, or unfair or unloving.

The church provides an avenue of hope for transformation and acceptance.  I still believe this to be true.  I still believe the experiment of people called together to love and nurture each other and grow to be worth the effort.

I rarely attend when I don't preach anymore.  There is too much pain for me because I am in a place where I have been unable to do that which I am called to do.

So that is a piece of my story....

I am finding contentment with the world being my altar

and the people in it being my congregation.

I have found peace for the most part in my journey and have learned to re-invent my call into something that works for me in the world. 

I am still open to the possibility that one day, in some fashion,

I will find a place to don my robe, speak the gospel and live and breath and grow with a group of people filled with the Love of God.

I am open and waiting.

so on this cynical Sunday

I still ask the question...

standing at the door of the entry way,

entering to live and breath and learn about God,

Who is welcome here?

is the spiritual healer,

the gay man with Aids,

the transgendered woman in beard and male clothes,

the drag queen in bright attire,

can the poor and rich sit side by side,

the crippled the blind the weak enter into or

find their way up the steps,

have the strength to open the door,

can the thinker come inside and think,

can the feeler give a hug,

can the hungry be fed,

the thirsty be given a drink,

who is welcome through the doors?

Is there room for me,

Sexy Hot liberal edgy questioning honest spiritual preacher mama???

The Univeresal God created all of us

in

Goodness...

for it says...

"it is very good"

We are all very good,

created in the image of the Divine...

and

we all should be welcome...

but

we're not...yet anyway

maybe someday...

someday in the distance tomorrow...

We...all God's kids...can

join to gether,

love together,

break bread together

and

be fed.

May it be so....

soon and very soon.

amen

So this is my rambling cynical sunday post!

I hope it does not offend.

What does faithful hospitatly look like to you? 

let me know...

sending you love, hugs and a wish for sunday blessings.