All by Mark Wingfield
To be presented the body of Christ by a transwoman created a role reversal I had not anticipated. As a pastor, I am accustomed to being the one serving the elements. As an ally to LGBTQ persons, I am accustomed to being the one reaching out a hand to offer support.
Recent travels have afforded me the opportunity to walk in the paths of both Monsignor Hugh O’Flaherty of Ireland and Pope Pius XII, born Eugenio Maria Giuseppe Giovanni Pacelli of Rome. Their paths converged at the Vatican during the atrocities of World War II. The subsequent passage of time has shown Pius XII to have been complicit in enabling Hitler’s genocide while appearing to say slightly reassuring things and O’Flaherty to have quietly done the right thing by saving 6,500 people from execution.
Sadly, it seems America’s cultural divide has reached such a bitter impasse that the Golden Rule no longer applies. We’ve short-circuited it by jumping to the conclusion that “others” are not like us enough for the Golden Rule to apply.
Clergy and lay leaders alike might assume that dying churches pass quickly and that the tale will be told in a decade’s time. My observation is that churches die much more slowly than that. Yes, some churches that are open today will be closed in 10 years, but many churches that are dying today will not be closed in 10 years; they’ll just be closer to death.
Here’s a biblical appeal to evangelical Christians who don’t feel any responsibility to prevent further worsening of the climate: The why doesn’t matter so much to those of us (like me) who can’t cite the specifics of climate science. The what-to-do does matter to all of us who believe God has entrusted the earth to human care.
We suffer today from new forms of scriptural and cultural proof-texting that should remind us of the need for good principles of interpretation all around: Always consider events in the broader sweep and stop taking single events out of context to prove what you want to believe.
Last year on Ash Wednesday, I was a broken person. Probably what we’re supposed to be on Ash Wednesday. But I also don’t recommend it. The lesson on how we are created from ash and will return to ash hit home in a way it never had before because at that moment I was struggling to adjust to the new reality of life with a spinal cord bruise.
We've got more information, more data, more facts, more research available to us today on every subject imaginable than ever before. Most of us are not lacking in access to information. What we lack is willingness to consider all the available information and to think critically about that information.
Despite the well-known challenges, it is self-defeating for pastors in particular to declare their moral superiority to everyone else and walk away from social media. We may not like the present reality of how people communicate, but it is the present reality. When we opt out, we remove our voices from the conversation and fail to be informed about what others are doing and saying.
There are many things the church universal and churches more specifically might – or should – admit we were wrong about. But admitting any error does not fall easily from the lips of religious folk – ironically, the very people who want others to confess their sins and turn from their wicked ways.
What congregants seem to mean when they ask pastors to “just preach the gospel” is to avoid the things that make them uncomfortable and cause them to leave worship with something less than a warm glow in their hearts. They want Christmas Eve and Easter Sunday sermons, not Ash Wednesday or Good Friday sermons.
Access to quality health care really is the difference between life and death — and the difference between the kind of life you want to keep living and the kind of life you don't. At any step along the way, my outcome could have been dramatically worse if I had been denied access to the right providers at the right time.
Even among Christians who appear kind or progressive, too often the existence of someone who identifies as transgender gets chalked up to “sin.” No doubt that’s the root reason so many Christians happily pile on against transgender persons and their family members about bathrooms and schools, because in their heart of hearts, they don’t understand transgender identity and simply default to thinking it is a sinful lifestyle choice.
One of the greatest blind spots of white privilege is the ability not to talk with your children about critical issues of the day, to “protect” them from reality. Black parents don’t have this privilege. Hispanic parents don’t have this privilege. Poor parents don’t have this privilege. Immigrant parents don’t have this privilege. My parents had this privilege, even though they would have been sympathetic to integration. The point is, they didn’t have to talk about, though.
I got this mark placed on my inner bicep on about the one-year anniversary of when my body started rebelling against me. The meaning of the semicolon is this: “Your story is not over.” It’s not a period, which ends a sentence; it’s a pause that says there’s more to come.
For men and women who are secure in their sexual orientation or gender identity to definitively testify to God calling them to service just as they are — that’s a game changer. Especially when it’s not just one or two random people but instead a pattern among people who never knew each other before. Perhaps it’s time for us to connect the dots and try to puzzle out what God’s Spirit is painting among us.
It turns out that ABC has a sharper moral compass than the Evangelical church in America today. ABC took a stand against racist hate speech by cancelling the “Roseanne” show, which was making the network a ton of money. In contrast, Evangelical pastors and churches have bowed down to the most blatantly racist American president since Andrew Jackson and have refused to challenge him for fear of losing influence in Washington.
Unless a face-to-face with Jesus has straightened out his theology or his politics — or both — Ed McAteer no doubt was smiling down from heaven this week as the United States relocated its embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. No religious figure worked harder for such an outcome than McAteer, who died in 2004 at the age of 78.
Too many states in our union, and even our nation itself, have cut funding for public education to the point of eating their seed corn. And they have done so around the rallying cry of low, low, bargain-basement taxes. It seems there is no bottom to the desire to avoid paying taxes. This is neither wise nor fiscally conservative. It is, instead, selfish. There is a difference between fiscal conservativism and selfishness.
I was so depleted that I could not even pray for myself. There were no words forming. And so I remembered the promise of Scripture, and I prayed over and over again, “Holy Spirit, pray for me.” Over and over, the pew that held my head shaking with my every petition.
