Our church is fighting in public.  Again.  This month – this week in particular – it’s a church trial in Pennsylvania.  Rev. Frank Schaefer is on trial for officiating at the wedding of his son, who is gay. 

Currently our United Methodist Book of Discipline, in a feat of fence-sitting “balance,” considers every human regardless of sexuality to be an individual of “sacred worth” but maintains that homosexuality is “incompatible with Christian teaching.”  We do not allow people to be clergy if they are “self-avowed practicing homosexuals” but we hold fast to (most) civil rights for LGBT people and unequivocally condemn violence against them . Our churches are not permitted to host weddings for same-sex couples, neither are our pastors permitted to officiate at these weddings. 

It’s an uncomfortable fence and we have been straddling it for a while.

The basic details in the Schaefer trial are this:  His son asked him to officiate at his wedding and Schaefer agreed.  The pastor told his district superintendent but not his congregation.  Life and ministry went on.  Over 5 years later – in the month when the statute of limitations would have expired for this “offense” – a member of Schaefer’s church filed a complaint.  The member, Jon Boger, was by this point living in another state and not involved in any church congregation but his membership was still on record at Schaefer’s church.  Boger’s mother worked at the church and had recently been fired.

Many have noticed the unusual timing of Boger’s complaint (many years after the wedding but just in time to cause trouble) and his own anger and presumed retaliation over his mother’s job loss.  It certainly explains a lot. 

Unfortunately, it doesn’t explain why we went ahead with a trial clearly forged out of anger and vengeance but that just happened to have an actual complaint wrapped up in the middle.  If the Council of Bishops has “discretion as the chief pastors of the church over the manner, purpose, and conduct of any supervisory response and just resolution under ‘fair process’” then they have missed a golden opportunity to exercise that discretion – especially given the retaliatory nature of the so-called complaint.  To make it even plainer:  If Boger had expressed his true complaint (i.e.,” You fired my mom!”) and this wouldn’t have gone to trial, why did it proceed?  A genuinely contentious and heartbreaking issue has been hijacked to serve another purpose and the Council sat by while it played out.

Something else bothering me throughout conversations about this trial is the well-meaning but theologically insubstantial point that Schaefer did this wedding for his own son.  This line of reasoning seems to posit that since it was a family matter, charges, punishments, and what’s at state theologically and pastorally are different.  Indeed, Schaefer may be speaking in a mixed way about both his duty as a father and his duty as a pastor – and who could blame him?

But for those of us observing and praying and talking about this from a few steps back, I find it dangerous to talk about pastoral-priestly actions clergy take within their own families as somehow separate from their vocation and ordination “to the rest of us.”  I am a pastor all the time but it is dangerous to think of myself as a pastor to my husband, for example.  That is not my role in that relationship.  This doesn’t mean we never officiate at funerals or weddings or baptisms within our own families, but it does require greater clarity on the part of the pastor as to her motivations and role in those moments. 

In the terms I hear Jesus using (“Woman here is your son”; “Who is my mother, and who are my brothers?”), he more often points us outside of our intimate and familial circles to those unrelated by blood, even those we don’t yet know or like or understand.  In theological terms, “he was doing it for his own son” seems to hold less water than “he did it for a church member” or “he did it for a person from the neighborhood who he didn’t know previously.” 

I say this not to diminish Schaefer’s actions but to ask all of us to consider the terrain more closely.  The argument that the church should go easy on him because he “just” did this for his son is a weak argument and not theologically sound.  The body of Christ forms us into a new family, creating brothers and sisters where before there were strangers.  The body of Christ does not call us to close ranks and minister to those closest to us but rather to extend the good news of Christ’s gospel to people and places where we are uncomfortable, challenged, or even afraid to go.

It seems clear to me Schaefer was acting both as a loving father and a minister of the gospel when he agreed to officiate at his son’s wedding.  He has said, “I did not want to make this a protest about the doctrine of the church. I wasn’t trying to be an advocate.  I just wanted this to be a beautiful family affair, and it was that.”  His ongoing concern for where his congregation is on these issues, even as he sought to minister to his son and respond to the call of the gospel, strikes me as pastoral (not cowardly or culpable as Boger and others might imply).  Schaefer has also said, “I love the United Methodist Church. I’ve been a minister for almost 20 years and there are so many good things about the United Methodist Church except for that one rule.” 

I support what Schaefer did, along with the actions of Bishops Swenson and Talbert and the group effort of solidarity earlier this month elsewhere in Pennsylvania.  I want our church to get off the fence and I want us to match our actions and our Discipline to the radically inclusive and norm-breaking love of Christ.  Of course, I want us to get off the fence in one particular direction:  full inclusion of all people in the full life of the church. 

I have no idea if this will happen or when.  But I write about it and I pray for it.  And I pray we United Methodists will remember both Jesus and John Wesley, who said, “As to all opinions which do not strike at the root of Christianity, we think and let think.”  The sexuality issues we are fighting about are not at the root of Christianity.  But to refuse full inclusion in the body of Christ to our brothers and sisters chops right into the root and threatens to sever it.  It’s a refusal to see Jesus for who he is (Matthew 25: 31-46).

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photo credit:  public domain