BEYOND WINTER: Musings of An Old Man—THE NEW MIDDLE {T, 5-14-23]

 [Warning: If you’re not interested in sex, or in reading 1100 words, do not continue…]

 

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.

The blood-dimmed tide is loose, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned.;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

Those are the 3^rd through 6^th lines of W.B. Yeats’ famous 1919 poem, “The Second Coming,” penned in response to WWI and the beginning of The Irish War of Independence. It ends with the oft-appropriated “slouching toward Bethlehem” line.

Those lines might have been written today, about the United States. Or maybe, specifically, The United Methodist Church [UMC].

The UMC has been much in the news the last couple of years, as anti-gay congregations have “disaffiliated” for fear the UMC would accept gays as full members, and specifically the last couple of weeks, while its General Conference, with delegates from all over the world, has been meeting to deal with its most recent crisis of inclusion.

It’s important to remember that “United” in UMC does not refer to theology or society. It’s a denominational name, not a descriptive name. “United” was part of the name of The Evangelical United Brethren denomination. When the EUBs merged with The Methodist Church denomination in 1968, one word was selected from each of the two former names to provide the name for the new church.

I do think, though, that unofficially, we always thought of “United” as a theological hope. As Peter Schultheis wrote in his hymn, “They’ll Know We are Christians by our Love:” We are one in the spirit, we are one in the Lord, and we pray that all unity may one day be restored…”

Robert Schuller--of The Crystal Cathedral, pretty much the opposite of a connectional denomination like Methodism--said a number of years ago that “…if the UMC did not exist, it would be necessary to invent it.”

He meant that the UMC occupied the broad middle of the denominational spectrum, a place where right and left could meet.

As the middle, the UMC too often tried to please everyone, theologically and socially. That was good, because we wanted to include everyone. It was bad, because it represented Yeats’ “…the best lack all conviction.”

It’s very difficult to include excluders, of either right or left, because they do not want to be included, not if they have to be in there with “the others.”

The most recent crisis of inclusion revolves around homosexuality, but it is certainly not the first. John Wesley’s life spanned almost the entire 18^th century, and during that time, his “people called Methodist,” had to deal with the social gospel [dealing with folks who said that the church should leave society alone and deal only with “the life hereafter], predestination [eternal division], democracy [against those who want a class/caste system], and slavery.

As Methodism came to America, slavery took front and center, and continued for… well, forever… as Civil War, reconstruction, segregation, civil rights, voting rights… well, race “relations,” including “some of my best friends are, but would you want your daughter to marry one?”

In fact, Methodism divided over slavery then, just as it is now over homosexuality. In 1844, the southern Methodist churches “disaffiliated” from The Methodist Episcopal Church and formed The Methodist Episcopal Church South. [Episcopal here has nothing to do with The Episcopal Church. It simply means a church with bishops, as distinct from The Methodist Protestant Church [MP], which did not have bishops.] Less than 100 years later, in 1939, folks began to realize that was neither Christian nor logical and so The MP, ME, and ME South churches merged into The Methodist Church.]

The same thing will happen with the churches that have divided over homosexuality, but it will probably take only 50 years, maybe fewer, because the issue of homosexuality has already been decided in society, especially with young people. The church just hasn’t caught up.

God is too smart to work only through the church. As the great church historian, Albert Outler, said, “The church has never done the right thing until pressured to do so by  the world.”

Of course, by the time we all acknowledge that this homophobic division is neither smart nor Christian, there may be no churches at all, if present trends continue. People are getting fed up with Christians who can’t get along with one another.

The problem with being the middle now is that no one wants a middle. In fact, the middle is hated by folks from all sides of it. Its very existence reminds them that they are frightened little kids who can’t stand for anything to be different from what they feel comfortable with.

How did we lose the middle? Well, because we had a black president. Thanks, Obama!

We thought the exact opposite when he was first elected. We thought the election of a black president showed that we were united, that we did not need our divisions anymore. But losing the divisions scared the pants off scaredy-pants people.

That was personified in Donald Trump. If you’ve always had privilege--as white people, especially straight white men, have always had--then equality makes you think you’re a victim. Donald Trump was the perfect model of someone who had everything, without working for it, and thought he was discriminated against because a black man got something better than he had, by working for it.

As Saul Alinsky said, “If you want to know where the action is, look for the reaction.” The action was in the middle. The reaction was everywhere else.

When I was ten years old, a boy on my school bus proclaimed, “My father says that the worst white man is still better than the best black man.” It made no sense even then, but most of the folks on the bus agreed. A lot still do. Fear and hate are not rational.

The fear and hate in the UMC is expressed not just in disaffiliation but in the attempt to destroy the UMC, so that there is no chance of a religious middle at all. That includes The Institute for Religion and Democracy, started by my friend and fellow UM pastor, Ira Galloway. I grieved for him then, and I mourn for him now.

The disaffiliations mean that The UMC is about 30% smaller than it was. But there is a new spirit in the UMC, not just of social change, but spiritual renewal, because with those anti-gay churches gone, the UMC’s General Conference just ended its strictures on gay folks. No more wishy-washy middling “Homosexuals are people of sacred worth but homosexuality is not in keeping with the Christian lifestyle.” In other words, no more “You gays are bad people.” No more bans on gays being preachers, or on preachers marrying gay couples. Total inclusion.

You know what that is? That’s the middle. It holds.

John Robert McFarland

 

 

When Will They Ever Learn? [T, 5-7-24]

BEYOND WINTER: Musings of an Old Man for his Own Purposes— When Will They Ever Learn? [T, 5-7-24]

 

I thought about going over to the Indiana University campus to join the demonstrations. There were 2 problems, though.

The first is physical. I would have to park so far away from Dunn Meadow that I probably could not walk there. And once there, I probably could not stand up without falling over, at which point the heavily militarized state cops—machine guns, and all—would think I should be arrested for impeding their movements. I have drunk jail coffee, and I don’t want to do it again.

The second was the demonstrations themselves. Some were pro-Gaza. Some were anti-war. Some were pro-Palestinian. Some were pro-Israel. Some were anti-antisemitism. Some were anti-Hamas. It was just confusing. I would fit into any of those camps, but then I’d be on the wrong side of everybody else.

I was in plenty of demonstrations in my campus ministry days—school segregation, civil rights, voting rights, Viet Nam, apartheid… Those demonstrations were successful in the context of my campuses—Indiana State [Terre Haute] and Illinois State [Normal-Bloomington] because they were not violent, and we always left a way out for the authorities to back off without losing face.

That’s a tricky thing when dealing with young hotheads. They don’t want to let anyone save face. They want to push the faces of their opponents into the mud and grind them down into it. That is happening on a lot of campuses right. Their methods are counter-productive. So are the face-grinding counter methods of university administrators and police.

The state of Indiana is currently ruled [that’s the right word] by a secretive cabal of billionaires and state legislators. The Indiana University Trustees are chosen either from their own ranks, or they choose people who are beholden to them, so that they can control them. So it is that IU has a president pulled from the lower ranks of the administration of a second-rate university. None of the stake holders--such as faculty and students--were involved in choosing her. They didn’t even know about her until she was hired. She and the Trustees have chosen to take authoritarian stances on all matters, and to do no communication about them, before or after. That is not how a university is supposed to operate. This is certainly not the university of Herman B Wells. That is not a university at all.

Maybe I’ll go over there after all…

John Robert McFarland

BEYOND WINTER [R, 5-2-24]

[I think I posted this here before, but I just came across this version in an
old journal.]

THE LADY IN RED

 

A newspaper girl in the 1940s was an odd sight.  I watched for her. When she came on to our street, Oakland Ave, at the New York Ave. end, I would meet her. She would give me the papers for my side of the street. Then we went down the street together, she delivering on the other side, I delivering on the side where I lived. When we got to the end of the block, at Washington Street, her route was over. Sometimes the circulation manager miscounted and gave her the wrong number of papers. She would have a paper or two left. She gave them to me as payment for helping her deliver.

I would cross Washington Street to the Mallory manufacturing plant and stand at the gate as the workers streamed out at the end of the day shift. I was too shy and frightened to call out “Newspapers for sale,” or even hold one aloft. I just waited and hoped someone would notice me and offer to buy a paper.

An office lady in a red coat did. She didn’t say anything, just handed me a nickel and took my only copy of  “The Indianapolis News,” the evening competitor of “The Indianapolis Star.” If I had only one paper on a particular evening, I would hide it behind my back until I saw her coming, so that no one else could buy it.

“The Star” had several boys who stood at the Mallory gates and shouted out the availability of their papers. Lesser people than the lady in the red coat bought them.

Once, as I stood there with my lone paper, the “Star” boys came to me as a group and told me that their boss, who was standing back on the sidewalk, by his van, watching, said it was illegal for me to stand there and I had to leave. I was scared, but I didn’t say anything, and I didn’t leave. I was not going to disappoint the lady in the red coat. The boys realized they were losing sales while they were trying to run me off so went back to their huckstering.

On days when the papers came out right for the route, and there were no extras, I felt bad. The lady in the red coat would get no paper.

In a cold and dark winter, the one when I turned ten but no one remembered my birthday, it was a relationship I counted on.

John Robert McFarland