don wrote:

> Hi Laura,
> My name is Don, I live in St Charles, Missouri. I was reading
> through some stuff on the Internet concerning the Methodist church and
> some of the recent decisions.

Hi don, thank you for writing. I dont have a lot of time to answer this throughly. I was in Milwalkee all weekend, and am playing catch up on hundreds of emails.

>
> I am just curious about a couple of things. I understand that you are
> grateful about some of the recent decisions, especially those concerning
> the Creech trial? I'm sorry, I don't have a lot of the information and
> I just found something that you had put out on the Internet.

For more information on the Creech trial, and now the Dell impending trail, and a samesex wedding being co-officiated by 67 UM clergy, see page http://www.umaffirm.org/cornet/

> As far as God is concerned, I don't think he
> differentiates between sins, big or small. That is a qualifier that we
> people put on sin. Usually, someone else's sin is considered big and
> mine is small - ha.
>
> Anyhow, I would imagine that you would say you are a Christian.

I AM a Christian! I say it, I speak it, I LIVE IT!

>
> Pardon my naivety, I would just like to understand. I'm not casting
> stones. Plenty could be cast my way if people knew all about me. I'm
> just trying to understand. Could you help me out in understanding this?
> Is homosexuality just to be accepted? Or has something been lost in the
> Methodist Church?

The UM Judicial Council did indeed rule after the Creech trial that it was against church to perform same sex unions, and ministers are using "ecclesastical" disobedience.

I think the whole thing boils down to this. I am a heterosexual. Married to the same man for 18 years, have 2 sons, etc... I am a seminarian as well.

I read the Bible as a book of wisdom, passed down from our ancestors. It is the greatest book ever written. However, I do NOT believe it is innerrant, or the exact word of God. I believe it is man's narrative of their understanding of God. Many people believe this.

1)If we read it in a historical context, that Leviticus was written by religious leaders of the day to prevent Judiasm from dying out after the 40 years in the wilderness, and the laws were written at a time when there was no understanding of sexual orientation,.... we can see it in a different light. We eat shell fish and pork, those laws were written at the same time.

2)Jesus never said anything about homosexuality, but had a lot to say about helping the marginalized and the poor, and most of all about loving your brother and not judging others.

3) When one studies the background of Paul, and how he was raised to be a great Jewish scholar - some of his pronouncments came as a direct result of that, not necessarily what Jesus taught. He was an old testiment scholar, basing much of what he said on the old testiment, taken out of historical context.

So, personally, I feel ones sexual orientation is a gift from god, whether gay or straight. Morally, it is equivalent to being left handed- a minority handedness, and we used to make left handed people right with their right hand. We no longer do that, we are beyond that. We are doing today with gays and lesbians what we did 50 years ago with people that wrote left handed.

We used to believe that black people we inferior to white, had no soul, whatever.... People used the bible (some still do) to justify their bigotry. We no longer believe that, as a society, we are beyond that.

It is time we started to get beyond sexual orientation.

Laura

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