Everything else will follow.

I want to send a thank you out to Bishop William W. Hutchinson, bishop of the Louisiana Annual Conference, for some very kind words he wrote about an entry on this blog. I am very honored. His column appears in the September 25 issue of Louisiana Now!, the biweekly newsletter of the Louisiana Conference (website here). The entry he references is here.

There I reflect on a baptism ceremony--actually a baptism remembrance ceremony--I saw while visiting another Methodist church to see my friend preach her first sermon there. The service came just as I was in the middle of delving into and reacting against the hellfire-first evangelism of my youth. I had been ready to rant, but the beauty of the service and of the pastor's meditation on Methodist baptism moved me to belay the tirade I had planned.

Baptismal themes resonate with my memory of the 2004 General Conference (the quadrennial meeting of United Methodists to hash out contentious issues and set policy). I attended the 10-day conference in Pittsburgh working for an alliance of pro-GLBT-inclusion (and pro-social justice more generally) Methodist subgroups such as the Reconciling Network and the Methodist Federation for Social Action. My work there ranged from note-taking in day-long committee meetings, consulting with delegates about MFSA's stances on particular issues, drafting talking points that delegates could use if they so desired, and participating in a number of visual and performance displays to garner attention for the GBLT-inclusive cause.

Each General Conference has a theme, and in 2004 it was "Water Washed, Spirit Born" (From a hymn by Ruth Duck: We, your people stand before You/ Water-washed and Spirit-born/ By your grace our lives we offer/Recreate us; God, transform!). The progressive alliance I was a part of operated on a variation of that theme--"Watermarked"--which highlighted the indelible element of God's inclusion present in Methodist baptism. As baptized Methodists, we argued, God had already marked us as God's own, regardless of our orientation or gender identity. Our more display-oriented demonstrations inside and outside of the Conference sought to underline this theme. We bought loads of bottled water, for example (not the most environmentally friendly action, in retrospect), covering them with a fairly neutral label that said something like, "Enjoy this water, remembering that you are watermarked by God" and displaying the progressive symbol.

Some of my most rewarding moments in the conference (in addition to the ones I shared yesterday) involved me and several other volunteers stationing ourselves near one of the conference entrances, doing nothing more than handing out water with a smile to anyone and everyone coming by. The water served as a neat riff on our theme, of course, and the free drink was real relief on the hot spring days.

But the real magic happened with the person-to-person contact that happened as we gave the water out. Getting into the conference hall itself involves braving a double line of earnest volunteers from dozens of different Methodist interest groups, each handing out a flier, newsletter, or appeal. Some delegates and guests eagerly and cheerfully collect all of them they can, gaining a full pile by the end of the line (only to be greeted by more such lines inside the hall). Others set their shoulders, fix their gaze straight ahead (or on the ground), and barrel through the gamut as fast as they can. Most delegates fall somewhere in between, automatically grabbing fliers handed to them while looking ahead and beyond.

We set up our water stations before the paper hand-out lines, and we made it a point to greet people cheerfully, making eye contact and smiling. We did not discuss issues or press for votes. We just grinned and said "Hi, would you like a bottle of water?" Not everyone took the bottles we offered--particularly those who knew and disagreed with our stances--but just about everyone smiled and returned the greeting. It was a minor humanizing moment in a massive process full of bureaucratic impersonality. I have no idea, really, about the stances or ultimate votes of the people who shared that spark of communion with me, but it reinforced for me the commonality that God's baptism imposes even on God's feuding children.

Speaking of which, I am sorry to say that sense of commonality got strained by the Conference's subsequent votes, which reinforced rather than lessened stances against GLBT identity as anything but "incompatible with Christian teaching." Particularly painful was the narrow failure of a resolution that would have done little more than acknowledge that the Methodist Church was not of one mind regarding the issue. After those votes, the Conference broke for a recess, and all of the pro-GLBT people gathered silently at the front of the convention hall auditorium. There we received communion--our Church's only other recognized sacrament besides baptism.

As I've mentioned, Methodist communion is, like baptism, considered primarily to be God's action. "It is God who sets the table, not I," says my pastor father to his flock on communion Sundays, "It is God who gives the invitations, and he invites everyone." Feeling so rejected by my church at that moment, the simple act (repeated every month) of taking bread and juice--accepting and celebrating God's invitation to me--took on grander import. I wonder sometimes if people who never have to think of their inclusion within the life of the church realize what a gift communion and baptism are, how powerful and radical the open invitation of God is.

It took another friend at that conference to hammer home just how powerful that welcome is. This friend (whose gender I will mask for greatest anonymity) was a minister who was secretly GLBT but who of course had to remain closeted lest he/she be stripped of ordination. That person's support for the cause had to come at a distance, since he/she held a position of some visibility in the church. As the conference wore on and as the contentious votes on sexuality issues approached, I caught up with the person. I asked this minister if s/he were worried and hurt about the outcome.

My friend surprised me, though, by saying it didn't matter. Well--of course it mattered, s/he explained. But a vote about sexuality alone fails to address the underlying tensions and divisions that afflict the UMC. Apart from the hullabaloo about sexuality, my friend told me, the Conference was set to accept another kind of change. A committee appointed to examine and clarify Methodist beliefs on communion had finished its work, and its report was set to be accepted by the Conference as the official interpretive stance of the UMC. "It's all in the report," s/he assured me. "Once people read and accept that, everything else will follow."

The report, "This Holy Mystery," was in fact accepted and is currently in force as authoritative for Methodists. It is, as my friend promised, a firm statement about the open table of communion. All who come in faith are fed. It is not for individual Christians to deny communion to anyone.

Alas, my church (at the 2008 Conference) again declined to liberalize its stances on GLBT people. "But," I can hear my friend urging me, "give it time. Let the radical welcome installed into baptism and communion both work its way through the membership. Everything else will follow." From the seed of that teaching, from the hope of a shared smile, from the promise of a common cup--may a greater, deeper communion follow.

More tomorrow,

JF