Five hundred twenty five thousand six hundred minutes - June 26, 2016
This song from the musical “Rent” has resonated with me since I first heard it many years ago, but especially so for the past two months. Five hundred twenty-five thousand six hundred minutes. How do you measure, measure a year?
Events of the past several months have led me to do some deep reflecting on the years I’ve already had and how I want to spend my precious minutes during however many years I may have left.
How do we measure a year?
In September of 1963, when the KKK bombed the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, I had just turned four years old. I don’t remember the event, but I believe that this tragedy shaped my upbringing and that of many of my peers in the South. Our families’ response was to circle the wagons and hope everything would settle down.
I was 8 years old in 1968. The only child of upper middle-class parents, one from the South and one from the North who had settled in Atlanta and made a good life for themselves and their daughter. We lived in a nice house, we went to the nearby Presbyterian church, and I was in the most selective private school in the city. Do I even need to mention that the only people of color I knew were our maid, Fanny, and her husband Arthur? I led a very sheltered, very white, existence.
My only exposure to the larger world around me came from the carefully edited snippets on the evening news, delivered in measured tones by either “Uncle” Walter Cronkite or Chet Huntley and David Brinkley, who were always reassuring. The world was safe in its orbit around the sun, and I could rest easy. But there were also the headlines in the Atlanta Journal and the Atlanta Constitution. Sit-ins, riots, police attacking protestors, and stories from my friends with much older siblings telling of unrest and protest on college campuses. I had the sense that something big was stewing.
April, 1968 Martin Luther King, Jr.
June, 1968 Bobby Kennedy
I remember going up the steps to my room and thinking, ‘what next?” Who will die next? Am I going to die? Are my parents going to die? Remember, we lived in Atlanta, and my parents fully expected the city to burn.
In the fall two years later, my private school had integrated. By this, I mean I now had one African-American classmate. The world didn’t end. By junior high, when the class size grew as we moved up the hill to a bigger building, our diversity grew, just a bit. One of the new students, who I met in the book line on the first day of 8th grade is my dear friend Elaine. She went to Princeton, then got an MBA from Cal Berkley and married Fred. They have two kids and live near Seattle, where their inter-racial marriage is not an issue. It broke my heart years ago when she told me stories of her boss saying that although she was a great employee, there were certain clients in certain parts of the country they would not send her to see, because the clients wouldn’t “accept” her. Also, she and Fred chose to live about as far away from the American South as they could get and still be in the continental US.
That’s the first thread.
Here’s the second.
I saw two sides of Christian faith growing up. On Sunday mornings I got the happy lessons about obeying God’s laws, following Jesus. We sang Jesus loves the little children, but I am sure that if any of those red, yellow or black children in the song had actually come to my church, they would have been told that yes, Jesus loved them, but that they would perhaps feel more loved in their “own” church.
During the school year, I had morning devotionals in the classroom. Some were more interesting than others, and mostly I remember them as just something we did every day, like taking attendance and listening to the announcements.
But in 3rd grade, I had an amazing teacher who took our religious instruction very seriously. She would ask us questions like this: “Where did the wives of the sons of Adam and Eve come from?” She did a great job of planting seeds of both respect for the Bible and curiosity about it in my little mind, at least. (I’d find out years later that her father and grandfather were well-known pastors and seminary professors).
In Junior high, in addition to those boring morning devotions, we also had to take a religion course. Looking back, I realize this was basically a “Christianity” course, which must have been awkward for my Jewish classmates.
To make sure we got the message, we had another required religion class in high school. While the school itself was Presbyterian, they did not restrict hiring to members of that denomination. I think basically any protestant church-goer was okay. So, our religion teacher when I was in high school was (as I’d describe it now) a very conservative Christian with strong views on right and wrong, who was in and who was out, and he didn’t hesitate to tell us that. I still recall him calling one of my friends to his classroom after school to tell her that she must stop dating another student because he was Jewish, and that if she didn’t, both of them would go to hell. Yes, really.
With the memory of my 3rd-grade teacher in my mind, I spent hours reading the Bible and looking for where he got this idea. I couldn’t find it. Instead, I found a story of love, grace and inclusion, so thanks, Mr. Trotter, for making me read my Bible.
The next thread, about gender and sexuality, didn’t really enter my tapestry until much later. I really didn’t think much about it. I knew I was a straight woman, and that was that. Issues of sexuality when I was in high school and college centered more on the women’s movement, but I was pretty content, so even that honestly passed me by.
Then I became a parent, somehow raised two smart, talented kids who asked hard questions about the world they saw, and conflicts between what they heard in church and how the world really worked, and how many of their friends were treated.
This hit hard with my daughter’s friend Mark. He is brilliant, funny and absolutely adorable and he quickly became one of “my” kids. Mark is gay. He came out in high school and had a tough time. He has spent his young life trying to prove he is acceptable. High school valedictorian. Full ride to college. Graduate with high honors. Stanford Law. Law Review and a clerkship with a Federal Judge. He has almost no contact with this father. Mark is married to Jason and they have a beautiful daughter.
This is where my challenge came in. When Mark and Jason got engaged, they called and asked me to be part of the wedding. It was heartbreaking as a pastor in the United Methodist Church to have to say that I could not put my name on their marriage license as the officiant without risking my orders as an Elder. I could go to the wedding (and I did). I could pray, I could read Scripture and I could bless, but I couldn’t “preside”. This, two years after I conducted the wedding of my god-daughter Lucy, to her husband, Mat.
I admit, I’m a chicken when it comes to standing up for things like this that are bigger than I am, but I am DONE with this crap.
Skip forward to the past few months.
The General Conference of the United Methodist Church met in Portland and once again refused to remove the language from the Book of Discipline which describes homosexuality as “incompatible with Christian teaching” and continues to allow clergy who preside at same-sex marriages or who embrace fully their own sexuality, to be brought up on charges by their Conferences. While a committee is to be appointed to examine the issue and a called session of GC will be held within two years, I, like many others, are done with waiting, with committees, etc.
On Saturday, June 11th, James and I joined with other fed-up United Methodists to march in the Boston Pride Parade. I wore my clergy shirt and carried a sign that read, “What Jesus said about gays” across the top of the sign. The rest, inside quotes, was blank.
As we walked, I watched the reactions in the crowd. First, fear. Uh-oh, in the midst of love and acceptance, here’s the protestor who’d going to quote Scripture at us. Then, the smiles, cheers, high fives, applause, snaps and hugs. I kept getting behind the group because young people were pulling me out of the parade so they could take pictures of me with them and with that sign.
That sign was a word to them about love and acceptance. Gay kids, Gay allies, kids with tattoos, piercings and wildly-colored hair. I’m on Twitter, Snapchat and Instagram now, I guess. And I hope the message to all of those kids and those who see their posts is that they are loved. That the Bible-thumping, scripture quoting folks like my high school religion teacher are wrong. They are loved, not condemned. God made them, just like God made me, and we are all part of the kingdom.
Then, less than 12 hours later, on June 12, the Pulse shooting happened.
On Thursday, June 16, the New England Conference of the United Methodist began its Annual Conference. Instead of “business as usual”, the first session of Conference was a time of hearing the brave, heartbreaking and painful stories of those folks here, and now, who share the pain of being hurt by the church, THEIR church, by being told they are “incompatible”. We repented with sackcloth and ashes and began the process of healing.
On Friday, by a margin of 4-1, your Annual Conference passed a Resolution of Non-Compliance” that reads, in part, The New England Annual Conference as a body affirms our commitment to a fully inclusive church. Therefore: The NEAC will not conform or comply with provisions of the Discipline which discriminate against LGBTQIA persons, including marriage (161.B), the incompatibility clause (161.F), ordination and appointments (304.3), homosexual unions (341.6), AC funding ban (613.19), GCFA funding ban (806.9), chargeable offenses pertaining to being "a self avowed practicing homosexual" or to officiating at weddings for couples regardless of the sex of the partners (2702.1b,d).
A week later, on June 19th, the kid who taught me to love ALL her friends turned 30. I felt like time was speeding up.
Then last Monday, we got the word that Ruth Lavinge had died at home, very unexpectedly.
Wednesday, Representative John Lewis began a sit-in in the House of Representatives. I felt like time was running backwards. Hadn’t we DONE this? Yes and no. there are still things to be done, actions that need to be taken.
At Ruth’s service on Friday, we talked about the “Unfinished Business” of her life and of ours.
How do I, how do we, want to spend the minutes we have remaining to us? If the Psalmist got his wish and we were told the number of our days, exactly how many minutes we had left, what would we do? How would we spend them?
This straight white Southern preacher is going to spend her minutes fighting to declare God’s love.
Like the song says,
Five hundred twenty five thousand six hundred minutes
Five hundred twenty five thousand moments so dear
Five hundred twenty five thousand six hundred minutes
How do you measure, measure a year?
How about love?
Measure in love.
This song from the musical “Rent” has resonated with me since I first heard it many years ago, but especially so for the past two months. Five hundred twenty-five thousand six hundred minutes. How do you measure, measure a year?
Events of the past several months have led me to do some deep reflecting on the years I’ve already had and how I want to spend my precious minutes during however many years I may have left.
How do we measure a year?
In September of 1963, when the KKK bombed the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, I had just turned four years old. I don’t remember the event, but I believe that this tragedy shaped my upbringing and that of many of my peers in the South. Our families’ response was to circle the wagons and hope everything would settle down.
I was 8 years old in 1968. The only child of upper middle-class parents, one from the South and one from the North who had settled in Atlanta and made a good life for themselves and their daughter. We lived in a nice house, we went to the nearby Presbyterian church, and I was in the most selective private school in the city. Do I even need to mention that the only people of color I knew were our maid, Fanny, and her husband Arthur? I led a very sheltered, very white, existence.
My only exposure to the larger world around me came from the carefully edited snippets on the evening news, delivered in measured tones by either “Uncle” Walter Cronkite or Chet Huntley and David Brinkley, who were always reassuring. The world was safe in its orbit around the sun, and I could rest easy. But there were also the headlines in the Atlanta Journal and the Atlanta Constitution. Sit-ins, riots, police attacking protestors, and stories from my friends with much older siblings telling of unrest and protest on college campuses. I had the sense that something big was stewing.
April, 1968 Martin Luther King, Jr.
June, 1968 Bobby Kennedy
I remember going up the steps to my room and thinking, ‘what next?” Who will die next? Am I going to die? Are my parents going to die? Remember, we lived in Atlanta, and my parents fully expected the city to burn.
In the fall two years later, my private school had integrated. By this, I mean I now had one African-American classmate. The world didn’t end. By junior high, when the class size grew as we moved up the hill to a bigger building, our diversity grew, just a bit. One of the new students, who I met in the book line on the first day of 8th grade is my dear friend Elaine. She went to Princeton, then got an MBA from Cal Berkley and married Fred. They have two kids and live near Seattle, where their inter-racial marriage is not an issue. It broke my heart years ago when she told me stories of her boss saying that although she was a great employee, there were certain clients in certain parts of the country they would not send her to see, because the clients wouldn’t “accept” her. Also, she and Fred chose to live about as far away from the American South as they could get and still be in the continental US.
That’s the first thread.
Here’s the second.
I saw two sides of Christian faith growing up. On Sunday mornings I got the happy lessons about obeying God’s laws, following Jesus. We sang Jesus loves the little children, but I am sure that if any of those red, yellow or black children in the song had actually come to my church, they would have been told that yes, Jesus loved them, but that they would perhaps feel more loved in their “own” church.
During the school year, I had morning devotionals in the classroom. Some were more interesting than others, and mostly I remember them as just something we did every day, like taking attendance and listening to the announcements.
But in 3rd grade, I had an amazing teacher who took our religious instruction very seriously. She would ask us questions like this: “Where did the wives of the sons of Adam and Eve come from?” She did a great job of planting seeds of both respect for the Bible and curiosity about it in my little mind, at least. (I’d find out years later that her father and grandfather were well-known pastors and seminary professors).
In Junior high, in addition to those boring morning devotions, we also had to take a religion course. Looking back, I realize this was basically a “Christianity” course, which must have been awkward for my Jewish classmates.
To make sure we got the message, we had another required religion class in high school. While the school itself was Presbyterian, they did not restrict hiring to members of that denomination. I think basically any protestant church-goer was okay. So, our religion teacher when I was in high school was (as I’d describe it now) a very conservative Christian with strong views on right and wrong, who was in and who was out, and he didn’t hesitate to tell us that. I still recall him calling one of my friends to his classroom after school to tell her that she must stop dating another student because he was Jewish, and that if she didn’t, both of them would go to hell. Yes, really.
With the memory of my 3rd-grade teacher in my mind, I spent hours reading the Bible and looking for where he got this idea. I couldn’t find it. Instead, I found a story of love, grace and inclusion, so thanks, Mr. Trotter, for making me read my Bible.
The next thread, about gender and sexuality, didn’t really enter my tapestry until much later. I really didn’t think much about it. I knew I was a straight woman, and that was that. Issues of sexuality when I was in high school and college centered more on the women’s movement, but I was pretty content, so even that honestly passed me by.
Then I became a parent, somehow raised two smart, talented kids who asked hard questions about the world they saw, and conflicts between what they heard in church and how the world really worked, and how many of their friends were treated.
This hit hard with my daughter’s friend Mark. He is brilliant, funny and absolutely adorable and he quickly became one of “my” kids. Mark is gay. He came out in high school and had a tough time. He has spent his young life trying to prove he is acceptable. High school valedictorian. Full ride to college. Graduate with high honors. Stanford Law. Law Review and a clerkship with a Federal Judge. He has almost no contact with this father. Mark is married to Jason and they have a beautiful daughter.
This is where my challenge came in. When Mark and Jason got engaged, they called and asked me to be part of the wedding. It was heartbreaking as a pastor in the United Methodist Church to have to say that I could not put my name on their marriage license as the officiant without risking my orders as an Elder. I could go to the wedding (and I did). I could pray, I could read Scripture and I could bless, but I couldn’t “preside”. This, two years after I conducted the wedding of my god-daughter Lucy, to her husband, Mat.
I admit, I’m a chicken when it comes to standing up for things like this that are bigger than I am, but I am DONE with this crap.
Skip forward to the past few months.
The General Conference of the United Methodist Church met in Portland and once again refused to remove the language from the Book of Discipline which describes homosexuality as “incompatible with Christian teaching” and continues to allow clergy who preside at same-sex marriages or who embrace fully their own sexuality, to be brought up on charges by their Conferences. While a committee is to be appointed to examine the issue and a called session of GC will be held within two years, I, like many others, are done with waiting, with committees, etc.
On Saturday, June 11th, James and I joined with other fed-up United Methodists to march in the Boston Pride Parade. I wore my clergy shirt and carried a sign that read, “What Jesus said about gays” across the top of the sign. The rest, inside quotes, was blank.
As we walked, I watched the reactions in the crowd. First, fear. Uh-oh, in the midst of love and acceptance, here’s the protestor who’d going to quote Scripture at us. Then, the smiles, cheers, high fives, applause, snaps and hugs. I kept getting behind the group because young people were pulling me out of the parade so they could take pictures of me with them and with that sign.
That sign was a word to them about love and acceptance. Gay kids, Gay allies, kids with tattoos, piercings and wildly-colored hair. I’m on Twitter, Snapchat and Instagram now, I guess. And I hope the message to all of those kids and those who see their posts is that they are loved. That the Bible-thumping, scripture quoting folks like my high school religion teacher are wrong. They are loved, not condemned. God made them, just like God made me, and we are all part of the kingdom.
Then, less than 12 hours later, on June 12, the Pulse shooting happened.
On Thursday, June 16, the New England Conference of the United Methodist began its Annual Conference. Instead of “business as usual”, the first session of Conference was a time of hearing the brave, heartbreaking and painful stories of those folks here, and now, who share the pain of being hurt by the church, THEIR church, by being told they are “incompatible”. We repented with sackcloth and ashes and began the process of healing.
On Friday, by a margin of 4-1, your Annual Conference passed a Resolution of Non-Compliance” that reads, in part, The New England Annual Conference as a body affirms our commitment to a fully inclusive church. Therefore: The NEAC will not conform or comply with provisions of the Discipline which discriminate against LGBTQIA persons, including marriage (161.B), the incompatibility clause (161.F), ordination and appointments (304.3), homosexual unions (341.6), AC funding ban (613.19), GCFA funding ban (806.9), chargeable offenses pertaining to being "a self avowed practicing homosexual" or to officiating at weddings for couples regardless of the sex of the partners (2702.1b,d).
A week later, on June 19th, the kid who taught me to love ALL her friends turned 30. I felt like time was speeding up.
Then last Monday, we got the word that Ruth Lavinge had died at home, very unexpectedly.
Wednesday, Representative John Lewis began a sit-in in the House of Representatives. I felt like time was running backwards. Hadn’t we DONE this? Yes and no. there are still things to be done, actions that need to be taken.
At Ruth’s service on Friday, we talked about the “Unfinished Business” of her life and of ours.
How do I, how do we, want to spend the minutes we have remaining to us? If the Psalmist got his wish and we were told the number of our days, exactly how many minutes we had left, what would we do? How would we spend them?
This straight white Southern preacher is going to spend her minutes fighting to declare God’s love.
Like the song says,
Five hundred twenty five thousand six hundred minutes
Five hundred twenty five thousand moments so dear
Five hundred twenty five thousand six hundred minutes
How do you measure, measure a year?
How about love?
Measure in love.