Giving So It Matters
As some of you may have read in an earlier post, we're publishing a biography of Bishop V. Gene Robinson, the first openly gay bishop in the history of Christendom. Consequently, I have his name in my Google News Alerts (the Poor Publisher's Clipping Service). I get about six or seven a day and this morning I got one with two entries: one, from Alternet adapted from a speech of his earlier this year, the other a letter to the editor of the Birmingham News. They speak for themselves.
Giving So It Matters AlterNet - San Francisco,CA,USA...There's a lot in scripture about leprosy. It was a much-feared disease in Biblical times, and one of the very interesting things about leprosy is it does something to the nerve endings in your hands and feet. Much of the disfigurement that you see in lepers comes from the fact that they can't feel pain in their hands and their feet. So you can put your hand on a red hot stove and it doesn't communicate to your brain that your skin is literally on fire.
I think the reason it's used in scripture so much is that we all want to insulate ourselves from the pain of the world. The trick is to stay connected to the world so that we feel the pain and then to make some kind of response to it.
There are two kinds of giving, but I like to think of it as downstream giving and upstream giving. It's not enough to pull the drowning victims out of the river, you need to walk back upstream and find out who's throwing them in. So there's both downstream-giving that actually takes care of victims of oppression. And then there's upstream-giving -- walking back upstream to do justice and to promote systemic change to find the underlying causes that are causing all this.
The religious right is upstream, throwing people in the river and it's time we named it for what it is. It's time we took the Bible back. It's time we took our faith back and stopped having to apologize for being Christian or Jewish or Muslim without having to explain, "No, we're not that kind of a Jew, we're not that kind of a Christian."
I think right now for gay and lesbian people it's easier to come out to someone as gay than it is to come out as Christian. We have allowed ourselves to be hijacked. Part of what I'm trying to do in my ministry is use my skills and my office to say that there are Christians in this world who feel differently about these issues. It takes religious people to fight back against religious people...
Birmingham News - Birmingham,AL,USA
...I was outraged when Gene Robinson, an admitted homosexual, was ordained as a bishop in New Hampshire a couple years ago. I have never seen my beloved church in the same light since this travesty occurred. It is like there is a dark cloud hanging over the church every time I attend. I have spoken with my priest and continue to pray about this issue on a daily basis. I have received no satisfaction because any way you look at it, according to the Bible, homosexuality is an abomination in the eyes of God...