June has been an emotional month, a
difficult month, a month of celebration, and, sadly, of tragedy. Sitting here, after having just returned to
Columbus from a weekend in Cincinnati, celebrating their city’s Pride festival,
my heart is filled with a breadth and
depth of emotions. The deaths in Orlando
still feel fresh and painful. Yet, it
was encouraging to see Pulse Night Club open its outdoor spaces over this past weekend
to hold a Latin-themed event. In
Cincinnati, a city known to be traditionally more conservative than my current
home city of Columbus, I feared that the police presence would not be what it
needed to be. To my surprise though, the
police were there in heavier numbers than I have ever seen at Cincinnati
Pride. Cincinnati is such a wonderful
place to visit right now. The energies
of support for the LGBTQ+ are rising there, in the home city of Jim Obergefell,
and I could not help but reflect on the sacrifices made by Jim, his late husband,
John, and the other plaintiffs who, thanks to their willingness to share their
stories, paved the way for us to be able to celebrate the one-year anniversary
of Obergefell vs. Hodges yesterday.
During my time in Cincinnati, I was
also able to devote energy to the work of inclusion within our faith and
political systems. My weekend began at
an interfaith service at a Cincinnati church.
I was there as a volunteer for Equality Ohio to encourage people of
faith to sign onto The Ohio Faith Coalition.
Through the service, I was able to connect with folks from a variety of
faith backgrounds, people faithfully serving out of the deep beliefs of their
faith and believing that their faith tells them that God loves everyone, a
message that is seldom heard from those most vocal in faith circles. On Saturday, I also represented Equality
Ohio, signing people up to support the political efforts to end legalized
discrimination of LGBTQ+ folks here in Ohio.
Having these conversations and hearing people share personal experience
of discrimination reminds me that this work is so vitally important.
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| Alex Shanks and I at the Equality Ohio Pride Festival Booth in Cincinnati 2016 (Photo Credit: Adrienne Michelson) |
During a lunch conversation with a
friend over the weekend, I commented at the irony of both my previous faith
context inside a very conservative, evangelical view of Christian believing and
my current, more progressive, mainline Christian perspective. So often, we like to focus on the ways in
which those two points of view are different, but, in many ways, they are the
same. Both see the text of the Bible as
sacred. They see truth in the words
contained on those pages. They may come
from different understandings of the authors and the various influences that
impacted the writings of those authors, but they each see those words as sacred
in different ways. Also, both are, in
many ways, biblical literalists. Now, a
more conservative me may have taken a more literal view of Romans 1:27 and a
more nuanced view of Matthew 25:35 (Yes,
I’m going to make you look them up.), and a more progressive me would now
take a more reversed perspective on both of those scriptures. I now see that the surface understanding of
the condemnation of homosexuality that is claimed by some in the first chapter
of Romans really is so vague that we can’t determine much of anything from it
conclusively, and, even if it were a clear-cut condemnation, we do not have the
right to hold the biblical writers to a higher understanding that their
cultural context gave them the ability to comprehend. Also, I am ashamed to say this, but in my
previous faith understanding, while I would have acknowledged that Jesus called
us to feed the hungry, I would have felt the need to qualify that mandate by
insisting that they go through proper channels and seek help through
organizations that my church appropriated funds to because we did not want to
take on the burden ourselves of determining who we felt had a legitimate need
and who was just “using the system.”
I share these reflections for a
reason. This year, during Annual
Conference, the yearly gathering of clergy and lay people from West Ohio to
elect officers and set policies and legislation for our own conference, the
same friend that I had lunch with in Cincinnati this past Friday commented that
he could not imagine the old me, and, yet, I can assure you that I existed in
that context and in that way of thinking.
This understanding and awareness of the shift that has taken place in me
opens me up to the possibilities that I see in others. When I look at the tragedy in Orlando, when I
look at the emergence of support in city’s like Cincinnati, when I see the joyous
faces of same-sex couples who have been married within the past year because of
the Supreme Court’s ruling in Obergefell vs. Hodges, I see hope. I see pain as well, but there is hope. One scripture that I see and hear both
conservative and progressive voices use is John 1:5: “The light shines in the
darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.” Of course, there would be disagreement over
what represents light and darkness, but those are questions that they must each
wrestle with for themselves. For me, it
says one thing. In the ultimate scheme
of things, the battle between the light and the dark has been settled and, to
paraphrase, “Love Wins!” Past
tense. It is finished.
~ Culbs
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