So, why not another shot of bad news? Lining up right on top of similarly-themed bad news. UMM is on the list but let's put that aside for now.
It's bad enough that we're in the immediate post-holidays period when the sheer holiday joy is gone and we are clearly in mid-winter. It is Saturday morning, Jan. 11. It is bleak. Word is we'll get dumped on with snow over next 24 hours. Perhaps worse yet, the sky is gray yet again. Sheer sunlight does so much, n'est-ce pas?
The bad news I got from yesterday has to do with my church of First Lutheran (FLC).
News is supposed to be man-bites-dog, right? The defining feature? So, is the following "news": FLC is losing its pastor? He was an "interim" to begin with. He only would have been here a year. FLC is one of two ELCA churches in Morris. What's up with the other one? The Faith Luth. faithful recently got word that their super-popular minister E.S. is leaving, soon.
An ELCA minister leaving is not news. The norm is for frustration and spinning-of-wheels. Even if you are a happy ELCA member these days, you have to concede that this organization is "bland" within Christianity. I sense it all the time. The late Rev. Cliff Grindland would not recognize this. For most of its history, FLC was the most mainstream institution you could imagine.
Is there anything more quaint than to remember the days when outstate Minnesota towns were divided between Lutheran and Catholic? Today the question is not whether you are Lutheran or Catholic, it is whether you'll stay in a woke or progressive organization or roll up your sleeves and profess the right wing political attitude. Get on board with our elected leaders like Michelle Fischbach, Torrey Westrom and Jeff Backer.
Today Backer does not directly represent us but he's close, and he certainly represents the prevailing attitude of our Morris area. I am puzzled why this trend has gotten locked in with such decisiveness, now with almost a hypnotizing effect on us.
Fischbach who voted against certifying the 2020 election results wasn't even good enough for lots of the local conservative folks. Steve Boyd got his own following. "Life begins at conception." If only moral questions were so simple.
And the ELCA has been severely sent to the ropes in a truly existential way. The shift took hold with the creation of a whole new church in a rural setting. It's just to the north of Morris. Couldn't these people have "stuck it out" at their ELCA churches?
Haven't you noticed that the whole tone with gay rights has been toned down? It is fundamentally unwise to make drastic decisions based on emotions. Yet we saw this in a pretty vivid fashion. Don't you realize that ELCA members are gentle people who want the best for everyone? The big shift happened because of a misunderstanding about what "gay rights" really ought to entail. What "gay marriage" ought to entail.
We read these days about how the vast majority of us really have no problem with gay rights, I mean with trying to stop outright abuse and discrimination against our gay brothers and sisters. Society did in fact need some adjusting. But here's the deal: We simply needed some basic tweaks within our legal system. Yes, even to allow "gay marriage" with the privileges of marriage accorded to those who do it. This should have been done in a relatively quiet, low-profile way, merely to bestow sensible legal protections.
Does anyone get married in a "church" any more? I said to a lawyer friend of mine "marriage is just a legal thing." Many in my boomer generation got married too young and went through unpleasant, read hellish divorces. A high school classmate friend of mine said "I wouldn't wish that on my worst enemy." Praise God I never experienced it, never risked it. To this day I have never even joined a woman for a cup of coffee. In theory I would very much like to. I am profoundly scared.
I digress here which is my license for writing online. The gay rights cause burgeoned with a flow of letters to the editor in our Morris newspaper. Seemed like everyone was just overreacting to the issue. Whenever anyone discovers problems in their own family with a gay person who has felt abused by society, there is immediate sympathy for that family member, not scorn. It's just like when a family member (i.e. close relative) is in position to deal with a problem pregnancy that could be life-threatening, all of a sudden the whole flag-waving "pro-life" thing is out the window.
So why can't people extrapolate this kind of empathy for everyone? Locally, we saw people associated with our U of M-Morris basically go nuts on the gay rights question. It was totally out of bounds. The collateral damage from that was with our "moderate" or "calm" churches like FLC, Faith Lutheran and Federated. We became seen as bland and even offensive in the eyes of those who were sickened by being exposed to so much talk about "sexual preference."
People got alienated by the "gay rights crusaders." And I don't blame them. The crusaders and (literal) flag-wavers were seizing on the issue in a way that was totally wayward, out of bounds. The local newspaper manager had to announce "we aren't publishing any more letters to the editor unless there are new developments." There was such a flood.
All society needed was minor adjustments with laws to properly accommodate people who were gay. Just like we need laws to accommodate women who might be imperiled by a problem pregnancy. It is the Good Shepherd people and all their ilk that have set the stage for a new presidential term of Donald J. Trump.
Once this momentum got started, I could see that nothing was going to stop it. People were wasting so much time listening to the usual suspects on "talk radio," time wasted because everything those guys said could have been scripted in advance. I check it out myself just to confirm that it's continuing.
So just because of a few "social issues," we have acceded power to this dangerous person DJT who will do God knows what in a new term.
What would Rev. Cliff Grindland RIP say? Well he wasn't perfect either. He was a Nixon Republican. This nation desperately needs Bernie Sanders. Would that we could have Kamala Harris.
- Brian Williams - morris mn minnesota - bwilly73@yahoo.com
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