The Distraction to End All Distractions

I wrote the essay below two nights ago as a follow-up on my task of commenting on recent Judicial Council decisions and to also follow up on why I had written several emails to the bishops.  

As you will see, I have several strong opinions.  For that reason, I am posting the whole essay in my personal blog and only the first two paragraphs and a few other sentences from this essay in the AIA blog.  

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I have not regretted going over a year without commentaries on Judicial Council Decisions.  Most of the issues before the Council were of how best to allow separation from the denomination by discontented pastors, bishops, churches, and conferences over gay rights.  Those decisions regarding separation have been carefully and thoughtfully described by Heather Hahn of the United Methodist News Service in her respective articles at the time of their publication by the Council.  I really had nothing to add regarding the meaning and legality of Paragraph 2553 and related paragraphs allowing withdrawal.

I have temporarily passed over the decisions on other subjects.  I hope to address those in the near future.

Back in the late 1960s and early 1970s, two issues arose in our church.  Those watching social concerns in the past began to focus on environmental matters, warning that air and water pollution were massive enough that work had to be done to reverse those trends or there could be terrible consequences.

Those watching for a chance to gain power in our denomination, as was happening at the time in all of the mainline churches, watched with gleeful dismay as a United Methodist pastor won a law suit against his conference for discrimination against him because he was gay.  Those culture warriors had lost the battle over abortion at the time with the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision of the Supreme Court.  But now those who claimed they took the Bible literally, as long as you took their word for what was to be taken literally, had a concrete issue over which to fight in order to gain political advantage.  They wanted to reshape our denomination after generations of modernist (liberals and moderates) theology had dominated the leadership.

Sadly, we liberals took the bait and entered into conflict over gay rights and barely noticed the threat of global warming.

Prior to the gay pastor winning his lawsuit, no one particularly thought about sexual orientation.  The estimated ten percent of men and women, not defining themselves sexually as the rest of us did, tended to be isolated and in the closet.  Even our swear words were almost all theological or bodily function terms at the time.  And "gay" was a happy word.

But as our population grew, so did the number and variety of people's sexuality to where they finally discovered each other on a political scale that disturbed everyone who had not noticed this natural phenomenon before.

My introduction to the reality of homosexuality occurred in an anthropology course where I discovered articles about "berdache" among Native Americans.  Those braves who took a male homosexual partner brought into the women's areas of responsibility someone with masculine strength, a real plus for the tribe.  My professor gave me a hard time because I did not mention it in the monograph about the tribe I chose to study but included reference to the articles in the bibliography.  That was in 1958.  --  The professor never did lecture on it or even bring it up in class.  It was at most a niche issue that 90 percent of the population was not encountering it or its impact on their closeted alternately oriented neighbors.  I also think it was too complicated to deal with.  We as a culture had not been as wise as the Native American cultures and many other cultures were regarding it.

I think the conservatives used the era's sexual revolution at the time and for awhile hornswoggled liberals and moderates into looking upon the variations not as biological realities to be respected and integrated into our culture but instead to be seen as moral deviations.  That was a whole lot more scintillating than discussing the rise of CO2 and plastics in our atmosphere.

And now we are paying for letting the conservatives distract us.  We are now facing the greatest extinction Earth's long history with the demise of millions of species of flora and fauna and the prospect of the collapse of civilization hovering just over the horizon.  (See note at the end of this essay.)

That is why I wrote a series of emails to the bishops during the last couple months.  We have got to break the cycle of distraction brought by some power hungry politically oriented church leaders and focus on saving the planet.  Part of saving the planet, besides facing up to global warming, is establishing a stronger church so that we can work together  better and so that we can lean on each other through the tragedies of floods, fires, and storms that are upon us and yet to come.

That does not mean that what the Judicial Council does is irrelevant to the fate of the human race.  They are stuck with the limitations of their role in our legal system.  Our legal system as defined by the General Conference has not yet found a way to deal with climate issues that would allow the Council to have a direct impact.

Here too close to the end of my own life is my real regret that it took so long to speak up in support of the Dave Steffensons and Bishop Dycks of our denomination who have been warning us.  

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Note:  I know several, though not all, of the key "conservatives" who have led the fight for separation.  They are good guys, "play well with others," and I would trust them "in the trenches" with me.  If they ever seek my help, I will help them.  They think they are right and acting with integrity.  I used strong language about them above only because I truly believe that history will view them harshly.  

Rev. Vincent Sammartino

I woke up early this morning and found myself thinking about an old friend and wondering if I would learn if he was still alive.  I went to Bing to search and his obituary was the first item listed.  He died in Wisconsin Rapids in 2010, close to his surviving son and his family.  The obit gave me a chance to leave a message so I wrote the following:

Vince was an amazing minister.  He was asked to merge three small congregations in Racine, one of African American background, one of Italian background, and one of English.  He succeeded in pulling them together.  He was then assigned to a small congregation on the northwest side of Milwaukee.  The neighborhood was transitioning from European American to African American and Vince succeeded in helping the church grow.  It was working class families that constituted the increase in attendance as well as their Black neighbors.  Sundays were great celebrations of community love and the Gospel.  I asked him how he preached to such a diverse crowd.  "I always quote Jesus," he said.

He also sang to them.  Being of Italian extraction, he was ready to break into operatic-style song, even from the pulpit in the midst of a sermon.  I never found it to be an ego trip but rather a gleeful rendition of a hymn or song appropriate to the theme of the sermon.   He wasn't afraid to put himself out there.

That Brooklyn assertiveness underlay his evangelical nature.  He knew how to draw people to the Church.  He was unique enough that many of us wondered if he was really a Southern Baptist.  He was quite open about where he stood theologically.  "I'm Arminian," he told me.  "I never bought into that Calvinist stuff.  God's grace is free but we still have to take responsibility for working beyond our salvation.  We have to remember we are on the road to perfection, like John Wesley preached."

There is one vignette I want to share about Vince to illustrate his sense of humor and made him easy to be around.  "When I was young,  I joined the navy to see the world.  And ended up all the years of my enlistment assigned to the Brooklyn Navy Yard!"

Now let me add some more critical information about him for which there was no room in the funeral home's response section.

Late one night, Vince called me.  "I don't know what to do.  The DS told me I had to be out of the parsonage by Friday.  It's terrible what they are doing to us."

I was serving Faith UMC in Milwaukee at the time.  While I was commuting from Whitewater where my family lived and my wife was working full time, I stayed overnight at the parsonage two nights and four full days (putting in 60 daytime work hours on site).  I asked if he could come down and we could talk over his situation.  He did just that.

He was facing charges of spouse abuse and he could not get anyone to stand with him against the conference.  A couple years earlier, he had observed my success before the Judicial Council (see JCD 492) and, though I was little more than an acquaintance, he called.

The upshot of that conversation was that I would be his advocate, that he could move in to the parsonage until other arrangements might be made, and over the following year or so, would see him through a church trial and finally back into a church.

I saw first hand how good friends could ignore me because the bishop was clear that Vince was in the wrong despite the facts of the case, even through a church trial.  Fortunately, the jurisdiction's committee on appeals ruled in his favor, though it took the bishop six months to finally appoint him.

The experience was demoralizing for me.  My mistakes in trying to help him were bad enough but all of my closest clergy friends, at more than one point each, disregarded my views and threw Vince to the wolves.  

Through it all, Vince was our chaplain.  The team we pulled together was as good as it could have been.  But the set-backs seemed to never end.  Even so, Vince would remind us that God was in charge and that everything would finally be all right.  

Once he was established in a church in the northern part of the state, he served there for many years until his retirement.  But he never forgot me.  Every holiday, he sent me a small check as a sign of his appreciation for helping him.

"Red Flag" Ministry

 What if we divided up our districts as United Methodists and established parish lines out to the next UM church in all directions. We would not use those lines as restrictive to define our pastoral "kingdoms" but as defining for whom we were responsible on at least one point: who might be a potential shooter.  

I do not think that John Wesley had that in mind when he admonished his preachers to visit from house to house. But I would not be surprised if he was concerned that mentally ill or otherwise vulnerable people were going unnoticed and therefore unserved by the community resources, of which the church is one.

In all of the hundreds of cases, especially since the assault weapons ban was allowed to expire, no shooter or his family has been reported to have a pastor or church involved in their lives.

The Jehovah's Witnesses who actually do visit house to house do not go beyond trying to encourage people to join their association. I know. I've mentioned to them when they visit me that they are doing a unique thing and could be bearers of lists of resources counties and communities offer. They turn glassy-eyed when I ask them about that.

So, my fellow UM pastors. What do you think? Can we carry on a "red flag" ministry that just might save a ton of lives?

The Supreme Court's anti-abortion ruling

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"Mommy killers! Mommy killers!"

I'm not surprised that protesters are not yelling that at the Supreme Court after today's ruling gutting Roe v. Wade.

Anti-abortion people have been crying "Baby killers!" for years. But this new ruling has the effect of forcing women who cannot afford to go to another state to end a pregnancy to do desperate things. In the early years of my ministry, when abortions were illegal, the death rate from efforts to get abortions were high, especially among minority women. Why the pro-life folks felt that was okay is a mystery to me, even when white women also died.

In the old days, it was Roman Catholic belief that abortion was bad because if you had to choose who should live, baby or mommy, baby was chosen because its pure soul trumped the bad things the woman may have done and must have done during her life.

That is not usually heard in any arguments nowadays. The focus is on the simpler issue: these are babies, even if they have not been born yet. The well-being of the mother is not even considered, AT ALL, by the politics of anti-abortion.

Jewish faith requires abortion if the mother's life could be otherwise harmed. In fact, the Bible. acknowledges life exists when the fetus first breathes.

We United Methodists passed a resolution that urged medical care in any circumstance where abortion was needed though we did not identify when that might be.

Maybe this will become a matter of religious freedom. And the issue of the right to privacy may no longer be the linchpin.

My friends who are against abortion may choose not to have them. What would happen if I somehow got legislatures and Congress to prohibit gambling because it is against my firmly help religious belief? Gambling along with alcohol are destructive of families that leave them impoverished.

You've probably stopped reading by now. Maybe I need to shout something so offensive that I get your attention back but which describes what will happen. No, I will only ask this:

What about the mothers?

Michael Cohen's View Of Things

 I just finished reading DISLOYAL, Donald Trump's personal lawyer's book on his work for Trump.  He describes working for Trump as an addiction that blocks rationality.  The Trump world was exciting, challenging, and very heady stuff.  Just a few days before the FBI arrested Cohen, he had sat at the dinner table with now President Trump and one of the richest men in the world, a meeting he had brokered for them both.  And he described the way Trump then distanced himself from Cohen and actually worked through Attorney General William Barr to have him put back in prison after he had been released to home custody during the pandemic as many other prisoners had been released.  All his years of loyalty to Trump were being repaid with retaliation to prevent the writing of this book.

Cohen does a couple other things that surprised me.  First, without diminishing their culpability, he humanized Don Jr., Ivanka, Eric, and Malania.  There was little he could do besides describe the actual behaviors of Trump himself to humanize him.

The other thing that surprised me was how much he downplayed the Russian connection in his book.  While he spoke at length about the probability of the existence of the "pee-pee tape" and showed no regard for the Steele Dossier, he said practically nothing about the Russian help everyone else who has written about the 2016 election included in great detail.  He may have been saving what he really knew for sharing with Congress after his book was published.  Or he may have really had little to do beyond what he admitted, that he had worked on the Moscow Trump Tower deal all during the campaign at the time when Trump was denying any business with the Russians.

His main thrust as to what got Trump elected was that the Main Stream Media amplified everything about Trump they could find and kept reporting all the negative things the GOP was doing to make Clinton's emails seem like the crime of the century.  To Cohen, what little the Russians did was nothing compared to the media's fascination with all things Trump.  Trump was exciting and free of any moral or ethical restraints, a state of being that was admired and yearned for by half the American population.  Trump was a star, one who ruled "reality" television, including the world of wrestling.  Fox Network, Limbaugh, and other "conservative" media only enhanced what the rest of the news gathering agencies were doing, in Cohen's mind.

As a side note, let me add that Jonathan Karl's BETRAYAL, Michael Wolff's LANDSLIDE, and the Woodward/Acosta book PERIL also said amazingly little about the Russian influence.  They may have been asked by the Department of Justice to hold up on what they learned about Russia.  I can't imagine such writers not encountering a lot more about foreign interference in the Trump years.  I am awaiting a book by someone who reports on the influence Putin had on Trump to do things like sending federal troops into the BLM protests to break them up, to clear the square in front of St. John's Church for Trump's PR stunt ("dominate the streets"), and other moments when Trump tried to do things that even his most loyal staff found a way to torpedo or drag out until he forgot about it.

Cohen has laid bare what it is like to become a cult member at the same time he was aware of how badly he was acting on Trump's behalf.  His book is most engaging.